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Pingchuan Ma

46 accepted papers

2026

Denoising, Fast and Slow: Difficulty-Aware Adaptive Sampling for Image Generation

CVPR 2026

Diffusion- and flow-based models usually allocate compute uniformly across space, updating all patches with the same timestep and number of function evaluations. While convenient, this ignores the heterogeneity of natural images: some regions are easy to denoise, whereas others benefit from more ref

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

AI-Enhanced Automatic Design of Efficient Underwater Gliders

ICRA 2025

The development of novel autonomous underwater gliders has been hindered by limited shape diversity, primarily due to the reliance on traditional design tools that depend heavily on manual trial and error. Building an automated design framework is challenging due to the complexities of representing

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

DepthFM: Fast Generative Monocular Depth Estimation with Flow Matching

AAAI 2025technical

Current discriminative depth estimation methods often produce blurry artifacts, while generative approaches suffer from slow sampling due to curvatures in the noise-to-depth transport. Our method addresses these challenges by framing depth estimation as a direct transport between image and depth dis…

2025

Does VLM Classification Benefit from LLM Description Semantics?

AAAI 2025technical

Accurately describing images with text is a foundation of explainable AI. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have recently addressed this by aligning images and texts in a shared embedding space, expressing semantic similarities between vision and language embeddings. VLM classification can be…

2025

Fabrica: Dual-Arm Assembly of General Multi-Part Objects via Integrated Planning and Learning

CoRL 2025oral

Multi-part assembly poses significant challenges for robotic systems to execute long-horizon, contact-rich manipulation with generalization across complex geometries. We present a dual-arm robotic system capable of end-to-end planning and control for autonomous assembly of general multi-part objects…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Large Language Models are Strong Audio-Visual Speech Recognition Learners

ICASSP 2025accepted

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently become a focal point of research due to their formidable multimodal understanding capabilities. For example, in the audio and speech domains, an LLM can be equipped with (automatic) speech recognition (ASR) abilities by just concatenating the au…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Learning Object Properties Using Robot Proprioception via Differentiable Robot-Object Interaction

ICRA 2025

Differentiable simulation has become a powerful tool for system identification. While prior work has focused on identifying robot properties using robot-specific data or object properties using object-specific data, our approach calibrates object properties by using information from the robot, witho

Cited by 5SourceScholar
2025

MoME: Mixture of Matryoshka Experts for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown strong potential in audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR), but their high computational demands and sensitivity to token granularity limit their practicality in resource-constrained settings. Token compression methods can reduce inference cost, but t…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

ROICtrl: Boosting Instance Control for Visual Generation

CVPR 2025poster

Natural language often struggles to accurately associate positional and attribute information with multiple instances, which limits current text-based visual generation models to simpler compositions featuring only a few dominant instances. To address this limitation, this work enhances diffusion mo…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

SCFlow: Implicitly Learning Style and Content Disentanglement with Flow Models

ICCV 2025poster

Explicitly disentangling style and content in vision models remains challenging due to their semantic overlap and the subjectivity of human perception. Existing methods propose separation through generative or discriminative objectives, but they still face the inherent ambiguity of disentangling int…

2025

Stochastic Interpolants for Revealing Stylistic Flows across the History of Art

ICCV 2025accepted

Generative models have made rapid progress in content creation, particularly in synthesizing artworks and capturing stylistic variation. However, most methods operate at the level of individual images, limiting their ability to reveal broader stylistic trends and temporal transitions. We address thi…

2025

TopoGaussian: Inferring Internal Topology Structures from Visual Clues

ICLR 2025poster

We present TopoGaussian, a holistic, particle-based pipeline for inferring the interior structure of an opaque object from easily accessible photos and videos as input. Traditional mesh-based approaches require tedious and error-prone mesh filling and fixing process, while typically output rough bou…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

ASAP: Automated Sequence Planning for Complex Robotic Assembly with Physical Feasibility

ICRA 2024poster

The automated assembly of complex products requires a system that can automatically plan a physically feasible sequence of actions for assembling many parts together. In this paper, we present ASAP, a physics-based planning approach for automatically generating such a sequence for general-shaped ass…

Cited by 23SourceScholar
2024

FMBoost: Boosting Latent Diffusion with Flow Matching

ECCV 2024oral

"Visual synthesis has recently seen significant leaps in performance, largely due to breakthroughs in generative models. Diffusion models have been a key enabler, as they excel in image diversity. However, this comes at the cost of slow training and synthesis, which is only partially alleviated by l…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

LLM and Simulation as Bilevel Optimizers: A New Paradigm to Advance Physical Scientific Discovery

ICML 2024poster

Large Language Models have recently gained significant attention in scientific discovery for their extensive knowledge and advanced reasoning capabilities. However, they encounter challenges in effectively simulating observational feedback and grounding it with language to propel advancements in phy…

2024

NeuralFluid: Nueral Fluidic System Design and Control with Differentiable Simulation

NeurIPS 2024poster

We present NeuralFluid, a novel framework to explore neural control and design of complex fluidic systems with dynamic solid boundaries. Our system features a fast differentiable Navier-Stokes solver with solid-fluid interface handling, a low-dimensional differentiable parametric geometry representa…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Physically Compatible 3D Object Modeling from a Single Image

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

We present a computational framework that transforms single images into 3D physical objects. The visual geometry of a physical object in an image is determined by three orthogonal attributes: mechanical properties, external forces, and rest-shape geometry. Existing single-view 3D reconstruction meth…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2024

Split and Merge: Aligning Position Biases in LLM-based Evaluators

EMNLP 2024main

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise as automated evaluators for assessing the quality of answers generated by AI systems. However, LLM-based evaluators exhibit position bias, or inconsistency, when used to evaluate candidate answers in pairwise comparisons, favoring either the first or s…

2024

WaSt-3D: Wasserstein-2 Distance for Scene-to-Scene Stylization on 3D Gaussians

ECCV 2024poster

"While style transfer techniques have been well-developed for 2D image stylization, the extension of these methods to 3D scenes remains relatively unexplored. Existing approaches demonstrate proficiency in transferring colors and textures but often struggle with replicating the geometry of the scene…

2024

ZigMa: A DiT-style Zigzag Mamba Diffusion Model

ECCV 2024poster

"The diffusion model has long been plagued by scalability and quadratic complexity issues, especially within transformer-based structures. In this study, we aim to leverage the long sequence modeling capability of a State-Space Model called Mamba to extend its applicability to visual data generation…

2023

Auto-AVSR: Audio-Visual Speech Recognition with Automatic Labels

ICASSP 2023accepted

Audio-visual speech recognition has received a lot of attention due to its robustness against acoustic noise. Recently, the performance of automatic, visual, and audio-visual speech recognition (ASR, VSR, and AV-ASR, respectively) has been substantially improved, mainly due to the use of larger mode…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Cross-Image-Attention for Conditional Embeddings in Deep Metric Learning

CVPR 2023poster

Learning compact image embeddings that yield semantic similarities between images and that generalize to unseen test classes, is at the core of deep metric learning (DML). Finding a mapping from a rich, localized image feature map onto a compact embedding vector is challenging: Although similarity e…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2023

DiffuseBot: Breeding Soft Robots With Physics-Augmented Generative Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2023oral

Nature evolves creatures with a high complexity of morphological and behavioral intelligence, meanwhile computational methods lag in approaching that diversity and efficacy. Co-optimization of artificial creatures' morphology and control in silico shows promise for applications in physical soft rob…

2023

Explain Any Concept: Segment Anything Meets Concept-Based Explanation

NeurIPS 2023poster

EXplainable AI (XAI) is an essential topic to improve human understanding of deep neural networks (DNNs) given their black-box internals. For computer vision tasks, mainstream pixel-based XAI methods explain DNN decisions by identifying important pixels, and emerging concept-based XAI explore formin…

2023

Jointly Learning Visual and Auditory Speech Representations from Raw Data

ICLR 2023poster

We present RAVEn, a self-supervised multi-modal approach to jointly learn visual and auditory speech representations. Our pre-training objective involves encoding masked inputs, and then predicting contextualised targets generated by slowly-evolving momentum encoders. Driven by the inherent differen…

2023

Learning Cross-Lingual Visual Speech Representations

ICASSP 2023accepted

Cross-lingual self-supervised learning has been a growing research topic in the last few years. However, current works only explored the use of audio signals to create representations. In this work, we study cross-lingual self-supervised visual representation learning. We use the recently-proposed R…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Learning Neural Constitutive Laws from Motion Observations for Generalizable PDE Dynamics

ICML 2023poster

We propose a hybrid neural network (NN) and PDE approach for learning generalizable PDE dynamics from motion observations. Many NN approaches learn an end-to-end model that implicitly models both the governing PDE and constitutive models (or material models). Without explicit PDE knowledge, these ap…

Cited by 40SourcePDFScholar
2023

SoftZoo: A Soft Robot Co-design Benchmark For Locomotion In Diverse Environments

ICLR 2023poster

While significant research progress has been made in robot learning for control, unique challenges arise when simultaneously co-optimizing morphology. Existing work has typically been tailored for particular environments or representations. In order to more fully understand inherent design and perfo…

Cited by 29SourcePDFScholar
2023

SynthVSR: Scaling Up Visual Speech Recognition With Synthetic Supervision

CVPR 2023poster

Recently reported state-of-the-art results in visual speech recognition (VSR) often rely on increasingly large amounts of video data, while the publicly available transcribed video datasets are limited in size. In this paper, for the first time, we study the potential of leveraging synthetic visual…

Cited by 27SourcePDFScholar
2022

Automatic Co-Design of Aerial Robots Using a Graph Grammar

IROS 2022poster

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have broad applications including disaster response, transportation, photography, and mapping. A significant bottleneck in the development of UAVs is the limited availability of automatic tools for task-specific co-design of a UAV's shape and controller. The developme…

Cited by 9SourceScholar
2022

Fast Aquatic Swimmer Optimization with Differentiable Projective Dynamics and Neural Network Hydrodynamic Models

ICML 2022spotlight

Aquatic locomotion is a classic fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problem of interest to biologists and engineers. Solving the fully coupled FSI equations for incompressible Navier-Stokes and finite elasticity is computationally expensive. Optimizing robotic swimmer design within such a system gener…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2022

Graph Grammar-Based Automatic Design for Heterogeneous Fleets of Underwater Robots

ICRA 2022poster

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are spe-cialized robots that are commonly used for seafloor surveying and ocean water sampling. Computational design approaches have emerged to reduce the effort required to design both individual AUVs as well as fleets. As the number and scale of underwater mis…

Cited by 13SourceScholar
2022

RISP: Rendering-Invariant State Predictor with Differentiable Simulation and Rendering for Cross-Domain Parameter Estimation

ICLR 2022oral

This work considers identifying parameters characterizing a physical system's dynamic motion directly from a video whose rendering configurations are inaccessible. Existing solutions require massive training data or lack generalizability to unknown rendering configurations. We propose a novel approa…

Cited by 30SourcePDFScholar
2022

Sim2Real for Soft Robotic Fish via Differentiable Simulation

IROS 2022poster

Accurate simulation of soft mechanisms under dynamic actuation is critical for the design of soft robots. We address this gap with our differentiable simulation tool by learning the material parameters of our soft robotic fish. On the example of a soft robotic fish, we demonstrate an experimentally-…

Cited by 22SourceScholar
2021

Towards Practical Lipreading with Distilled and Efficient Models

ICASSP 2021accepted

Lipreading has witnessed a lot of progress due to the resurgence of neural networks. Recent works have placed emphasis on aspects such as improving performance by finding the optimal architecture or improving generalization. However, there is still a significant gap between the current methodologies…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2020

Metamorphic Testing and Certified Mitigation of Fairness Violations in NLP Models

IJCAI 2020poster

Natural language processing (NLP) models have been increasingly used in sensitive application domains including credit scoring, insurance, and loan assessment. Hence, it is critical to know that the decisions made by NLP models are free of unfair bias toward certain subpopulation groups. In this pap…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2020

Prediction-Guided Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning for Continuous Robot Control

ICML 2020poster

Many real-world control problems involve conflicting objectives where we desire a dense and high-quality set of control policies that are optimal for different objective preferences (called Pareto-optimal). While extensive research in multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) has been conducted…

2020

Towards Pose-Invariant Lip-Reading

ICASSP 2020accepted

Lip-reading models have been significantly improved recently thanks to powerful deep learning architectures. However, most works focused on frontal or near frontal views of the mouth. As a consequence, lip-reading performance seriously deteriorates in non-frontal mouth views. In this work, we presen…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2020

Visually Guided Self Supervised Learning of Speech Representations

ICASSP 2020accepted

Self supervised representation learning has recently attracted a lot of research interest for both the audio and visual modalities. However, most works typically focus on a particular modality or feature alone and there has been very limited work that studies the interaction between the two modaliti…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2019

A Content Transformation Block for Image Style Transfer

CVPR 2019poster

Style transfer has recently received a lot of attention, since it allows to study fundamental challenges in image understanding and synthesis. Recent work has significantly improved the representation of color and texture and com- putational speed and image resolution. The explicit transformation of…

Cited by 111PDFcodeScholar
2018

End-to-End Audiovisual Speech Recognition

ICASSP 2018accepted

Several end-to-end deep learning approaches have been recently presented which extract either audio or visual features from the input images or audio signals and perform speech recognition. However, research on end-to-end audiovisual models is very limited. In this work, we present an end-to-end aud…

Cited by 0SourceScholar