arXiv subjects

Qingqiu Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Qingqiu Huang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

What Matters for Latent Actions in Robot Learning

Latent Action Models (LAMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling robot learning to leverage large-scale unlabeled videos through latent actions that serve as compact surrogates for physical actions. Despite rapid progress, research on LAM remains highly fragmented, with existing methods evaluating different design choices in isolation under inconsistent experimental settings, making it difficult to identify the factors that truly determine downstream robotic manipulation performance. In this work, we present the first comprehensive empirical study of latent action learning for robotic manipulation. We unify representative LAM methods within a common autoencoding framework and systematically investigate 41 LAM design choices across three dimensions, including latent action modeling paradigms, learning objectives and regularization methods, and latent action integration strategies. We further examine four proxy metrics for evaluating latent action quality and assess their ability to reliably predict downstream robotic manipulation performance. Extensive experiments on three widely used benchmarks provide strong empirical evidence that fine-tuning vision-language model (VLM) backbones with latent actions provides a stronger initialization for downstream policy learning, with further validation on real-world robot manipulation tasks.

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arXiv2026

From Noise to Intent: Anchoring Generative VLA Policies with Residual Bridges

Bridging high-level semantic understanding with low-level physical control remains a persistent challenge in embodied intelligence, stemming from the fundamental spatiotemporal scale mismatch between cognition and action. Existing generative VLA policies typically adopt a "Generation-from-Noise" paradigm, which disregards this disparity, leading to representation inefficiency and weak condition alignment during optimization. In this work, we propose ResVLA, an architecture that shifts the paradigm to "Refinement-from-Intent." Recognizing that robotic motion naturally decomposes into global intent and local dynamics, ResVLA utilizes spectral analysis to decouple control into a deterministic low-frequency anchor and a stochastic high-frequency residual. By anchoring the generative process on the predicted intent, our model focuses strictly on refining local dynamics via a residual diffusion bridge. Extensive simulation experiments show that ResVLA achieves competitive performance, strong robustness to language and robot embodiment perturbations, and faster convergence than standard generative baselines. ResVLA also demonstrates strong performance in real-world robot experiments.

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arXiv2026

LAFP: Preserving Latent Action Structure in Latent Policy Learning via Flow Matching

Learning high-quality latent actions from large-scale unlabeled videos, coupled with limited real-world interaction data for training an action decoder, has emerged as a promising paradigm for scalable latent policy learning. However, existing approaches typically rely on behavior cloning, which tends to collapse inherently multimodal action distributions into unimodal ones, thereby degrading the pretrained latent action structure. While flow matching provides a potential alternative, directly applying it leads to a misalignment between latent actions and physical actions during action decoder training, due to the stochastic nature of the learned policy. To address these, we propose Latent Action Flow Policy (LAFP), which leverages flow matching for latent policy learning and introduces an inference-time interpolation mechanism to mitigate stochasticity-induced misalignment. Experimental results demonstrate that LAFP consistently outperforms prior methods on downstream imitation learning tasks, achieving up to 10-15% improvement in success rate while incurring less than 1x additional inference overhead.

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arXiv2026

Implicit Drifting Policy: One-Step Action Generation via Conditional Expert Geometry

Generative action policies based on diffusion or flow matching excel in behavior cloning, yet their iterative sampling is prohibitive for high-frequency robot control. While recent one-step formulations alleviate this latency, they inevitably discard the intermediate trajectory evolution that provides crucial action correction. Directly recovering this mechanism by explicitly estimating a training-time drifting field is mathematically ill-posed due to extreme conditional demonstration sparsity. We introduce Implicit Drifting Policy (IDP), a one-step imitation learning framework that brings the training-time correction of Drifting into policy learning without explicit vector field estimation. IDP extracts a conditional expert geometry from the local variation of observation-similar expert actions, and compares it against a global reference geometry to isolate condition-specific constraints. This local geometric structure adaptively weights a scalar potential objective. Combined with an expert-proximal terminal evaluation, IDP directly enforces manifold constraints on the one-step generator during training. Extensive evaluations across 2D, 3D, and real-world manipulation tasks show IDP effectively maintains adherence to valid action manifolds, improving upon explicit drifting methods and achieving competitive performance with strong one-step baselines.

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arXiv2026

Data-Asymmetric Latent Imagination and Reranking for 3D Robotic Imitation Learning

Robotic imitation learning typically assumes access to optimal demonstrations, yet real-world data collection often yields suboptimal, exploratory, or even failed trajectories. Discarding such data wastes valuable information about environment dynamics and failure modes, which can instead be leveraged to improve decision-making. While 3D policies reduce reliance on high-quality demonstrations through strong spatial generalization, they still require large-scale data to achieve high task success. To address this, we propose DALI-R, a Data-Asymmetric Latent Imagination and Reranking framework for 3D robotic imitation learning from mixed-quality trajectories. It learns a Latent World Model over 3D point clouds for imagined rollouts and a Task Completion Scorer that reranks candidate action chunks, improving decision-making without additional high-quality demonstrations. We instantiate DALI-R with both diffusion and efficient flow-matching policies and evaluate it on Adroit and MetaWorld benchmarks. Across the two evaluated 3D base policies, DALI-R achieves an average $6.8$\% improvement in success rate while incurring less than $0.7\times$ additional inference overhead.

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arXiv2025

Percept-WAM: Perception-Enhanced World-Awareness-Action Model for Robust End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving heavily relies on accurate and robust spatial perception. Many failures arise from inaccuracies and instability, especially in long-tail scenarios and complex interactions. However, current vision-language models are weak at spatial grounding and understanding, and VLA systems built on them therefore show limited perception and localization ability. To address these challenges, we introduce Percept-WAM, a perception-enhanced World-Awareness-Action Model that is the first to implicitly integrate 2D/3D scene understanding abilities within a single vision-language model (VLM). Instead of relying on QA-style spatial reasoning, Percept-WAM unifies 2D/3D perception tasks into World-PV and World-BEV tokens, which encode both spatial coordinates and confidence. We propose a grid-conditioned prediction mechanism for dense object perception, incorporating IoU-aware scoring and parallel autoregressive decoding, improving stability in long-tail, far-range, and small-object scenarios. Additionally, Percept-WAM leverages pretrained VLM parameters to retain general intelligence (e.g., logical reasoning) and can output perception results and trajectory control outputs directly. Experiments show that Percept-WAM matches or surpasses classical detectors and segmenters on downstream perception benchmarks, achieving 51.7/58.9 mAP on COCO 2D detection and nuScenes BEV 3D detection. When integrated with trajectory decoders, it further improves planning performance on nuScenes and NAVSIM, e.g., surpassing DiffusionDrive by 2.1 in PMDS on NAVSIM. Qualitative results further highlight its strong open-vocabulary and long-tail generalization.

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arXiv2025

STAGE: A Stream-Centric Generative World Model for Long-Horizon Driving-Scene Simulation

The generation of temporally consistent, high-fidelity driving videos over extended horizons presents a fundamental challenge in autonomous driving world modeling. Existing approaches often suffer from error accumulation and feature misalignment due to inadequate decoupling of spatio-temporal dynamics and limited cross-frame feature propagation mechanisms. To address these limitations, we present STAGE (Streaming Temporal Attention Generative Engine), a novel auto-regressive framework that pioneers hierarchical feature coordination and multi-phase optimization for sustainable video synthesis. To achieve high-quality long-horizon driving video generation, we introduce Hierarchical Temporal Feature Transfer (HTFT) and a novel multi-stage training strategy. HTFT enhances temporal consistency between video frames throughout the video generation process by modeling the temporal and denoising process separately and transferring denoising features between frames. The multi-stage training strategy is to divide the training into three stages, through model decoupling and auto-regressive inference process simulation, thereby accelerating model convergence and reducing error accumulation. Experiments on the Nuscenes dataset show that STAGE has significantly surpassed existing methods in the long-horizon driving video generation task. In addition, we also explored STAGE's ability to generate unlimited-length driving videos. We generated 600 frames of high-quality driving videos on the Nuscenes dataset, which far exceeds the maximum length achievable by existing methods.

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arXiv2023

PARTNER: Level up the Polar Representation for LiDAR 3D Object Detection

Recently, polar-based representation has shown promising properties in perceptual tasks. In addition to Cartesian-based approaches, which separate point clouds unevenly, representing point clouds as polar grids has been recognized as an alternative due to (1) its advantage in robust performance under different resolutions and (2) its superiority in streaming-based approaches. However, state-of-the-art polar-based detection methods inevitably suffer from the feature distortion problem because of the non-uniform division of polar representation, resulting in a non-negligible performance gap compared to Cartesian-based approaches. To tackle this issue, we present PARTNER, a novel 3D object detector in the polar coordinate. PARTNER alleviates the dilemma of feature distortion with global representation re-alignment and facilitates the regression by introducing instance-level geometric information into the detection head. Extensive experiments show overwhelming advantages in streaming-based detection and different resolutions. Furthermore, our method outperforms the previous polar-based works with remarkable margins of 3.68% and 9.15% on Waymo and ONCE validation set, thus achieving competitive results over the state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2023

CLIP$^2$: Contrastive Language-Image-Point Pretraining from Real-World Point Cloud Data

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training, benefiting from large-scale unlabeled text-image pairs, has demonstrated great performance in open-world vision understanding tasks. However, due to the limited Text-3D data pairs, adapting the success of 2D Vision-Language Models (VLM) to the 3D space remains an open problem. Existing works that leverage VLM for 3D understanding generally resort to constructing intermediate 2D representations for the 3D data, but at the cost of losing 3D geometry information. To take a step toward open-world 3D vision understanding, we propose Contrastive Language-Image-Point Cloud Pretraining (CLIP$^2$) to directly learn the transferable 3D point cloud representation in realistic scenarios with a novel proxy alignment mechanism. Specifically, we exploit naturally-existed correspondences in 2D and 3D scenarios, and build well-aligned and instance-based text-image-point proxies from those complex scenarios. On top of that, we propose a cross-modal contrastive objective to learn semantic and instance-level aligned point cloud representation. Experimental results on both indoor and outdoor scenarios show that our learned 3D representation has great transfer ability in downstream tasks, including zero-shot and few-shot 3D recognition, which boosts the state-of-the-art methods by large margins. Furthermore, we provide analyses of the capability of different representations in real scenarios and present the optional ensemble scheme.

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arXiv2022

TransFusion: Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection with Transformers

LiDAR and camera are two important sensors for 3D object detection in autonomous driving. Despite the increasing popularity of sensor fusion in this field, the robustness against inferior image conditions, e.g., bad illumination and sensor misalignment, is under-explored. Existing fusion methods are easily affected by such conditions, mainly due to a hard association of LiDAR points and image pixels, established by calibration matrices. We propose TransFusion, a robust solution to LiDAR-camera fusion with a soft-association mechanism to handle inferior image conditions. Specifically, our TransFusion consists of convolutional backbones and a detection head based on a transformer decoder. The first layer of the decoder predicts initial bounding boxes from a LiDAR point cloud using a sparse set of object queries, and its second decoder layer adaptively fuses the object queries with useful image features, leveraging both spatial and contextual relationships. The attention mechanism of the transformer enables our model to adaptively determine where and what information should be taken from the image, leading to a robust and effective fusion strategy. We additionally design an image-guided query initialization strategy to deal with objects that are difficult to detect in point clouds. TransFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance on large-scale datasets. We provide extensive experiments to demonstrate its robustness against degenerated image quality and calibration errors. We also extend the proposed method to the 3D tracking task and achieve the 1st place in the leaderboard of nuScenes tracking, showing its effectiveness and generalization capability.

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arXiv2021

Distribution-Balanced Loss for Multi-Label Classification in Long-Tailed Datasets

We present a new loss function called Distribution-Balanced Loss for the multi-label recognition problems that exhibit long-tailed class distributions. Compared to conventional single-label classification problem, multi-label recognition problems are often more challenging due to two significant issues, namely the co-occurrence of labels and the dominance of negative labels (when treated as multiple binary classification problems). The Distribution-Balanced Loss tackles these issues through two key modifications to the standard binary cross-entropy loss: 1) a new way to re-balance the weights that takes into account the impact caused by label co-occurrence, and 2) a negative tolerant regularization to mitigate the over-suppression of negative labels. Experiments on both Pascal VOC and COCO show that the models trained with this new loss function achieve significant performance gains over existing methods. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/wutong16/DistributionBalancedLoss .

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arXiv2021

Adversarial Robustness under Long-Tailed Distribution

Adversarial robustness has attracted extensive studies recently by revealing the vulnerability and intrinsic characteristics of deep networks. However, existing works on adversarial robustness mainly focus on balanced datasets, while real-world data usually exhibits a long-tailed distribution. To push adversarial robustness towards more realistic scenarios, in this work we investigate the adversarial vulnerability as well as defense under long-tailed distributions. In particular, we first reveal the negative impacts induced by imbalanced data on both recognition performance and adversarial robustness, uncovering the intrinsic challenges of this problem. We then perform a systematic study on existing long-tailed recognition methods in conjunction with the adversarial training framework. Several valuable observations are obtained: 1) natural accuracy is relatively easy to improve, 2) fake gain of robust accuracy exists under unreliable evaluation, and 3) boundary error limits the promotion of robustness. Inspired by these observations, we propose a clean yet effective framework, RoBal, which consists of two dedicated modules, a scale-invariant classifier and data re-balancing via both margin engineering at training stage and boundary adjustment during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach over other state-of-the-art defense methods. To our best knowledge, we are the first to tackle adversarial robustness under long-tailed distributions, which we believe would be a significant step towards real-world robustness. Our code is available at: https://github.com/wutong16/Adversarial_Long-Tail .

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arXiv2020

Online Multi-modal Person Search in Videos

The task of searching certain people in videos has seen increasing potential in real-world applications, such as video organization and editing. Most existing approaches are devised to work in an offline manner, where identities can only be inferred after an entire video is examined. This working manner precludes such methods from being applied to online services or those applications that require real-time responses. In this paper, we propose an online person search framework, which can recognize people in a video on the fly. This framework maintains a multimodal memory bank at its heart as the basis for person recognition, and updates it dynamically with a policy obtained by reinforcement learning. Our experiments on a large movie dataset show that the proposed method is effective, not only achieving remarkable improvements over online schemes but also outperforming offline methods.

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arXiv2020

A Unified Framework for Shot Type Classification Based on Subject Centric Lens

Shots are key narrative elements of various videos, e.g. movies, TV series, and user-generated videos that are thriving over the Internet. The types of shots greatly influence how the underlying ideas, emotions, and messages are expressed. The technique to analyze shot types is important to the understanding of videos, which has seen increasing demand in real-world applications in this era. Classifying shot type is challenging due to the additional information required beyond the video content, such as the spatial composition of a frame and camera movement. To address these issues, we propose a learning framework Subject Guidance Network (SGNet) for shot type recognition. SGNet separates the subject and background of a shot into two streams, serving as separate guidance maps for scale and movement type classification respectively. To facilitate shot type analysis and model evaluations, we build a large-scale dataset MovieShots, which contains 46K shots from 7K movie trailers with annotations of their scale and movement types. Experiments show that our framework is able to recognize these two attributes of shot accurately, outperforming all the previous methods.

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arXiv2020

MovieNet: A Holistic Dataset for Movie Understanding

Recent years have seen remarkable advances in visual understanding. However, how to understand a story-based long video with artistic styles, e.g. movie, remains challenging. In this paper, we introduce MovieNet -- a holistic dataset for movie understanding. MovieNet contains 1,100 movies with a large amount of multi-modal data, e.g. trailers, photos, plot descriptions, etc. Besides, different aspects of manual annotations are provided in MovieNet, including 1.1M characters with bounding boxes and identities, 42K scene boundaries, 2.5K aligned description sentences, 65K tags of place and action, and 92K tags of cinematic style. To the best of our knowledge, MovieNet is the largest dataset with richest annotations for comprehensive movie understanding. Based on MovieNet, we set up several benchmarks for movie understanding from different angles. Extensive experiments are executed on these benchmarks to show the immeasurable value of MovieNet and the gap of current approaches towards comprehensive movie understanding. We believe that such a holistic dataset would promote the researches on story-based long video understanding and beyond. MovieNet will be published in compliance with regulations at https://movienet.github.io.

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arXiv2020

Placepedia: Comprehensive Place Understanding with Multi-Faceted Annotations

Place is an important element in visual understanding. Given a photo of a building, people can often tell its functionality, e.g. a restaurant or a shop, its cultural style, e.g. Asian or European, as well as its economic type, e.g. industry oriented or tourism oriented. While place recognition has been widely studied in previous work, there remains a long way towards comprehensive place understanding, which is far beyond categorizing a place with an image and requires information of multiple aspects. In this work, we contribute Placepedia, a large-scale place dataset with more than 35M photos from 240K unique places. Besides the photos, each place also comes with massive multi-faceted information, e.g. GDP, population, etc., and labels at multiple levels, including function, city, country, etc.. This dataset, with its large amount of data and rich annotations, allows various studies to be conducted. Particularly, in our studies, we develop 1) PlaceNet, a unified framework for multi-level place recognition, and 2) a method for city embedding, which can produce a vector representation for a city that captures both visual and multi-faceted side information. Such studies not only reveal key challenges in place understanding, but also establish connections between visual observations and underlying socioeconomic/cultural implications.

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arXiv2020

Learn to Propagate Reliably on Noisy Affinity Graphs

Recent works have shown that exploiting unlabeled data through label propagation can substantially reduce the labeling cost, which has been a critical issue in developing visual recognition models. Yet, how to propagate labels reliably, especially on a dataset with unknown outliers, remains an open question. Conventional methods such as linear diffusion lack the capability of handling complex graph structures and may perform poorly when the seeds are sparse. Latest methods based on graph neural networks would face difficulties on performance drop as they scale out to noisy graphs. To overcome these difficulties, we propose a new framework that allows labels to be propagated reliably on large-scale real-world data. This framework incorporates (1) a local graph neural network to predict accurately on varying local structures while maintaining high scalability, and (2) a confidence-based path scheduler that identifies outliers and moves forward the propagation frontier in a prudent way. Experiments on both ImageNet and Ms-Celeb-1M show that our confidence guided framework can significantly improve the overall accuracies of the propagated labels, especially when the graph is very noisy.

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arXiv2020

A Local-to-Global Approach to Multi-modal Movie Scene Segmentation

Scene, as the crucial unit of storytelling in movies, contains complex activities of actors and their interactions in a physical environment. Identifying the composition of scenes serves as a critical step towards semantic understanding of movies. This is very challenging -- compared to the videos studied in conventional vision problems, e.g. action recognition, as scenes in movies usually contain much richer temporal structures and more complex semantic information. Towards this goal, we scale up the scene segmentation task by building a large-scale video dataset MovieScenes, which contains 21K annotated scene segments from 150 movies. We further propose a local-to-global scene segmentation framework, which integrates multi-modal information across three levels, i.e. clip, segment, and movie. This framework is able to distill complex semantics from hierarchical temporal structures over a long movie, providing top-down guidance for scene segmentation. Our experiments show that the proposed network is able to segment a movie into scenes with high accuracy, consistently outperforming previous methods. We also found that pretraining on our MovieScenes can bring significant improvements to the existing approaches.

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