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Jiayi Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Jiayi Chen.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Information Density Imbalance in Visual Object Detection

In object detection, the number of instances is typically used to determine whether a dataset exhibits a long-tailed distribution, implicitly assuming that the model will perform poorly on categories with fewer instances. This assumption has led to extensive research on category bias in datasets with imbalanced instance numbers. However, even in datasets where instance numbers are relatively balanced, models still exhibit category bias, indicating that instance count alone cannot explain this phenomenon. In this work, we first introduce the concept and measurement of information density. We then observe a significant negative correlation between a category's information density and its accuracy, and we investigate how the training process impacts this relationship. Empirical studies suggest that information density imbalance may be a potential source of category bias. To preliminarily validate the potential of information density, we made simple improvements to three advanced object detection loss functions using this concept. Experiments on the Pascal VOC, COCO-LT, and LVIS datasets demonstrate that information density can significantly reduce model bias while effectively enhancing the overall performance of existing loss functions. This study provides a new perspective for understanding the generalized bias phenomenon in object detection models and offers new tools for designing fairer loss functions and training strategies.

cs.CV↗

Agents in the Large: Perception-Centered Architecture for Persistent Agents

Cognitive language agents have achieved substantial progress by equipping language models with memory, tools, and decision-making procedures, enabling agents to reason and act in interactive environments. Existing frameworks largely cast these agents as systems for solving user-specified, bounded tasks. An increasingly important goal is for language agents to provide persistent assistance in long-lived settings where user needs, context, and service procedures persist and change, and to remain useful across the broad range of tasks that arise over time. Yet we still lack a framework to characterize persistent AI agents, organize existing work, and guide future development. To this end, we propose a Perception-Centered Architecture for Persistent Agents (Pera). Pera describes a persistent agent organized around perception and control components that continually perceive service-relevant signals from episodic task executions, internal context, and changes in the surrounding environment, and use these signals to construct lifecycle tasks. These tasks drive the ongoing operation and adaptation of the agent's service procedures. We use Pera to retrospectively organize recent work, examine a detailed case study, and offer forward-looking insights for building more capable persistent agents. Just as software engineering moved from programming in the small to programming in the large, Pera frames the evolution of language agents as an analogous architectural transition toward long-lived, adaptive intelligence systems.

cs.CL↗

VISTA: Visually Inferred Spatial ConTact Attention for Contact-Rich Manipulation

Contact-rich manipulation requires precise interaction feedback. While vision-centric imitation learning is prevalent, external visual observations provide indirect and ambiguous cues about contact states, particularly under occlusion or subtle object--gripper interactions; dedicated tactile or force sensors can provide rich contact information but introduce additional hardware complexity, calibration requirements, and deployment costs. To bridge this gap, we propose VISTA-Policy, an imitation learning paradigm that utilizes the Visual Deformation Field (VDF), a 3D displacement representation of a compliant gripper, as high-dimensional visuo-physical feedback. The framework integrates: 1) a Physics-Aware Encoding Engine for real-time VDF decoding; 2) an Energy Aggregation Denoising Mechanism to isolate true interaction signals; and 3) a Deformation-Augmented Policy Network with incremental gripper actions for precise closed-loop correction. Extensive evaluations on Cross-Scale Object Grasping, Cap Unscrewing, and Calligraphy Writing demonstrate that VISTA-Policy outperforms the strong pure-vision baseline 3D Diffusion Policy and the tactile baseline. VISTA-Policy further demonstrates substantial out-of-distribution generalization to unseen object scales and robustness against dynamic disturbances, offering a durable and cost-effective route toward general-purpose fine-grained manipulation in unstructured environments. Project videos and supplementary materials are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/vista-policy.

cs.RO↗

Towards a Unified Understanding of Robot Manipulation: A Comprehensive Survey

Embodied intelligence has witnessed remarkable progress in recent years, driven by advances in computer vision, natural language processing, and the rise of large-scale multimodal models. Among its core challenges, robot manipulation stands out as a fundamental yet intricate problem, requiring the seamless integration of perception, planning, and control to enable interaction within diverse and unstructured environments. This survey presents a comprehensive overview of robotic manipulation, encompassing foundational background, task-organized benchmarks and datasets, and a unified taxonomy of existing methods. We extend the classical division between high-level planning and low-level control by broadening high-level planning to include language, code, motion, affordance, and 3D representations, while introducing a new taxonomy of low-level learning-based control grounded in training paradigms such as input modeling, latent learning, and policy learning. Furthermore, we provide the first dedicated taxonomy of key bottlenecks, focusing on data collection, utilization, and generalization, and conclude with an extensive review of real-world applications. Compared with prior surveys, our work offers both a broader scope and deeper insight, serving as an accessible roadmap for newcomers and a structured reference for experienced researchers. All related resources, including research papers, open-source datasets, and projects, are curated for the community at https://github.com/BaiShuanghao/Awesome-Robotics-Manipulation.

cs.RO↗

Embodied Robot Manipulation in the Era of Foundation Models: Planning and Learning Perspectives

Recent advances in vision, language, and multimodal learning have significantly accelerated progress in robotic foundation models, with robotic manipulation remaining one of the most challenging embodied tasks. Its difficulty lies in integrating perception, semantic understanding, task reasoning, physically grounded action generation, and reliable execution. This survey examines robotic manipulation from an algorithmic perspective and organizes recent learning-based approaches through a unified abstraction of high-level planning and low-level action modeling. At the high level, we extend the classical notion of task planning to include reasoning over language, code, affordances, geometric constraints, and 3D representations. At the low level, we present a learning-paradigm-oriented taxonomy of learning-based action models, covering input modeling, latent learning, and policy learning. Within this abstraction, foundation models contribute either by generating structured planning artifacts that are instantiated as constraints or latent inputs for downstream action generation, or by directly modeling executable actions and trajectories. Finally, we summarize open challenges and future directions related to scalability, generalization, data efficiency, multimodal physical interaction, and safety. Together, this survey provides a structured view of the design space and emerging trends in foundation models for robotic manipulation.

cs.RO↗

4D-WAM: Infusing Spatiotemporal Awareness into World Action Models through Trajectory Fields

Building on recent advances in world models, World Action Models (WAMs) jointly model video prediction and action generation. However, they typically represent videos in 2D pixel space, creating a representation gap with 3D space in which robotic actions are executed. Recent 3D approaches introduce 3D information, but fail to fully exploit the dynamics of 3D structures. In this work, we propose 4D-WAM, a model-agnostic training strategy that injects spatiotemporal knowledge from 3D trajectory fields into WAMs through representation alignment. To this end, we introduce two complementary objectives: 1) motion alignment, which aligns temporal feature variations across adjacent frames and encourages the model to build local 4D awareness during training, and 2) destination alignment, which guides the model to infer the final destination from the source frame by minimizing the gap between their attention-like similarity distributions. Together, these objectives provide both local motion supervision and long-horizon goal guidance, enabling WAMs to learn trajectory-level spatiotemporal representations. Extensive in-distribution and out-of-distribution experiments across different base models demonstrate the model's improvements in spatial understanding, execution precision, robustness, generalization, and versatility.

cs.RO↗

Is Forward Prediction Enough? Physical State Grounding for JEPA World Models

Learning structured and control-relevant latent representations remains a key challenge for world models. Recent JEPA-based world models learn action-conditioned predictive latent dynamics from observation sequences. However, their forward-prediction objectives do not explicitly enforce reliable identifiability of robot-centric physical state from individual latents or state changes from latent pairs, which can limit downstream planning and policy performance. We propose PSG-JEPA, a physically grounded JEPA world model that shapes its latent space with two complementary grounding objectives beyond forward prediction: grounding individual latents in robot proprioceptive state, and grounding latent pairs in multi-horizon joint-angle changes. Both objectives are applied only during training, leaving the inference architecture and computational cost unchanged. To comprehensively evaluate PSG-JEPA, we conduct experiments at three levels: (1) latent identifiability via probing, (2) goal-conditioned planning on frozen latents, and (3) policy learning in simulation and on a real robot. Experiments demonstrate that our PSG-JEPA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art latent world-model baselines at all three levels.

cs.RO↗

iQuantum groups and iHopf algebras I: foundation

We introduce the notion of iHopf algebra, a new associative algebra structure defined on a Hopf algebra equipped with a Hopf pairing. The iHopf algebra on a Borel quantum group endowed with a $τ$-twisted Hopf pairing is shown to be a quasi-split universal iquantum group. In particular, the Drinfeld double quantum group is realized as the iHopf algebra on the double Borel. This iHopf approach allows us to develop connections between Lusztig's braid group action and ibraid group action. It will further lead to the construction of dual canonical basis in a sequel.

math.QA↗

DFM-VLA: Iterative Action Refinement for Robot Manipulation via Discrete Flow Matching

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models that encode actions using a discrete tokenization scheme have been widely adopted for robotic manipulation, but existing decoding paradigms remain fundamentally limited. Whether actions are decoded sequentially by autoregressive VLAs or in parallel by discrete diffusion VLAs, once a token is generated, it is typically fixed and cannot be revised in subsequent iterations. Consequently, early token errors cannot be effectively corrected later. We propose DFM-VLA, a discrete flow matching VLA that iteratively refines action tokens. DFM-VLA models a token-level probability velocity field that dynamically updates the full action sequence across refinement iterations. We investigate two approaches to constructing the velocity field: an auxiliary velocity-head formulation and an embedding-guided formulation. To further improve prediction accuracy, we introduce a metric-aligned action tokenizer (MAAT) tailored to the coarse-to-fine nature of DFM, together with a two-stage decoding strategy. Extensive experiments on CALVIN, LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our project is available at https://chris1220313648.github.io/DFM-VLA/.

cs.RO↗

ARMOR: A Robust Self-Supervised Framework for Root Cause Analysis in Microservices under Missing Modality

Automated incident management is critical for microservice reliability. While recent unified frameworks leverage multimodal data for joint optimization, they unrealistically assume perfect data completeness. In practice, network fluctuations and agent failures frequently cause missing modalities. Existing approaches relying on static placeholders introduce imputation noise that masks anomalies and degrades performance. To address this, we propose ARMOR, a robust self-supervised framework designed for missing modality scenarios. ARMOR features: (i) a modality-specific asymmetric encoder that isolates distribution disparities among metrics, logs, and traces; and (ii) a missing-aware gated fusion mechanism utilizing learnable placeholders and dynamic bias compensation to prevent cross-modal interference from incomplete inputs. By employing self-supervised auto-regression with mask-guided reconstruction, ARMOR jointly optimizes anomaly detection (AD), failure triage (FT), and root cause localization (RCL). AD and RCL require no fault labels, while FT relies solely on failure-type annotations for the downstream classifier. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ARMOR achieves state-of-the-art performance under complete data conditions and maintains robust diagnostic accuracy even with severe modality loss.

cs.LG↗

GraspADMM: Improving Dexterous Grasp Synthesis via ADMM Optimization

Synthesizing high-quality dexterous grasps is a fundamental challenge in robot manipulation, requiring adherence to diversity, kinematic feasibility (valid hand-object contact without penetration), and dynamic stability (secure multi-contact forces). The recent framework Dexonomy successfully ensures broad grasp diversity through dense sampling and improves kinematic feasibility via a simulator-based refinement method that excels at resolving exact collisions. However, its reliance on fixed contact points restricts the hand's reachability and prevents the optimization of grasp metrics for dynamic stability. Conversely, purely gradient-based optimizers can maximize dynamic stability but rely on simplified contact approximations that inevitably cause physical penetrations. To bridge this gap, we propose GraspADMM, a novel grasp synthesis framework that preserves sampling-based diversity while improving kinematic feasibility and dynamic stability. By formulating the refinement stage using the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM), we decouple the target contact points on the object from the actual contact locations on the hand. This decomposition allows the pipeline to alternate between updating the target object points to directly maximize dynamic grasp metrics, and adjusting the hand pose to physically reach these targets while strictly respecting collision boundaries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GraspADMM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving a nearly 15\% absolute improvement in grasp success rate for type-unaware synthesis and roughly a 100\% relative improvement in type-aware synthesis. Furthermore, our approach maintains robust, physically plausible grasp generation even under extreme low-friction conditions.

cs.RO↗

Correct Asymptotic Wavefunctions for Calculating Photoelectron Angular Distributions of O2- and NO-

The ab initio calculation of photoelectron angular distributions (PADs) for negative ions remains a significant theoretical challenge. In this work, we report a joint experimental and theoretical investigation of PADs for a series of molecular anions with varying polarities, including the nonpolar O2-, the weakly polar NO-, and the strongly polar AsO- and SbO-. To accurately describe the long-range electronic wavefunctions -- where photodetachment contributes most strongly -- we modified the standard Gaussian-type orbitals (GTOs) by augmenting them with a correct exponential Slater-tail basis set (~e^(-ξr)). This simple yet effective approach significantly improves the agreement between the experimental and theoretical PADs for O2- and NO-. However, notable discrepancies persist for NO- for transitions to the v = 0 and v = 1 vibrational levels of neutral NO even after this correction. Given that our methodology successfully reproduced PADs for strongly polar anions (e.g., AsO- and SbO-), these residual discrepancies are unlikely to stem from "exit-channel scattering" induced by long-range dipole fields. Instead, we tentatively attribute the failure for NO- to the breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation or the frozen orbital approximation, arising from the extremely weak binding of the excess electron.

physics.atom-ph↗

The Universal Language of CSI:Unifying Wireless Sensing Across Devices and Environments

WiFi sensing based on Channel State Information (CSI) promises ubiquitous, device-free perception, yet current research remains trapped in a Tower of Babel - fragmented into isolated silos where models are tailored to specific hardware dialects, fixed environments, and narrow tasks. The primary bottleneck is the Heterogeneity Gap: the disparity in signal dimensions, sampling rates, and semantic labels that prevents cross-system understanding. To bridge this gap, we propose a foundation-model framework that treats CSI not merely as raw signals but as a structured language with a learnable universal grammar. We first curate and standardize a large collection of heterogeneous real-world CSI datasets, establishing a unified infrastructure that allows incompatible signal formats to be treated as a single corpus. Second, we introduce a modular architecture that acts as a universal translator where lightweight dataset-specific adapters tokenize diverse signal inputs into a shared latent vocabulary, while a shared self-supervised Transformer backbone learns the temporal syntax of human motion and environmental dynamics. This design decouples sensing semantics from hardware syntax. Extensive evaluations show that by mastering this universal language, our approach consistently outperforms task-specific baselines and exhibits strong generalization capability in new environments, achieving superior efficiency in few-shot scenarios. By effectively absorbing heterogeneity, the framework offers a path toward robust, general-purpose wireless sensing, mirroring the linguistic generalization observed in Large Language Models. The code implementation is available at: https://github.com/cjychenjiayi/WiLLM.

eess.SP↗

Thermal Processing Limits in Oxide-Channel Ferroelectric Field Effect Transistors

In this work, we report a systematic study of the impact of high-temperature post-capping thermal annealing on the memory characteristics of Oxide-semiconductor channel ferroelectric field-effect transistors (OS-FeFETs). Using an identical engineered ferroelectric gate stack 8nm Hf0.5Zr0.5O2 (HZO) / 3 nm Al2O3 / 8 nm HZO (8/3/8) and a hybrid capping layer (3 nm HfO2 + 3 nm Al2O3), 10 percent Ga doped InO (IGO) channel and 4 percent W doped InO (IWO) channel FeFETs remain functional after annealing at temperatures up to 650 C for durations of up to 30 min and 10 min, respectively; further annealing results in irreversible loss of conduction and device failure. Detailed electrical analysis reveals that the MW enhancement originates from a preferential positive shift in the erased-state threshold voltage, while the programmed-state threshold voltage remains comparatively stable. Grazing-incidence X-ray diffraction measurements further indicate structural evolution in the IWO and IGO oxide channels with increasing annealing temperature, supporting the observed electrical trends.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Quantifying Non-Abelian Stability in Majorana Qubits through Rabi Beating Signatures

Evaluating the stability of Majorana qubits (MQs) is a central challenge for topological quantum computation. Here we propose a simple and experimentally accessible protocol to quantify MQ stability by coupling a quantum dot (QD) to an MQ, which induces Rabi oscillations in the QD charge occupation that can be directly detected using recently developed single-shot readout techniques. In realistic systems, deviations from ideal MQ behavior lead to a characteristic beating pattern in the Rabi dynamics. We show that the beating frequency scales linearly with these deviations while remaining independent of the base Rabi frequency, thereby providing a direct and quantitative measure of MQ stability. Importantly, the beating signature is robust against weak dissipation, and we further demonstrate that the effective model remains quantitatively accurate when benchmarked against a realistic minimal Kitaev chain. Our results establish a practical and scalable route for quantitatively characterizing Majorana qubit stability in current experimental platforms.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

LDA-1B: Scaling Latent Dynamics Action Model via Universal Embodied Data Ingestion

Recent robot foundation models largely rely on large-scale behavior cloning, which imitates expert actions but discards transferable dynamics knowledge embedded in heterogeneous embodied data. While the Unified World Model (UWM) formulation has the potential to leverage such diverse data, existing instantiations struggle to scale to foundation-level due to coarse data usage and fragmented datasets. We introduce LDA-1B, a robot foundation model that scales through universal embodied data ingestion by jointly learning dynamics, policy, and visual forecasting, assigning distinct roles to data of varying quality. To support this regime at scale, we assemble and standardize EI-30k, an embodied interaction dataset comprising over 30k hours of human and robot trajectories in a unified format. Scalable dynamics learning over such heterogeneous data is enabled by prediction in a structured DINO latent space, which avoids redundant pixel-space appearance modeling. Complementing this representation, LDA-1B employs a multi-modal diffusion transformer to handle asynchronous vision and action streams, enabling stable training at the 1B-parameter scale. Experiments in simulation and the real world show LDA-1B outperforms prior methods (e.g., $π_{0.5}$) by up to 21\%, 48\%, and 23\% on contact-rich, dexterous, and long-horizon tasks, respectively. Notably, LDA-1B enables data-efficient fine-tuning, gaining 10\% by leveraging 30\% low-quality trajectories typically harmful and discarded.

cs.RO↗

A Visual Analytics System for Interactive Exploration of Historical Painter Cohorts

Painter cohort analysis has long been regarded as a key lens for studying how painting artistic styles develop and transmit across generations. Through a two-year collaboration with art historians, we identify key challenges in traditional painter cohort research: the unstructured characteristic of painter features, the entangled complexity of inheritance relationships, and the cognitively demanding nature of cohort definition and validation. To solve these challenges, we propose HPC-Vis, a visual analytics system for interactive exploration of historical painter cohorts. An improved cohort analytical workflow is designed to integrate structured feature construction, visualization-assisted exploration, algorithm-based recommendation, and unified cohort management. Based on this workflow, we develop three core computational modules: a multi-scale artistic feature construction method that leverages LLMs to extract and organize hierarchical style features from unstructured historical texts, an inheritance reconstruction algorithm that transforms the entangled multi-parent inheritance network into a clear hierarchical forest structure, and a recommendation model that identifies core features of the cohort and recommends cohort members via painter relevance assessment. To support smooth interactive exploration, we further design a set of novel visualizations with multidimensional collaboration, especially an inheriting mountain view inspired by traditional Chinese landscape paintings, and a foldable doughnut chart for hierarchical artistic style labels. HPC-Vis is evaluated and validated through case studies, user studies, and technical evaluations, demonstrating its effectiveness in supporting painter cohort exploration and in providing visual insights for art historical research.

cs.HC↗

Emerging Extrinsic Dexterity in Cluttered Scenes via Dynamics-aware Policy Learning

Extrinsic dexterity leverages environmental contact to overcome the limitations of prehensile manipulation. However, achieving such dexterity in cluttered scenes remains challenging and underexplored, as it requires selectively exploiting contact among multiple interacting objects with inherently coupled dynamics. Existing approaches lack explicit modeling of such complex dynamics and therefore fall short in non-prehensile manipulation in cluttered environments, which in turn limits their practical applicability in real-world environments. In this paper, we introduce a Dynamics-Aware Policy Learning (DAPL) framework that can facilitate policy learning with a learned representation of contact-induced object dynamics in cluttered environments. This representation is learned through explicit world modeling and used to condition reinforcement learning, enabling extrinsic dexterity to emerge without hand-crafted contact heuristics or complex reward shaping. We evaluate our approach in both simulation and the real world. Our method outperforms prehensile manipulation, human teleoperation, and prior representation-based policies by over 25% in success rate on unseen simulated cluttered scenes with varying densities. The real-world success rate reaches around 50% across 10 cluttered scenes, while a practical grocery deployment further demonstrates robust sim-to-real transfer and applicability.

cs.RO↗