arXiv subjects

Kelin Yu

Publications and source records attributed to Kelin Yu.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

OmniTacTune: Policy-Agnostic Real-World RL for Tactile Residual Adaptation of Visual Policies

Visual policies learned from human videos, teleoperation, and robot demonstrations offer scalable motion priors, but often fail in contact-rich manipulation, where success significantly depends on local force and contact geometry. Tactile sensing provides these complementary signals, yet tactile data remain costly to collect and hard to generalize across sensors, robots, and tasks. We introduce OmniTacTune, a policy-agnostic real-world RL pipeline that adapts tactile feedback to pretrained visual policies through residual correction. OmniTacTune uses a two-stage design: it first bootstraps tactile-aware learning from autonomous base-policy rollouts, then learns a lightweight tactile residual policy through online interaction. Extensive experiments show that OmniTacTune generalizes across diverse contact-rich tasks, visual base policies, and tactile representations. Across four real-world contact-rich tasks, it improves visual base policies from 5-40% success to 85-100% within 40-80 minutes, demonstrating an efficient path for adapting tactile feedback to scalable visual robot policies. Project page: https://colinyu1.github.io/omnitactune-site/

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

HumanEgo: Zero-Shot Robot Learning from Minutes of Human Egocentric Videos

Human egocentric video captures rich manipulation demonstrations without any robot hardware, yet transferring these skills to robots remains challenging due to the embodiment gap between human and robot in both visual appearance and kinematics. We present HumanEgo, a framework that bridges the embodiment gap by lifting each human demonstration to an entity-level representation of hand-object interaction, and training a flow matching policy with dense auxiliary objectives that amplify supervision from every trajectory. HumanEgo is robot-data-free, hardware-agnostic, data-efficient, and zero-shot human-to-robot transferable. With only 30 minutes of human videos per task, HumanEgo achieves 92.5% average success across four real-world tasks (75% with just 15 minutes), outperforms matched-time robot teleoperation by 41%, and robustly transfers zero-shot across novel robots, cameras, and environments. We release HumanEgo as an easy-to-use, open-source framework for learning robot policies directly from human data: https://github.com/TX-Leo/HumanEgo

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arXiv2026

SceneOrchestra: Efficient Agentic 3D Scene Synthesis via Full Tool-Call Trajectory Generation

Recent agentic frameworks for 3D scene synthesis have advanced realism and diversity by integrating heterogeneous generation and editing tools. These tools are organized into workflows orchestrated by an off-the-shelf LLM. Current approaches typically adopt an execute-review-reflect loop: at each step, the orchestrator executes a tool, renders intermediate results for review, and then decides on the tool and its parameters for the next step. However, this design has two key limitations. First, next-step tool selection and parameter configuration are driven by heuristic rules, which can lead to suboptimal execution flows, unnecessary tool invocations, degraded output quality, and increased runtime. Second, rendering and reviewing intermediate results after each step introduces additional latency. To address these issues, we propose SceneOrchestra, a trainable orchestration framework that optimizes the tool-call execution flow and eliminates the step-by-step review loop, improving both efficiency and output quality. SceneOrchestra consists of an orchestrator and a discriminator, which we fine-tune with a two-phase training strategy. In the first phase, the orchestrator learns context-aware tool selection and complete tool-call trajectory generation, while the discriminator is trained to assess the quality of full trajectories, enabling it to select the best trajectory from multiple candidates. In the second phase, we perform interleaved training, where the discriminator adapts to the orchestrator's evolving trajectory distribution and distills its discriminative capability back into the orchestrator. At inference, we only use the orchestrator to generate and execute full tool-call trajectories from instructions, without requiring the discriminator. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art scene quality compared to previous work.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

AFFORD2ACT: Affordance-Guided Automatic Keypoint Selection for Generalizable and Lightweight Robotic Manipulation

Vision-based robot learning often relies on dense image or point-cloud inputs, which are computationally heavy and entangle irrelevant background features. Existing keypoint-based approaches can focus on manipulation-centric features and be lightweight, but either depend on manual heuristics or task-coupled selection, limiting scalability and semantic understanding. To address this, we propose AFFORD2ACT, an affordance-guided framework that distills a minimal set of semantic 2D keypoints from a text prompt and a single image. AFFORD2ACT follows a three-stage pipeline: affordance filtering, category-level keypoint construction, and transformer-based policy learning with embedded gating to reason about the most relevant keypoints, yielding a compact 38-dimensional state policy that can be trained in 15 minutes, which performs well in real-time without proprioception or dense representations. Across diverse real-world manipulation tasks, AFFORD2ACT consistently improves data efficiency, achieving an 82% success rate on unseen objects, novel categories, backgrounds, and distractors.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

GenFlowRL: Shaping Rewards with Generative Object-Centric Flow in Visual Reinforcement Learning

Recent advances have shown that video generation models can enhance robot learning by deriving effective robot actions through inverse dynamics. However, these methods heavily depend on the quality of generated data and struggle with fine-grained manipulation due to the lack of environment feedback. While video-based reinforcement learning improves policy robustness, it remains constrained by the uncertainty of video generation and the challenges of collecting large-scale robot datasets for training diffusion models. To address these limitations, we propose GenFlowRL, which derives shaped rewards from generated flow trained from diverse cross-embodiment datasets. This enables learning generalizable and robust policies from diverse demonstrations using low-dimensional, object-centric features. Experiments on 10 manipulation tasks, both in simulation and real-world cross-embodiment evaluations, demonstrate that GenFlowRL effectively leverages manipulation features extracted from generated object-centric flow, consistently achieving superior performance across diverse and challenging scenarios. Our Project Page: https://colinyu1.github.io/genflowrl

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arXiv2025

ControlTac: Scaling Tactile Data with Physically Controlled Tactile Image Generation

Vision-based tactile sensing is widely used in perception, reconstruction, and robotic manipulation, yet collecting large-scale tactile data remains costly due to diverse sensor-object interactions and inconsistencies across sensor instances. Existing approaches to scaling tactile data---simulation and free-form tactile generation---often yield unrealistically rendered signals with poor transfer to highly dynamic real-world tasks. We propose \name, a two-stage controllable tactile image generation framework that generates realistic tactile images conditioned on a single reference tactile image, contact force, and contact pose. By grounding generation in these important physical priors, \name synthesizes realistic samples across different sensors while effectively capturing task-relevant variations. Across a series of downstream tasks and real-world experiments, such as object insertion, imitation learning, and object weighting, the augmented datasets using our approach consistently improve performance and demonstrate practical utility in dynamic real-world settings. Project page: https://dongyuluo.github.io/controltac.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

MimicTouch: Leveraging Multi-modal Human Tactile Demonstrations for Contact-rich Manipulation

Tactile sensing is critical to fine-grained, contact-rich manipulation tasks, such as insertion and assembly. Prior research has shown the possibility of learning tactile-guided policy from teleoperated demonstration data. However, to provide the demonstration, human users often rely on visual feedback to control the robot. This creates a gap between the sensing modality used for controlling the robot (visual) and the modality of interest (tactile). To bridge this gap, we introduce "MimicTouch", a novel framework for learning policies directly from demonstrations provided by human users with their hands. The key innovations are i) a human tactile data collection system which collects multi-modal tactile dataset for learning human's tactile-guided control strategy, ii) an imitation learning-based framework for learning human's tactile-guided control strategy through such data, and iii) an online residual RL framework to bridge the embodiment gap between the human hand and the robot gripper. Through comprehensive experiments, we highlight the efficacy of utilizing human's tactile-guided control strategy to resolve contact-rich manipulation tasks. The project website is at https://sites.google.com/view/MimicTouch.

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arXiv2023

Evolutionary Curriculum Training for DRL-Based Navigation Systems

In recent years, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has emerged as a promising method for robot collision avoidance. However, such DRL models often come with limitations, such as adapting effectively to structured environments containing various pedestrians. In order to solve this difficulty, previous research has attempted a few approaches, including training an end-to-end solution by integrating a waypoint planner with DRL and developing a multimodal solution to mitigate the drawbacks of the DRL model. However, these approaches have encountered several issues, including slow training times, scalability challenges, and poor coordination among different models. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a novel approach called evolutionary curriculum training to tackle these challenges. The primary goal of evolutionary curriculum training is to evaluate the collision avoidance model's competency in various scenarios and create curricula to enhance its insufficient skills. The paper introduces an innovative evaluation technique to assess the DRL model's performance in navigating structured maps and avoiding dynamic obstacles. Additionally, an evolutionary training environment generates all the curriculum to improve the DRL model's inadequate skills tested in the previous evaluation. We benchmark the performance of our model across five structured environments to validate the hypothesis that this evolutionary training environment leads to a higher success rate and a lower average number of collisions. Further details and results at our project website.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

Temporal Video-Language Alignment Network for Reward Shaping in Reinforcement Learning

Designing appropriate reward functions for Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches has been a significant problem, especially for complex environments such as Atari games. Utilizing natural language instructions to provide intermediate rewards to RL agents in a process known as reward shaping can help the agent in reaching the goal state faster. In this work, we propose a natural language-based reward shaping approach that maps trajectories from the Montezuma's Revenge game environment to corresponding natural language instructions using an extension of the LanguagE-Action Reward Network (LEARN) framework. These trajectory-language mappings are further used to generate intermediate rewards which are integrated into reward functions that can be utilized to learn an optimal policy for any standard RL algorithms. For a set of 15 tasks from Atari's Montezuma's Revenge game, the Ext-LEARN approach leads to the successful completion of tasks more often on average than the reward shaping approach that uses the LEARN framework and performs even better than the reward shaping framework without natural language-based rewards.

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arXiv2021

Learning Generalizable Vision-Tactile Robotic Grasping Strategy for Deformable Objects via Transformer

Reliable robotic grasping, especially with deformable objects such as fruits, remains a challenging task due to underactuated contact interactions with a gripper, unknown object dynamics and geometries. In this study, we propose a Transformer-based robotic grasping framework for rigid grippers that leverage tactile and visual information for safe object grasping. Specifically, the Transformer models learn physical feature embeddings with sensor feedback through performing two pre-defined explorative actions (pinching and sliding) and predict a grasping outcome through a multilayer perceptron (MLP) with a given grasping strength. Using these predictions, the gripper predicts a safe grasping strength via inference. Compared with convolutional recurrent networks, the Transformer models can capture the long-term dependencies across the image sequences and process spatial-temporal features simultaneously. We first benchmark the Transformer models on a public dataset for slip detection. Following that, we show that the Transformer models outperform a CNN+LSTM model in terms of grasping accuracy and computational efficiency. We also collect a new fruit grasping dataset and conduct online grasping experiments using the proposed framework for both seen and unseen fruits. {In addition, we extend our model to objects with different shapes and demonstrate the effectiveness of our pre-trained model trained on our large-scale fruit dataset. Our codes and dataset are public on GitHub.

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