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Qianyi Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Qianyi Zhang.

14 recordsLinked to original sources

VikingRAG: Accurate and Token-efficient Retrieval-augmented Generation over Structured Documents

State-of-the-art retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods exploit document structures to acquire sufficient evidence, but often incur substantial token costs. To reduce structural-context tokens without compromising high RAG accuracy, we present {\sf VikingRAG}, a directory-aware semantic data management system that tightly integrates semantic and structural access to support structural-context-efficient, evidence-gap-driven multi-round retrieval. To further reduce token overhead of multi-round interaction, we materialize agentic multi-round retrieval traces as experience edges, and reuse these edges for similar queries, avoiding repeated multi-round exploration. To additionally reduce token costs when agentic multi-round retrieval is unnecessary, we introduce an adaptive escalation strategy that answers from one-round experience-augmented retrieval when the evidence is sufficient, and invokes agentic multi-round retrieval only otherwise. Experiments on real datasets show that the base system {\sf VikingRAG} matches high accuracy of state-of-the-art methods while consuming only 11.6\%--51.9\% of their tokens. With retrieval-trace reuse and adaptive escalation, token costs drop to 5.1\%--32.5\% while maintaining competitive accuracy and practical document-storage performance, showing the utility of this work for emerging AI knowledge bases.

cs.IR

Overcoming Scattering in High-Cell-Density Tomographic Volumetric Bioprinting Using Computational Light Optimization

Tomographic volumetric additive manufacturing has emerged as a transformative 3D printing technology for rapidly fabricating complex geometries. It offers significant advantages for bioprinting due to its contactless and short process time (a few tens of seconds). However, the presence of high cell densities ($>10^7$ cells mL-1) in bioresins introduces substantial light scattering, which degrades printing resolution and fidelity, hindering the fabrication of biologically relevant microstructures such as vascular channels and cavities. To address this challenge, we utilize a computational patterning framework leveraging physically based inverse rendering to optimize light delivery in scattering environments. This method iteratively refines tomographic projections by simulating light-matter interactions in cell-laden hydrogels, enabling precise compensation for scattering effects. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves 500 $μm$ diameter vascular channels at $2*10^7$ cells mL-1. Furthermore, we integrate this computational method with refractive index matching strategies, reducing scattering artifacts by minimizing optical mismatch between cells and the hydrogel matrix, enabling printing at $4.1*10^7$ cells mL-1. The compatibility of these dual strategies enables unprecedented print fidelity in turbid bioresins. This advancement expands the scope of tomographic volumetric additive manufacturing for engineering functional tissues with intricate microarchitectures.

physics.optics

OpenNavMap: Multi-Session Appearance-Based Topometric Mapping for Scalable Visual Navigation

Scalable and maintainable maps are fundamental to large-scale navigation and the long-term deployment of robots in real-world environments. However, conventional maps that explicitly maintain dense geometry or 3D landmarks incur high storage and maintenance costs, while the core challenge of scaling to multi-session mapping is visual localization under sparse viewpoint overlap, temporal appearance shifts, and cross-device variance. To address this, we propose OpenNavMap, a lightweight, landmark-free topometric mapping system that organizes image nodes into covisibility, odometry, and traversability graphs and delegates local geometry recovery to 3D geometric foundation models (GFMs) on demand. For localization, dynamic-programming-based sequence matching narrows candidate correspondences for a GFM, reducing global estimation to a lightweight, pose-only optimization; for mapping, a lifelong pipeline fuses multi-session, multi-device data via cross-device merging and node culling. On a 19km dataset across four real-world environments, \methodname attains a state-of-the-art $0.62$m translation error on the Map-Free benchmark, bounds the absolute trajectory error below $3$m across 15.7km without depth sensors, and completes $12$ autonomous image-goal visual navigation tasks on both simulated and physical robots. Code and datasets will be made publicly available at https://rpl-cs-ucl.github.io/OpenNavMap_page.

cs.RO

Follow Everything: A Leader-Following and Obstacle Avoidance Framework with Goal-Aware Adaptation

Robust and flexible leader-following is a critical capability for robots to integrate into human society. While existing methods struggle to generalize to leaders of arbitrary form and often fail when the leader temporarily leaves the robot's field of view, this work introduces a unified framework addressing both challenges. First, traditional detection models are replaced with a segmentation model, allowing the leader to be anything. To enhance recognition robustness, a distance frame buffer is implemented that stores leader embeddings at multiple distances, accounting for the unique characteristics of leader-following tasks. Second, a goal-aware adaptation mechanism is designed to govern robot planning states based on the leader's visibility and motion, complemented by a graph-based planner that generates candidate trajectories for each state, ensuring efficient following with obstacle avoidance. Simulations and real-world experiments with a legged robot follower and various leaders (human, ground robot, UAV, legged robot, stop sign) in both indoor and outdoor environments show competitive improvements in follow success rate, reduced visual loss duration, lower collision rate, and decreased leader-follower distance.

cs.RO

Too Big, Too Small, Too $O_2$: The Pandoro Effect from Oxygen Gradients in Tomographic Volumetric Additive Manufacturing

Tomographic Volumetric Additive Manufacturing (TVAM) enables rapid, layerless biofabrication; however, its application to thermoreversible hydrogels is often compromised by complex chemical kinetics. In this study, we identify and characterize a recurrent printing artifact - termed the Pandoro effect - manifesting as a truncated-cone distortion caused by premature polymerization at the vial bottom and inhibition at the top. We demonstrate that this phenomenon originates from a vertical oxygen gradient driven by the thermal hysteresis of resin preparation: heating depletes dissolved oxygen, while subsequent cooling induces diffusion-limited re-oxygenation from the air-resin interface. To mitigate this, we present a multi-tiered strategy. First, we introduce a coupled ray-optical and photochemical optimization model that rigorously accounts for spatially heterogeneous inhibitor concentrations. Unlike conventional threshold-based approaches, this differentiable framework explicitly simulates the spatiotemporal reaction-diffusion dynamics of oxygen depletion, allowing the inverse solver to predictively compensate for local inhibition gradients. Complementing this algorithmic correction, we validate two process-based interventions: the elimination of the air-resin interface and the control of headspace atmosphere. We demonstrate that these strategies effectively suppress the Pandoro effect, and are compatible with cell-laden resins. This work establishes guidelines for reproducible volumetric bioprinting and expands our open-source Dr.TVAM platform with advanced polymerization modeling capabilities.

physics.optics

The Starlink Robot: A Platform and Dataset for Mobile Satellite Communication

The integration of satellite communication into mobile devices represents a paradigm shift in connectivity, yet the performance characteristics under motion and environmental occlusion remain poorly understood. We present the Starlink Robot, the first mobile robotic platform equipped with Starlink satellite internet, comprehensive sensor suite including upward-facing camera, LiDAR, and IMU, designed to systematically study satellite communication performance during movement. Our multi-modal dataset captures synchronized communication metrics, motion dynamics, sky visibility, and 3D environmental context across diverse scenarios including steady-state motion, variable speeds, and different occlusion conditions. This platform and dataset enable researchers to develop motion-aware communication protocols, predict connectivity disruptions, and optimize satellite communication for emerging mobile applications from smartphones to autonomous vehicles. In this work, we use LEOViz for real-time satellite tracking and data collection. The starlink robot project is available at https://github.com/StarlinkRobot.

cs.RO

NavG: Risk-Aware Navigation in Crowded Environments Based on Reinforcement Learning with Guidance Points

Motion planning in navigation systems is highly susceptible to upstream perceptual errors, particularly in human detection and tracking. To mitigate this issue, the concept of guidance points--a novel directional cue within a reinforcement learning-based framework--is introduced. A structured method for identifying guidance points is developed, consisting of obstacle boundary extraction, potential guidance point detection, and redundancy elimination. To integrate guidance points into the navigation pipeline, a perception-to-planning mapping strategy is proposed, unifying guidance points with other perceptual inputs and enabling the RL agent to effectively leverage the complementary relationships among raw laser data, human detection and tracking, and guidance points. Qualitative and quantitative simulations demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves the highest success rate and near-optimal travel times, greatly improving both safety and efficiency. Furthermore, real-world experiments in dynamic corridors and lobbies validate the robot's ability to confidently navigate around obstacles and robustly avoid pedestrians.

cs.RO

Scene Modeling of Autonomous Vehicles Avoiding Stationary and Moving Vehicles on Narrow Roads

Navigating narrow roads with oncoming vehicles is a significant challenge that has garnered considerable public interest. These scenarios often involve sections that cannot accommodate two moving vehicles simultaneously due to the presence of stationary vehicles or limited road width. Autonomous vehicles must therefore profoundly comprehend their surroundings to identify passable areas and execute sophisticated maneuvers. To address this issue, this paper presents a comprehensive model for such an intricate scenario. The primary contribution is the principle of road width occupancy minimization, which models the narrow road problem and identifies candidate meeting gaps. Additionally, the concept of homology classes is introduced to help initialize and optimize candidate trajectories, while evaluation strategies are developed to select the optimal gap and most efficient trajectory. Qualitative and quantitative simulations demonstrate that the proposed approach, SM-NR, achieves high scene pass rates, efficient movement, and robust decisions. Experiments conducted in tiny gap scenarios and conflict scenarios reveal that the autonomous vehicle can robustly select meeting gaps and trajectories, compromising flexibly for safety while advancing bravely for efficiency.

cs.RO

RGBDS-SLAM: A RGB-D Semantic Dense SLAM Based on 3D Multi Level Pyramid Gaussian Splatting

High-quality reconstruction is crucial for dense SLAM. Recent popular approaches utilize 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D GS) techniques for RGB, depth, and semantic reconstruction of scenes. However, these methods often overlook issues of detail and consistency in different parts of the scene. To address this, we propose RGBDS-SLAM, a RGB-D semantic dense SLAM system based on 3D multi-level pyramid gaussian splatting, which enables high-quality dense reconstruction of scene RGB, depth, and semantics.In this system, we introduce a 3D multi-level pyramid gaussian splatting method that restores scene details by extracting multi-level image pyramids for gaussian splatting training, ensuring consistency in RGB, depth, and semantic reconstructions. Additionally, we design a tightly-coupled multi-features reconstruction optimization mechanism, allowing the reconstruction accuracy of RGB, depth, and semantic maps to mutually enhance each other during the rendering optimization process. Extensive quantitative, qualitative, and ablation experiments on the Replica and ScanNet public datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods. The open-source code will be available at: https://github.com/zhenzhongcao/RGBDS-SLAM.

cs.CV

SAMIPS: A Synthesised Asynchronous Processor

Miniaturisation and ever increasing clock speeds pose significant challenges to synchronous VLSI design with clock distribution becoming an increasingly costly and complicated issue and power consumption rapidly emerging as a major concern. Asynchronous logic promises to alleviate these challenges however its development and adoption has been hindered by the lack of mature design tools. Balsa is a response to this gap, encompassing a CSP-based asynchronous hardware description language and a framework for automatically synnthesising asynchronous circuits. This paper discusses SAMIPS, an asynchronous implementation of the MIPS microprocessor and the first full scale asynchronous microprocessor to be synthesised in Balsa. The objectives of the paper are twofold: first to provide a holistic description of SAMIPS and its components, the approach that it has been followed for the asynchronisation of MIPS and the innovative solutions that have been developed to address hazard challenges and a quantitative performance analysis of the system; secondly, to provide insights about the effectiveness of Balsa as a hardware description language and synthesis system.

cs.AR

GA-TEB: Goal-Adaptive Framework for Efficient Navigation Based on Goal Lines

In crowd navigation, the local goal plays a crucial role in trajectory initialization, optimization, and evaluation. Recognizing that when the global goal is distant, the robot's primary objective is avoiding collisions, making it less critical to pass through the exact local goal point, this work introduces the concept of goal lines, which extend the traditional local goal from a single point to multiple candidate lines. Coupled with a topological map construction strategy that groups obstacles to be as convex as possible, a goal-adaptive navigation framework is proposed to efficiently plan multiple candidate trajectories. Simulations and experiments demonstrate that the proposed GA-TEB framework effectively prevents deadlock situations, where the robot becomes frozen due to a lack of feasible trajectories in crowded environments. Additionally, the framework greatly increases planning frequency in scenarios with numerous non-convex obstacles, enhancing both robustness and safety.

cs.RO

PS6D: Point Cloud Based Symmetry-Aware 6D Object Pose Estimation in Robot Bin-Picking

6D object pose estimation holds essential roles in various fields, particularly in the grasping of industrial workpieces. Given challenges like rust, high reflectivity, and absent textures, this paper introduces a point cloud based pose estimation framework (PS6D). PS6D centers on slender and multi-symmetric objects. It extracts multi-scale features through an attention-guided feature extraction module, designs a symmetry-aware rotation loss and a center distance sensitive translation loss to regress the pose of each point to the centroid of the instance, and then uses a two-stage clustering method to complete instance segmentation and pose estimation. Objects from the Siléane and IPA datasets and typical workpieces from industrial practice are used to generate data and evaluate the algorithm. In comparison to the state-of-the-art approach, PS6D demonstrates an 11.5\% improvement in F$_{1_{inst}}$ and a 14.8\% improvement in Recall. The main part of PS6D has been deployed to the software of Mech-Mind, and achieves a 91.7\% success rate in bin-picking experiments, marking its application in industrial pose estimation tasks.

cs.RO

Light focusing and additive manufacturing through highly scattering media using upconversion nanoparticles

Light-based additive manufacturing holds great potential in the field of bioprinting due to its exceptional spatial resolution, enabling the reconstruction of intricate tissue structures. However, printing through biological tissues is severely limited due to the strong optical scattering within the tissues. The propagation of light is scrambled to form random speckle patterns, making it impossible to print features at the diffraction-limited size with conventional printing approaches. The poor tissue penetration depth of ultra-violet or blue light, which is commonly used to trigger photopolymerization, further limits the fabrication of high cell-density tissue constructs. Recently, several strategies based on wavefront shaping have been developed to manipulate the light and refocus it inside scattering media to a diffraction-limited spot. In this study, we present a high-resolution additive manufacturing technique using upconversion nanoparticles and a wavefront shaping method that does not require measurement from an invasive detector, i.e., it is a non-invasive technique. Upconversion nanoparticles convert near-infrared light to ultraviolet and visible light. The ultraviolet light serves as a light source for photopolymerization and the visible light as a guide star for digital light shaping. The incident light pattern is manipulated using the feedback information of the guide star to focus light through the tissue. In this way, we experimentally demonstrate that near-infrared light can be non-invasively focused through a strongly scattering medium. By exploiting the optical memory effect, we further demonstrate micro-meter resolution additive manufacturing through highly scattering media such as a 300-μm-thick chicken breast. This study provides a proof of concept of high-resolution additive manufacturing through turbid media with potential application in tissue engineering.

physics.optics

Multi-photon polymerization using upconversion nanoparticles for tunable feature-size printing

The recent development of light-based 3D printing technologies has marked a turning point in additive manufacturing. Through photopolymerization, liquid resins can be solidified into complex objects. Usually, the polymerization is triggered by exciting a photoinitiator with ultraviolet (UV) or blue light. In two-photon printing (TPP), the excitation is done through the non-linear absorption of two photons; it enables printing 100-nm voxels but requires expensive femtosecond lasers which strongly limits their broad dissemination. Upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) have recently been proposed as an alternative to TPP for photopolymerization but using continuous-wave lasers. UCNPs convert near-infrared (NIR) into visible/UV light to initiate the polymerization locally as in TPP. Here we provide a study of this multi-photon mechanism and demonstrate how the non-linearity impacts the printing process. In particular, we report on the possibility of fine-tuning the size of the printed voxel by adjusting the NIR excitation intensity. Using gelatin-based hydrogel, we are able to vary the transverse voxel size from 1.3 to 2.8 μm and the axial size from 7.7 to 59 μm by adjusting the NIR power without changing the degree of polymerization. This work opens up new opportunities for speeding up the fabrication while preserving the minimum feature size with cheap light sources.

physics.optics