Mingxiao Huo

Mingxiao Huo, Mingyu Ding, Chenfeng Xu et al. · berkeley

Humans inherently possess generalizable visual representations that empower them to efficiently explore and interact with the environments in manipulation tasks. We advocate that such a representation automatically arises from simultaneously learning about multiple simple perceptual skills that are critical for everyday scenarios (e.g., hand detection, state estimate, etc.) and is better suited for learning robot manipulation policies compared to current state-of-the-art visual representations purely based on self-supervised objectives. We formalize this idea through the lens of human-oriented multi-task fine-tuning on top of pre-trained visual encoders, where each task is a perceptual skill tied to human-environment interactions. We introduce Task Fusion Decoder as a plug-and-play embedding translator that utilizes the underlying relationships among these perceptual skills to guide the representation learning towards encoding meaningful structure for what's important for all perceptual skills, ultimately empowering learning of downstream robotic manipulation tasks. Extensive experiments across a range of robotic tasks and embodiments, in both simulations and real-world environments, show that our Task Fusion Decoder consistently improves the representation of three state-of-the-art visual encoders including R3M, MVP, and EgoVLP, for downstream manipulation policy-learning. Project page: https://sites.google.com/view/human-oriented-robot-learning

Yixiao Wang, Yifei Zhang, Mingxiao Huo et al.

The increasing complexity of tasks in robotics demands efficient strategies for multitask and continual learning. Traditional models typically rely on a universal policy for all tasks, facing challenges such as high computational costs and catastrophic forgetting when learning new tasks. To address these issues, we introduce a sparse, reusable, and flexible policy, Sparse Diffusion Policy (SDP). By adopting Mixture of Experts (MoE) within a transformer-based diffusion policy, SDP selectively activates experts and skills, enabling efficient and task-specific learning without retraining the entire model. SDP not only reduces the burden of active parameters but also facilitates the seamless integration and reuse of experts across various tasks. Extensive experiments on diverse tasks in both simulations and real world show that SDP 1) excels in multitask scenarios with negligible increases in active parameters, 2) prevents forgetting in continual learning of new tasks, and 3) enables efficient task transfer, offering a promising solution for advanced robotic applications. Demos and codes can be found in https://forrest-110.github.io/sparse_diffusion_policy/.

Mingxiao Huo, Zhihao Zhang, Xinyang Ren et al.

Homography estimation is a basic computer vision task, which aims to obtain the transformation from multi-view images for image alignment. Unsupervised learning homography estimation trains a convolution neural network for feature extraction and transformation matrix regression. While the state-of-theart homography method is based on convolution neural networks, few work focuses on transformer which shows superiority in highlevel vision tasks. In this paper, we propose a strong-baseline model based on the Swin Transformer, which combines convolution neural network for local features and transformer module for global features. Moreover, a cross non-local layer is introduced to search the matched features within the feature maps coarsely. In the homography regression stage, we adopt an attention layer for the channels of correlation volume, which can drop out some weak correlation feature points. The experiment shows that in 8 Degree-of-Freedoms(DOFs) homography estimation our method overperforms the state-of-the-art method.

Jinjiang You, Hewei Wang, Yijie Li et al.

Calibrating large-scale camera arrays, such as those in dome-based setups, is time-intensive and typically requires dedicated captures of known patterns. While extrinsics in such arrays are fixed due to the physical setup, intrinsics often vary across sessions due to factors like lens adjustments or temperature changes. In this paper, we propose a dense-feature-driven multi-frame calibration method that refines intrinsics directly from scene data, eliminating the necessity for additional calibration captures. Our approach enhances traditional Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipelines by introducing an extrinsics regularization term to progressively align estimated extrinsics with ground-truth values, a dense feature reprojection term to reduce keypoint errors by minimizing reprojection loss in the feature space, and an intrinsics variance term for joint optimization across multiple frames. Experiments on the Multiface dataset show that our method achieves nearly the same precision as dedicated calibration processes, and significantly enhances intrinsics and 3D reconstruction accuracy. Fully compatible with existing SfM pipelines, our method provides an efficient and practical plug-and-play solution for large-scale camera setups. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/YJJfish/Multi-Cali-Anything

Mingxiao Huo, Pengliang Ji, Haotian Lin et al.

We introduce a pioneering unified library that leverages depth anything, segment anything models to augment neural comprehension in language-vision model zero-shot understanding. This library synergizes the capabilities of the Depth Anything Model (DAM), Segment Anything Model (SAM), and GPT-4V, enhancing multimodal tasks such as vision-question-answering (VQA) and composition reasoning. Through the fusion of segmentation and depth analysis at the symbolic instance level, our library provides nuanced inputs for language models, significantly advancing image interpretation. Validated across a spectrum of in-the-wild real-world images, our findings showcase progress in vision-language models through neural-symbolic integration. This novel approach melds visual and language analysis in an unprecedented manner. Overall, our library opens new directions for future research aimed at decoding the complexities of the real world through advanced multimodal technologies and our code is available at \url{https://github.com/AnthonyHuo/SAM-DAM-for-Compositional-Reasoning}.

Yixiao Wang, Mingxiao Huo, Zhixuan Liang et al. · berkeley

Pretrained vision foundation models (VFMs) advance robotic learning via rich visual representations, yet individual VFMs typically excel only in specific domains, limiting generality across tasks. Distilling multiple VFMs into a unified representation for policy can mitigate this limitation but often yields inflexible task-specific feature selection and requires costly full re-training to incorporate robot-domain knowledge. We propose VER, a Vision Expert transformer for Robot learning. During pretraining, VER distills multiple VFMs into a vision expert library. It then fine-tunes only a lightweight routing network (fewer than 0.4% of parameters) to dynamically select task-relevant experts from the pretrained library for downstream robot tasks. We further introduce Patchwise Expert Routing with Curriculum Top-K Annealing to improve both flexibility and precision of dynamic expert selection. Moreover, VER supports parameter-efficient finetuning for scalable expert utilization and adaptive robot-domain knowledge integration. Across 17 diverse robotic tasks and multiple policy heads, VER achieves state-of-the-art performance. We find that VER reduces large-norm outliers in task-irrelevant regions (e.g., background) and concentrates on task-critical regions. Visualizations and codes can be found in https://yixiaowang7.github.io/ver_page/.

Mingxiao Huo, Jiayi Zhang, Hewei Wang et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) enable powerful multimodal reasoning but suffer from slow autoregressive inference, limiting their deployment in real-time applications. We introduce Spec-LLaVA, a system that applies speculative decoding to accelerate VLMs without sacrificing output quality. Spec-LLaVA pairs a lightweight draft VLM with a large target model: the draft speculates future tokens, which the target verifies in parallel, allowing multiple tokens to be generated per step. To maximize efficiency, we design a dynamic tree-based verification algorithm that adaptively expands and prunes speculative branches using draft model confidence. On MS COCO out-of-domain images, Spec-LLaVA achieves up to 3.28$\times$ faster decoding on LLaVA-1.5 (7B, 13B) with no loss in generation quality. This work presents a lossless acceleration framework for VLMs using dynamic tree-structured speculative decoding, opening a path toward practical real-time multimodal assistants. Importantly, the lightweight draft model design makes the framework amenable to resource-constrained or on-device deployment settings.

Wen-Hsuan Chu, Lei Ke, Jianmeng Liu et al.

We tackle the challenge of generating dynamic 4D scenes from monocular, multi-object videos with heavy occlusions, and introduce GenMOJO, a novel approach that integrates rendering-based deformable 3D Gaussian optimization with generative priors for view synthesis. While existing models perform well on novel view synthesis for isolated objects, they struggle to generalize to complex, cluttered scenes. To address this, GenMOJO decomposes the scene into individual objects, optimizing a differentiable set of deformable Gaussians per object. This object-wise decomposition allows leveraging object-centric diffusion models to infer unobserved regions in novel viewpoints. It performs joint Gaussian splatting to render the full scene, capturing cross-object occlusions, and enabling occlusion-aware supervision. To bridge the gap between object-centric priors and the global frame-centric coordinate system of videos, GenMOJO uses differentiable transformations that align generative and rendering constraints within a unified framework. The resulting model generates 4D object reconstructions over space and time, and produces accurate 2D and 3D point tracks from monocular input. Quantitative evaluations and perceptual human studies confirm that GenMOJO generates more realistic novel views of scenes and produces more accurate point tracks compared to existing approaches.