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Chengdong Wu

Publications and source records attributed to Chengdong Wu.

15 recordsLinked to original sources

EaDex: A Cross-Embodiment Dexterous Manipulation Framework from Low-Cost Demonstrations

Dexterous manipulation learning has long been hindered by the high costs of data and training, as pure reinforcement learning typically requires large-scale interactive exploration and imitation learning depends on high-quality demonstrations that are expensive to collect. To address this problem, we propose EaDex, a multi-embodiment dexterous manipulation learning framework under low-cost demonstration conditions, which enables rapid generation of demonstration data and consequently reduces training time for efficient dexterous manipulation. At the data level, EaDex captures human hand motions using only a single RGB-D camera and constructs structured demonstration data through MANO-based hand modeling, data normalization, and motion retargeting. At the learning level, we introduce a contact-reward-based dynamic demonstration annealing mechanism, which guides early-stage exploration under demonstration and gradually transitions to autonomous optimization with accumulating contact rewards. Using our custom dataset, we evaluate EaDex on three dexterous hands and three articulated object-opening tasks, covering nine cross-embodiment manipulation settings, achieving a 55.3% relative improvement over the baseline without demonstration annealing. These results validate the effectiveness of the proposed low-cost demonstration pipeline and the dynamic demonstration annealing strategy for dexterous manipulation learning.

cs.RO

From Code to Road: A Vehicle-in-the-Loop and Digital Twin-Based Framework for Central Car Server Testing in Autonomous Driving

Simulation is one of the most essential parts in the development stage of automotive software. However, purely virtual simulations often struggle to accurately capture all real-world factors due to limitations in modeling. To address this challenge, this work presents a test framework for automotive software on the centralized E/E architecture, which is a central car server in our case, based on Vehicle-in-the-Loop (ViL) and digital twin technology. The framework couples a physical test vehicle on a dynamometer test bench with its synchronized virtual counterpart in a simulation environment. Our approach provides a safe, reproducible, realistic, and cost-effective platform for validating autonomous driving algorithms with a centralized architecture. This test method eliminates the need to test individual physical ECUs and their communication protocols separately. In contrast to traditional ViL methods, the proposed framework runs the full autonomous driving software directly on the vehicle hardware after the simulation process, eliminating flashing and intermediate layers while enabling seamless virtual-physical integration and accurately reflecting centralized E/E behavior. In addition, incorporating mixed testing in both simulated and physical environments reduces the need for full hardware integration during the early stages of automotive development. Experimental case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework in different test scenarios. These findings highlight the potential to reduce development and integration efforts for testing autonomous driving pipelines in the future.

cs.RO

PRAM-R: A Perception-Reasoning-Action-Memory Framework with LLM-Guided Modality Routing for Adaptive Autonomous Driving

Multimodal perception enables robust autonomous driving but incurs unnecessary computational cost when all sensors remain active. This paper presents PRAM-R, a unified Perception-Reasoning-Action-Memory framework with LLM-Guided Modality Routing for adaptive autonomous driving. PRAM-R adopts an asynchronous dual-loop design: a fast reactive loop for perception and control, and a slow deliberative loop for reasoning-driven modality selection and memory updates. An LLM router selects and weights modalities using environmental context and sensor diagnostics, while a hierarchical memory module preserves temporal consistency and supports long-term adaptation. We conduct a two-stage evaluation: (1) synthetic stress tests for stability analysis and (2) real-world validation on the nuScenes dataset. Synthetic stress tests confirm 87.2% reduction in routing oscillations via hysteresis-based stabilization. Real-world validation on nuScenes shows 6.22% modality reduction with 20% memory recall while maintaining comparable trajectory accuracy to full-modality baselines in complex urban scenarios. Our work demonstrates that LLM-augmented architectures with hierarchical memory achieve efficient, adaptive multimodal perception in autonomous driving.

cs.RO

Towards Safety-Compliant Transformer Architectures for Automotive Systems

Transformer-based architectures have shown remarkable performance in vision and language tasks but pose unique challenges for safety-critical applications. This paper presents a conceptual framework for integrating Transformers into automotive systems from a safety perspective. We outline how multimodal Foundation Models can leverage sensor diversity and redundancy to improve fault tolerance and robustness. Our proposed architecture combines multiple independent modality-specific encoders that fuse their representations into a shared latent space, supporting fail-operational behavior if one modality degrades. We demonstrate how different input modalities could be fused in order to maintain consistent scene understanding. By structurally embedding redundancy and diversity at the representational level, this approach bridges the gap between modern deep learning and established functional safety practices, paving the way for certifiable AI systems in autonomous driving.

cs.SE

LLM-Empowered Event-Chain Driven Code Generation for ADAS in SDV systems

This paper presents an event-chain-driven, LLM-empowered workflow for generating validated, automotive code from natural-language requirements. A Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) layer retrieves relevant signals from large and evolving Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS) catalogs as code generation prompt context, reducing hallucinations and ensuring architectural correctness. Retrieved signals are mapped and validated before being transformed into event chains that encode causal and timing constraints. These event chains guide and constrain LLM-based code synthesis, ensuring behavioral consistency and real-time feasibility. Based on our initial findings from the emergency braking case study, with the proposed approach, we managed to achieve valid signal usage and consistent code generation without LLM retraining.

cs.SE

A Unified Perception-Language-Action Framework for Adaptive Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving systems face significant challenges in achieving human-like adaptability, robustness, and interpretability in complex, open-world environments. These challenges stem from fragmented architectures, limited generalization to novel scenarios, and insufficient semantic extraction from perception. To address these limitations, we propose a unified Perception-Language-Action (PLA) framework that integrates multi-sensor fusion (cameras, LiDAR, radar) with a large language model (LLM)-augmented Vision-Language-Action (VLA) architecture, specifically a GPT-4.1-powered reasoning core. This framework unifies low-level sensory processing with high-level contextual reasoning, tightly coupling perception with natural language-based semantic understanding and decision-making to enable context-aware, explainable, and safety-bounded autonomous driving. Evaluations on an urban intersection scenario with a construction zone demonstrate superior performance in trajectory tracking, speed prediction, and adaptive planning. The results highlight the potential of language-augmented cognitive frameworks for advancing the safety, interpretability, and scalability of autonomous driving systems.

cs.RO

Autonomous Vehicle Lateral Control Using Deep Reinforcement Learning with MPC-PID Demonstration

The controller is one of the most important modules in the autonomous driving pipeline, ensuring the vehicle reaches its desired position. In this work, a reinforcement learning based lateral control approach, despite the imperfections in the vehicle models due to measurement errors and simplifications, is presented. Our approach ensures comfortable, efficient, and robust control performance considering the interface between controlling and other modules. The controller consists of the conventional Model Predictive Control (MPC)-PID part as the basis and the demonstrator, and the Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) part which leverages the online information from the MPC-PID part. The controller's performance is evaluated in CARLA using the ground truth of the waypoints as inputs. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the controller when vehicle information is incomplete, and the training of DRL can be stabilized with the demonstration part. These findings highlight the potential to reduce development and integration efforts for autonomous driving pipelines in the future.

cs.RO

Bridging the Inter-Domain Gap through Low-Level Features for Cross-Modal Medical Image Segmentation

This paper addresses the task of cross-modal medical image segmentation by exploring unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) approaches. We propose a model-agnostic UDA framework, LowBridge, which builds on a simple observation that cross-modal images share some similar low-level features (e.g., edges) as they are depicting the same structures. Specifically, we first train a generative model to recover the source images from their edge features, followed by training a segmentation model on the generated source images, separately. At test time, edge features from the target images are input to the pretrained generative model to generate source-style target domain images, which are then segmented using the pretrained segmentation network. Despite its simplicity, extensive experiments on various publicly available datasets demonstrate that \proposed achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming eleven existing UDA approaches under different settings. Notably, further ablation studies show that \proposed is agnostic to different types of generative and segmentation models, suggesting its potential to be seamlessly plugged with the most advanced models to achieve even more outstanding results in the future. The code is available at https://github.com/JoshuaLPF/LowBridge.

eess.IV

AUTOFRAME -- A Software-driven Integration Framework for Automotive Systems

The evolution of automotive technologies towards more integrated and sophisticated systems requires a shift from traditional distributed architectures to centralized vehicle architectures. This work presents a novel framework that addresses the increasing complexity of Software Defined Vehicles (SDV) through a centralized approach that optimizes software and hardware integration. Our approach introduces a scalable, modular, and secure automotive deployment framework that leverages a hardware abstraction layer and dynamic software deployment capabilities to meet the growing demands of the industry. The framework supports centralized computing of vehicle functions, making software development more dynamic and easier to update and upgrade. We demonstrate the capabilities of our framework by implementing it in a simulated environment where it effectively handles several automotive operations such as lane detection, motion planning, and vehicle control. Our results highlight the framework's potential to facilitate the development and maintenance of future vehicles, emphasizing its adaptability to different hardware configurations and its readiness for real-world applications. This work lays the foundation for further exploration of robust, scalable, and secure SDV systems, setting a new standard for future automotive architectures.

cs.SE

Deep Fourier-embedded Network for RGB and Thermal Salient Object Detection

The rapid development of deep learning has significantly improved salient object detection (SOD) combining both RGB and thermal (RGB-T) images. However, existing Transformer-based RGB-T SOD models with quadratic complexity are memory-intensive, limiting their application in high-resolution bimodal feature fusion. To overcome this limitation, we propose a purely Fourier Transform-based model, namely Deep Fourier-embedded Network (FreqSal), for accurate RGB-T SOD. Specifically, we leverage the efficiency of Fast Fourier Transform with linear complexity to design three key components: (1) To fuse RGB and thermal modalities, we propose Modal-coordinated Perception Attention, which aligns and enhances bimodal Fourier representation in multiple dimensions; (2) To clarify object edges and suppress noise, we design Frequency-decomposed Edge-aware Block, which deeply decomposes and filters Fourier components of low-level features; (3) To accurately decode features, we propose Fourier Residual Channel Attention Block, which prioritizes high-frequency information while aligning channel-wise global relationships. Additionally, even when converged, existing deep learning-based SOD models' predictions still exhibit frequency gaps relative to ground-truth. To address this problem, we propose Co-focus Frequency Loss, which dynamically weights hard frequencies during edge frequency reconstruction by cross-referencing bimodal edge information in the Fourier domain. Extensive experiments on ten bimodal SOD benchmark datasets demonstrate that FreqSal outperforms twenty-nine existing state-of-the-art bimodal SOD models. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the value and effectiveness of our newly proposed components. The code is available at https://github.com/JoshuaLPF/FreqSal.

cs.CV

Efficient Fourier Filtering Network with Contrastive Learning for AAV-based Unaligned Bimodal Salient Object Detection

Autonomous aerial vehicle (AAV)-based bi-modal salient object detection (BSOD) aims to segment salient objects in a scene utilizing complementary cues in unaligned RGB and thermal image pairs. However, the high computational expense of existing AAV-based BSOD models limits their applicability to real-world AAV devices. To address this problem, we propose an efficient Fourier filter network with contrastive learning that achieves both real-time and accurate performance. Specifically, we first design a semantic contrastive alignment loss to align the two modalities at the semantic level, which facilitates mutual refinement in a parameter-free way. Second, inspired by the fast Fourier transform that obtains global relevance in linear complexity, we propose synchronized alignment fusion, which aligns and fuses bi-modal features in the channel and spatial dimensions by a hierarchical filtering mechanism. Our proposed model, AlignSal, reduces the number of parameters by 70.0%, decreases the floating point operations by 49.4%, and increases the inference speed by 152.5% compared to the cutting-edge BSOD model (i.e., MROS). Extensive experiments on the AAV RGB-T 2400 and seven bi-modal dense prediction datasets demonstrate that AlignSal achieves both real-time inference speed and better performance and generalizability compared to nineteen state-of-the-art models across most evaluation metrics. In addition, our ablation studies further verify AlignSal's potential in boosting the performance of existing aligned BSOD models on AAV-based unaligned data. The code is available at: https://github.com/JoshuaLPF/AlignSal.

cs.CV

MGS-SLAM: Monocular Sparse Tracking and Gaussian Mapping with Depth Smooth Regularization

This letter introduces a novel framework for dense Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (VSLAM) based on Gaussian Splatting. Recently, SLAM based on Gaussian Splatting has shown promising results. However, in monocular scenarios, the Gaussian maps reconstructed lack geometric accuracy and exhibit weaker tracking capability. To address these limitations, we jointly optimize sparse visual odometry tracking and 3D Gaussian Splatting scene representation for the first time. We obtain depth maps on visual odometry keyframe windows using a fast Multi-View Stereo (MVS) network for the geometric supervision of Gaussian maps. Furthermore, we propose a depth smooth loss and Sparse-Dense Adjustment Ring (SDAR) to reduce the negative effect of estimated depth maps and preserve the consistency in scale between the visual odometry and Gaussian maps. We have evaluated our system across various synthetic and real-world datasets. The accuracy of our pose estimation surpasses existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art. Additionally, it outperforms previous monocular methods in terms of novel view synthesis and geometric reconstruction fidelities.

cs.CV

A geometry-aware deep network for depth estimation in monocular endoscopy

Monocular depth estimation is critical for endoscopists to perform spatial perception and 3D navigation of surgical sites. However, most of the existing methods ignore the important geometric structural consistency, which inevitably leads to performance degradation and distortion of 3D reconstruction. To address this issue, we introduce a gradient loss to penalize edge fluctuations ambiguous around stepped edge structures and a normal loss to explicitly express the sensitivity to frequently small structures, and propose a geometric consistency loss to spreads the spatial information across the sample grids to constrain the global geometric anatomy structures. In addition, we develop a synthetic RGB-Depth dataset that captures the anatomical structures under reflections and illumination variations. The proposed method is extensively validated across different datasets and clinical images and achieves mean RMSE values of 0.066 (stomach), 0.029 (small intestine), and 0.139 (colon) on the EndoSLAM dataset. The generalizability of the proposed method achieves mean RMSE values of 12.604 (T1-L1), 9.930 (T2-L2), and 13.893 (T3-L3) on the ColonDepth dataset. The experimental results show that our method exceeds previous state-of-the-art competitors and generates more consistent depth maps and reasonable anatomical structures. The quality of intraoperative 3D structure perception from endoscopic videos of the proposed method meets the accuracy requirements of video-CT registration algorithms for endoscopic navigation. The dataset and the source code will be available at https://github.com/YYM-SIA/LINGMI-MR.

cs.CV

Amos-SLAM: An Anti-Dynamics Two-stage SLAM Approach

The traditional Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) systems rely on the assumption of a static environment and fail to accurately estimate the system's location when dynamic objects are present in the background. While learning-based dynamic SLAM systems have difficulties in handling unknown moving objects, geometry-based methods have limited success in addressing the residual effects of unidentified dynamic objects on location estimation. To address these issues, we propose an anti-dynamics two-stage SLAM approach. Firstly, the potential motion regions of both prior and non-prior dynamic objects are extracted and pose estimates for dynamic discrimination are quickly obtained using optical flow tracking and model generation methods. Secondly, dynamic points in each frame are removed through dynamic judgment. For non-prior dynamic objects, we present a approach that uses super-pixel extraction and geometric clustering to determine the potential motion regions based on color and geometric information in the image. Evaluations on multiple low and high dynamic sequences in a public RGB-D dataset show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art dynamic SLAM methods.

cs.RO

A Novel Underwater Image Enhancement and Improved Underwater Biological Detection Pipeline

For aquaculture resource evaluation and ecological environment monitoring, automatic detection and identification of marine organisms is critical. However, due to the low quality of underwater images and the characteristics of underwater biological, a lack of abundant features may impede traditional hand-designed feature extraction approaches or CNN-based object detection algorithms, particularly in complex underwater environment. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to perform object detection in the underwater environment. This paper proposed a novel method for capturing feature information, which adds the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) to the YOLOv5 backbone. The interference of underwater creature characteristics on object characteristics is decreased, and the output of the backbone network to object information is enhanced. In addition, the self-adaptive global histogram stretching algorithm (SAGHS) is designed to eliminate the degradation problems such as low contrast and color loss caused by underwater environmental information to better restore image quality. Extensive experiments and comprehensive evaluation on the URPC2021 benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and adaptivity of our methods. Beyond that, this paper conducts an exhaustive analysis of the role of training data on performance.

cs.CV