Jiaxiao Shi | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Ecological Cycle Optimizer: A novel nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithm for non-convex global optimization

This article proposes the Ecological Cycle Optimizer (ECO), a novel metaheuristic algorithm inspired by energy flow and material cycling within ecosystems. ECO draws an analogy between the dynamic process of solving optimization problems and ecological cycling. Unique update strategies are designed for the producer, consumer and decomposer, aiming to enhance the balance between exploration and exploitation processes. Through these strategies, ECO is able to approach the global optimum, simulating the evolution of an ecological system toward its optimal state of stability and balance. Moreover, a parameter sensitivity analysis is conducted on 23 classic optimization functions to determine a suitable default configuration for ECO. Furthermore, 30 competitive metaheuristic algorithms are selected to form an algorithm pool, and comprehensive experiments are conducted on the IEEE CEC-2014 and CEC-2017 test suites. Among these, five top-performing algorithms, namely ARO, CFOA, CSA, WSO, and INFO, are chosen for an in-depth comparison with the ECO on the IEEE CEC-2020 test suite, verifying the ECO's exceptional optimization performance. Finally, in order to validate the practical applicability of ECO in complex real-world engineering problems, five state-of-the-art algorithms, including FDB-AGDE, FDB-SFS, LRFDB-COA, L-SHADE, and NSM-SFS are selected for comparative experiments on five engineering problems from the CEC-2020-RW test suite, demonstrating that ECO achieves competitive performance against advanced engineering-oriented algorithms. The ECO project page is available at https://jxxsteven7.github.io/ECO-Optimizer/.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2026

Towards Human-level Dexterous Teleoperation

Humans routinely wield tools, swap grasps, and reposition objects within a single hand, seamlessly orchestrating contact transitions that span translation, reorientation, and finger gaiting. Endowing robot dexterous hands with this level of in-hand dexterity through teleoperation requires precise control of object motion via dynamic hand-object contact, yet current teleoperation systems remain far from this capability. To bridge this gap, we take a major step towards human-level dexterous teleoperation by introducing TeleDexter, a hand-object co-tracking controller that maps operator intent into learned, low-level contact execution. The controller is trained on consecutive co-tracking subgoals derived from human reference motions, utilizing a hybrid reward that couples sparse subgoal objectives with dense tracking rewards to enable learning across diverse interaction modalities rather than frame-wise trajectory imitation. The entire pipeline requires only single-stage RL and, with random action masking and domain randomization, transfers zero-shot to the real robot. We evaluate TeleDexter on seven challenging dexterous teleoperation tasks spanning object reorientation and long-horizon tool use across two dexterous hands, achieving a 75% average success rate where all baselines consistently fail. Furthermore, the collected demonstrations successfully train autonomous policies via behavioral cloning, marking a concrete step towards human-level dexterous teleoperation.

cs.RO↗