15 accepted papers
Expressive policies based on flow-matching have been successfully applied in reinforcement learning (RL) more recently due to their ability to model complex action distributions from offline data. These algorithms build on standard policy gradients, which assume that there is no unmeasured confoundi…
Blind Image Quality Assessment, aiming to replicate human perception of visual quality without reference, plays a key role in vision tasks, yet existing models often fail to effectively capture subtle distortion cues, leading to a misalignment with human subjective judgments. We identify that the ro
Point Cloud Quality Assessment (PCQA) faces a critical disconnect: existing methods operate on a flawed single-perception paradigm, while human observers evaluate quality through dual cognitive streams: technical rationality and semantic sensibility. This fundamental mismatch routinely produces asse
The edifice of native Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has emerged as a rising contender to typical modular VLMs, shaped by evolving model architectures and training paradigms. Yet, two lingering clouds cast shadows over its widespread exploration and promotion: (-) What fundamental constraints set nat…
Virtual Knowledge Graphs (VKGs) provide an effective solution for data integration by mapping heterogeneous data sources to a unified ontology. However, existing VKG construction frameworks primarily focus on one-shot construction, which often results in partial data coverage and support for only in
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in quality assessment tasks. However, a fundamental paradox arises when their application to Point Cloud Quality Assessment (PCQA). Existing VLMs, designed for image-text pairs, are inherently incompatible with 3D point cloud data
Reward shaping has been demonstrated to be an effective technique for accelerating the learning process of reinforcement learning (RL) agents. While successful in empirical applications, the design of a good shaping function is less well understood in principle and thus often relies on domain expert…
A key task in Artificial Intelligence is learning effective policies for controlling agents in unknown environments to optimize performance measures. Off-policy learning methods, like Q-learning, allow learners to make optimal decisions based on past experiences. This paper studies off-policy learni…
Humans can steadily and gently grasp unfamiliar objects based on tactile perception. Robots still face challenges in achieving similar performance due to the difficulty of learning accurate grasp-force predictions and force control strategies that can be generalized from limited data. In this articl
AI holds promise for transforming scientific processes, including hypothesis generation. Prior work on hypothesis generation can be broadly categorized into theory-driven and data-driven approaches. While both have proven effective in generating novel and plausible hypotheses, it remains an open que…
A pervasive challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the ``curse of dimensionality'' which is the exponential growth in the state-action space when optimizing a high-dimensional target task. The framework of curriculum learning trains the agent in a curriculum composed of a sequence of related an…
For elastomer-based tactile sensors, represented by vision-based tactile sensors, routine calibration of mechanical parameters (Young's modulus and Poisson's ratio) has been shown to be important for force reconstruction. However, the reliance on existing in-situ calibration methods for accurate for
In typical in-hand manipulation tasks represented by object pivoting, the real-time perception of rotational slippage has been proven beneficial for improving the dexterity and stability of robotic hands. An effective strategy is to obtain the contact properties for measuring rotation angle through…
Nanophotonic structures have versatile applications including solar cells, anti-reflective coatings, electromagnetic interference shielding, optical filters, and light emitting diodes. To design and understand these nanophotonic structures, electrodynamic simulations are essential. These simulations…
Tactile perception has been a hot topic of research in robotics. Robots sense the shape, material, distributed force, slip during contact, and use the multi-modal contact information to control grasping and manipulation. For vision-based tactile sensors, the contact representation and extraction det