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Hongbo Zhang

36 accepted papers

2026

Traversability-Aware Legged Navigation by Learning from Real-World Visual Data

ICRA 2026poster

The enhanced mobility brought by legged locomotion empowers quadrupedal robots to navigate through complex and unstructured environments. However, optimizing agile locomotion while accounting for the varying energy costs of traversing different terrains remains an open challenge. Most previous work …

2025

Constrain Alignment with Sparse Autoencoders

ICML 2025poster

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences remains a key challenge. While post-training techniques like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have achieved notable success, they often experience computational inefficienci…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

CycleResearcher: Improving Automated Research via Automated Review

ICLR 2025poster

The automation of scientific discovery has been a long-standing goal within the research community, driven by the potential to accelerate knowledge creation. While significant progress has been made using commercial large language models (LLMs) as research assistants or idea generators, the possibil…

2025

Direct Value Optimization: Improving Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in LLMs with Refined Values

EMNLP 2025

We introduce Direct Value Optimization (DVO), an innovative offline reinforcement learning framework for enhancing large language models in complex reasoning tasks. Unlike traditional methods relying on preference labels, DVO utilizes value signals at individual reasoning steps, optimizing models vi

2025

How Likely Do LLMs with CoT Mimic Human Reasoning?

COLING 2025main

Chain-of-thought emerges as a promising technique for eliciting reasoning capabilities from Large Language Models (LLMs). However, it does not always improve task performance or accurately represent reasoning processes, leaving unresolved questions about its usage. In this paper, we diagnose the und…

2025

Lotus: Diffusion-based Visual Foundation Model for High-quality Dense Prediction

ICLR 2025poster

Leveraging the visual priors of pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models offers a promising solution to enhance zero-shot generalization in dense prediction tasks. However, existing methods often uncritically use the original diffusion formulation, which may not be optimal due to the fundamental d…

Cited by 33SourcePDFScholar
2025

OMEGA: Open-Source and Multi-Mode Hopping Platform for Educational and Groundwork Aims

RA-L 2025

This letter presents OMEGA, a new open-source, multi-mode hopping platform. It consists of a rig and a middle-size robot equipped with an omnidirectional parallel 3-RSR leg, allowing for 1D, 2D, and 3D hopping modes. All modes can be easily interchanged via detachable mechanisms. A control framework

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Prioritizing Perception-Guided Self-Supervision: A New Paradigm for Causal Modeling in End-to-End Autonomous Driving

NeurIPS 2025poster

End-to-end autonomous driving systems, predominantly trained through imitation learning, have demonstrated considerable effectiveness in leveraging large-scale expert driving data. Despite their success in open-loop evaluations, these systems often exhibit significant performance degradation in clos…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

"Segment, Lift and Fit: Automatic 3D Shape Labeling from 2D Prompts"

ECCV 2024poster

"This paper proposes an algorithm for automatically labeling 3D objects from 2D point or box prompts, especially focusing on applications in autonomous driving. Unlike previous arts, our auto-labeler predicts 3D shapes instead of bounding boxes and does not require training on a specific dataset. We…

2024

A Fast Online Omnidirectional Quadrupedal Jumping Framework Via Virtual-Model Control and Minimum Jerk Trajectory Generation

IROS 2024poster

Exploring the limits of quadruped robot agility, particularly in the context of rapid and real-time planning and execution of omnidirectional jump trajectories, presents significant challenges due to the complex dynamics involved, especially when considering significant impulse contacts. This paper…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Adaptive Model Predictive Control with Data-driven Error Model for Quadrupedal Locomotion

ICRA 2024poster

Model Predictive Control (MPC) relies heavily on the robot model for its control law. However, a gap always exists between the reduced-order control model with uncertainties and the real robot, which degrades its performance. To address this issue, we propose the controller of integrating a data-dri…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

AutoSurvey: Large Language Models Can Automatically Write Surveys

NeurIPS 2024poster

This paper introduces AutoSurvey, a speedy and well-organized methodology for automating the creation of comprehensive literature surveys in rapidly evolving fields like artificial intelligence. Traditional survey paper creation faces challenges due to the vast volume and complexity of information,…

2024

NondBREM: Nondeterministic Offline Reinforcement Learning for Large-Scale Order Dispatching

AAAI 2024technical

One of the most important tasks in ride-hailing is order dispatching, i.e., assigning unserved orders to available drivers. Recent order dispatching has achieved a significant improvement due to the advance of reinforcement learning, which has been approved to be able to effectively address sequenti…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2023

Co-training and Co-distillation for Quality Improvement and Compression of Language Models

EMNLP 2023long findings

Knowledge Distillation (KD) compresses computationally expensive pre-trained language models (PLMs) by transferring their knowledge to smaller models, allowing their use in resource-constrained or real-time settings. However, most smaller models fail to surpass the performance of the original larger…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Enhancing Dialogue Generation via Dynamic Graph Knowledge Aggregation

ACL 2023long

Incorporating external graph knowledge into neural chatbot models has been proven effective for enhancing dialogue generation. However, in conventional graph neural networks (GNNs), message passing on a graph is independent from text, resulting in the graph representation hidden space differing from…

2023

Evolutionary-Based Online Motion Planning Framework for Quadruped Robot Jumping

IROS 2023poster

Offline evolutionary-based methodologies have supplied a successful motion planning framework for the quadrupedal jump. However, the time-consuming computation caused by massive population evolution in offline evolutionary-based jumping framework significantly limits the popularity in the quadrupeda…

Cited by 2SourceScholar
2023

FG-Depth: Flow-Guided Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation

ICRA 2023poster

The great potential of unsupervised monocular depth estimation has been demonstrated by many works due to low annotation cost and impressive accuracy comparable to supervised methods. To further improve the performance, recent works mainly focus on designing more complex network structures and explo…

Cited by 8SourceScholar
2023

HuatuoGPT, Towards Taming Language Model to Be a Doctor

EMNLP 2023long findings

In this paper, we present HuatuoGPT, a Large Language Model (LLM) for medical consultation. The core recipe of HuatuoGPT is to leverage both distilled data from **ChatGPT** and real-world data from **doctors** in the supervised fine-tuning stage. This is not only because purely using **ChatGPT**-di…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Self-Supervised Event-Based Monocular Depth Estimation Using Cross-Modal Consistency

IROS 2023poster

An event camera is a novel vision sensor that can capture per-pixel brightness changes and output a stream of asynchronous “events”. It has advantages over conventional cameras in those scenes with high-speed motions and challenging lighting conditions because of the high temporal resolution, high d…

Cited by 7SourceScholar
2022

GenLoco: Generalized Locomotion Controllers for Quadrupedal Robots

CoRL 2022poster

Recent years have seen a surge in commercially-available and affordable quadrupedal robots, with many of these platforms being actively used in research and industry. As the availability of legged robots grows, so does the need for controllers that enable these robots to perform useful skills. Howev…

Cited by 70SourcecodeScholar
2022

LTSR: Long-term Semantic Relocalization based on HD Map for Autonomous Vehicles

ICRA 2022poster

Highly accurate and robust relocalization or localization initialization ability is of great importance for autonomous vehicles (AVs). Traditional GNSS-based methods are not reliable enough in occlusion and multipath conditions. In this paper we propose a novel long-term semantic relocalization algo…

Cited by 10SourceScholar
2022

RINet: Efficient 3D Lidar-Based Place Recognition Using Rotation Invariant Neural Network

RA-L 2022

LiDAR-based place recognition (LPR) is one of the basic capabilities of robots, which can retrieve scenes from maps and identify previously visited locations based on 3D point clouds. As robots often pass the same place from different views, LPR methods are supposed to be robust to rotation, which i

Cited by 64SourceScholar
2021

BSP-MonoLoc: Basic Semantic Primitives based Monocular Localization on Roads

IROS 2021poster

Robust visual localization in traffic scenes is a fundamental problem for self-driving vehicles. However, it is still challenging to achieve accurate localization performance because of drastic viewpoint and illumination changes. To address the issues, we design a novel monocular localization framew…

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2021

IMU/Vehicle Calibration and Integrated Localization for Autonomous Driving

ICRA 2021poster

The localization system, which outputs vehicle position, velocity, and attitude, is one of the fundamental components in the autonomous driving vehicle. The global pose is not only used for the planning and control system, but also an important reference for the cloud source-based HD Map building an…

Cited by 10SourceScholar
2021

PocoNet: SLAM-oriented 3D LiDAR Point Cloud Online Compression Network

ICRA 2021poster

In this paper, we present PocoNet: Point cloud Online COmpression NETwork to address the task of SLAM-oriented compression. The aim of this task is to select a compact subset of points with high priority to maintain localization accuracy. The key insight is that points with high priority have simila…

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2021

PointSiamRCNN: Target-aware Voxel-based Siamese Tracker for Point Clouds

IROS 2021poster

Currently, there have been many kinds of pointbased 3D trackers, while voxel-based methods are still underexplored. In this paper, we first propose a voxel-based tracker, named PointSiamRCNN, improving tracking performance by embedding target information into the search region. Our framework is comp…

Cited by 5SourceScholar
2021

Reinforcement Learning based Negotiation-aware Motion Planning of Autonomous Vehicles

IROS 2021poster

For autonomous vehicles integrating onto road-ways with human traffic participants, it requires understanding and adapting to the participants’ intention by responding in predictable ways. This paper proposes a reinforcement learning based negotiation-aware motion planning framework, which adopts RL…

Cited by 14SourceScholar
2021

SA-LOAM: Semantic-aided LiDAR SLAM with Loop Closure

ICRA 2021poster

LiDAR-based SLAM system is admittedly more accurate and stable than others, while its loop closure detection is still an open issue. With the development of 3D semantic segmentation for point cloud, semantic information can be obtained conveniently and steadily, essential for high-level intelligence…

Cited by 110SourceScholar
2021

SSC: Semantic Scan Context for Large-Scale Place Recognition

IROS 2021poster

Place recognition gives a SLAM system the ability to correct cumulative errors. Unlike images that contain rich texture features, point clouds are almost pure geometric information which makes place recognition based on point clouds challenging. Existing works usually encode low-level features such…

Cited by 110SourcecodeScholar
2021

Semantic Segmentation-assisted Scene Completion for LiDAR Point Clouds

IROS 2021poster

Outdoor scene completion is a challenging issue in 3D scene understanding, which plays an important role in intelligent robotics and autonomous driving. Due to the sparsity of LiDAR acquisition, it is far more complex for 3D scene completion and semantic segmentation. Since semantic features can pro…

Cited by 48SourcecodeScholar
2021

Up-to-Down Network: Fusing Multi-Scale Context for 3D Semantic Scene Completion

IROS 2021poster

An efficient 3D scene perception algorithm is a vital component for autonomous driving and robotics systems. In this paper, we focus on semantic scene completion, which is a task of jointly estimating the volumetric occupancy and semantic labels of objects. Since the real-world data is sparse and oc…

Cited by 26SourceScholar
2021

Visual Semantic Localization based on HD Map for Autonomous Vehicles in Urban Scenarios

ICRA 2021poster

Highly accurate and robust localization ability is of great importance for autonomous vehicles (AVs) in urban scenarios. Traditional vision-based methods suffer from lost due to illumination, weather, viewing and appearance changes. In this paper we propose a novel visual semantic localization algor…

Cited by 52SourceScholar
2020

SMARTS: An Open-Source Scalable Multi-Agent RL Training School for Autonomous Driving

CoRL 2020

Interaction is fundamental in autonomous driving (AD). Despite more than a decade of intensive R&D in AD, how to dynamically interact with diverse road users in various contexts still remains unsolved. Multi-agent learning has recently seen big breakthroughs and has much to offer towards solving rea

2020

Triple-GAIL: A Multi-Modal Imitation Learning Framework with Generative Adversarial Nets

IJCAI 2020poster

Generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL) has shown promising results by taking advantage of generative adversarial nets, especially in the field of robot learning. However, the requirement of isolated single modal demonstrations limits the scalability of the approach to real world scenarios…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar