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Pang-Chi Lo

Publications and source records attributed to Pang-Chi Lo.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

RobotArena $\infty$: Scalable Robot Benchmarking via Real-to-Sim Translation

The pursuit of robot generalists, agents capable of performing diverse tasks across diverse environments, demands rigorous and scalable evaluation. Yet real-world testing of robot policies remains fundamentally constrained: it is labor-intensive, slow, unsafe at scale, and difficult to reproduce. As policies expand in scope and complexity, these barriers only intensify, since defining "success" in robotics often hinges on nuanced human judgments of execution quality. We introduce RobotArena Infinity, a new benchmarking framework that overcomes these challenges by shifting vision-language-action (VLA) evaluation into large-scale simulated environments augmented with online human feedback. Leveraging advances in vision-language models, 2D-to-3D generative modeling, and differentiable rendering, our approach automatically converts video demonstrations from widely used robot datasets into simulated counterparts. Within these digital twins, we assess VLA policies using both automated vision-language-model-guided scoring and scalable human preference judgments collected from crowdworkers, transforming human involvement from tedious scene setup, resetting, and safety supervision into lightweight preference comparisons. To measure robustness, we systematically perturb simulated environments along multiple axes, including textures and object placements, stress-testing policy generalization under controlled variation. The result is a continuously evolving, reproducible, and scalable benchmark for real-world-trained robot manipulation policies, addressing a critical missing capability in today's robotics landscape.

cs.RO

VICtoR: Learning Hierarchical Vision-Instruction Correlation Rewards for Long-horizon Manipulation

We study reward models for long-horizon manipulation tasks by learning from action-free videos and language instructions, which we term the visual-instruction correlation (VIC) problem. Recent advancements in cross-modality modeling have highlighted the potential of reward modeling through visual and language correlations. However, existing VIC methods face challenges in learning rewards for long-horizon tasks due to their lack of sub-stage awareness, difficulty in modeling task complexities, and inadequate object state estimation. To address these challenges, we introduce VICtoR, a novel hierarchical VIC reward model capable of providing effective reward signals for long-horizon manipulation tasks. VICtoR precisely assesses task progress at various levels through a novel stage detector and motion progress evaluator, offering insightful guidance for agents learning the task effectively. To validate the effectiveness of VICtoR, we conducted extensive experiments in both simulated and real-world environments. The results suggest that VICtoR outperformed the best existing VIC methods, achieving a 43% improvement in success rates for long-horizon tasks.

cs.RO

AED: Adaptable Error Detection for Few-shot Imitation Policy

We introduce a new task called Adaptable Error Detection (AED), which aims to identify behavior errors in few-shot imitation (FSI) policies based on visual observations in novel environments. The potential to cause serious damage to surrounding areas limits the application of FSI policies in real-world scenarios. Thus, a robust system is necessary to notify operators when FSI policies are inconsistent with the intent of demonstrations. This task introduces three challenges: (1) detecting behavior errors in novel environments, (2) identifying behavior errors that occur without revealing notable changes, and (3) lacking complete temporal information of the rollout due to the necessity of online detection. However, the existing benchmarks cannot support the development of AED because their tasks do not present all these challenges. To this end, we develop a cross-domain AED benchmark, consisting of 322 base and 153 novel environments. Additionally, we propose Pattern Observer (PrObe) to address these challenges. PrObe is equipped with a powerful pattern extractor and guided by novel learning objectives to parse discernible patterns in the policy feature representations of normal or error states. Through our comprehensive evaluation, PrObe demonstrates superior capability to detect errors arising from a wide range of FSI policies, consistently surpassing strong baselines. Moreover, we conduct detailed ablations and a pilot study on error correction to validate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture design and the practicality of the AED task, respectively. The AED project page can be found at https://aed-neurips.github.io/.

cs.RO