Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Li, Tianyu


Elastic Motion Policy: An Adaptive Dynamical System for Robust and Efficient One-Shot Imitation Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

-- Behavior cloning (BC) has become a staple imitation learning paradigm in robotics due to its ease of teaching robots complex skills directly from expert demonstrations. However, BC suffers from an inherent generalization issue. T o solve this, the status quo solution is to gather more data. Y et, regardless of how much training data is available, out-of-distribution performance is still sub-par, lacks any formal guarantee of convergence and success, and is incapable of allowing and recovering from physical interactions with humans. These are critical flaws when robots are deployed in ever-changing human-centric environments. Thus, we propose Elastic Motion Policy (EMP), a one-shot imitation learning framework that allows robots to adjust their behavior based on the scene change while respecting the task specification. Trained from a single demonstration, EMP follows the dynamical systems paradigm where motion planning and control are governed by first-order differential equations with convergence guarantees. SO (3), and online convex learning of Lyapunov functions, to adapt EMP online to new contexts, avoiding the need to collect new demonstrations. I. INTRODUCTION As robots become more common in human-centric environments like homes, warehouses, hospitals, and factories, it is important to consider generating motion that allows for possible physical interactions with humans or other agents.


Is Depth All You Need? An Exploration of Iterative Reasoning in LLMs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Deep iterative chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enables LLMs to tackle complex tasks by progressively activating relevant pre-trained knowledge. However, it faces challenges in ensuring continual improvement and determining a stopping criterion. In this paper, we investigate whether the relevant knowledge that contributes directly to solving the given question can be activated from the initial reasoning path, thus circumventing the need for iterative refinement. Our experiments reveal that increasing the diversity of initial reasoning paths can achieve comparable or superior performance, a concept we term \textit{breadth reasoning}. However, existing breadth reasoning approaches, such as self-consistency, offer limited diversity. To address this limitation, we propose a simple yet effective method that enhances reasoning breadth by integrating contextual exploration with reduced sampling randomness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms deep iterative reasoning. Our code is provided in https://github.com/zongqianwu/breadth.


A Physical Coherence Benchmark for Evaluating Video Generation Models via Optical Flow-guided Frame Prediction

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent advances in video generation models demonstrate their potential as world simulators, but they often struggle with videos deviating from physical laws, a key concern overlooked by most text-to-video benchmarks. We introduce a benchmark designed specifically to assess the Physical Coherence of generated videos, PhyCoBench. Our benchmark includes 120 prompts covering 7 categories of physical principles, capturing key physical laws observable in video content. We evaluated four state-of-the-art (SoTA) T2V models on PhyCoBench and conducted manual assessments. Additionally, we propose an automated evaluation model: PhyCoPredictor, a diffusion model that generates optical flow and video frames in a cascade manner. Through a consistency evaluation comparing automated and manual sorting, the experimental results show that PhyCoPredictor currently aligns most closely with human evaluation. Therefore, it can effectively evaluate the physical coherence of videos, providing insights for future model optimization. Our benchmark, including physical coherence prompts, the automatic evaluation tool PhyCoPredictor, and the generated video dataset, has been released on GitHub at https://github.com/Jeckinchen/PhyCoBench.


RobotMover: Learning to Move Large Objects by Imitating the Dynamic Chain

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Moving large objects, such as furniture, is a critical capability for robots operating in human environments. This task presents significant challenges due to two key factors: the need to synchronize whole-body movements to prevent collisions between the robot and the object, and the under-actuated dynamics arising from the substantial size and weight of the objects. These challenges also complicate performing these tasks via teleoperation. In this work, we introduce \method, a generalizable learning framework that leverages human-object interaction demonstrations to enable robots to perform large object manipulation tasks. Central to our approach is the Dynamic Chain, a novel representation that abstracts human-object interactions so that they can be retargeted to robotic morphologies. The Dynamic Chain is a spatial descriptor connecting the human and object root position via a chain of nodes, which encode the position and velocity of different interaction keypoints. We train policies in simulation using Dynamic-Chain-based imitation rewards and domain randomization, enabling zero-shot transfer to real-world settings without fine-tuning. Our approach outperforms both learning-based methods and teleoperation baselines across six evaluation metrics when tested on three distinct object types, both in simulation and on physical hardware. Furthermore, we successfully apply the learned policies to real-world tasks, such as moving a trash cart and rearranging chairs.


Disentangled Interpretable Representation for Efficient Long-term Time Series Forecasting

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Industry 5.0 introduces new challenges for Long-term Time Series Forecasting (LTSF), characterized by high-dimensional, high-resolution data and high-stakes application scenarios. Against this backdrop, developing efficient and interpretable models for LTSF becomes a key challenge. Existing deep learning and linear models often suffer from excessive parameter complexity and lack intuitive interpretability. To address these issues, we propose DiPE-Linear, a Disentangled interpretable Parameter-Efficient Linear network. DiPE-Linear incorporates three temporal components: Static Frequential Attention (SFA), Static Temporal Attention (STA), and Independent Frequential Mapping (IFM). These components alternate between learning in the frequency and time domains to achieve disentangled interpretability. The decomposed model structure reduces parameter complexity from quadratic in fully connected networks (FCs) to linear and computational complexity from quadratic to log-linear. Additionally, a Low-Rank Weight Sharing policy enhances the model's ability to handle multivariate series. Despite operating within a subspace of FCs with limited expressive capacity, DiPE-Linear demonstrates comparable or superior performance to both FCs and nonlinear models across multiple open-source and real-world LTSF datasets, validating the effectiveness of its sophisticatedly designed structure. The combination of efficiency, accuracy, and interpretability makes DiPE-Linear a strong candidate for advancing LTSF in both research and real-world applications. The source code is available at https://github.com/wintertee/DiPE-Linear.


MotionWavelet: Human Motion Prediction via Wavelet Manifold Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Modeling temporal characteristics and the non-stationary dynamics of body movement plays a significant role in predicting human future motions. However, it is challenging to capture these features due to the subtle transitions involved in the complex human motions. This paper introduces MotionWavelet, a human motion prediction framework that utilizes Wavelet Transformation and studies human motion patterns in the spatial-frequency domain. In MotionWavelet, a Wavelet Diffusion Model (WDM) learns a Wavelet Manifold by applying Wavelet Transformation on the motion data therefore encoding the intricate spatial and temporal motion patterns. Once the Wavelet Manifold is built, WDM trains a diffusion model to generate human motions from Wavelet latent vectors. In addition to the WDM, MotionWavelet also presents a Wavelet Space Shaping Guidance mechanism to refine the denoising process to improve conformity with the manifold structure. WDM also develops Temporal Attention-Based Guidance to enhance prediction accuracy. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of MotionWavelet, demonstrating improved prediction accuracy and enhanced generalization across various benchmarks. Our code and models will be released upon acceptance.


Out-of-Distribution Recovery with Object-Centric Keypoint Inverse Policy For Visuomotor Imitation Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We propose an object-centric recovery policy framework to address the challenges of out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios in visuomotor policy learning. Previous behavior cloning (BC) methods rely heavily on a large amount of labeled data coverage, failing in unfamiliar spatial states. Without relying on extra data collection, our approach learns a recovery policy constructed by an inverse policy inferred from object keypoint manifold gradient in the original training data. The recovery policy serves as a simple add-on to any base visuomotor BC policy, agnostic to a specific method, guiding the system back towards the training distribution to ensure task success even in OOD situations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our object-centric framework in both simulation and real robot experiments, achieving an improvement of 77.7% over the base policy in OOD. Project Website: https://sites.google.com/view/ocr-penn


Language Guided Skill Discovery

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Skill discovery methods enable agents to learn diverse emergent behaviors without explicit rewards. To make learned skills useful for unknown downstream tasks, obtaining a semantically diverse repertoire of skills is essential. While some approaches introduce a discriminator to distinguish skills and others aim to increase state coverage, no existing work directly addresses the "semantic diversity" of skills. We hypothesize that leveraging the semantic knowledge of large language models (LLMs) can lead us to improve semantic diversity of resulting behaviors. In this sense, we introduce Language Guided Skill Discovery (LGSD), a skill discovery framework that aims to directly maximize the semantic diversity between skills. LGSD takes user prompts as input and outputs a set of semantically distinctive skills. The prompts serve as a means to constrain the search space into a semantically desired subspace, and the generated LLM outputs guide the agent to visit semantically diverse states within the subspace. We demonstrate that LGSD enables legged robots to visit different user-intended areas on a plane by simply changing the prompt. Furthermore, we show that language guidance aids in discovering more diverse skills compared to five existing skill discovery methods in robot-arm manipulation environments. Lastly, LGSD provides a simple way of utilizing learned skills via natural language.


Constrained Passive Interaction Control: Leveraging Passivity and Safety for Robot Manipulators

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Passivity is necessary for robots to fluidly collaborate and interact with humans physically. Nevertheless, due to the unconstrained nature of passivity-based impedance control laws, the robot is vulnerable to infeasible and unsafe configurations upon physical perturbations. In this paper, we propose a novel control architecture that allows a torque-controlled robot to guarantee safety constraints such as kinematic limits, self-collisions, external collisions and singularities and is passive only when feasible. This is achieved by constraining a dynamical system based impedance control law with a relaxed hierarchical control barrier function quadratic program subject to multiple concurrent, possibly contradicting, constraints. Joint space constraints are formulated from efficient data-driven self- and external C^2 collision boundary functions. We theoretically prove constraint satisfaction and show that the robot is passive when feasible. Our approach is validated in simulation and real robot experiments on a 7DoF Franka Research 3 manipulator.


Hallucination Detection and Hallucination Mitigation: An Investigation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs), including ChatGPT, Bard, and Llama, have achieved remarkable successes over the last two years in a range of different applications. In spite of these successes, there exist concerns that limit the wide application of LLMs. A key problem is the problem of hallucination. Hallucination refers to the fact that in addition to correct responses, LLMs can also generate seemingly correct but factually incorrect responses. This report aims to present a comprehensive review of the current literature on both hallucination detection and hallucination mitigation. We hope that this report can serve as a good reference for both engineers and researchers who are interested in LLMs and applying them to real world tasks.