arXiv subjects

Shutong Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Shutong Chen.

12 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

See Before You Code: Learning Visual Priors for Spatially Aware Educational Animation Generation

Large language models can generate executable code for educational animations, but the resulting renders often exhibit visual defects, including element overlap, misalignment, and broken animation continuity. These defects cannot be reliably detected from the code alone and become apparent only after execution. We formalize this problem as render-feedback-aware constrained code generation: given a natural language specification, the model must generate executable code whose rendered output satisfies structured quality criteria that can be evaluated only after rendering. To address this problem, we introduce OmniManim, a render-feedback-aware educational animation generation framework built around a shared scene state, explicit visual planning, structured post-render diagnostics, and localized repair. Within OmniManim, the Vision Agent is a task-specific visual planning module: it predicts sparse keyframe layouts with coarse-to-fine bounding-box denoising and optimizes an interpolation-aware objective to reduce intermediate-frame failures induced by downstream animation interpolation. We further construct two datasets, ManimLayout-1K and EduRequire-500, and provide a reproducible evaluation protocol covering executability, instructional quality, visual quality, and efficiency. On EduRequire-500, OmniManim improves measured render quality over both single-model baselines and existing multi-agent frameworks. Systematic ablation studies further verify that explicit visual planning, especially its coarse spatial prior, bounding-box refinement, and interpolation-aware optimization, is central to these gains.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Goal-Oriented Framework for Optical Flow-based Multi-User Multi-Task Video Transmission

Efficient multi-user multi-task video transmission is an important research topic within the realm of current wireless communication systems. To reduce the transmission burden and save communication resources, we propose a goal-oriented semantic communication framework for optical flow-based multi-user multi-task video transmission (OF-GSC). At the transmitter, we design a semantic encoder that consists of a motion extractor and a patch-level optical flow-based semantic representation extractor to effectively identify and select important semantic representations. At the receiver, we design a transformer-based semantic decoder for high-quality video reconstruction and video classification tasks. To minimize the communication time, we develop a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG)-based bandwidth allocation algorithm for multi-user transmission. For video reconstruction tasks, our OF-GSC framework achieves a significant improvement in the received video quality, as evidenced by a 13.47% increase in the structural similarity index measure (SSIM) score in comparison to DeepJSCC. For video classification tasks, OF-GSC achieves a Top-1 accuracy slightly surpassing the performance of VideoMAE with only 25% required data under the same mask ratio of 0.3. For bandwidth allocation optimization, our DDPG-based algorithm reduces the maximum transmission time by 25.97% compared with the baseline equal-bandwidth allocation scheme.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2026

Safety-aware Goal-oriented Semantic Sensing, Communication, and Control for Robotics

Wirelessly-connected robotic systems empower robots with real-time intelligence by leveraging remote computing resources for decision-making. However, the data exchange between robots and edge servers often overwhelms communication links, introducing latency that degrades task performance. To tackle this, goal-oriented semantic communication (GSC) has been introduced for wirelessly-connected robotic systems to extract and transmit only goal-relevant semantic representations. While this improves task effectiveness, it generally overlooks practical safety requirements. Meanwhile, existing robotics research often treats safety primarily as a control-level problem, without systematically considering safety across sensing, communication, and control in a closed-loop manner. To bridge this gap, we investigate how to enable safety-aware goal-oriented semantic (SA-GS) sensing, communication, and control co-design in wirelessly-connected robotic systems, aiming to maximize the robotic task effectiveness subject to practical safety requirements. We first introduce {an} architecture {for} wirelessly-connected robotic systems and representative use cases. We then summarize general safety requirements and effectiveness metrics across the use cases. Next, we systematically analyze the unique safety and effectiveness challenges in sensing, communication, and control. Based on these, we further present potential SA-GS research directions. Finally, an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) target tracking case study validates that one of the presented SA-GS research directions, i.e., semantic-based C\&C packet execution, could significantly improve safety rate and tracking success rate by more than 2 times and 4.5 times, respectively.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Goal-oriented Communication for Fast and Robust Robotic Fault Detection and Recovery

Autonomous robotic systems are widely deployed in smart factories and operate in dynamic, uncertain, and human-involved environments that require low-latency and robust fault detection and recovery (FDR). However, existing FDR frameworks exhibit various limitations, such as significant delays in communication and computation, and unreliability in robot motion/trajectory generation, mainly because the communication-computation-control (3C) loop is designed without considering the downstream FDR goal. To address this, we propose a novel Goal-oriented Communication (GoC) framework that jointly designs the 3C loop tailored for fast and robust robotic FDR, with the goal of minimising the FDR time while maximising the robotic task (e.g., workpiece sorting) success rate. For fault detection, our GoC framework innovatively defines and extracts the 3D scene graph (3D-SG) as the semantic representation via our designed representation extractor, and detects faults by monitoring spatial relationship changes in the 3D-SG. For fault recovery, we fine-tune a small language model (SLM) via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and enhance its reasoning and generalization capabilities via knowledge distillation to generate recovery motions for robots. We also design a lightweight goal-oriented digital twin reconstruction module to refine the recovery motions generated by the SLM when fine-grained robotic control is required, using only task-relevant object contours for digital twin reconstruction. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our GoC framework reduces the FDR time by up to 82.6% and improves the task success rate by up to 76%, compared to the state-of-the-art frameworks that rely on vision language models for fault detection and large language models for fault recovery.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Goal-Oriented Multi-Agent Semantic Networking: Unifying Intents, Semantics, and Intelligence

6G services are evolving toward goal-oriented and AI-native communication, which are expected to deliver transformative societal benefits across various industries and promote energy sustainability. Yet today's networking architectures, built on complete decoupling of the applications and the network, cannot expose or exploit high-level goals, limiting their ability to adapt intelligently to service needs. This work introduces Goal-Oriented Multi-Agent Semantic Networking (GoAgentNet), a new architecture that elevates communication from data exchange to goal fulfilment. GoAgentNet enables applications and the network to collaborate by abstracting their functions into multiple collaborative agents, and jointly orchestrates multi-agent sensing, networking, computation, and control through semantic computation and cross-layer semantic networking, allowing the entire architecture to pursue unified application goals. We first outline the limitations of legacy network designs in supporting 6G services, based on which we highlight key enablers of our GoAgentNet design. Then, through three representative 6G usage scenarios, we demonstrate how GoAgentNet can unlock more efficient and intelligent services. We further identify unique challenges faced by GoAgentNet deployment and corresponding potential solutions. A case study on robotic fault detection and recovery shows that our GoAgentNet architecture improves energy efficiency by up to 99% and increases the task success rate by up to 72%, compared with the existing networking architectures without GoAgentNet, which underscores its potential to support scalable and sustainable 6G systems.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2025

FedMerge: Federated Personalization via Model Merging

One global model in federated learning (FL) might not be sufficient to serve many clients with non-IID tasks and distributions. While there has been advances in FL to train multiple global models for better personalization, they only provide limited choices to clients so local finetuning is still indispensable. In this paper, we propose a novel ``FedMerge'' approach that can create a personalized model per client by simply merging multiple global models with automatically optimized and customized weights. In FedMerge, a few global models can serve many non-IID clients, even without further local finetuning. We formulate this problem as a joint optimization of global models and the merging weights for each client. Unlike existing FL approaches where the server broadcasts one or multiple global models to all clients, the server only needs to send a customized, merged model to each client. Moreover, instead of periodically interrupting the local training and re-initializing it to a global model, the merged model aligns better with each client's task and data distribution, smoothening the local-global gap between consecutive rounds caused by client drift. We evaluate FedMerge on three different non-IID settings applied to different domains with diverse tasks and data types, in which FedMerge consistently outperforms existing FL approaches, including clustering-based and mixture-of-experts (MoE) based methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Goal-oriented Semantic Communication for Robot Arm Reconstruction in Digital Twin: Feature and Temporal Selections

As one of the most promising technologies in industry, the Digital Twin (DT) facilitates real-time monitoring and predictive analysis for real-world systems by precisely reconstructing virtual replicas of physical entities. However, this reconstruction faces unprecedented challenges due to the everincreasing communication overhead, especially for digital robot arm reconstruction. To this end, we propose a novel goal-oriented semantic communication (GSC) framework to extract the GSC information for the robot arm reconstruction task in the DT, with the aim of minimising the communication load under the strict and relaxed reconstruction error constraints. Unlike the traditional reconstruction framework that periodically transmits a reconstruction message for real-time DT reconstruction, our framework implements a feature selection (FS) algorithm to extract the semantic information from the reconstruction message, and a deep reinforcement learning-based temporal selection algorithm to selectively transmit the semantic information over time. We validate our proposed GSC framework through both Pybullet simulations and lab experiments based on the Franka Research 3 robot arm. For a range of distinct robotic tasks, simulation results show that our framework can reduce the communication load by at least 59.5% under strict reconstruction error constraints and 80% under relaxed reconstruction error constraints, compared with traditional communication framework. Also, experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our framework, where the communication load is reduced by 53% in strict constraint case and 74% in relaxed constraint case. The demo is available at: https://youtu.be/2OdeHKxcgnk.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Estimating Individual Dose-Response Curves under Unobserved Confounders from Observational Data

Estimating an individual's potential response to continuously varied treatments is crucial for addressing causal questions across diverse domains, from healthcare to social sciences. However, existing methods are limited either to estimating causal effects of binary treatments, or scenarios where all confounding variables are measurable. In this work, we present ContiVAE, a novel framework for estimating causal effects of continuous treatments, measured by individual dose-response curves, considering the presence of unobserved confounders using observational data. Leveraging a variational auto-encoder with a Tilted Gaussian prior distribution, ContiVAE models the hidden confounders as latent variables, and is able to predict the potential outcome of any treatment level for each individual while effectively capture the heterogeneity among individuals. Experiments on semi-synthetic datasets show that ContiVAE outperforms existing methods by up to 62%, demonstrating its robustness and flexibility. Application on a real-world dataset illustrates its practical utility.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Personalized Additive Modeling for Multi-level Federated Learning

Contemporary AI faces the challenge of balancing generality with user-specific personalization. In federated learning (FL), this challenge is amplified by highly heterogeneous client data with complex non-IID patterns beyond standard IID assumptions. Many existing FL methods are designed for relatively restricted heterogeneity settings (e.g., a fixed number of clusters or a fixed form of personalization), limiting their robustness under complex structures. In this work, we study FL from a \emph{multi-level non-IID} perspective, where client similarity is captured by multiple granularities of shared knowledge: global, subgroup, and client-specific components. This view captures coarse-to-fine relationships while requiring less prior knowledge of task boundaries. Building on this insight, we propose \emph{Federated Multi-level Additive Modeling} (FeMAM), which learns multiple levels of shareable models and constructs personalized predictors via additive composition across levels. To move beyond a fixed structure, FeMAM allows models to grow and be pruned dynamically during training, adapting to diverse federated scenarios. Despite employing multiple models, FeMAM remains cost-friendly by unlocking only a small subset (one level) of models for training at a time. Extensive experiments show that FeMAM effectively approximates diverse complex non-IID structures and consistently outperforms representative clustered and personalized FL baselines.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

When the Metaverse Meets Carbon Neutrality: Ongoing Efforts and Directions

The metaverse has recently gained increasing attention from the public. It builds up a virtual world where we can live as a new role regardless of the role we play in the physical world. However, building and operating this virtual world will generate an extraordinary amount of carbon emissions for computing, communicating, displaying, and so on. This inevitably hinders the realization of carbon neutrality as a priority of our society, adding heavy burden to our earth. In this survey, we first present a green viewpoint of the metaverse by investigating the carbon issues in its three core layers, namely the infrastructure layer, the interaction layer, and the economy layer, and estimate their carbon footprints in the near future. Next, we analyze a range of current and emerging applicable green techniques for the purpose of reducing energy usage and carbon emissions of the metaverse, and discuss their limitations in supporting metaverse workloads. Then, in view of these limitations, we discuss important implications and bring forth several insights and future directions to make each metaverse layer greener. After that, we investigate green solutions from the governance perspective, including both public policies in the physical world and regulation of users in the virtual world, and propose an indicator Carbon Utility (CU) to quantify the service quality brought by an user activity per unit of carbon emissions. Finally, we identify an issue for the metaverse as a whole and summarize three directions: (1) a comprehensive consideration of necessary performance metrics, (2) a comprehensive consideration of involved layers and multiple internal components, and (3) a new assessing, recording, and regulating mechanism on carbon footprints of user activities. Our proposed quantitative indicator CU would be helpful in regulating user activities in the metaverse world.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2022

Violation Probabilities of AoI and PAoI and Optimal Arrival Rate Allocation for the IoT-based Multi-Source Status Update System

Lots of real-time applications over Internet of things (IoT)-based status update systems have imperative demands on information freshness, which is usually evaluated by age of information (AoI). Compared to the average AoI and peak AoI (PAoI), violation probabilities and distributions of AoI and PAoI characterize the timeliness in more details. This paper studies the timeliness of the IoT-based multi-source status update system. By modeling the system as a multi-source M/G/1/1 bufferless preemptive queue, general formulas of violation probabilities and probability density functions (p.d.f.s) of AoI and PAoI are derived with a time-domain approach. For the case with negativeexponentially distributed service time, the violation probabilities and p.d.f.s are obtained in closed form. Moreover, the maximal violation probabilities of AoI and PAoI are proposed to characterize the overall timeliness. To improve the overall timeliness under the resource constraint of IoT-device, the arrival rate allocation scheme is used to minimize the maximal violation probabilities. It is proved that the optimal arrival rates can be found by convex optimization algorithms. In addition, it is obtained that the minimum of maximal violation probability of AoI (or PAoI) is achieved only if all violation probabilities of AoI (or PAoI) are equal. Finally, numerical results verify the theoretical analysis and show the effectiveness of the arrival rate allocation scheme.

cs.PF↗

arXiv2022

Minimizing Age-upon-Decisions in Bufferless System: Service Scheduling and Decision Interval

In Internet of Things (IoT), the decision timeliness of time-sensitive applications is jointly affected by the statistics of update process and decision process. This work considers an update-and-decision system with a Poisson-arrival bufferless queue, where updates are delivered and processed for making decisions with exponential or periodic intervals. We use age-upon-decisions (AuD) to characterize timeliness of updates at decision moments, and the missing probability to specify whether updates are useful for decision-making. Our theoretical analyses 1) present the average AuDs and the missing probabilities for bufferless systems with exponential or deterministic decision intervals under different service time distributions; 2) show that for service scheduling, the deterministic service time achieves a lower average AuD and a smaller missing probability than the uniformly distributed and the negative exponentially distributed service time; 3) prove that the average AuD of periodical decision system is larger than and will eventually drop to that of Poisson decision system along with the increase of decision rate; however, the missing probability in periodical decision system is smaller than that of Poisson decision system. The numerical results and simulations verify the correctness of our analyses, and demonstrate that the bufferless systems outperform the systems applying infinite buffer length.

cs.IT↗