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Shuang-Yi Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Shuang-Yi Wang.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

SPIRONet: Spatial-Frequency Learning and Graph-based Channel Interaction Network for Vessel Segmentation

Automatic vessel segmentation plays a pivotal role in the development of next-generation interventional navigation systems for surgical robotics. However, current approaches still suffer from suboptimal segmentation performance under challenging intraoperative conditions, such as low-signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), small or slender vessels, and strong interference. In this study, a novel spatial-frequency learning and graph-based channel interaction network (SPIRONet) is proposed to address the above issues. To address low-SNR vessel appearance and small or slender branches, dual spatial-frequency encoders are utilized, where the frequency encoder captures global vessel continuity that is less affected by local noise fluctuations, while the spatial encoder preserves fine vessel details. A cross-attention fusion module is further introduced to adaptively integrate this complementary spatial and frequency information. Moreover, to suppress interference from non-target vessels and vessel-like structures, a graph-based channel interaction module is designed to model channel-wise correlations, enhancing consistent vessel-related responses while suppressing task-irrelevant activations. Extensive experimental results on five challenging datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive and consistently strong performance compared with existing methods. For example, SPIRONet achieves IoU improvements of +0.87%, +0.52%, +0.23%, +1.39%, and +2.22% over the strongest competing methods on CADSA, CAXF, DCA1, XCAD, and ARCADE, respectively. Moreover, SPIRONet achieves an inference speed of 21 FPS with a 512x512 input size, meeting the real-time requirements of interventional scenarios (6-12 FPS). These promising results indicate SPIRONet's potential for integration into interventional navigation systems. Code is available at https://github.com/Dxhuang-CASIA/SPIRONet.

eess.IV↗

CROP: Conservative Reward for Model-based Offline Policy Optimization

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize a policy using collected data without online interactions. Model-based approaches are particularly appealing for addressing offline RL challenges because of their capability to mitigate the limitations of data coverage through data generation using models. Nonetheless, a prevalent issue in offline RL is the overestimation caused by distribution shift. This study proposes a novel model-based offline RL algorithm named Conservative Reward for model-based Offline Policy optimization (CROP). CROP introduces a streamlined objective that concurrently minimizes estimation error and the rewards of random actions, thereby yielding a robustly conservative reward estimator. Theoretical analysis shows that the designed conservative reward mechanism leads to a conservative policy evaluation and mitigates distribution shift. Experiments showcase that with the simple modification to reward estimation, CROP can conservatively estimate the reward and achieve competitive performance with existing methods. The source code will be available after acceptance.

cs.LG↗

Parallels Between VLA Model Post-Training and Human Motor Learning: Progress, Challenges, and Trends

Vision-language-action (VLA) models extend vision-language models (VLM) by integrating action generation modules for robotic manipulation. Leveraging the strengths of VLM in vision perception and instruction understanding, VLA models exhibit promising generalization across diverse manipulation tasks. However, applications demanding high precision and accuracy reveal performance gaps without further adaptation. Evidence from multiple domains highlights the critical role of post-training to align foundational models with downstream applications, spurring extensive research on post-training VLA models. VLA model post-training aims to enhance an embodiment's ability to interact with the environment for the specified tasks. This perspective aligns with Newell's constraints-led theory of skill acquisition, which posits that motor behavior arises from interactions among task, environmental, and organismic (embodiment) constraints. Accordingly, this survey structures post-training methods into four categories: (i) enhancing environmental perception, (ii) improving embodiment awareness, (iii) deepening task comprehension, and (iv) multi-component integration. Experimental results on standard benchmarks are synthesized to distill actionable guidelines. Finally, open challenges and emerging trends are outlined, relating insights from human learning to prospective methods for VLA post-training. This work delivers both a comprehensive overview of current VLA model post-training methods from a human motor learning perspective and practical insights for VLA model development. Project website: https://github.com/AoqunJin/Awesome-VLA-Post-Training.

cs.RO↗

VasoMIM: Vascular Anatomy-Aware Masked Image Modeling for Vessel Segmentation

Accurate vessel segmentation in X-ray angiograms is crucial for numerous clinical applications. However, the scarcity of annotated data presents a significant challenge, which has driven the adoption of self-supervised learning (SSL) methods such as masked image modeling (MIM) to leverage large-scale unlabeled data for learning transferable representations. Unfortunately, conventional MIM often fails to capture vascular anatomy because of the severe class imbalance between vessel and background pixels, leading to weak vascular representations. To address this, we introduce Vascular anatomy-aware Masked Image Modeling (VasoMIM), a novel MIM framework tailored for X-ray angiograms that explicitly integrates anatomical knowledge into the pre-training process. Specifically, it comprises two complementary components: anatomy-guided masking strategy and anatomical consistency loss. The former preferentially masks vessel-containing patches to focus the model on reconstructing vessel-relevant regions. The latter enforces consistency in vascular semantics between the original and reconstructed images, thereby improving the discriminability of vascular representations. Empirically, VasoMIM achieves state-of-the-art performance across three datasets. These findings highlight its potential to facilitate X-ray angiogram analysis.

cs.CV↗

MOSformer: Momentum encoder-based inter-slice fusion transformer for medical image segmentation

Medical image segmentation takes an important position in various clinical applications. 2.5D-based segmentation models bridge the computational efficiency of 2D-based models with the spatial perception capabilities of 3D-based models. However, existing 2.5D-based models primarily adopt a single encoder to extract features of target and neighborhood slices, failing to effectively fuse inter-slice information, resulting in suboptimal segmentation performance. In this study, a novel momentum encoder-based inter-slice fusion transformer (MOSformer) is proposed to overcome this issue by leveraging inter-slice information from multi-scale feature maps extracted by different encoders. Specifically, dual encoders are employed to enhance feature distinguishability among different slices. One of the encoders is moving-averaged to maintain consistent slice representations. Moreover, an inter-slice fusion transformer (IF-Trans) module is developed to fuse inter-slice multi-scale features. MOSformer is evaluated on three benchmark datasets (Synapse, ACDC, and AMOS), achieving a new state-of-the-art with 85.63%, 92.19%, and 85.43% DSC, respectively. These results demonstrate MOSformer's competitiveness in medical image segmentation.

eess.IV↗

VLA Model Post-Training via Action-Chunked PPO and Self Behavior Cloning

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising avenue for post-training vision-language-action (VLA) models, but practical deployment is hindered by sparse rewards and unstable training. This work mitigates these challenges by introducing an action chunk based on proximal policy optimization (PPO) with behavior cloning using self-collected demonstrations. Aggregating consecutive actions into chunks improves the temporal consistency of the policy and the density of informative feedback. In addition, an auxiliary behavior cloning loss is applied with a dynamically updated demonstration buffer that continually collects high-quality task trials during training. The relative weight between the action-chunked PPO objective and the self behavior clone auxiliary loss is adapted online to stabilize the post-training process. Experiments on the MetaWorld benchmark indicate improved performance over supervised fine-tuning, achieving a high success rate (0.93) and few steps to success (42.17). These results demonstrate the viability of RL for VLA post-training and help lay the groundwork for downstream VLA applications.

cs.RO↗

DOMAIN: MilDly COnservative Model-BAsed OfflINe Reinforcement Learning

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL), which learns an environment model from the offline dataset and generates more out-of-distribution model data, has become an effective approach to the problem of distribution shift in offline RL. Due to the gap between the learned and actual environment, conservatism should be incorporated into the algorithm to balance accurate offline data and imprecise model data. The conservatism of current algorithms mostly relies on model uncertainty estimation. However, uncertainty estimation is unreliable and leads to poor performance in certain scenarios, and the previous methods ignore differences between the model data, which brings great conservatism. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a milDly cOnservative Model-bAsed offlINe RL algorithm (DOMAIN) without estimating model uncertainty, and designs the adaptive sampling distribution of model samples, which can adaptively adjust the model data penalty. In this paper, we theoretically demonstrate that the Q value learned by the DOMAIN outside the region is a lower bound of the true Q value, the DOMAIN is less conservative than previous model-based offline RL algorithms, and has the guarantee of safety policy improvement. The results of extensive experiments show that DOMAIN outperforms prior RL algorithms and the average performance has improved by 1.8% on the D4RL benchmark.

cs.LG↗

Learning Novel Skills from Language-Generated Demonstrations

Robots are increasingly deployed across diverse domains to tackle tasks requiring novel skills. However, current robot learning algorithms for acquiring novel skills often rely on demonstration datasets or environment interactions, resulting in high labor costs and potential safety risks. To address these challenges, this study proposes DemoGen, a skill-learning framework that enables robots to acquire novel skills from natural language instructions. DemoGen leverages the vision-language model and the video diffusion model to generate demonstration videos of novel skills, which enabling robots to learn new skills effectively. Experimental evaluations in the MetaWorld simulation environments demonstrate the pipeline's capability to generate high-fidelity and reliable demonstrations. Using the generated demonstrations, various skill learning algorithms achieve an accomplishment rate three times the original on novel tasks. These results highlight a novel approach to robot learning, offering a foundation for the intuitive and intelligent acquisition of novel robotic skills. (Project website: https://aoqunjin.github.io/LNSLGD/)

cs.RO↗

VLA Model-Expert Collaboration for Bi-directional Manipulation Learning

The emergence of vision-language-action (VLA) models has given rise to foundation models for robot manipulation. Although these models have achieved significant improvements, their generalization in multi-task manipulation remains limited. This study proposes a VLA model-expert collaboration framework that leverages a limited number of expert actions to enhance VLA model performance. This approach reduces expert workload relative to manual operation while simultaneously improving the reliability and generalization of VLA models. Furthermore, manipulation data collected during collaboration can further refine the VLA model, while human participants concurrently enhance their skills. This bi-directional learning loop boosts the overall performance of the collaboration system. Experimental results across various VLA models demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system in collaborative manipulation and learning, as evidenced by improved success rates across tasks. Additionally, validation using a brain-computer interface (BCI) indicates that the collaboration system enhances the efficiency of low-speed action systems by involving VLA model during manipulation. These promising results pave the way for advancing human-robot interaction in the era of foundation models for robotics. (Project website: https://aoqunjin.github.io/Expert-VLA/)

cs.RO↗

CAS-GAN for Contrast-free Angiography Synthesis

Iodinated contrast agents are widely utilized in numerous interventional procedures, yet posing substantial health risks to patients. This paper presents CAS-GAN, a novel GAN framework that serves as a "virtual contrast agent" to synthesize X-ray angiographies via disentanglement representation learning and vessel semantic guidance, thereby reducing the reliance on iodinated contrast agents during interventional procedures. Specifically, our approach disentangles X-ray angiographies into background and vessel components, leveraging medical prior knowledge. A specialized predictor then learns to map the interrelationships between these components. Additionally, a vessel semantic-guided generator and a corresponding loss function are introduced to enhance the visual fidelity of generated images. Experimental results on the XCAD dataset demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our CAS-GAN, achieving a FID of 5.87 and a MMD of 0.016. These promising results highlight CAS-GAN's potential for clinical applications.

eess.IV↗