Yifan Chang

CV
h-index3
10papers
64citations
Novelty44%
AI Score52

10 Papers

15.6CVMar 18
GigaWorld-Policy: An Efficient Action-Centered World--Action Model

Angen Ye, Boyuan Wang, Chaojun Ni et al.

World-Action Models (WAM) initialized from pre-trained video generation backbones have demonstrated remarkable potential for robot policy learning. However, existing approaches face two critical bottlenecks that hinder performance and deployment. First, jointly reasoning over future visual dynamics and corresponding actions incurs substantial inference overhead. Second, joint modeling often entangles visual and motion representations, making motion prediction accuracy heavily dependent on the quality of future video forecasts. To address these issues, we introduce GigaWorld-Policy, an action-centered WAM that learns 2D pixel-action dynamics while enabling efficient action decoding, with optional video generation. Specifically, we formulate policy training into two coupled components: the model predicts future action sequences conditioned on the current observation, and simultaneously generates future videos conditioned on the predicted actions and the same observation. The policy is supervised by both action prediction and video generation, providing richer learning signals and encouraging physically plausible actions through visual-dynamics constraints. With a causal design that prevents future-video tokens from influencing action tokens, explicit future-video generation is optional at inference time, allowing faster action prediction during deployment. To support this paradigm, we curate a diverse, large-scale robot dataset to pre-train an action-centered video generation model, which is then adapted as the backbone for robot policy learning. Experimental results on real-world robotic platforms show that GigaWorld-Policy runs 9x faster than the leading WAM baseline, Motus, while improving task success rates by 7%. Moreover, compared with pi-0.5, GigaWorld-Policy improves performance by 95% on RoboTwin 2.0.

28.6ROJul 15
GigaWorld-Policy-0.5: A Faster and Stronger WAM Empowered by AutoResearch

GigaWorld Team, Angen Ye, Angyuan Ma et al.

World Action Models (WAMs) improve robot policy learning by jointly modeling actions and future visual observations, using future scene evolution as dense supervision for physically grounded action generation. However, a common design in existing WAMs is to explicitly generate future videos at inference time, incurring substantial computational overhead and hindering real-time closed-loop deployment. GigaWorld-Policy addresses this issue with an action-centered formulation, where future visual dynamics are used during training while action-only decoding is used at inference time. Building upon this framework, we present GigaWorld-Policy-0.5, an enhanced action-centered WAM designed for more efficient robot control. During pretraining, GigaWorld-Policy-0.5 adopts a mixed Action-Conditioned World Modeling (AC-WM) and WAM training strategy. This strengthens the coupling between visual dynamics and robot actions and improves the transferability of action representations for downstream policy learning. For efficient inference, GigaWorld-Policy-0.5 introduces a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture that separates visual dynamics modeling and action generation into specialized experts, reducing active computation during action-only inference and achieving 85 ms inference latency on a local RTX 4090 setup. In addition, we employ an agent-based AutoResearch pipeline to systematically search training configurations, enabling more efficient identification of optimal experimental setups while reducing the time and manual intervention required for hyperparameter tuning. Experiments and ablations show that GigaWorld-Policy-0.5 preserves the training benefits of future visual dynamics while improving inference efficiency for robot control.

24.9ROJul 15
PhysClaw-0: A Symbiotic Agentic System for Robot Autonomy via Language Corrections

Boyuan Wang, Zhenyuan Zhang, Zhiqin Yang et al.

Autonomous data collection governs the volume and quality of real-world trajectories for manipulation policy learning. Existing pipelines reduce human effort via self-resetting, VLM verification, or language-guided correction, yet episode-scoped fixes must be reissued whenever the same failure recurs, so oversight cost grows with session length rather than with the number of distinct problems. We present PhysClaw-0, a human-robot symbiotic agentic system in which corrections are retained and reused across rounds. The collection loop collects, verifies, and resets autonomously, pausing for a remote operator only when a phase exhausts an explicit retry budget. An LLM parser maps each natural-language utterance to a structured adjustment stored in Corrective Memory, so addressed failure modes typically need not be corrected again under the same conditions. On a real-robot desktop-clearing testbed, PhysClaw-0 matches teleoperation episode success while reducing human working time to 16%. Language corrections improve verifier-human agreement in all four evaluated settings and raise average single-attempt success from 12.5% to 47.5% (arm-selection: 20.0% to 50.0%). Policies fine-tuned on PhysClaw-0 data match teleoperation-trained policy success at a fraction of collection human cost.

3.3AIOct 31, 2025
Dialogue as Discovery: Navigating Human Intent Through Principled Inquiry

Jianwen Sun, Yukang Feng, Yifan Chang et al.

A fundamental bottleneck in human-AI collaboration is the "intention expression gap," the difficulty for humans to effectively convey complex, high-dimensional thoughts to AI. This challenge often traps users in inefficient trial-and-error loops and is exacerbated by the diverse expertise levels of users. We reframe this problem from passive instruction following to a Socratic collaboration paradigm, proposing an agent that actively probes for information to resolve its uncertainty about user intent. we name the proposed agent Nous, trained to acquire proficiency in this inquiry policy. The core mechanism of Nous is a training framework grounded in the first principles of information theory. Within this framework, we define the information gain from dialogue as an intrinsic reward signal, which is fundamentally equivalent to the reduction of Shannon entropy over a structured task space. This reward design enables us to avoid reliance on costly human preference annotations or external reward models. To validate our framework, we develop an automated simulation pipeline to generate a large-scale, preference-based dataset for the challenging task of scientific diagram generation. Comprehensive experiments, including ablations, subjective and objective evaluations, and tests across user expertise levels, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework. Nous achieves leading efficiency and output quality, while remaining robust to varying user expertise. Moreover, its design is domain-agnostic, and we show evidence of generalization beyond diagram generation. Experimental results prove that our work offers a principled, scalable, and adaptive paradigm for resolving uncertainty about user intent in complex human-AI collaboration.

13.9CVJun 4
Faithful, Enriched, and Precise: Benchmarking Natural-Science Illustration Generation by T2I models

Yifan Chang, Jiaxin Ai, Jianwen Sun et al.

Scientific illustrations are essential tools for communicating research findings, especially in natural science, where they visualize complex concepts and processes. As Text-to-Image (T2I) models become increasingly capable, researchers have started to use them for scientific illustration generation. However, existing benchmarks often assess outputs at a holistic level, overlooking fine-grained elements, while scientific reasoning ability and output conciseness remain under-quantified. We introduce FEPBench, a benchmark built from carefully selected high-quality scientific illustrations across multiple disciplines and layout types. With the assistance of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and human experts, we provide fine-grained atom set annotations and systematically evaluate T2I models along three dimensions: instruction faithfulness, reasoning enrichment, and semantic precision. Our evaluation further decomposes model performance across visual, textual, relation, and layout elements. Results show that even state-of-the-art (SOTA) closed-source models, such as GPT Image 2 and Nano Banana Pro, still suffer from text-rendering bottlenecks, limited reasoning enrichment, and difficulty balancing generation richness with precision. These findings provide practical guidance for improving and deploying T2I models in scientific illustration generation. Benchmark data, atom set annotations, and evaluation code will be released by us.

13.8CVApr 9
ReconPhys: Reconstruct Appearance and Physical Attributes from Single Video

Boyuan Wang, Xiaofeng Wang, Yongkang Li et al.

Reconstructing non-rigid objects with physical plausibility remains a significant challenge. Existing approaches leverage differentiable rendering for per-scene optimization, recovering geometry and dynamics but requiring expensive tuning or manual annotation, which limits practicality and generalizability. To address this, we propose ReconPhys, the first feedforward framework that jointly learns physical attribute estimation and 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstruction from a single monocular video. Our method employs a dual-branch architecture trained via a self-supervised strategy, eliminating the need for ground-truth physics labels. Given a video sequence, ReconPhys simultaneously infers geometry, appearance, and physical attributes. Experiments on a large-scale synthetic dataset demonstrate superior performance: our method achieves 21.64 PSNR in future prediction compared to 13.27 by state-of-the-art optimization baselines, while reducing Chamfer Distance from 0.349 to 0.004. Crucially, ReconPhys enables fast inference (<1 second) versus hours required by existing methods, facilitating rapid generation of simulation-ready assets for robotics and graphics.

22.3CVMay 28, 2025
SridBench: Benchmark of Scientific Research Illustration Drawing of Image Generation Model

Yifan Chang, Yukang Feng, Jianwen Sun et al.

Recent years have seen rapid advances in AI-driven image generation. Early diffusion models emphasized perceptual quality, while newer multimodal models like GPT-4o-image integrate high-level reasoning, improving semantic understanding and structural composition. Scientific illustration generation exemplifies this evolution: unlike general image synthesis, it demands accurate interpretation of technical content and transformation of abstract ideas into clear, standardized visuals. This task is significantly more knowledge-intensive and laborious, often requiring hours of manual work and specialized tools. Automating it in a controllable, intelligent manner would provide substantial practical value. Yet, no benchmark currently exists to evaluate AI on this front. To fill this gap, we introduce SridBench, the first benchmark for scientific figure generation. It comprises 1,120 instances curated from leading scientific papers across 13 natural and computer science disciplines, collected via human experts and MLLMs. Each sample is evaluated along six dimensions, including semantic fidelity and structural accuracy. Experimental results reveal that even top-tier models like GPT-4o-image lag behind human performance, with common issues in text/visual clarity and scientific correctness. These findings highlight the need for more advanced reasoning-driven visual generation capabilities.

27.9CVNov 25, 2025
GigaWorld-0: World Models as Data Engine to Empower Embodied AI

GigaWorld Team, Angen Ye, Boyuan Wang et al.

World models are emerging as a foundational paradigm for scalable, data-efficient embodied AI. In this work, we present GigaWorld-0, a unified world model framework designed explicitly as a data engine for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) learning. GigaWorld-0 integrates two synergistic components: GigaWorld-0-Video, which leverages large-scale video generation to produce diverse, texture-rich, and temporally coherent embodied sequences under fine-grained control of appearance, camera viewpoint, and action semantics; and GigaWorld-0-3D, which combines 3D generative modeling, 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstruction, physically differentiable system identification, and executable motion planning to ensure geometric consistency and physical realism. Their joint optimization enables the scalable synthesis of embodied interaction data that is visually compelling, spatially coherent, physically plausible, and instruction-aligned. Training at scale is made feasible through our efficient GigaTrain framework, which exploits FP8-precision and sparse attention to drastically reduce memory and compute requirements. We conduct comprehensive evaluations showing that GigaWorld-0 generates high-quality, diverse, and controllable data across multiple dimensions. Critically, VLA model (e.g., GigaBrain-0) trained on GigaWorld-0-generated data achieve strong real-world performance, significantly improving generalization and task success on physical robots without any real-world interaction during training.

8.4CVMay 21, 2025
IA-T2I: Internet-Augmented Text-to-Image Generation

Chuanhao Li, Jianwen Sun, Yukang Feng et al.

Current text-to-image (T2I) generation models achieve promising results, but they fail on the scenarios where the knowledge implied in the text prompt is uncertain. For example, a T2I model released in February would struggle to generate a suitable poster for a movie premiering in April, because the character designs and styles are uncertain to the model. To solve this problem, we propose an Internet-Augmented text-to-image generation (IA-T2I) framework to compel T2I models clear about such uncertain knowledge by providing them with reference images. Specifically, an active retrieval module is designed to determine whether a reference image is needed based on the given text prompt; a hierarchical image selection module is introduced to find the most suitable image returned by an image search engine to enhance the T2I model; a self-reflection mechanism is presented to continuously evaluate and refine the generated image to ensure faithful alignment with the text prompt. To evaluate the proposed framework's performance, we collect a dataset named Img-Ref-T2I, where text prompts include three types of uncertain knowledge: (1) known but rare. (2) unknown. (3) ambiguous. Moreover, we carefully craft a complex prompt to guide GPT-4o in making preference evaluation, which has been shown to have an evaluation accuracy similar to that of human preference evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, outperforming GPT-4o by about 30% in human evaluation.

3.1LGNov 23, 2021
Reviewing continual learning from the perspective of human-level intelligence

Yifan Chang, Wenbo Li, Jian Peng et al.

Humans' continual learning (CL) ability is closely related to Stability Versus Plasticity Dilemma that describes how humans achieve ongoing learning capacity and preservation for learned information. The notion of CL has always been present in artificial intelligence (AI) since its births. This paper proposes a comprehensive review of CL. Different from previous reviews that mainly focus on the catastrophic forgetting phenomenon in CL, this paper surveys CL from a more macroscopic perspective based on the Stability Versus Plasticity mechanism. Analogous to biological counterpart, "smart" AI agents are supposed to i) remember previously learned information (information retrospection); ii) infer on new information continuously (information prospection:); iii) transfer useful information (information transfer), to achieve high-level CL. According to the taxonomy, evaluation metrics, algorithms, applications as well as some open issues are then introduced. Our main contributions concern i) rechecking CL from the level of artificial general intelligence; ii) providing a detailed and extensive overview on CL topics; iii) presenting some novel ideas on the potential development of CL.