190 accepted papers
Articulated object pose estimation is a core task in embodied AI and computer vision. Existing methods typically regress poses in a continuous space, but often struggle with 1) navigating a large, complex search space and 2) failing to incorporate intrinsic kinematic constraints. In this paper, we i
A core challenge for embodied agents is the ``semantic-to-physical gap"—the difficulty of mapping symbolic reasoning to precise execution. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) enhance agent task planning, they often fail in problem classes requiring accurate alignment between functional geometry and
Articulated objects are prevalent in daily life and robotic manipulation tasks. However, compared to rigid objects, pose tracking for articulated objects remains an underexplored problem due to their inherent kinematic constraints. To address these challenges, this work proposes a novel point-pair-b
Dexterous in-hand manipulation remains a long-standing challenge in robotics, primarily due to the complex contact dynamics and partial observability. While humans synergize vision and touch for such tasks, robotic approaches often prioritize one modality, therefore limiting adaptability. This paper…
Contact-rich manipulation demands human-like integration of perception and force feedback: vision should guide task progress, while high-frequency interaction control must stabilize contact under uncertainty. Existing learning-based policies often entangle these roles in a monolithic network, tradin…
Embodied intelligence for contact-rich manipulation has predominantly relied on position control, while explicit awareness and regulation of interaction forces remain under-explored, limiting stability, precision, and robustness in real-world tasks. We propose ForceVLA2, an end-to-end vision-languag
Humanoid loco-manipulation requires executing precise manipulation tasks while maintaining dynamic stability amid base motion and impacts. Existing approaches typically formulate commands in body-centric frames, fail to inherently correct cumulative world-frame drift induced by legged locomotion. We…
Many manipulation tasks require memory beyond the current observation, yet most visuomotor policies rely on the Markov assumption and thus struggle with repeated states or long-horizon dependencies. Existing methods attempt to extend observation horizons but remain insufficient for diverse memory re…
Dexterous robotic hands enable robots to perform complex manipulations that require fine-grained control and adaptability. Achieving such manipulation is challenging because the high degrees of freedom tightly couple hand and arm motions, making learning and control difficult. Successful dexterous m…
Real-world physical sensing exhibits complex, heterogeneous noise patterns that deviate significantly from idealized simulation, posing a fundamental bottleneck for sim-to-real transfer. Existing sensor modelings typically treat depth noise as a monolithic black-box process, overlooking the distinct…
While imitation learning (IL) has achieved impressive success in dexterous manipulation through generative modeling and pretraining, state-of-the-art approaches like Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models still struggle with adaptation to environmental changes and skill transfer. We argue this stems fr…
Inferring object motion representations from observations enhances the performance of robotic manipulation tasks. This paper introduces a new paradigm for robot imitation learning that generates action sequences by reasoning about object motion from visual observations.We propose MBA, a novel module…
We humans rely on a wide range of commonsense knowledge to interact with an extensive number and categories of objects in the physical world. Likewise, such commonsense knowledge is also crucial for robots to successfully develop generalized object manipulation skills. While recent advancements in M
Articulated objects are pervasive in daily environments, such as drawers and refrigerators. Towards their part-level surface reconstruction and joint parameter estimation, REArtGS [??] introduces a category-agnostic approach using multi-view RGB images at two different states. However, we observe th
The adoption of fisheye cameras in robotic manipulation, driven by their exceptionally wide Field of View (FoV), is rapidly outpacing a systematic understanding of their downstream effects on policy learning. This paper presents the first comprehensive empirical study to bridge this gap, rigorously
Turning garments right-side out is a challenging manipulation task: it is highly dynamic, entails rapid contact changes, and is subject to severe visual occlusion. We introduce Right-Side-Out, a zero-shot sim-to-real framework that effectively solves this challenge by exploiting task structures. We …
Intelligent agents progress by continually refining their capabilities through actively exploring environments. Yet robot policies often lack sufficient exploration capability due to action mode collapse. Existing methods that encourage exploration typically rely on random perturbations, which are u…
Vision-Language-Action models face significant challenges in real-world deployment due to the entanglement of high-level reasoning with low-level control, and the instability of policy optimization. In this paper, we introduce SyVLA, a robust VLA model trained with diversified experiences. We propos…
Recent advancements in visual-inertial motion capture systems have demonstrated the potential of combining monocular cameras with sparse inertial measurement units (IMUs) as cost-effective solutions, which effectively mitigate occlusion and drift issues inherent in single-modality systems. However, …
Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show potential to generalize across embodiments but struggle to quickly align with a new robot’s action space when high-quality demonstrations are scarce, especially for bipedal humanoids. We present TrajBooster, a cross-embodiment framework that leverages …
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have garnered significant attention recently and demonstrate outstanding capabilities in various tasks such as OCR, VQA, captioning, etc. However, hallucination remains a persistent issue. While numerous methods have been proposed to mitigate hallucinations,
We introduce AgentWorld, an interactive simulation platform for developing household mobile manipulation capabilities. Our platform combines automated scene construction that encompasses layout generation, semantic asset placement, visual material configuration, and physics simulation, with a dual-m…
Scaling up robotic imitation learning for real-world applications requires efficient and scalable demonstration collection methods. While teleoperation is effective, it depends on costly and inflexible robot platforms. In-the-wild demonstrations offer a promising alternative, but existing collection…
Articulated object manipulation remains a critical challenge in robotics due to the complex kinematic constraints and the limited physical reasoning of existing methods. In this work, we introduce ArtGS, a novel framework that extends 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) by integrating visual-physical model
The acquisition of substantial volumes of 3D articulated object data is expensive and time-consuming, and consequently the scarcity of 3D articulated object data becomes an obstacle for deep learning methods to achieve remarkable performance in various articulated object understanding tasks. Meanwhi…
Generalization in robotic manipulation remains a critical challenge, particularly when scaling to new environments with limited demonstrations. This paper introduces CAGE, a novel robotic manipulation policy designed to overcome these generalization barriers by integrating the pretrained visual repr
We introduce ChatGarment, a novel approach that leverages large vision-language models (VLMs) to automate the estimation, generation, and editing of 3D garment sewing patterns from images or text descriptions. Unlike previous methods that often lack robustness and interactive editing capabilities, C…
In recent years, imitation learning has made progress in the field of robotic manipulation. However, it still faces challenges when addressing complex long-horizon tasks with deformable objects, such as high-dimensional state spaces, complex dynamics, and multimodal action distributions. Traditional
Mainstream visuomotor policies predominantly rely on generative models for holistic action prediction, while current autoregressive policies, predicting the next token or chunk, have shown suboptimal results. This motivates a search for more effective learning methods to unleash the potential of aut…
This study introduces a novel language-guided diffusion-based learning framework, DexTOG, aimed at advancing the field of task-oriented grasping (TOG) with dexterous hands. Unlike existing methods that mainly focus on 2-finger grippers, this research addresses the complexities of dexterous manipulat
Dexterous manipulation has received considerable attention in recent research. Predominantly, existing studies have concentrated on reinforcement learning methods to address the substantial degrees of freedom in hand movements. Nonetheless, these methods typically suffer from low efficiency and accu
Generating robot demonstrations through simulation is widely recognized as an effective way to scale up robot data. Previous work often trained reinforcement learning agents to generate expert policies, but this approach lacks sample efficiency. Recently, a line of work has attempted to generate rob
Human cognition can leverage fundamental conceptual knowledge, like geometry and kinematic ones, to appropriately perceive, comprehend and interact with novel objects. Motivated by this finding, we aim to endow machine intelligence with an analogous capability through performing at the conceptual le…
We present ViTaM-D, a novel visual-tactile framework for reconstructing dynamic hand-object interaction with distributed tactile sensing to enhance contact modeling. Existing methods, relying solely on visual inputs, often fail to capture occluded interactions and object deformation. To address this…
Accurate hand motion capture (MoCap) is vital for applications in robotics, virtual reality, and biomechanics, yet existing systems face limitations in capturing high-degree-of-freedom (DoF) joint kinematics and personalized hand shape. Commercial gloves offer up to 21 DoFs, which are insufficient f
Contact-rich tasks present significant challenges for robotic manipulation policies due to the complex dynamics of contact and the need for precise control. Vision-based policies often struggle with the skill required for such tasks, as they typically lack critical contact feedback modalities like f
In most contact-rich manipulation tasks, humans apply time-varying forces to the target object, compensating for inaccuracies in the vision-guided hand trajectory. However, current robot learning algorithms primarily focus on trajectory-based policy, with limited attention given to learning force-re
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced general-purpose robotic manipulation by leveraging pretrained visual and linguistic representations. However, they struggle with contact-rich tasks that require fine-grained control involving force, especially under visual occlusion or dynamic uncert…
Garments are common in daily life and are important for embodied intelligence community. Current category-level garments pose tracking works focus on predicting point-wise canonical correspondence and learning a shape deformation in point cloud sequences. In this paper, motivated by the 2D warping s…
Manipulating articulated objects with robotic arms is challenging due to the complex kinematic structure, which requires precise part segmentation for efficient manipulation. In this work, we introduce a novel superpoint-based perception method designed to improve part segmentation in 3D point cloud…
The ability to perform cross-category object perception and manipulation is highly desirable in building intelligent robots. One promising approach is to define the concept of Generalizable and Actionable Parts (GAParts), such as buttons and handles, on both seen and unseen object categories. Howeve
Analyses of human motion kinematics have achieved tremendous advances. However, the production mechanism, known as human dynamics, is still undercovered. In this paper, we aim to push data-driven human dynamics understanding forward. We identify a major obstacle to this as the heterogeneity of exist…
Employing a teleoperation system for gathering demonstrations offers the potential for more efficient learning of robot manipulation. However, teleoperating a robot arm equipped with a dexterous hand or gripper, via a teleoperation system presents inherent challenges due to the task's high dimension
Inverse dynamics (ID), which aims at reproducing the driven torques from human kinematic observations, has been a critical tool for gait analysis. However, it is hindered from wider application to general motion due to its limited scalability. Conventional optimization-based ID requires expensive la…
Spatio-temporal Human-Object Interaction (ST-HOI) understanding aims at detecting HOIs from videos, which is crucial for activity understanding. However, existing whole-body-object interaction video benchmarks overlook the truth that open-world objects are diverse, that is, they usually provide limi…
Human trajectory prediction is fundamental for autonomous driving and service robot. The research community has studied various important aspects of this task and made remarkable progress recently. However, there is an essential perspective which is not well exploited in previous research all along,…
Hand-eye calibration aims to estimate the transformation between a camera and a robot. Traditional methods rely on fiducial markers, which require considerable manual effort and precise setup. Recent advances in deep learning have introduced markerless techniques but come with more prerequisites, su
Imitation learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm in robot manipulation, yet its generalization capability remains constrained by object-specific dependencies in limited expert demonstrations. To address this challenge, we propose knowledge-driven imitation learning, a framework that leverages e
Language plays a crucial role in robotic manipulation, particularly in facilitating complex tasks. Previous work primarily focused on two-finger manipulation. However, leveraging language to guide reinforcement learning for dexterous hands remains a challenge due to their high degrees of freedom. In
Intelligent robots need to interact with diverse objects across various environments. The appearance and state of objects frequently undergo complex transformations depending on the object properties, e.g., phase transitions. However, in the vision community, segmenting dynamic objects with phase tr…
Inferring object motion representations from observations enhances the performance of robotic manipulation tasks. This paper introduces a new paradigm for robot imitation learning that generates action sequences by reasoning about object motion from visual observations. We propose MBA (Motion Before
Visuomotor policies learned through imitation learning methods often struggle to generalize to new visual domains due to the limited diversity of expert demonstrations, and collecting extensive real-world data is exhaustive. To address this challenge, we propose a novel demonstration generation app…
Articulated objects, as prevalent entities in human life, their 3D representations play crucial roles across various applications. However, achieving both high-fidelity textured surface reconstruction and dynamic generation for articulated objects remains challenging for existing methods. In this pa…
Achieving generalizability in solving out-of-distribution tasks is one of the ultimate goals of learning robotic manipulation. Recent progress of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has shown that VLM-based task planners can alleviate the difficulty of solving novel tasks, by decomposing the compounded ta
Humans can accomplish complex contact-rich tasks using vision and touch, with highly reactive capabilities such as quick adjustments to environmental changes and adaptive control of contact forces; however, this remains challenging for robots. Existing visual imitation learning (IL) approaches rely…
Self-improvement requires robotic systems to initially learn from human-provided data and then gradually enhance their capabilities through interaction with the environment. This is similar to how humans improve their skills through continuous practice. However, achieving effective self-improvement
Automating garment manipulation poses a significant challenge for assistive robotics due to the diverse and de-formable nature of garments. Traditional approaches typically require separate models for each garment type, which limits scalability and adaptability. In contrast, this paper presents a un
Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have exhibited impressive capability. However, recently many deficiencies of MLLMs have been found compared to human intelligence, $\textit{e.g.}$, hallucination. To drive the MLLMs study, the community dedicated efforts to building larger benchmarks with co…
Data is crucial for robotic manipulation, as it underpins the development of robotic systems for complex tasks. While high-quality, diverse datasets enhance the performance and adaptability of robotic manipulation policies, collecting extensive expert-level data is resource-intensive. Consequently,
Task planning under uncertainty is essential for home-service robots operating in the real world. Tasks involve ambiguous human instructions, hidden or unknown object locations, and open-vocabulary object types, leading to significant open-ended uncertainty and a boundlessly large planning space. To…
Previous studies on robotic manipulation are based on a limited understanding of the underlying 3D motion constraints and affordances. To address these challenges, we propose a comprehensive paradigm, termed UniAff, that integrates 3D object-centric manipulation and task understanding in a unified f
Robotic task planning in real-world environments requires reasoning over implicit constraints from language and vision. While LLMs and VLMs offer strong priors, they struggle with long-horizon structure and symbolic grounding. Existing meth- ods that combine LLMs with symbolic planning often rely on…
The problem of grasping objects using a multi-finger hand has received significant attention in recent years. However, it remains challenging to handle a large number of unfamiliar objects in real and cluttered environments. In this work, we propose a representation that can be effectively mapped to…
Human dexterity facilitates the quick identification of optimal grasp configurations and the precise exertion of force, regardless of the novelty of the objects encountered. Although previous research has primarily focused on the use of visual cues, this work introduces an innovative approach to dex
While humans can use parts of their arms other than the hands for manipulations like gathering and supporting, whether robots can effectively learn and perform the same type of operations remains relatively unexplored. As these manipulations require joint-level control to regulate the complete poses…
"Estimating global human motion from moving cameras is challenging due to the entanglement of human and camera motions. To mitigate the ambiguity, existing methods leverage learned human motion priors, which however often result in oversmoothed motions with misaligned 2D projections. To tackle this…
We present ConceptFactory, a novel scope to facilitate more efficient annotation of 3D object knowledge by recognizing 3D objects through generalized concepts (i.e. object conceptualization), aiming at promoting machine intelligence to learn comprehensive object knowledge from both vision and roboti…
Recently dataset distillation has paved the way towards efficient machine learning especially for image datasets. However the distillation for videos characterized by an exclusive temporal dimension remains an underexplored domain. In this work we provide the first systematic study of video distilla…
Grasp planning is an important task for robotic manipulation. Though it is a richly studied area, a standalone, fast, and differentiable grasp planner that can work with robot grippers of different DOFs has not been reported. In this work, we present DiPGrasp, a grasp planner that satisfies all thes
In the realm of robotic cloth manipulation, accurately estimating the cloth state during or post-execution is imperative. However, the inherent complexities in a cloth's dynamic behavior and its near-infinite degrees of freedom (DoF) pose significant challenges. Traditional methods have been restric
Fluid interactions are crucial in daily tasks, with properties like density and viscosity being key parameters. The property states can be used as control signals for robot operation. While density estimation is simple, assessing viscosity, especially for different fluid types, is complex. This stud…
"Data-efficient learning has garnered significant attention, especially given the current trend of large multi-modal models. Recently, dataset distillation has become an effective approach by synthesizing data samples that are essential for network training. However, it remains to be explored which…
In the realm of computer vision and robotics embodied agents are expected to explore their environment and carry out human instructions. This necessitates the ability to fully understand 3D scenes given their first-person observations and contextualize them into language for interaction. However tra…
Rearrangement operations form the crux of interactions between humans and their environment. The ability to generate natural, fluid sequences of this operation is of essential value in AR/VR and CG. Bridging a gap in the field, our study introduces FAVOR: a novel dataset for Full-body AR-driven Virt…
Action understanding matters for intelligent agents and has attracted long-term attention. It can be formed as the mapping from the action physical space to the semantic space. Typically researchers built action datasets according to idiosyncratic choices to define classes and push the envelope of b…
Articulated objects like cabinets and doors are widespread in daily life. However, directly manipulating 3D articulated objects is challenging because they have diverse geometrical shapes, semantic categories, and kinetic constraints. Prior works mostly focused on recognizing and manipulating articu…
Articulated object manipulation in real images is a fundamental step in computer and robotic vision tasks. Recently, several image editing methods based on diffusion models have been proposed to manipulate articulated objects according to text prompts. However, these methods often generate weird art…
Physical Human-Scene Interaction (HSI) plays a crucial role in numerous applications. However, existing HSI techniques are limited to specific object dynamics and privileged information, which prevents the development of more comprehensive applications. To address this limitation, we introd…
This paper presents a novel simulation platform, ZeMa, designed for robotic manipulation tasks concerning soft objects. Such simulation ideally requires three properties: two-way soft-rigid coupling, intersection-free guarantee, and frictional contact modeling, with acceptable runtime suitable for l
Though dataset distillation has witnessed rapid development in recent years, the distillation of multimodal data, e.g., image-text pairs, poses unique and under-explored challenges. Unlike unimodal data, image-text contrastive learning (ITC) data lack inherent categorization and should instead place…
This work proposes a novel learning framework for visual hand dynamics analysis that takes into account the physiological aspects of hand motion. The existing models which are simplified joint-actuated systems often produce unnatural motions. To address this we integrate a musculoskeletal system wit…
We present OAKINK2 a dataset of bimanual object manipulation tasks for complex daily activities. In pursuit of constructing the complex tasks into a structured representation OAKINK2 introduces three level of abstraction to organize the manipulation tasks: Affordance Primitive Task and Complex Task.…
Large, high-capacity models trained on diverse datasets have shown remarkable successes on efficiently tackling downstream applications. In domains from NLP to Computer Vision, this has led to a consolidation of pretrained models, with general pretrained backbones serving as a starting point for man
Large, high-capacity models trained on diverse datasets have shown remarkable successes on efficiently tackling downstream applications. In domains from NLP to Computer Vision, this has led to a consolidation of pretrained models, with general pretrained backbones serving as a starting point for man…
Embedding Human and Articulated Object Interaction (HAOI) in 3D is an important direction for a deeper human activity understanding. Different from previous works that use parametric and CAD models to represent humans and objects, in this work, we propose a novel 3D geometric primitive-based languag…
Transparent objects are widely used in our daily lives, making it important to teach robots to interact with them. However, it's not easy because the reflective and refractive effects can make depth cameras fail to give accurate geometry measurements. To solve this problem, this paper introduces RFT
A key challenge for robotic manipulation in open domains is how to acquire diverse and generalizable skills for robots. Recent progress in one-shot imitation learning and robotic foundation models have shown promise in transferring trained policies to new tasks based on demonstrations. This feature…
Precise robot manipulations require rich spatial information in imitation learning. Image-based policies model object positions from fixed cameras, which are sensitive to camera view changes. Policies utilizing 3D point clouds usually predict keyframes rather than continuous actions, posing difficul…
Articulated objects are commonly found in daily life. It is essential that robots can exhibit robust perception and manipulation skills for articulated objects in real-world robotic applications. However, existing methods for articulated objects insufficiently address noise in point clouds and strug…
"Human-scene Interaction (HSI) generation is a challenging task and crucial for various downstream tasks. However, one of the major obstacles is its limited data scale. High-quality data with simultaneously captured human and 3D environments is hard to acquire, resulting in limited data diversity an…
Accurate human shape recovery from a monocular RGB image is a challenging task because humans come in different shapes and sizes and wear different clothes. In this paper, we propose ShapeBoost, a new human shape recovery framework that achieves pixel-level alignment even for rare body shapes and hi…
Tactile perception stands as a critical sensory modality for human interaction with the environment. Among various tactile sensor techniques, optical sensor-based approaches have gained traction, notably for producing high-resolution tactile images. This letter explores gel elastomer deformation sim
"As a prominent research area, visual reasoning plays a crucial role in AI by facilitating concept formation and interaction with the world. However, current works are usually carried out separately on small datasets thus lacking generalization ability. Through rigorous evaluation of diverse benchma…
The tie-knotting task is highly challenging due to the tie's high deformation and long-horizon manipulation actions. This work presents TieBot, a Real-to-Sim-to-Real learning from visual demonstration system for the robots to learn to knot a tie. We introduce the Hierarchical Feature Matching approa…
Understanding objects is a central building block of AI, especially for embodied AI. Even though object recognition excels with deep learning, current machines struggle to learn higher-level knowledge, e.g., what attributes an object has, and what we can do with it. Here, we propose a challenging Ob…
In daily life, humans utilize hands to manipulate objects. Modeling the shape of objects that are manipulated by the hand is essential for AI to comprehend daily tasks and to learn manipulation skills. However, previous approaches have encountered difficulties in reconstructing the precise shapes of…
Various recent methods attempt to implement rotation-invariant 3D deep learning by replacing the input coordinates of points with relative distances and angles. Due to the incompleteness of these low-level features, they have to undertake the expense of losing global information. In this paper, we p…
Garments are important and pervasive in daily life. However, visual analysis on them for pose estimation is challenging because it requires recovering the complete configurations of garments, which is difficult, if not impossible, to annotate in the real world. In this work, we propose a recording s…
We present ClothesNet: a large-scale dataset of 3D clothes objects with information-rich annotations. Our dataset consists of around 4000 models covering 11 categories annotated with clothes features, boundary lines, and keypoints. ClothesNet can be used to facilitate a variety of computer vision an…
Multiphysics phenomena, the coupling effects involving different aspects of physics laws, are pervasive in the real world and can often be encountered when performing everyday household tasks. Intelligent agents which seek to assist or replace human laborers will need to learn to cope with such phe…
Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is an efficient technique for robots to acquire new skills through expert observation, significantly mitigating the need for laborious manual reward function design. This paper introduces a novel framework for model-based LfD in the context of robotic manipulation.…
With the surge in attention to Egocentric Hand-Object Interaction (Ego-HOI), large-scale datasets such as Ego4D and EPIC-KITCHENS have been proposed. However, most current research is built on resources derived from third-person video action recognition. This inherent domain gap between first- and t…
In recent years, there has been a significant effort dedicated to developing efficient, robust, and general human-to-robot handover systems. However, the area of flexible handover in the context of complex and continuous objects' motion remains relatively unexplored. In this work, we propose an appr…
Garments are important to humans. A visual system that can estimate and track the complete garment pose can be useful for many downstream tasks and real-world applications. In this work, we present a complete package to address the category-level garment pose tracking task: (1) A recording system VR…
With the progress of 3D human pose and shape estimation, state-of-the-art methods can either be robust to occlusions or obtain pixel-aligned accuracy in non-occlusion cases. However, they cannot obtain robustness and mesh-image alignment at the same time. In this work, we present NIKI (Neural Invers…
Enable neural networks to capture 3D geometrical-aware features is essential in multi-view based vision tasks. Previous methods usually encode the 3D information of multi-view stereo into the 2D features. In contrast, we present a novel method, named POEM, that directly operates on the 3D POints Emb…
This work presents a novel tactile perception-based method, named T-NT, for performing the needle-threading task, an application of deformable linear object (DLO) manipulation. This task is divided into two main stages: \textit{Tail-end Finding} and \textit{Tail-end Insertion}. In the first stage, t…
Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is recognized with the potential to be significantly more sample efficient than model-free RL. How an accurate model can be developed automatically and efficiently from raw sensory inputs (such as images), especially for complex environments and tasks, is a…
To comprehensively cover the uncertainty of the future, the common practice of multi-modal human trajectory prediction is to first generate a set/distribution of candidate future trajectories and then sample required numbers of trajectories from them as final predictions. Even though a large number…
Human reasoning can be understood as a cooperation between the intuitive, associative "System-1'' and the deliberative, logical "System-2''. For existing System-1-like methods in visual activity understanding, it is crucial to integrate System-2 processing to improve explainability, generalization,…
Reactive grasping, which enables the robot to successfully grasp dynamic moving objects, is of great interest in robotics. Current methods mainly focus on the temporal smoothness of the predicted grasp poses but few consider their semantic consistency. Consequently, the predicted grasps are not guar…
This paper explores the development of UniFolding, a sample-efficient, scalable, and generalizable robotic system for unfolding and folding various garments. UniFolding employs the proposed UFONet neural network to integrate unfolding and folding decisions into a single policy model that is adaptab…
Due to the difficulty of annotating the 3D LiDAR data of autonomous driving, an efficient unsupervised 3D representation learning method is important. In this paper, we design the Triangle Constrained Contrast (TriCC) framework tailored for autonomous driving scenes which learns 3D unsupervised repr…
Deep neural networks (DNNs) often perform poorly in the presence of domain shift and category shift. How to upcycle DNNs and adapt them to the target task remains an important open problem. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA), especially recently proposed Source-free Domain Adaptation (SFDA), has b…
Tactile sensing is one of the modalities human rely on heavily to perceive the world. Working with vision, this modality refines local geometry structure, measures deformation at contact area, and indicates hand-object contact state. With the availability of open-source tactile sensors such as DIGIT…
Human life is populated with articulated objects. A comprehensive understanding of articulated objects, namely appearance, structure, physics property, and semantics, will benefit many research communities. As current articulated object understanding solutions are usually based on synthetic object d…
Estimating the articulated 3D hand-object pose from a single RGB image is a highly ambiguous and challenging problem, requiring large-scale datasets that contain diverse hand poses, object types, and camera viewpoints. Most real-world datasets lack these diversities. In contrast, data synthesis can…
In this paper, we tackle the problem of category-level 9D pose estimation in the wild, given a single RGB-D frame. Using supervised data of real-world 9D poses is tedious and erroneous, and also fails to generalize to unseen scenarios. Besides, category-level pose estimation requires a method to be…
3D object detection has attracted much attention thanks to the advances in sensors and deep learning methods for point clouds. Current state-of-the-art methods like VoteNet regress direct offset towards object centers and box orientations with an additional Multi-Layer-Perceptron network. Both their…
"Long-tailed image recognition presents massive challenges to deep learning systems since the imbalance between majority (head) classes and minority (tail) classes severely skews the data-driven deep neural networks. Previous methods tackle with data imbalance from the viewpoints of data distributio…
Data augmentation is an efficient way to elevate 3D object detection performance. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective online crop-and-paste data augmentation pipeline for structured 3D point cloud scenes, named CorrelaBoost. Observing that 3D objects should have reasonable relative posi…
"3D human pose estimation from a monocular video has recently seen significant improvements. However, most state-of-the-art methods are kinematics-based, which are prone to physically implausible motions with pronounced artifacts. Current dynamics-based methods can predict physically plausible motio…
Hand, the bearer of human productivity and intelligence, is receiving much attention due to the recent fever of digital twins. Among different hand morphable models, MANO has been widely used in vision and graphics community. However, MANO disregards textures and accessories, which largely limits it…
Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection plays a core role in activity understanding. As a compositional learning problem (human-verb-object), studying its generalization matters. However, widely-used metric mean average precision (mAP) fails to model the compositional generalization well. Thus, we…
Human trajectory prediction task aims to analyze human future movements given their past status, which is a crucial step for many autonomous systems such as self-driving cars and social robots. In real-world scenarios, it is unlikely to obtain sufficiently long observations at all times for predicti…
Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection plays a core role in activity understanding. Though recent two/one-stage methods have achieved impressive results, as an essential step, discovering interactive human-object pairs remains challenging. Both one/two-stage methods fail to effectively extract int…
Anticipating future events is an essential feature for intelligent systems and embodied AI. However, compared to the traditional recognition task, the uncertainty of future and reasoning ability requirement make the anticipation task very challenging and far beyond solved. In this filed, previous me…
"Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection plays a crucial role in activity understanding. Though significant progress has been made, interactiveness learning remains a challenging problem in HOI detection: existing methods usually generate redundant negative H-O pair proposals and fail to effectivel…
When tracking objects, humans rely on a memory mechanism, memorize the track of an object then look for it in the current scene. In this paper, we propose Memory-based Multi-object Tracking with Transformers (MMTT) to mimic human behavior in multi-object tracking. Unlike Re-ID-based methods, MMTT so…
Learning how humans manipulate objects requires machines to acquire knowledge from two perspectives: one for understanding object affordances and the other for learning human's interactions based on the affordances. Even though these two knowledge bases are crucial, we find that current databases la…
We present RCareWorld, a human-centric simulation world for physical and social robotic caregiving designed with inputs from stakeholders. RCareWorld has realistic human models of care recipients with mobility limitations and caregivers, home environments with multiple levels of accessibility and as…
We aim to build a useful, reproducible, democratized benchmark for learning household robotic manipulation from human videos. To realize this goal, a diverse, high-quality human video dataset curated specifically for robots is desired. To evaluate the learning progress, a simulated twin environment…
Building general-purpose robots to perform a diverse range of tasks in a large variety of environments in the physical world at the human level is extremely challenging. According to [1], it requires the robot learning to be sample-efficient, generalizable, compositional, and incremental. In this wo…
Typical vision backbones manipulate structured features. As a compromise, semantic segmentation has long been modeled as per-point prediction on dense regular grids. In this work, we present a novel and efficient modeling that starts from interpreting the image as a tessellation of learnable regions…
Transparent objects are common in our daily life and frequently handled in the automated production line. Robust vision-based robotic grasping and manipulation for these objects would be beneficial for automation. However, the majority of current grasping algorithms would fail in this case since the
Keypoint detection is an essential component for the object registration and alignment. In this work, we reckon keypoint detection as information compression, and force the model to distill out important points of an object. Based on this, we propose UKPGAN, a general self-supervised 3D keypoint det…
Human trajectory prediction is crucial for service robots, autonomous driving and advanced driver assistant systems. Current top-performing methods mainly rely on intractable generative models to learn a distribution of future trajectories, and sample multiple plausible ones as prediction results. I
We study the unsupervised representation learning for the semantic segmentation task. Different from previous works that aim at providing unsupervised pre-trained backbones for segmentation models which need further supervised fine-tune, here, we focus on providing representation that is only traine…
"In this paper, we propose a genuine group-level contrastive visual representation learning method whose linear evaluation performance on ImageNet surpasses the vanilla supervised learning. Two mainstream unsupervised learning schemes are the instance-level contrastive framework and clustering-based…
Modeling the hand-object (HO) interaction not only requires estimation of the HO pose, but also pays attention to the contact due to their interaction. Significant progress has been made in estimating hand and object separately with deep learning methods, simultaneous HO pose estimation and contact…
Recent years, human-object interaction (HOI) detection has achieved impressive advances. However, conventional two-stage methods are usually slow in inference. On the other hand, existing one-stage methods mainly focus on the union regions of interactions, which introduce unnecessary visual informat…
Human-object interaction (HOI) detection requires a large amount of annotated data. Current algorithms suffer from insufficient training samples and category imbalance within datasets. To increase data efficiency, in this paper, we propose an efficient and effective data augmentation method called D…
Efficient and robust grasp pose detection is vital for robotic manipulation. For general 6 DoF grasping, conventional methods treat all points in a scene equally and usually adopt uniform sampling to select grasp candidates. However, we discover that ignoring where to grasp greatly harms the speed a…
Object handover is a common human collaboration behavior that attracts attention from researchers in Robotics and Cognitive Science. Though visual perception plays an important role in the object handover task, the whole handover process has been specifically explored. In this work, we propose a nov…
Heatmap-based methods dominate in the field of human pose estimation by modelling the output distribution through likelihood heatmaps. In contrast, regression-based methods are more efficient but suffer from inferior performance. In this work, we explore maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) to develo…
Model-based 3D pose and shape estimation methods reconstruct a full 3D mesh for the human body by estimating several parameters. However, learning the abstract parameters is a highly non-linear process and suffers from image-model misalignment, leading to mediocre model performance. In contrast, 3D…
Soft-argmax operation is commonly adopted in detection-based methods to localize the target position in a differentiable manner. However, training the neural network with soft-argmax makes the shape of the probability map unconstrained. Consequently, the model lacks pixel-wise supervision through th…
Convolutional video models have an order of magnitude larger computational complexity than their counterpart image-level models. Constrained by computational resources, there is no model or training method that can train long video sequences end-to-end. Currently, the main-stream method is to split…
General object grasping is an important yet unsolved problem in the field of robotics. Most of the current methods either generate grasp poses with few DoF that fail to cover most of the success grasps, or only take the unstable depth image or point cloud as input which may lead to poor results in s…
Detecting aligned 3D keypoints is essential under many scenarios such as object tracking, shape retrieval and robotics. However, it is generally hard to prepare a high-quality dataset for all types of objects due to the ambiguity of keypoint itself. Meanwhile, current unsupervised detectors are unab…
Suction is an important solution for the long-standing robotic grasping problem. Compared with other kinds of grasping, suction grasping is easier to represent and often more reliable in practice. Though preferred in many scenarios, it is not fully investigated and lacks sufficient training data and
Human attention mechanisms often work in a top-down manner, yet it is not well explored in vision research. Here, we propose the Top-Down Attention Framework (TDAF) to capture top-down attentions, which can be easily adopted in most existing models. The designed Recursive Dual-Directional Nested Str…
Multimodal prediction results are essential for trajectory prediction task as there is no single correct answer for the future. Previous frameworks can be divided into three categories: regression, generation and classification frameworks. However, these frameworks have weaknesses in different aspec…
We present 6-PACK, a deep learning approach to category-level 6D object pose tracking on RGB-D data. Our method tracks in real time novel object instances of known object categories such as bowls, laptops, and mugs. 6-PACK learns to compactly represent an object by a handful of 3D keypoints, based o…
Understanding interaction is an essential part of video action detection. We propose the Asynchronous Interaction Aggregation network (AIA) that leverages different interactions to boost action detection. There are two key designs in it: one is the Interaction Aggregation structure (IA) adopting a u…
Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection lies at the core of action understanding. Besides 2D information such as human/object appearance and locations, 3D pose is also usually utilized in HOI learning since its view-independence. However, rough 3D body joints just carry sparse body information and…
Object grasping is critical for many applications, which is also a challenging computer vision problem. However, for cluttered scene, current researches suffer from the problems of insufficient training data and the lacking of evaluation benchmarks. In this work, we contribute a large-scale grasp po…
Remarkable progress has been made in 3D human pose estimation from a monocular RGB camera. However, only a few studies explored 3D multi-person cases. In this paper, we attempt to address the lack of a global perspective of the top-down approaches by introducing a novel form of supervision - Hierarc…
Human-Object Interaction (HOI) consists of human, object and implicit interaction/verb. Different from previous methods that directly map pixels to HOI semantics, we propose a novel perspective for HOI learning in an analytical manner. In analogy to Harmonic Analysis, whose goal is to study how to r…
Semantic understanding of 3D objects is crucial in many applications such as object manipulation. However, it is hard to give a universal definition of point-level semantics that everyone would agree on. We observe that people have a consensus on semantic correspondences between two areas from diffe…
Detecting 3D objects keypoints is ofgreat interest to the areas of both graphics and computer vision. There have been several 2D and 3D keypoint datasets aiming to address this problem in a data-driven way. These datasets, however, either lack scalability or bring ambiguity to the definition of keyp…
Existing image-based activity understanding methods mainly adopt direct mapping, i.e. from image to activity concepts, which may encounter performance bottleneck since the huge gap. In light of this, we propose a new path: infer human part states first and then reason out the activities based on par…
Social interaction is an important topic in human trajectory prediction to generate plausible paths. In this paper, we present a novel insight of group-based social interaction model to explore relationships among pedestrians. We recursively extract social representations supervised by group-based a…
Attributes and objects can compose diverse compositions. To model the compositional nature of these general concepts, it is a good choice to learn them through transformations, such as coupling and decoupling. However, complex transformations need to satisfy specific principles to guarantee the rati…
Grasping in cluttered scenes is challenging for robot vision systems, as detection accuracy can be hindered by partial occlusion of objects. We adopt a reinforcement learning (RL) framework and 3D vision architectures to search for feasible viewpoints for grasping by the use of hand-mounted RGB-D ca…
Multi-object tracking is a fundamental vision problem that has been studied for a long time. As deep learning brings excellent performances to object detection algorithms, Tracking by Detection (TBD) has become the mainstream tracking framework. Despite the success of TBD, this two-step method is to…
We consider two less-emphasized temporal properties of video: 1. Temporal cues are fine-grained; 2. Temporal modeling needs reasoning. To tackle both problems at once, we exploit approximated bilinear modules (ABMs) for temporal modeling. There are two main points making the modules effective: two-l…
In this paper, we are interested in pose estimation of animals. Animals usually exhibit a wide range of variations on poses and there is no available animal pose dataset for training and testing. To address this problem, we build an animal pose dataset to facilitate training and evaluation. Consider…
Multi-person pose estimation is fundamental to many computer vision tasks and has made significant progress in recent years. However, few previous methods explored the problem of pose estimation in crowded scenes while it remains challenging and inevitable in many scenarios. Moreover, current benchm…
Extracting temporal and representation features efficiently plays a pivotal role in understanding visual sequence information. To deal with this, we propose a new recurrent neural framework that can be stacked deep effectively. There are mainly two novel designs in our deep RNN framework: one is a n…
A key technical challenge in performing 6D object pose estimation from RGB-D image is to fully leverage the two complementary data sources. Prior works either extract information from the RGB image and depth separately or use costly post-processing steps, limiting their performances in highly clutte…
In this paper, we propose a novel top-down instance segmentation framework based on explicit shape encoding, named ESE-Seg. It largely reduces the computational consumption of the instance segmentation by explicitly decoding the multiple object shapes with tensor operations, thus performs the instan…
Instance segmentation requires a large number of training samples to achieve satisfactory performance and benefits from proper data augmentation. To enlarge the training set and increase the diversity, previous methods have investigated using data annotation from other domain (e.g. bbox, point) in a…
Deep reinforcement learning algorithms have been proven successful in a variety of simulation tasks with dense reward feedback. However, real-world RL applications, e.g. robotic manipulation, remain challenging as most of them are multi-stage and a positive reward can only be received when the final…
Human-Object Interaction (HOI) Detection is an important problem to understand how humans interact with objects. In this paper, we explore Interactiveness Knowledge which indicates whether human and object interact with each other or not. We found that interactiveness knowledge can be learned across…
Peg-in-hole is a fine-level manipulation task that requires highly precise location and the normal direction of the hole, which is beyond state-of-the-art object detectors' capability. Therefore, we propose a novel method that trains a robot arm to progressively search for the right inserting pose t…
Important high-level vision tasks require rich semantic descriptions of objects at part level. Based upon previous work on part localization, in this paper, we address the problem of inferring rich semantics imparted by an object part in still images. Specifically, we propose to tokenize the semanti…
Recent advances in multi-stage algorithms have shown great promise, but two important problems still remain. First of all, at inference time, information can't feed back from downstream to upstream. Second, at training time, end-to-end training is not possible if the overall pipeline involves non-di…
Learning autonomous-driving policies is one of the most challenging but promising tasks for computer vision. Most researchers believe that future research and applications should combine cameras, video recorders and laser scanners to obtain comprehensive semantic understanding of real traffic. Howev…
In human-object interactions (HOI) recognition, conventional methods consider the human body as a whole and pay a uniform attention to the entire body region. They ignore the fact that normally, human interacts with an object by using some parts of the body. In this paper, we argue that different bo…
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have made impressive progress in many video recognition tasks such as video pose estimation and video object detection. However, running CNN inference on video requires numerous computation and is usually slow. In this work, we propose a framework called Rec…
Instance segmentation is a problem of significance in computer vision. However, preparing annotated data for this task is extremely time-consuming and costly. By combining the advantages of 3D scanning, reasoning, and GAN-based domain adaptation techniques, we introduce a novel pipeline named SRDA t…
Human body part parsing, or human semantic part segmentation, is fundamental to many computer vision tasks. In conventional semantic segmentation methods, the ground truth segmentations are provided, and fully convolutional networks (FCN) are trained in an end-to-end scheme. Although these methods h…
Video object detection is a fundamental tool for many applications. Since direct application of image-based object detection cannot leverage the rich temporal information inherent in video data, we advocate to the detection of long-range video object pattern. While the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)…
Multi-person pose estimation in the wild is challenging. Although state-of-the-art human detectors have demonstrated good performance, small errors in localization and recognition are inevitable. These errors can cause failures for a single-person pose estimator (SPPE), especially for methods that s…
Regions-with-convolutional-neural-network (RCNN) is now a commonly employed object detection pipeline. Its main steps, i.e., proposal generation and convolutional neural network (CNN) feature extraction, have been intensively investigated. We focus on the last step of the system to aggregate thousan…
Distance metric plays a key role in grouping superpixels to produce object proposals for object detection. We observe that existing distance metrics work primarily for low complexity cases. In this paper, we develop a novel distance metric for grouping two superpixels in high-complexity scenarios. C…
Closed contour is an important objectness indicator. We propose a new measure subject to the completeness and tightness constraints, where the optimized closed contour should be tightly bounded within an object proposal. The closed contour measure is defined using closed path integral, and we solve…
We propose a fine-grained recognition system that incorporates part localization, alignment, and classification in one deep neural network. This is a nontrivial process, as the input to the classification module should be functions that enable back-propagation in constructing the solver. Our major c…
The key contribution of this paper is the compact square object localization, which relaxes the exhaustive sliding window from testing all windows of different combinations of aspect ratios. Square object localization is category scalable. By using a binary search strategy, the number of scales to t…