93 accepted papers
B* is a novel optimization framework that addresses a critical challenge in fixed-base manipulator robotics: optimal base placement. Current methods rely on pre-computed kinematics databases generated through sampling to search for solutions. However, they face an inherent trade-off between solution…
Clinical video diagnosis, in which physicians assess dynamic tissue responses across procedural stages, is critical for detecting diseases such as cervical and colorectal cancers. Recent spatiotemporal models map visual progressions directly to diagnostic outputs, yet overlook two hallmarks of exper
We present IntrinsicWeather, a diffusion-based framework for controllable weather editing in intrinsic space. Our framework includes two components based on diffusion priors: an inverse renderer that estimates material properties, scene geometry, and lighting as intrinsic maps from an input image, a
Predicting physical dynamics from raw visual data remains a major challenge in AI. While recent video generation models have achieved impressive visual quality, they still cannot consistently generate physically plausible videos due to a lack of modeling of physical laws. Recent approaches combining…
Synthesizing realistic human motion from natural language holds transformative potential for animation, robotics, and virtual reality. Recent methods handle single-action sequences and simple textual instructions, yet multi-action compositions and precise editing remain elusive due to limited data d
Physical reasoning is a remarkable human ability that enables rapid learning and generalization from limited experience. Current AI models, despite extensive training, still struggle to achieve similar generalization, especially in Out-of-distribution (OOD) settings. This limitation stems from their…
Robots deployed in unstructured environments must coordinate whole-body motion---simultaneously moving a mobile base and arm---to interact with the physical world. This coupled mobility and dexterity yields a state space that grows combinatorially with scene and object diversity, demanding datasets
Robotic manipulation requires both rich multimodal perception and effective learning frameworks to handle complex real-world tasks. See-Through-Skin (STS) sensors, which combine tactile and visual perception, offer promising sensing capabilities, while modern imitation learning provides powerful too
Autonomous manipulation of articulated objects represents a basic skill for robots deployed in human environments. Current vision-based methods can infer object hidden kinematics, but their estimates are sometimes imprecise in driving reliable actions, especially on previously unseen objects. Tactil…
Bimanual manipulation, fundamental to human daily activities, remains a challenging task due to its inherent complexity of coordinated control. Recent advances have enabled zero-shot learning of single-arm manipulation skills through agent-agnostic visual representations derived from human videos; h
Humanoid robot teleoperation plays a vital role in demonstrating and collecting data for complex interactions. Current methods suffer from two key limitations: (1) restricted controllability due to decoupled upper- and lower-body control, and (2) severe drift caused by open-loop execution. These iss…
Vehicle aerodynamics optimization has become critical for automotive electrification, where drag reduction directly determines electric vehicle range and energy efficiency. Traditional approaches face an intractable trade-off: computationally expensive Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations…
Text-guided motion editing enables high-level semantic control and iterative modifications beyond traditional keyframe animation. Existing methods rely on limited pre-collected training triplets (original motion, edited motion, and instruction), which severely hinders their versatility in diverse ed…
Learning open-vocabulary physical skills for simulated agents presents a significant challenge in artificial intelligence. Current reinforcement learning approaches face critical limitations: manually designed rewards lack scalability across diverse tasks, while demonstration-based methods struggle…
Global seismic tomography, taking advantage of seismic waves from natural earthquakes, provides essential insights into the earth's internal dynamics. Advanced Full-Waveform Inversion (FWI) techniques, whose aim is to meticulously interpret every detail in seismograms, confront formidable computatio…
Self-play constitutes a fundamental paradigm for autonomous skill acquisition, whereby agents iteratively enhance their capabilities through self-directed environmental exploration. Conventional self-play frameworks exploit agent symmetry within zero-sum competitive settings, yet this approach prove…
Synthesizing realistic Human-Object Interaction (HOI) motions is essential for creating believable digital characters and intelligent robots. Existing approaches rely on data-intensive learning models that struggle with the compositional structure of daily HOI motions, particularly for complex multi…
Tactile sensing is crucial for achieving human-level robotic capabilities in manipulation tasks. As a promising solution, Vision-based Tactile Sensors (VBTSs) offer high spatial resolution and cost-effectiveness, but present unique challenges in robotics for their complex physical characteristics an…
Autonomous robotic systems capable of learning novel manipulation tasks are poised to transform industries from manufacturing to service automation. However, current methods (e.g., VIP and R3M) still face significant hurdles, notably the domain gap among robotic embodiments and the sparsity of succe…
Traditional approaches in physics-based motion generation centered around imitation learning and reward shaping often struggle to adapt to new scenarios. To tackle this limitation we propose AnySkill a novel hierarchical method that learns physically plausible interactions following open-vocabulary…
The intricate kinematics of the human hand enable simultaneous grasping and manipulation of multiple objects, essential for tasks, such as object transfer and in-hand manipulation. Despite its significance, the domain of robotic multi-object grasping is relatively unexplored and presents notable cha
Current evaluation protocols predominantly assess physical reasoning in stationary scenes, creating a gap in evaluating agents' abilities to interact with dynamic events. While contemporary methods allow agents to modify initial scene configurations and observe consequences, they lack the capability…
Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RAMIS) provides substantial benefits over traditional open and laparoscopic methods. However, a significant limitation of robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RAMIS) is the surgeon's inability to palpate tissues, a crucial technique for examining tiss
Despite significant advancements in text-to-motion synthesis generating language-guided human motion within 3D environments poses substantial challenges. These challenges stem primarily from (i) the absence of powerful generative models capable of jointly modeling natural language 3D scenes and huma…
One-shot transfer of dexterous grasps to novel scenes with object and context variations has been a challenging problem. While distilled feature fields from large vision models have enabled semantic correspondences across 3D scenes, their features are point-based and restricted to object surfaces, l…
Current learning models often struggle with human-like systematic generalization, particularly in learning compositional rules from limited data and extrapolating them to novel combinations. We introduce the Neural-Symbolic Recursive Ma- chine ( NSR), whose core is a Grounded Symbol System ( GSS), a…
We address the issue of physical implausibility in multi-view neural reconstruction. While implicit representations have gained popularity in multi-view 3D reconstruction, previous work struggles to yield physically plausible results, limiting their utility in domains requiring rigorous physical acc…
Robotic manipulation with two-finger grippers is challenged by objects lacking distinct graspable features. Traditional pre-grasping methods, which typically involve repositioning objects or utilizing external aids like table edges, are limited in their adaptability across different object categorie…
Confronting the challenges of data scarcity and advanced motion synthesis in human-scene interaction modeling we introduce the TRUMANS dataset alongside a novel HSI motion synthesis method. TRUMANS stands as the most comprehensive motion-captured HSI dataset currently available encompassing over 15…
Humans demonstrate remarkable skill in transferring manipulation abilities across objects of varying shapes, poses, and appearances, a capability rooted in their understanding of semantic correspondences between different instances. To equip robots with a similar high-level comprehension, we present…
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are investigated as biologically inspired models of neural computation, distinguished by their computational capability and energy efficiency due to precise spiking times and sparse spikes with event-driven computation. A significant question is how SNNs can emulate hu…
New Natural Langauge Process~(NLP) benchmarks are urgently needed to align with the rapid development of large language models (LLMs). We present Xiezhi, the most comprehensive evaluation suite designed to assess holistic domain knowledge.Xiezhi comprises multiple-choice questions across 516 diverse…
Inspired by humans' exceptional ability to master arithmetic and generalize to new problems, we present a new dataset, HINT, to examine machines' capability of learning generalizable concepts at three levels: perception, syntax, and semantics. In HINT, machines are tasked with learning how concepts…
Recent advances in vision-language learning have achieved notable success on *complete-information* question-answering datasets through the integration of extensive world knowledge. Yet, most models operate *passively*, responding to questions based on pre-stored knowledge. In stark contrast, humans…
Understanding the behavior of non-human primates is crucial for improving animal welfare, modeling social behavior, and gaining insights into distinctively human and phylogenetically shared behaviors. However, the lack of datasets on non-human primate behavior hinders in-depth exploration of primate…
We introduce SceneDiffuser, a conditional generative model for 3D scene understanding. SceneDiffuser provides a unified model for solving scene-conditioned generation, optimization, and planning. In contrast to prior works, SceneDiffuser is intrinsically scene-aware, physics-based, and goal-oriented…
Standardized and quantified evaluation of machine behaviors is a crux of understanding LLMs. In this study, we draw inspiration from psychometric studies by leveraging human personality theory as a tool for studying machine behaviors. Originating as a philosophical quest for human behaviors, the stu…
Fine-grained capture of 3D Human-Object Interactions (HOIs) boosts human activity understanding and facilitates various downstream visual tasks. Prior models mostly assume that humans interact with rigid objects using only a few body parts, limiting their scope. In this paper, we address the challen…
Generating dexterous grasping has been a long-standing and challenging robotic task. Despite recent progress, existing methods primarily suffer from two issues. First, most prior art focuses on a specific type of robot hand, lacking generalizable capability of handling unseen ones. Second, prior art…
One of the fundamental cognitive abilities of humans is to quickly resolve uncertainty by generating hypotheses and testing them via active trials. Encountering a novel phenomenon accompanied by ambiguous cause-effect relationships, humans make hypotheses against data, conduct inferences from observ…
Cutting objects into desired fragments is challenging for robots due to the spatially unstructured nature of fragments and the complex one-to-many object fragmentation caused by actions. We present a novel approach to model object fragmentation using an attributed stochastic grammar. This grammar ab…
Without explicit feedback, humans can rapidly learn the meaning of words. Children can acquire a new word after just a few passive exposures, a process known as fast mapping. This word learning capability is believed to be the most fundamental building block of multimodal understanding and reasoning…
We examine concept generalization at a large scale in the natural visual spectrum. Established computational modes (*i.e.*, rule-based or similarity-based) are primarily studied isolated, focusing on confined and abstract problem spaces. In this work, we study these two modes when the *problem space…
Existing methods for reconstructing interactive scenes primarily focus on replacing reconstructed objects with CAD models retrieved from a limited database, resulting in significant discrepancies between the reconstructed and observed scenes. To address this issue, our work introduces a part-level r…
The challenge of replicating research results has posed a significant impediment to the field of molecular biology. The advent of modern intelligent systems has led to notable progress in various domains. Consequently, we embarked on an investigation of intelligent monitoring systems as a means of t…
We present an optimization-based framework for rearranging indoor furniture to accommodate human-robot co-activities better. The rearrangement aims to afford sufficient accessible space for robot activities without compromising everyday human activities. To retain human activities, our algorithm pre…
We investigate the sequential manipulation planning problem for unmanned aerial manipulators (UAMs). Unlike prior work that primarily focuses on one-step manipulation tasks, sequential manipulations require coordinated motions of a UAM's floating base, the manipulator, and the object being manipulat…
We study embodied reference understanding, the task of locating referents using embodied gestural signals and language references. Human studies have revealed that, contrary to popular belief, objects referred to or pointed to do not lie on the elbow-wrist line, but rather on the so-called virtual t…
Intuitive physics is pivotal for human understanding of the physical world, enabling prediction and interpretation of events even in infancy. Nonetheless, replicating this level of intuitive physics in artificial intelligence (AI) remains a formidable challenge. This study introduces X-VoE, a compre…
Magnetic microrobots are potentially used in various biomedical applications due to their distinguished properties in bio-related manipulation such as minimally invasive and accessible in complex bio-environment. Precise path tracking control of magnetic microrobots in complex interference is an imp
Tracking position and orientation independently affords more agile maneuver for over-actuated multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) while introducing undesired downwash effects; downwash flows generated by thrust generators may counteract others due to close proximity, which significantly threa…
Humans communicate with graphical sketches apart from symbolic languages. Primarily focusing on the latter, recent studies of emergent communication overlook the sketches; they do not account for the evolution process through which symbolic sign systems emerge in the trade-off between iconicity and…
Learning to generate diverse scene-aware and goal-oriented human motions in 3D scenes remains challenging due to the mediocre characters of the existing datasets on Human-Scene Interaction (HSI); they only have limited scale/quality and lack semantics. To fill in the gap, we propose a large-scale an…
Latent space Energy-Based Models (EBMs), also known as energy-based priors, have drawn growing interests in generative modeling. Fueled by its flexibility in the formulation and strong modeling power of the latent space, recent works built upon it have made interesting attempts aiming at the interpr…
"Is intelligence realized by connectionist or classicist? While connectionist approaches have achieved superhuman performance, there has been growing evidence that such task-specific superiority is particularly fragile in systematic generalization. This observation lies in the central debate between…
We devise a cooperative planning framework to generate optimal trajectories for a robot duo tethered by a flexible net to gather scattered objects spread in a large area. Specifically, the proposed planning framework first produces a set of dense waypoints for each robot, serving as the initializati
Is dynamics prediction indispensable for physical reasoning? If so, what kind of roles do the dynamics prediction modules play during the physical reasoning process? Most studies focus on designing dynamics prediction networks and treating physical reasoning as a downstream task without investigatin…
We devise a 3D scene graph representation, contact graph+ (cg+), for efficient sequential manipulation planning. Augmented with predicate-like attributes, this contact graph-based representation abstracts scene layouts with succinct geometric information and valid robot-scene interactions. Goal conf…
Existing grasp synthesis methods are either analytical or data-driven. The former one is oftentimes limited to specific application scope. The latter one depends heavily on demonstrations, thus suffers from generalization issues; <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="ht
We present a robot learning and planning framework that produces an effective tool-use strategy with the least joint efforts, capable of handling objects different from training. Leveraging a Finite Element Method (FEM)-based simulator that reproduces fine-grained, continuous visual and physical eff
Causal induction, i.e., identifying unobservable mechanisms that lead to the observable relations among variables, has played a pivotal role in modern scientific discovery, especially in scenarios with only sparse and limited data. Humans, even young toddlers, can induce causal relationships surpris…
Spatial-temporal reasoning is a challenging task in Artificial Intelligence (AI) due to its demanding but unique nature: a theoretic requirement on representing and reasoning based on spatial-temporal knowledge in mind, and an applied requirement on a high-level cognitive system capable of navigatin…
Human-robot collaboration is an essential re-search topic in artificial intelligence (AI), enabling researchers to devise cognitive AI systems and affords an intuitive means for users to interact with the robot. Of note, communication plays a central role. To date, prior studies in embodied agent na…
Predicting agents’ future trajectories plays a crucial role in modern AI systems, yet it is challenging due to intricate interactions exhibited in multi-agent systems, especially when it comes to collision avoidance. To address this challenge, we propose to learn congestion patterns as contextual cu…
We construct a Virtual Kinematic Chain (VKC) that readily consolidates the kinematics of the mobile base, the arm, and the object to be manipulated in mobile manipulations. Accordingly, a mobile manipulation task is represented by altering the state of the constructed VKC, which can be converted to…
We present a Virtual Kinematic Chain (VKC) perspective, a simple yet effective method, to improve task planning efficacy for mobile manipulation. By consolidating the kinematics of the mobile base, the arm, and the object being manipulated collectively as a whole, this novel VKC perspective naturall…
Humans possess a unique social cognition capability; nonverbal communication can convey rich social information among agents. In contrast, such crucial social characteristics are mostly missing in the existing scene understanding literature. In this paper, we incorporate different nonverbal communic…
In this paper, we rethink the problem of scene reconstruction from an embodied agent’s perspective: While the classic view focuses on the reconstruction accuracy, our new perspective emphasizes the underlying functions and constraints such that the reconstructed scenes provide actionable information…
To date, various 3D scene understanding tasks still lack practical and generalizable pre-trained models, primarily due to the intricate nature of 3D scene understanding tasks and their immerse variations due to camera views, lighting, occlusions, etc. In this paper, we tackle this immanent challenge…
We present Deep Region Competition (DRC), an algorithm designed to extract foreground objects from images in a fully unsupervised manner. Foreground extraction can be viewed as a special case of generic image segmentation that focuses on identifying and disentangling objects from the background. In…
We study the machine's understanding of embodied reference: One agent uses both language and gesture to refer to an object to another agent in a shared physical environment. Of note, this new visual task requires understanding multimodal cues with perspective-taking to identify which object is being…
We present a congestion-aware routing solution for indoor evacuation, which produces real-time individual-customized evacuation routes among multiple destinations while keeping tracks of all evacuees’ locations. A population density map, obtained on-the-fly by aggregating locations of evacuees from…
We study the hierarchical knowledge transfer problem using a cloth-folding task, wherein the agent is first given a set of human demonstrations in the virtual world using an Oculus Headset, and later transferred and validated on a physical Baxter robot. We argue that such an intricate robot task tra…
We design and develop a new shared Augmented Reality (AR) workspace for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), which establishes a bi-directional communication between human agents and robots. In a prototype system, the shared AR workspace enables a shared perception, so that a physical robot not only perce…
Aiming to understand how human (false-)belief— a core socio-cognitive ability—would affect human interactions with robots, this paper proposes to adopt a graphical model to unify the representation of object states, robot knowledge, and human (false-)beliefs. Specifically, a parse graph (pg) is lear…
The ability to understand and interpret human actions is a long-standing challenge and a critical indicator of perception in artificial intelligence. However, a few imperative components of daily human activities are largely missed in prior literature, including the goal-directed actions, concurrent…
This paper presents a design that jointly provides hand pose sensing, hand localization, and haptic feedback to facilitate real-time stable grasps in Virtual Reality (VR). The design is based on an easy-to-replicate glove-based system that can reliably perform (i) a high-fidelity hand pose sensing i…
We propose a new 3D holistic++ scene understanding problem, which jointly tackles two tasks from a single-view image: (i) holistic scene parsing and reconstruction---3D estimations of object bounding boxes, camera pose, and room layout, and (ii) 3D human pose estimation. The intuition behind is to l…
“Thinking in pictures,” [1] i.e., spatial-temporal reasoning, effortless and instantaneous for humans, is believed to be a significant ability to perform logical induction and a crucial factor in the intellectual history of technology development. Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI), fueled by massi…
We propose Bayesian Inverse Reinforcement Learning with Failure (BIRLF), which makes use of failed demonstrations that were often ignored or filtered in previous methods due to the difficulties to incorporate them in addition to the successful ones. Specifically, we leverage halfspaces derived from…
Detecting 3D objects from a single RGB image is intrinsically ambiguous, thus requiring appropriate prior knowledge and intermediate representations as constraints to reduce the uncertainties and improve the consistencies between the 2D image plane and the 3D world coordinate. To address this challe…
Dramatic progress has been witnessed in basic vision tasks involving low-level perception, such as object recognition, detection, and tracking. Unfortunately, there is still enormous performance gap between artificial vision systems and human intelligence in terms of higher-level vision problems, es…
This paper presents an incremental learning framework for mobile robots localizing the human sound source using a microphone array in a complex indoor environment consisting of multiple rooms. In contrast to conventional approaches that leverage direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation, the framework a…
Holistic 3D indoor scene understanding refers to jointly recovering the i) object bounding boxes, ii) room layout, and iii) camera pose, all in 3D. The existing methods either are ineffective or only tackle the problem partially. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end model that simultaneously solv…
We propose a computational framework to jointly parse a single RGB image and reconstruct a holistic 3D configuration composed by a set of CAD models using a stochastic grammar model. Specifically, we introduce a Holistic Scene Grammar (HSG) to represent the 3D scene structure, which characterizes a…
We present a human-centric method to sample and synthesize 3D room layouts and 2D images thereof, for the purpose of obtaining large-scale 2D/3D image data with the perfect per-pixel ground truth. An attributed spatial And-Or graph (S-AOG) is proposed to represent indoor scenes. The S-AOG is a proba…
We present a novel Augmented Reality (AR) approach, through Microsoft HoloLens, to address the challenging problems of diagnosing, teaching, and patching interpretable knowledge of a robot. A Temporal And-Or graph (T-AOG) of opening bottles is learned from human demonstration and programmed to the r…
Contact forces of the hand are visually unobservable, but play a crucial role in understanding hand-object interactions. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised learning approach for manipulation event segmentation and manipulation event parsing. The proposed framework incorporates hand pose kinem…
We present a design of an easy-to-replicate glove-based system that can reliably perform simultaneous hand pose and force sensing in real time, for the purpose of collecting human hand data during fine manipulative actions. The design consists of a sensory glove that is capable of jointly collecting…
Learning complex robot manipulation policies for real-world objects is challenging, often requiring significant tuning within controlled environments. In this paper, we learn a manipulation model to execute tasks with multiple stages and variable structure, which typically are not suitable for most…
We propose a notion of affordance that takes into account physical quantities generated when the human body interacts with real-world objects, and introduce a learning framework that incorporates the concept of human utilities, which in our opinion provides a deeper and finer-grained account not onl…
In this paper, we present a new framework - task-oriented modeling, learning and recognition which aims at understanding the underlying functions, physics and causality in using objects as "tools". Given a task, such as, cracking a nut or painting a wall, we represent each object, e.g. a hammer or…