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Seungho Han

Publications and source records attributed to Seungho Han.

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Don't Contrast the Impossible: Region-Constrained Batching for Contrastive User Modeling on a Local Community Platform

Contrastive learning is widely used for user modeling in large-scale recommender systems, where standard in-batch negatives implicitly assume universal exposure that any user can be shown any item. On local community platforms such as Karrot, however, exposure is geographically constrained; many user-item pairs are impossible by design yet still treated as negatives during training, diluting the contrastive learning signal. We address this impossible negatives problem and propose Region-Constrained Batch Sampling (RCBS), a simple yet effective batching method that constructs region-homogeneous mini-batches so that users are contrasted primarily against items they could feasibly see. By replacing impossible negatives with feasible ones, RCBS naturally introduces harder and more informative negatives under realistic exposure constraints. With offline evaluations and online A/B tests, we show that RCBS consistently improves user representation quality and consequently enhances home feed ranking, retrieval, and display ads ranking. The resulting user embeddings have been deployed in production across various applications.

cs.IR

ADP: Adversarial Dynamics Priors for Physically Grounded Humanoid Locomotion

In this paper, we propose Adversarial Dynamics Priors (ADP) for perturbation-resilient humanoid locomotion control. Existing motion prior-based methods induce natural motion styles by imitating kinematic motion features, but they do not directly regularize dynamics features, such as CoM motion, centroidal momentum, contact forces, and contact states. To address this limitation, we replace kinematic motion-style feature with selected dynamics features extracted from locomotion trajectories as the target of adversarial regularization. To this end, we use trajectory optimization to construct a reference dataset and train a discriminator to evaluate whether policy-induced temporal windows are consistent with the resulting reference distribution. Without explicit motion tracking, ADP encourages policy rollouts to remain close to the reference support, even after perturbations. Experimental results show that, compared with AMP, the strongest baseline in our evaluation, ADP improves the $80\%$-success impulse threshold ($J_{80}$) by $16.7\%$, while reducing direction-averaged recovery time and velocity tracking error by $47.9\%$ and $35.4\%$, respectively.

cs.RO

Evolution Fine-Tuning: Learning to Discover Across 371 Optimization Tasks

Would experience designing faster GPU kernels also help close in on a long-standing open mathematical conjecture? Large Language Models (LLMs) integrated into evolutionary search have recently produced state-of-the-art solutions on optimization tasks, including open mathematical conjectures, GPU kernel design, scientific law discovery, and combinatorial puzzles. To achieve this, prior work applied search scaffolds to one target task at a time, so every new problem is approached from scratch and the experience accumulated during search is discarded once the model finishes its attempt. This leaves the capability of iteratively evolving a solution (e.g., knowing which part to mutate and how, deciding when to backtrack) entirely in the scaffold rather than in the model itself. Whether the model itself could acquire this capability and reuse it across different tasks has been largely unexamined. To address this, we introduce Evolution Fine-Tuning (EFT), a mid-training paradigm that teaches LLMs to evolve solutions across tasks by converting evolutionary search trajectories into supervision. We construct Finch Collection, a 156K-trajectory dataset spanning 10 domains and 371 optimization tasks, and fine-tune open-source LLMs from 2B to 9B parameters. Empirically, EFT confers cross-task generalization: across 22 held-out tasks, our models surpass their base counterparts by 10.22% on average. Furthermore, when paired with test-time RL, our model matches state-of-the-art performance on two circle-packing tasks and outperforms its base-model counterpart on the Erd\H{o}s minimum-overlap problem. EFT thus serves as a "practice phase" for general-purpose discovery agents that do not solve new problems from scratch.

cs.CL

RAY-TOLD: Ray-Based Latent Dynamics for Dense Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance with TDMPC

Dense, dynamic crowds pose a persistent challenge for autonomous mobile robots. Purely reactive planning methods, such as Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control, often fail to escape local minima in complex scenarios due to their limited prediction horizon. To bridge this gap, we propose Ray-based Task-Oriented Latent Dynamics (RAY-TOLD), a hybrid control architecture that integrates obstacle information into latent dynamics and utilizes the robustness of physics-based MPPI with the long-horizon foresight of reinforcement learning. RAY-TOLD leverages a LiDAR-centric latent dynamics model to encode high-dimensional sensor data into a compact state representation, enabling the learning of a terminal value function and a policy prior. We introduce a policy mixture sampling strategy that augments the MPPI candidate population with trajectories derived from the learned policy, effectively guiding the planner towards the goal while maintaining kinematic feasibility. Extensive tests in a stochastic environment with high-density dynamic obstacles demonstrate that our method outperforms the MPPI baseline, reducing the collision rate. The results confirm that blending short-horizon physics-based rollouts with learned long-horizon intent significantly enhances navigation reliability and safety.

cs.RO

Learning Tactile-Aware Quadrupedal Loco-Manipulation Policies

Quadrupedal loco-manipulation is commonly built on visual perception and proprioception. Yet reliable contact-rich manipulation remains difficult: vision and proprioception alone cannot resolve uncertain, evolving interactions with the environment. Tactile sensing offers direct contact observability, but scalable tactile-aware learning framework for quadrupedal loco-manipulation is still underexplored. In this paper, we present a tactile-aware loco-manipulation policy learning pipeline with a hierarchical structure. Our approach has two key components. First, we leverage real-world human demonstrations to train a tactile-conditioned visuotactile high-level policy. This policy predicts not only end-effector trajectories for manipulation, but also the evolving tactile interaction cues that characterize how contact should develop over time. Second, we perform large-scale reinforcement learning in simulation to learn a tactile-aware whole-body control policy that tracks diverse commanded trajectories and tactile interaction cues, and transfers zero-shot to the real world. Together, these components enable coordinated locomotion and manipulation under contact-rich scenarios. We evaluate the system on real-world contact-rich tasks, including in-hand reorientation with insertion, valve tightening, and delicate object manipulation. Compared to vision-only and visuotactile baselines, our method improves performance by 28.54% on average across these tasks.

cs.RO

Design and Performance of a Monolithic Plastic Scintillator Tracker with Embedded Scatterers

We propose a new scintillator-based tracker concept based on a monolithic plastic scintillator plate with embedded scatterers and wavelength-shifting fiber readout. The embedded scatterers localize scintillation light so that channels closer to the charged-particle crossing point collect more light. The particle crossing position is reconstructed from the channel-to-channel light yield distribution with a position resolution well below the readout pitch. We performed a positron beam test with prototypes to validate the reconstruction principle and to evaluate the detection efficiency and position resolution. The beam test validated the position reconstruction principle, and demonstrated a near-100% detection efficiency and a position resolution of 1.47 mm for normal incidence and 1.85 mm for an incidence angle of 45{\deg}, with a 10-mm readout pitch. In this paper, we describe the detector concept, the reconstruction method, and the results of the beam test.

physics.ins-det

EquiBim: Learning Symmetry-Equivariant Policy for Bimanual Manipulation

Robotic imitation learning has achieved impressive success in learning complex manipulation behaviors from demonstrations. However, many existing robot learning methods do not explicitly account for the physical symmetries of robotic systems, often resulting in asymmetric or inconsistent behaviors under symmetric observations. This limitation is particularly pronounced in dual-arm manipulation, where bilateral symmetry is inherent to both the robot morphology and the structure of many tasks. In this paper, we introduce EquiBim, a symmetry-equivariant policy learning framework for bimanual manipulation that enforces bilateral equivariance between observations and actions during training. Our approach formulates physical symmetry as a group action on both observation and action spaces, and imposes an equivariance constraint on policy predictions under symmetric transformations. The framework is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated into a wide range of imitation learning pipelines with diverse observation modalities and action representations, including point cloud-based and image-based policies, as well as both end-effector-space and joint-space parameterizations. We evaluate EquiBim on RoboTwin, a dual-arm robotic platform with symmetric kinematics, and evaluate it across diverse observation and action configurations in simulation. We further validate the approach on a real-world dual-arm system. Across both simulation and physical experiments, our method consistently improves performance and robustness under distribution shifts. These results suggest that explicitly enforcing physical symmetry provides a simple yet effective inductive bias for bimanual robot learning.

cs.RO

Delay Time Characterization on FPGA: A Low Nonlinearity, Picosecond Resolution Time-to-Digital Converter on 16-nm FPGA using Bin Sequence Calibration

We present a Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC) implemented on a 16 nm Xilinx UltraScale Plus FPGA that achieves a resolution of 1.15 ps, RMS precision of 3.38 ps, a differential nonlinearity (DNL) of [-0.43, 0.24] LSB, and an integral nonlinearity (INL) of [-2.67, 0.15] LSB. This work introduces two novel hardware-independent post-processing techniques - Partial Order Reconstruction (POR) and Iterative Time-bin Interleaving (ITI) - that significantly enhance the performance of FPGA-based TDCs. POR addresses the missing code problem by inferring the partial order of each time bin through code density test data and directed acyclic graph (DAG) analysis, enabling near-complete recovery of usable bins. ITI further improves fine time resolution by merging multiple calibrated tapped delay lines (TDLs) into a single unified delay chain, achieving scalable resolution without resorting to averaging. Compared to state-of-the-art FPGA-based TDC architectures, the proposed methods deliver competitive or superior performance with reduced hardware overhead. These techniques are broadly applicable to high-resolution time measurement and precise delay calibration in programmable logic platforms.

cs.AR