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Jianye Hao

Publications and source records attributed to Jianye Hao.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Bridging Evolutionary Algorithms and Reinforcement Learning: A Comprehensive Survey on Hybrid Algorithms

Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning (ERL), which integrates Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) for optimization, has demonstrated remarkable performance advancements. By fusing both approaches, ERL has emerged as a promising research direction. This survey offers a comprehensive overview of the diverse research branches in ERL. Specifically, we systematically summarize recent advancements in related algorithms and identify three primary research directions: EA-assisted Optimization of RL, RL-assisted Optimization of EA, and synergistic optimization of EA and RL. Following that, we conduct an in-depth analysis of each research direction, organizing multiple research branches. We elucidate the problems that each branch aims to tackle and how the integration of EAs and RL addresses these challenges. In conclusion, we discuss potential challenges and prospective future research directions across various research directions. To facilitate researchers in delving into ERL, we organize the algorithms and codes involved on https://github.com/yeshenpy/Awesome-Evolutionary-Reinforcement-Learning.

cs.NE↗

Global Prior Meets Local Consistency: Dual-Memory Augmented Vision-Language-Action Model for Efficient Robotic Manipulation

Hierarchical Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have rapidly become a dominant paradigm for robotic manipulation. It typically comprising a Vision-Language backbone for perception and understanding, together with a generative policy for action generation. However, its performance is increasingly bottlenecked by the action generation proceess. (i) Low inference efficiency. A pronounced distributional gap between isotropic noise priors and target action distributions, which increases denoising steps and the incidence of infeasible samples. (ii) Poor robustness. Existing policies condition solely on the current observation, neglecting the constraint of history sequence and thus lacking awareness of task progress and temporal consistency. To address these issues, we introduce OptimusVLA, a dual-memory VLA framework with Global Prior Memory (GPM) and Local Consistency Memory (LCM). GPM replaces Gaussian noise with task-level priors retrieved from semantically similar trajectories, thereby shortening the generative path and reducing the umber of function evaluations (NFE). LCM dynamically models executed action sequence to infer task progress and injects a learned consistency constraint that enforces temporal coherence and smoothness of trajectory. Across three simulation benchmarks, OptimusVLA consistently outperforms strong baselines: it achieves 98.6% average success rate on LIBERO, improves over pi_0 by 13.5% on CALVIN, and attains 38% average success rate on RoboTwin 2.0 Hard. In Real-World evaluation, OptimusVLA ranks best on Generalization and Long-horizon suites, surpassing pi_0 by 42.9% and 52.4%, respectively, while delivering 2.9x inference speedup.

cs.RO↗

SWE Context Bench: A Benchmark for Context Learning in Coding

Large language models are increasingly used as coding agents for software engineering tasks. Current benchmarks mainly evaluate whether the agent can correctly solve the request or fix the bugs. They largely treat tasks as independent and do not assess whether agents can reuse previous experience across related problems. As a result, the efficiency gains from reusing the previous experience remains difficult to measure. We introduce SWE-ContextBench, a benchmark designed to explicitly evaluate context understanding and retrieval in coding agents. SWE-ContextBench consists of 1,100 base tasks with another 376 related tasks derived from real dependency and reference relationships among GitHub issues and pull requests. SWE-ContextBench groups base tasks and related tasks with shared context across 51 unique repositories and 9 programming languages. The benchmark evaluates how accurately and efficiently agents solve related issues when prior cases are available in context. Using SWE-ContextBench, we study the behavior of multiple coding agents across varying context reuse settings and retrieval strategies. Our results show that accurately summarized and retrieved previous experience can significantly improve resolution accuracy and reduce runtime and token cost, particularly on harder tasks. In contrast, unfiltered or incorrectly selected context provides limited or negative benefits. These findings highlight the importance of context management and retrieval accuracy, and position SWE-ContextBench as a principled benchmark for studying context learning in coding agents.

cs.SE↗

AhaRobot: A Low-Cost Open-Source Bimanual Mobile Manipulator for Embodied AI

Scaling Vision-Language-Action models for embodied manipulation demands large volumes of diverse manipulation data, yet the high cost of commercial mobile manipulators and teleoperation interfaces that are difficult to deploy at scale remain key bottlenecks. We present AhaRobot, a low-cost, fully open-source bimanual mobile manipulator tailored for Embodied-AI. The system contributes: (1) a SCARA-like dual-arm hardware design that reduces motor torque demands while maintaining a large vertical reachable workspace, (2) an optimized control stack that improves precision via dual-motor backlash mitigation and static-friction compensation through dithering, and (3) RoboPilot, a teleoperation interface featuring a novel 26-faced marker handle for precise, long-horizon remote data collection. Experimental results show that our hardware-control co-design achieves 0.7 mm repeatability at a total hardware cost of only $1,000. The proposed 26-faced handle reduces tracking error by 80% over a 6-faced baseline and improves data-collection efficiency by 30%, while robustly handling singularities and supporting extremely long-horizon tasks in fully remote settings. Despite its low cost, AhaRobot enables imitation learning of complex household behaviors involving bimanual coordination, upper-body mobility, and contact-rich interaction, with data quality comparable to VR-based collection. All software, CAD files, and documentation are available at https://aha-robot.github.io.

cs.RO↗

A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Embodied AI

Embodied AI is widely recognized as a cornerstone of artificial general intelligence (AGI) because it involves controlling embodied agents to perform tasks in the physical world. Building on the success of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), a new category of multimodal models -- referred to as vision-language-action (VLA) models -- has emerged to address language-conditioned robotic tasks in embodied AI by leveraging their distinct ability to generate actions. The recent proliferation of VLAs necessitates a comprehensive survey to capture the rapidly evolving landscape. To this end, we present the first survey on VLAs for embodied AI. This work provides a detailed taxonomy of VLAs, organized into three major lines of research. The first line focuses on individual components of VLAs. The second line is dedicated to developing VLA-based control policies adept at predicting low-level actions. The third line comprises high-level task planners capable of decomposing long-horizon tasks into a sequence of subtasks, thereby guiding VLAs to follow more general user instructions. Furthermore, we provide an extensive summary of relevant resources, including datasets, simulators, and benchmarks. Finally, we discuss the challenges facing VLAs and outline promising future directions in embodied AI. A curated repository associated with this survey is available at: https://github.com/yueen-ma/Awesome-VLA.

cs.RO↗

Advancing Multi-Agent RAG Systems with Minimalist Reinforcement Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) equipped with modern Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems often employ multi-turn interaction pipelines to interface with search engines for complex reasoning tasks. However, such multi-turn interactions inevitably produce long intermediate contexts, as context length grows exponentially with exploration depth. This leads to a well-known limitation of LLMs: their difficulty in effectively leveraging information from long contexts. This problem is further amplified in RAG systems that depend on in-context learning, where few-shot demonstrations must also be included in the prompt, compounding the context-length bottleneck. To address these challenges, we propose Mujica-MyGo, a unified framework for efficient multi-turn reasoning in RAG. Inspired by the divide-and-conquer principle, we introduce Mujica (Multi-hop Joint Intelligence for Complex Question Answering), a multi-agent RAG workflow that decomposes multi-turn interactions into cooperative sub-interactions, thereby mitigating long-context issues. To eliminate the dependency on in-context learning, we further develop MyGO (Minimalist Policy Gradient Optimization), a lightweight and efficient reinforcement learning algorithm that enables effective post-training of LLMs within complex RAG pipelines. We provide theoretical guarantees for MyGO's convergence to the optimal policy. Empirical evaluations across diverse question-answering benchmarks, covering both text corpora and knowledge graphs, show that Mujica-MyGO achieves superior performance.

cs.CL↗

STAR: Learning Diverse Robot Skill Abstractions through Rotation-Augmented Vector Quantization

Transforming complex actions into discrete skill abstractions has demonstrated strong potential for robotic manipulation. Existing approaches mainly leverage latent variable models, e.g., VQ-VAE, to learn skill abstractions through learned vectors (codebooks), while they suffer from codebook collapse and modeling the causal relationship between learned skills. To address these limitations, we present \textbf{S}kill \textbf{T}raining with \textbf{A}ugmented \textbf{R}otation (\textbf{STAR}), a framework that advances both skill learning and composition to complete complex behaviors. Specifically, to prevent codebook collapse, we devise rotation-augmented residual skill quantization (RaRSQ). It encodes relative angles between encoder outputs into the gradient flow by rotation-based gradient mechanism. Points within the same skill code are forced to be either pushed apart or pulled closer together depending on gradient directions. Further, to capture the causal relationship between skills, we present causal skill transformer (CST) which explicitly models dependencies between skill representations through an autoregressive mechanism for coherent action generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of STAR on both LIBERO benchmark and realworld tasks, with around 12\% improvement over the baselines.

cs.RO↗

Beyond Syntax: Action Semantics Learning for App Agents

The recent development of Large Language Models (LLMs) enables the rise of App agents that interpret user intent and operate smartphone Apps through actions such as clicking and scrolling. While prompt-based solutions with proprietary LLM APIs show promising ability, they incur heavy compute costs and external API dependency. Fine-tuning smaller open-source LLMs solves these limitations. However, current supervised fine-tuning methods use a syntax learning paradigm that forces agents to reproduce exactly the ground truth action strings, leading to out-of-distribution (OOD) vulnerability. To fill this gap, we propose Action Semantics Learning (ASL), a novel learning framework, where the learning objective is capturing the semantics of the ground truth actions. Specifically, inspired by the programming language theory, we define the action semantics for App agents as the state transition induced by the action in the user interface. Building on this insight, ASL employs a novel SEmantic Estimator~(SEE) to compute a semantic similarity to train the App agents in generating actions aligned with the semantics of ground truth actions, even when their syntactic forms differ. SEE is a flexible module that can be applied in both supervised and reinforcement fine-tuning paradigms. To support the effectiveness of ASL, we theoretically demonstrate the superior robustness of ASL for the OOD problem compared with the existing syntax learning paradigm. Extensive experiments across multiple offline and online benchmarks demonstrate that ASL significantly improves the accuracy and generalisation of App agents compared to existing methods.

cs.AI↗

Embodied-R1: Reinforced Embodied Reasoning for General Robotic Manipulation

Generalization in embodied AI is hindered by the "seeing-to-doing gap," which stems from data scarcity and embodiment heterogeneity. To address this, we pioneer "pointing" as a unified, embodiment-agnostic intermediate representation, defining four core embodied pointing abilities that bridge high-level vision-language comprehension with low-level action primitives. We introduce Embodied-R1, a 3B Vision-Language Model (VLM) specifically designed for embodied reasoning and pointing. We use a wide range of embodied and general visual reasoning datasets as sources to construct a large-scale dataset, Embodied-Points-200K, which supports key embodied pointing capabilities. We then train Embodied-R1 using a two-stage Reinforced Fine-tuning (RFT) curriculum with a specialized multi-task reward design. Embodied-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on 11 embodied spatial and pointing benchmarks. Critically, it demonstrates robust zero-shot generalization by achieving a 56.2% success rate in the SIMPLEREnv and 87.5% across 8 real-world XArm tasks without any task-specific fine-tuning, representing a 62% improvement over strong baselines. Furthermore, the model exhibits high robustness against diverse visual disturbances. Our work shows that a pointing-centric representation, combined with an RFT training paradigm, offers an effective and generalizable pathway to closing the perception-action gap in robotics.

cs.RO↗

From Seeing to Doing: Bridging Reasoning and Decision for Robotic Manipulation

Achieving generalization in robotic manipulation remains a critical challenge, particularly for unseen scenarios and novel tasks. Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, while building on top of general Vision-Language Models (VLMs), still fall short of achieving robust zero-shot performance due to the scarcity and heterogeneity prevalent in embodied datasets. To address these limitations, we propose FSD (From Seeing to Doing), a novel vision-language model that generates intermediate representations through spatial relationship reasoning, providing fine-grained guidance for robotic manipulation. Our approach combines a hierarchical data pipeline for training with a self-consistency mechanism that aligns spatial coordinates with visual signals. Through extensive experiments, we comprehensively validated FSD's capabilities in both "seeing" and "doing," achieving outstanding performance across 8 benchmarks for general spatial reasoning and embodied reference abilities, as well as on our proposed more challenging benchmark VABench. We also verified zero-shot capabilities in robot manipulation, demonstrating significant performance improvements over baseline methods in both SimplerEnv and real robot settings. Experimental results show that FSD achieves 40.6% success rate in SimplerEnv and 72% success rate across 8 real-world tasks, outperforming the strongest baseline by 30%.

cs.RO↗

The Rank and Gradient Lost in Non-stationarity: Sample Weight Decay for Mitigating Plasticity Loss in Reinforcement Learning

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from plasticity loss severely due to the nature of non-stationarity, which impairs the ability to adapt to new data and learn continually. Unfortunately, our understanding of how plasticity loss arises, dissipates, and can be dissolved remains limited to empirical findings, leaving the theoretical end underexplored.To address this gap, we study the plasticity loss problem from the theoretical perspective of network optimization. By formally characterizing the two culprit factors in online RL process: the non-stationarity of data distributions and the non-stationarity of targets induced by bootstrapping, our theory attributes the loss of plasticity to two mechanisms: the rank collapse of the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) Gram matrix and the $Θ(\frac{1}{k})$ decay of gradient magnitude. The first mechanism echoes prior empirical findings from the theoretical perspective and sheds light on the effects of existing methods, e.g., network reset, neuron recycle, and noise injection. Against this backdrop, we focus primarily on the second mechanism and aim to alleviate plasticity loss by addressing the gradient attenuation issue, which is orthogonal to existing methods. We propose Sample Weight Decay -- a lightweight method to restore gradient magnitude, as a general remedy to plasticity loss for deep RL methods based on experience replay. In experiments, we evaluate the efficacy of \methodName upon TD3, \myadded{Double DQN} and SAC with SimBa architecture in MuJoCo, \myadded{ALE} and DeepMind Control Suite tasks. The results demonstrate that \methodName effectively alleviates plasticity loss and consistently improves learning performance across various configurations of deep RL algorithms, UTD, network architectures, and environments, achieving SOTA performance on challenging DMC Humanoid tasks.

cs.LG↗

Extracting and Following Paths for Robust Relational Reasoning with Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) possess vast semantic knowledge but often struggle with complex reasoning tasks, particularly in relational reasoning problems such as kinship or spatial reasoning. In this paper, we present Path-of-Thoughts (PoT), a novel framework for solving relation reasoning that decomposes the task into three key stages: graph extraction, path identification, and reasoning. Unlike previous approaches, PoT efficiently extracts a reasoning graph that identifies crucial entities, relations, and attributes within the context. Subsequently, PoT identifies query-relevant reasoning paths within the graph, facilitating downstream reasoning of potential answers. Experimental evaluations across four datasets of relational reasoning demonstrate that PoT surpasses state-of-the-art baselines by a significant margin (up to 21.3%) without requiring fine-tuning or extensive LLM calls. Furthermore, unlike prior neuro-symbolic methods, PoT exhibits improved resilience against LLM extraction errors and input ambiguity by leveraging the compositional nature of graphs.

cs.CL↗

UniUGG: Unified 3D Understanding and Generation via Geometric-Semantic Encoding

Despite the impressive progress on understanding and generating images shown by the recent unified architectures, the integration of 3D tasks remains challenging and largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce UniUGG, the first unified understanding and generation framework for 3D modalities. Our unified framework employs an LLM to comprehend and decode sentences and 3D representations. At its core, we propose a spatial decoder leveraging a latent diffusion model to generate high-quality 3D representations. This allows for the generation and imagination of 3D scenes based on a reference image and an arbitrary view transformation, while remaining supports for spatial visual question answering (VQA) tasks. Additionally, we propose a geometric-semantic learning strategy to pretrain the vision encoder. This design jointly captures the input's semantic and geometric cues, enhancing both spatial understanding and generation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method in visual representation, spatial understanding, and 3D generation.

cs.CV↗

$\textbf{Re}^{2}$: Unlocking LLM Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning with Re-solving

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has shown promise in enhancing the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by increasing test-time compute. However, even after extensive RLVR training, such models still tend to generate unnecessary and low-quality steps in their chain-of-thought (CoT), leading to inefficient overthinking and lower answer quality. We show that when the initial direction or quality of the CoT is suboptimal, the model often fails to reach the correct answer, even after generating several times more tokens than when the initial CoT is well-initialized. To this end, we introduce Reinforcement Learning with Re-solving (Re$^2$), in which LLMs learn to flexibly abandon unproductive reasoning paths and restart the solution process when necessary, rather than always committing to a final answer. Re$^2$ applies pure reinforcement learning without any preliminary supervised fine-tuning, successfully amplifying the rare redo behavior in vanilla models from only 0.5% to over 30%. This leads to substantial performance gains over standard RLVR under the same training compute budget, and also demonstrates notable improvements in test-time performance as the number of samples increases.

cs.AI↗

Generative Models in Decision Making: A Survey

Generative models have fundamentally reshaped the landscape of decision-making, reframing the problem from pure scalar reward maximization to high-fidelity trajectory generation and distribution matching. This paradigm shift addresses intrinsic limitations in classical Reinforcement Learning (RL), particularly the limited expressivity of standard unimodal policy distributions in capturing complex, multi-modal behaviors embedded in diverse datasets. However, current literature often treats these models as isolated algorithmic improvements, rarely synthesizing them into a single comprehensive framework. This survey proposes a principled taxonomy grounding generative decision-making within the probabilistic framework of Control as Inference. By performing a variational factorization of the trajectory posterior, we conceptualize four distinct functional roles: Controllers for amortized policy inference, Modelers for dynamics priors, Optimizers for iterative trajectory refinement, and Evaluators for trajectory guidance and value assessment. Unlike existing architecture-centric reviews, this function-centric framework allows us to critically analyze representative generative families across distinct dimensions. Furthermore, we examine deployment in high-stakes domains, specifically Embodied AI, Autonomous Driving, and AI for Science, highlighting systemic risks such as dynamics hallucination in world models and proxy exploitation. Finally, we chart the path toward Generalist Physical Intelligence, identifying pivotal challenges in inference efficiency, trustworthiness, and the emergence of Physical Foundation Models.

cs.LG↗

K^2-Agent: Co-Evolving Know-What and Know-How for Hierarchical Mobile Device Control

Existing mobile device control agents often perform poorly when solving complex tasks requiring long-horizon planning and precise operations, typically due to a lack of relevant task experience or unfamiliarity with skill execution. We propose K2-Agent, a hierarchical framework that models human-like cognition by separating and co-evolving declarative (knowing what) and procedural (knowing how) knowledge for planning and execution. K2-Agent's high level reasoner is bootstrapped from a single demonstration per task and runs a Summarize-Reflect-Locate-Revise (SRLR) loop to distill and iteratively refine task-level declarative knowledge through self-evolution. The low-level executor is trained with our curriculum-guided Group Relative Policy Optimization (C-GRPO), which (i) constructs a balanced sample pool using decoupled reward signals and (ii) employs dynamic demonstration injection to guide the model in autonomously generating successful trajectories for training. On the challenging AndroidWorld benchmark, K2-Agent achieves a 76.1% success rate using only raw screenshots and open-source backbones. Furthermore, K2-Agent shows powerful dual generalization: its high-level declarative knowledge transfers across diverse base models, while its low-level procedural skills achieve competitive performance on unseen tasks in ScreenSpot-v2 and Android-in-the-Wild (AitW).

cs.AI↗

One Demo Is All It Takes: Planning Domain Derivation with LLMs from A Single Demonstration

Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) show promise for robotic task planning but often struggle to guarantee correctness in long-horizon problems. Task and motion planning (TAMP) addresses this by grounding symbolic plans in low-level execution, yet it relies heavily on manually engineered planning domains. To improve long-horizon planning reliability and reduce human intervention, we present Planning Domain Derivation with LLMs (PDDLLM), a framework that automatically induces symbolic predicates and actions directly from demonstration trajectories by combining LLM reasoning with physical simulation roll-outs. Unlike prior domain-inference methods that rely on partially predefined or language descriptions of planning domains, PDDLLM constructs domains without manual domain initialization and automatically integrates them with motion planners to produce executable plans, enhancing long-horizon planning automation. Across 1,200 tasks in nine environments, PDDLLM outperforms six LLM-based planning baselines, achieving at least 20\% higher success rates, reduced token costs, and successful deployment on multiple physical robot platforms.

cs.RO↗

Scalable In-Context Q-Learning

Recent advancements in language models have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning abilities, prompting the exploration of in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) to extend the promise to decision domains. Due to involving more complex dynamics and temporal correlations, existing ICRL approaches may face challenges in learning from suboptimal trajectories and achieving precise in-context inference. In the paper, we propose \textbf{S}calable \textbf{I}n-\textbf{C}ontext \textbf{Q}-\textbf{L}earning (\textbf{S-ICQL}), an innovative framework that harnesses dynamic programming and world modeling to steer ICRL toward efficient reward maximization and task generalization, while retaining the scalability and stability of supervised pretraining. We design a prompt-based multi-head transformer architecture that simultaneously predicts optimal policies and in-context value functions using separate heads. We pretrain a generalized world model to capture task-relevant information, enabling the construction of a compact prompt that facilitates fast and precise in-context inference. During training, we perform iterative policy improvement by fitting a state value function to an upper-expectile of the Q-function, and distill the in-context value functions into policy extraction using advantage-weighted regression. Extensive experiments across a range of discrete and continuous environments show consistent performance gains over various types of baselines, especially when learning from suboptimal data. Our code is available at \textcolor{magenta}{\href{https://github.com/NJU-RL/SICQL}{https://github.com/NJU-RL/SICQL}}.

cs.AI↗