ROJun 3
HapTile: A Haptic-Informed Vision-Tactile-Language-Action Dataset for Contact-Rich Imitation LearningAmirhosein Alian, Yongqiang Zhao, Shiyi Gu et al.
Despite the importance of tactile sensing for reliable manipulation, most existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) datasets remain vision-only, and those that do incorporate tactile information typically lack the joint combination of task diversity, language conditioning, and action trajectories. Furthermore, existing teleoperation pipelines rarely provide haptic feedback to the operator, despite its established role in demonstration quality and manipulation stability. In this work, we present HapTile, a contact-grounded visuotactile manipulation dataset that advances beyond vision-only trajectory datasets by embedding physical interaction sensing at two levels: fingertip tactile feedback at the robot end-effector, and haptic-informed demonstrations at the teleoperator side. The data collection platform integrates haptic feedback directly into the teleoperation controller, enabling the operator to perceive contact interactions in real time. It is built around a standard and reproducible robotic system equipped with custom-designed fingertip tactile sensors. The dataset comprises everyday manipulation tasks spanning a broad range of contact-rich skills, including pick-and-place, folding, pressing, stacking, and other routine activities. Each task is paired with language instructions that condition the policy on the manipulation objective, together with synchronized visuotactile observations and action trajectories. In addition, we provide a benchmarking study on contact-rich policy learning using two baseline models to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed contact-grounded dataset. The dataset and additional details are available on our website: haptile-dataset.github.io.
ROApr 22
Open-H-Embodiment: A Large-Scale Dataset for Enabling Foundation Models in Medical RoboticsOpen-H-Embodiment Consortium, Nigel Nelson, Juo-Tung Chen et al.
Autonomous medical robots hold promise to improve patient outcomes, reduce provider workload, democratize access to care, and enable superhuman precision. However, autonomous medical robotics has been limited by a fundamental data problem: existing medical robotic datasets are small, single-embodiment, and rarely shared openly, restricting the development of foundation models that the field needs to advance. We introduce Open-H-Embodiment, the largest open dataset of medical robotic video with synchronized kinematics to date, spanning more than 49 institutions and multiple robotic platforms including the CMR Versius, Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci, da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK), Rob Surgical BiTrack, Virtual Incision's MIRA, Moon Surgical Maestro, and a variety of custom systems, spanning surgical manipulation, robotic ultrasound, and endoscopy procedures. We demonstrate the research enabled by this dataset through two foundation models. GR00T-H is the first open foundation vision-language-action model for medical robotics, which is the only evaluated model to achieve full end-to-end task completion on a structured suturing benchmark (25% of trials vs. 0% for all others) and achieves 64% average success across a 29-step ex vivo suturing sequence. We also train Cosmos-H-Surgical-Simulator, the first action-conditioned world model to enable multi-embodiment surgical simulation from a single checkpoint, spanning nine robotic platforms and supporting in silico policy evaluation and synthetic data generation for the medical domain. These results suggest that open, large-scale medical robot data collection can serve as critical infrastructure for the research community, enabling advances in robot learning, world modeling, and beyond.
CVMay 7
MSD-Score: Multi-Scale Distributional Scoring for Reference-Free Image Caption EvaluationShichao Kan, Xuyang Zhang, Haojie Zhang et al.
Evaluating image captions without references remains challenging because global embedding similarity often misses fine-grained mismatches such as hallucinated objects, missing attributes, or incorrect relations. We propose MSD-Score, a reference-free metric that models image patch and text token embeddings as von Mises-Fisher mixtures on the unit hypersphere. Instead of treating each modality as a single point, MSD-Score formulates image-text matching as a multi-scale distributional scoring problem. Semantic discrepancies are quantified via a weighted bi-directional KL divergence and combined with global similarity in a multi-scale framework for both single- and multi-candidate evaluations. Extensive experiments show that MSD-Score achieves state-of-the-art correlation with human judgments among reference-free metrics. Beyond accuracy, its probabilistic formulation yields transparent and decomposable diagnostics of local grounding errors, providing a deterministic complementary signal to holistic similarity metrics and judge-based evaluators.
ROApr 22
Visual-Tactile Peg-in-Hole Assembly Learning from Peg-out-of-Hole DisassemblyYongqiang Zhao, Xuyang Zhang, Zhuo Chen et al.
Peg-in-hole (PiH) assembly is a fundamental yet challenging robotic manipulation task. While reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in tackling such tasks, it requires extensive exploration. In this paper, we propose a novel visual-tactile skill learning framework for the PiH task that leverages its inverse task, i.e., peg-out-of-hole (PooH) disassembly, to facilitate PiH learning. Compared to PiH, PooH is inherently easier as it only needs to overcome existing friction without precise alignment, making data collection more efficient. To this end, we formulate both PooH and PiH as Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) in a unified environment with shared visual-tactile observation space. A visual-tactile PooH policy is first trained; its trajectories, containing kinematic, visual and tactile information, are temporally reversed and action-randomized to provide expert data for PiH. In the policy learning, visual sensing facilitates the peg-hole approach, while tactile measurements compensate for peg-hole misalignment. Experiments across diverse peg-hole geometries show that the visual-tactile policy attains 6.4% lower contact forces than its single-modality counterparts, and that our framework achieves average success rates of 87.5% on seen objects and 77.1% on unseen objects, outperforming direct RL methods that train PiH policies from scratch by 18.1% in success rate. Demos, code, and datasets are available at https://sites.google.com/view/pooh2pih.
LGMay 17, 2024
Improved AdaBoost for Virtual Reality Experience Prediction Based on Long Short-Term Memory NetworkWenhan Fan, Zhicheng Ding, Ruixin Huang et al.
A classification prediction algorithm based on Long Short-Term Memory Network (LSTM) improved AdaBoost is used to predict virtual reality (VR) user experience. The dataset is randomly divided into training and test sets in the ratio of 7:3.During the training process, the model's loss value decreases from 0.65 to 0.31, which shows that the model gradually reduces the discrepancy between the prediction results and the actual labels, and improves the accuracy and generalisation ability.The final loss value of 0.31 indicates that the model fits the training data well, and is able to make predictions and classifications more accurately. The confusion matrix for the training set shows a total of 177 correct predictions and 52 incorrect predictions, with an accuracy of 77%, precision of 88%, recall of 77% and f1 score of 82%. The confusion matrix for the test set shows a total of 167 correct and 53 incorrect predictions with 75% accuracy, 87% precision, 57% recall and 69% f1 score. In summary, the classification prediction algorithm based on LSTM with improved AdaBoost shows good prediction ability for virtual reality user experience. This study is of great significance to enhance the application of virtual reality technology in user experience. By combining LSTM and AdaBoost algorithms, significant progress has been made in user experience prediction, which not only improves the accuracy and generalisation ability of the model, but also provides useful insights for related research in the field of virtual reality. This approach can help developers better understand user requirements, optimise virtual reality product design, and enhance user satisfaction, promoting the wide application of virtual reality technology in various fields.
ROSep 29, 2025
CEDex: Cross-Embodiment Dexterous Grasp Generation at Scale from Human-like Contact RepresentationsZhiyuan Wu, Rolandos Alexandros Potamias, Xuyang Zhang et al.
Cross-embodiment dexterous grasp synthesis refers to adaptively generating and optimizing grasps for various robotic hands with different morphologies. This capability is crucial for achieving versatile robotic manipulation in diverse environments and requires substantial amounts of reliable and diverse grasp data for effective model training and robust generalization. However, existing approaches either rely on physics-based optimization that lacks human-like kinematic understanding or require extensive manual data collection processes that are limited to anthropomorphic structures. In this paper, we propose CEDex, a novel cross-embodiment dexterous grasp synthesis method at scale that bridges human grasping kinematics and robot kinematics by aligning robot kinematic models with generated human-like contact representations. Given an object's point cloud and an arbitrary robotic hand model, CEDex first generates human-like contact representations using a Conditional Variational Auto-encoder pretrained on human contact data. It then performs kinematic human contact alignment through topological merging to consolidate multiple human hand parts into unified robot components, followed by a signed distance field-based grasp optimization with physics-aware constraints. Using CEDex, we construct the largest cross-embodiment grasp dataset to date, comprising 500K objects across four gripper types with 20M total grasps. Extensive experiments show that CEDex outperforms state-of-the-art approaches and our dataset benefits cross-embodiment grasp learning with high-quality diverse grasps.
CVMay 28, 2025
Hadaptive-Net: Efficient Vision Models via Adaptive Cross-Hadamard SynergyXuyang Zhang, Xi Zhang, Liang Chen et al.
Recent studies have revealed the immense potential of Hadamard product in enhancing network representational capacity and dimensional compression. However, despite its theoretical promise, this technique has not been systematically explored or effectively applied in practice, leaving its full capabilities underdeveloped. In this work, we first analyze and identify the advantages of Hadamard product over standard convolutional operations in cross-channel interaction and channel expansion. Building upon these insights, we propose a computationally efficient module: Adaptive Cross-Hadamard (ACH), which leverages adaptive cross-channel Hadamard products for high-dimensional channel expansion. Furthermore, we introduce Hadaptive-Net (Hadamard Adaptive Network), a lightweight network backbone for visual tasks, which is demonstrated through experiments that it achieves an unprecedented balance between inference speed and accuracy through our proposed module.