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Vincent Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Vincent Chen.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

WALL-SS: Scaling Long-horizon World Models via Next-Scale Autoregression

Generative world models provide robots with predictive models of how the world evolves under interaction, with growing potential for simulation, planning, policy evaluation, and robot learning. Beyond clip-level future prediction, a unified generative formulation should relate actions to consequences, support flexible horizons and continuous interaction, and enable reward-driven optimization. We introduce WALL-SS, a world model that generates visual futures through Scale-wise autoregressive Scaling, enabling action-controllable and long-horizon robotic simulation. WALL-SS represents embodied trajectories as causal sequences of temporally interleaved observations and actions, making action-dependent state transitions explicit while naturally supporting variable-length generation, streaming extension through reusable causal states, and direct optimization through sequence probabilities. To make this formulation effective over long horizons, we generate each future observation in a coarse-to-fine manner and develop three complementary components within the same hierarchy. Action-conditioned next-scale prediction injects scale-aligned action representations to improve action-future coupling and model both successful and failed behaviors. Scale-compressed long-horizon memory retains recent interactions at fine resolution while compressing distant observations and actions, with scale-wise dream forcing enhancing robustness to self-generated context. Finally, on-policy alignment optimizes autoregressive visual dynamics with action-following and long-term consistency rewards while preserving the pretrained visual distribution. Experiments show that WALL-SS improves action following and trajectory accuracy, supports coherent minute-long streaming rollout under bounded memory, and consistently benefits from on-policy alignment in reducing action drift and long-horizon inconsistency.

cs.RO

DMuon: Efficient Distributed Muon Training with Near-Adam Overhead

Matrix-orthogonalization-based optimizers, exemplified by Muon, have demonstrated strong convergence behavior across a wide range of modern deep learning workloads. The matrix-aware updates offer a compelling alternative to conventional element-wise optimization, particularly as model architectures continue to grow in scale and heterogeneity. Yet contemporary distributed training infrastructure built around the assumption of element-wise optimizers is poorly matched to matrix-level optimizers such as Muon, whose updates couple entire weight matrices and require costly Newton-Schulz iterations. Vanilla Muon implementations incur more than 2x the cost of forward and backward passes. To close this gap, we present DMuon, an open-source distributed Muon implementation that integrates into existing training pipelines as a drop-in module, with no framework-level modifications. Across both embodied foundation model and large language model (LLM) training workloads, DMuon achieves a 1.48x-3.01x speedup in end-to-end step time and a 6.85x-163.00x speedup in optimizer-step time, bringing per-step latency to near-AdamW levels and enabling efficient scaling in our model training.

cs.DC

WALL-WM: Carving World Action Modeling at the Event Joints

WALL-WM is a World Action Model that shifts video-action learning from chunk-centric optimization to event-grounded Vision-Language-Action pretraining, using semantically coherent action events as the atomic unit of learning. Existing WAMs commonly initialize from multimodal or video foundation models and then optimize fixed-length action chunks conditioned directly on the current observation and instruction. Although convenient, this chunk-centric formulation creates a fundamental granularity mismatch. Language describes semantic goals and events, vision evolves through continuous scene dynamics, and actions operate at control-level timescales; forcing all three into the same fixed-length prediction window turns VLA training into short-horizon correlation fitting. WALL-WM addresses this mismatch by organizing both supervision and data around semantic events. Specifically, it pairs event-grounded VLA pretraining with a data ecosystem built from event-level captions and cluster-balanced sampling, enabling scalable learning over diverse behaviors, scenes, and task structures. From the same event-pretrained backbone, WALL-WM supports two complementary inference modes. The event mode consumes next-event descriptions and enables variable-length execution chunks, while the unified mode uses a VLM with Staircase Decoding to condition conventional fixed-length chunk inference while preserving a gradient-continuous VLA path. Together with Muon-optimizer-based large-scale pretraining infrastructure, WALL-WM provides a practical scale-up recipe for general-purpose WAMs. Experiments show that WALL-WM generalizes broadly across language, scenes, and tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance in large-scale real-world generalization evaluation.

cs.RO

Wall-OSS-0.5 Technical Report

Large-scale Vision-Language-Action (VLA) pretraining is increasingly adopted as the foundation for robot policies, yet the evidence for pretrained VLAs is almost invariably reported after task-specific fine-tuning. This leaves a foundational question unanswered: does VLA pretraining itself yield executable robot behavior, or does it merely furnish a better initialization for downstream policy learning? We present Wall-OSS-0.5, an open-source 4B VLA built upon a 3B VLM backbone augmented with action-generation components, designed so that pretrained robotic capability is directly measurable on physical hardware. The model is pretrained across more than 20 embodiments, processing over one million robot trajectories per epoch alongside a grounded multimodal corpus. We adopt a gradient-bridged co-training recipe in which three objectives play distinct and complementary roles: discrete action prediction routes strong VLM-native gradients into the backbone, multimodal prediction preserves grounded vision-language understanding, and continuous flow matching serves as the deployment-time action interface. Before task-specific fine-tuning, the pretrained checkpoint achieves non-trivial zero-shot real-robot behavior, completing several tasks, including a held-out deformable manipulation task, at high task progress on a 17-task suite. After fine-tuning, the same checkpoint serves as a stronger adaptation prior, reaching 60.5% average task progress on 15 real-robot tasks and outperforming \pi_0.5 by 17.5%. Multimodal evaluations further confirm that action training does not erode grounded vision-language competence: the model preserves broad vision-language ability while strengthening embodied grounding. Together, these results reposition VLA pretraining from an initialization strategy to a directly testable, already useful source of robot capability.

cs.RO

Minimally Truncated SU(3) Lattice Gauge Theory and String Tension

We study SU(3) gauge theory on small lattices in the minimal (qutrit) electric field truncation retaining only the ${\bf 1}, {\bf 3}, {\bf \overline{3}}$ representations for the link variables. Explicit expressions are given for the Kogut-Susskind Hamiltonian for the square plaquette chain and the two-dimensional honeycomb lattice. Our formalism can be easily extended to the minimally truncated general SU($N_c$) gauge theory. The addition of (static) quarks is discussed. We present results for the energy spectrum of the gauge field on these lattices by exact diagonalization of the Hamiltonian and analyze its statistical properties. We also compute the SU(3) string tension and discuss how it is modified by vacuum fluctuations. Finally, we calculate the potential energies of a static quark-antiquark pair and three static quarks and study their screening at finite temperature.

hep-lat

Exact Lagrangian fillings of twist-spun torus links

We construct exact Lagrangian fillings of Legendrian torus links $\Lambda(k, n-k)$ that are fixed by a Legendrian loop that acts by $2\pi\ell/n$ rotation. Using these rotationally symmetric fillings, we produce fillings of the corresponding Legendrian twist-spun tori. Our construction is combinatorial in nature, relating symmetric weakly separated collections and plabic graphs to symmetric Legendrian weaves via the T-shift procedure of Casals, Le, Sherman-Bennett, and Weng. The main technical ingredient in this process is a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of maximal weakly separated collections of $k$-element subsets of $\{1, \dots, n\}$ that are fixed by addition of $\ell$ modulo $n$.

math.SG

Igniting VLMs toward the Embodied Space

While foundation models show remarkable progress in language and vision, existing vision-language models (VLMs) still have limited spatial and embodiment understanding. Transferring VLMs to embodied domains reveals fundamental mismatches between modalities, pretraining distributions, and training objectives, leaving action comprehension and generation as a central bottleneck on the path to AGI. We introduce WALL-OSS, an end-to-end embodied foundation model that leverages large-scale multimodal pretraining to achieve (1) embodiment-aware vision-language understanding, (2) strong language-action association, and (3) robust manipulation capability. Our approach employs a tightly coupled architecture and multi-strategies training curriculum that enables Unified Cross-Level CoT-seamlessly unifying instruction reasoning, subgoal decomposition, and fine-grained action synthesis within a single differentiable framework. Our results show that WALL-OSS attains high success on complex long-horizon manipulations, demonstrates strong instruction-following capabilities, complex understanding and reasoning, and outperforms strong baselines, thereby providing a reliable and scalable path from VLMs to embodied foundation models.

cs.RO

ERUPT: Efficient Rendering with Unposed Patch Transformer

This work addresses the problem of novel view synthesis in diverse scenes from small collections of RGB images. We propose ERUPT (Efficient Rendering with Unposed Patch Transformer) a state-of-the-art scene reconstruction model capable of efficient scene rendering using unposed imagery. We introduce patch-based querying, in contrast to existing pixel-based queries, to reduce the compute required to render a target view. This makes our model highly efficient both during training and at inference, capable of rendering at 600 fps on commercial hardware. Notably, our model is designed to use a learned latent camera pose which allows for training using unposed targets in datasets with sparse or inaccurate ground truth camera pose. We show that our approach can generalize on large real-world data and introduce a new benchmark dataset (MSVS-1M) for latent view synthesis using street-view imagery collected from Mapillary. In contrast to NeRF and Gaussian Splatting, which require dense imagery and precise metadata, ERUPT can render novel views of arbitrary scenes with as few as five unposed input images. ERUPT achieves better rendered image quality than current state-of-the-art methods for unposed image synthesis tasks, reduces labeled data requirements by ~95\% and decreases computational requirements by an order of magnitude, providing efficient novel view synthesis for diverse real-world scenes.

cs.CV

Technical Design Review of Duke Robotics Club's Oogway: An AUV for RoboSub 2024

The Duke Robotics Club is proud to present our robot for the 2024 RoboSub Competition: Oogway. Now in its second year, Oogway has been dramatically upgraded in both its capabilities and reliability. Oogway was built on the principle of independent, well-integrated, and reliable subsystems. Individual components and subsystems were tested and designed separately. Oogway's most advanced capabilities are a result of the tight integration between these subsystems. Such examples include a re-envisioned controls system, an entirely new electrical stack, advanced sonar integration, additional cameras and system monitoring, a new marker dropper, and a watertight capsule mechanism. These additions enabled Oogway to prequalify for Robosub 2024.

cs.RO

Oogway: Designing, Implementing, and Testing an AUV for RoboSub 2023

The Duke Robotics Club is proud to present our robot for the 2023 RoboSub Competition: Oogway. Oogway marks one of the largest design overhauls in club history. Beyond a revamped formfactor, some of Oogway's notable features include all-new computer vision software, advanced sonar integration, novel acoustics hardware processing, and upgraded stereoscopic cameras. Oogway was built on the principle of independent, well-integrated, and reliable subsystems. Individual components and subsystems were tested and designed separately. Oogway's most advanced capabilities are a result of the tight integration between these subsystems. Such examples include sonar-assisted computer vision algorithms and robot-agnostic controls configured in part through the robot's 3D model. The success of constructing and testing Oogway in under 2 year's time can be attributed to 20+ contributing club members, supporters within Duke's Pratt School of Engineering, and outside sponsors.

cs.RO

CMDBench: A Benchmark for Coarse-to-fine Multimodal Data Discovery in Compound AI Systems

Compound AI systems (CASs) that employ LLMs as agents to accomplish knowledge-intensive tasks via interactions with tools and data retrievers have garnered significant interest within database and AI communities. While these systems have the potential to supplement typical analysis workflows of data analysts in enterprise data platforms, unfortunately, CASs are subject to the same data discovery challenges that analysts have encountered over the years -- silos of multimodal data sources, created across teams and departments within an organization, make it difficult to identify appropriate data sources for accomplishing the task at hand. Existing data discovery benchmarks do not model such multimodality and multiplicity of data sources. Moreover, benchmarks of CASs prioritize only evaluating end-to-end task performance. To catalyze research on evaluating the data discovery performance of multimodal data retrievers in CASs within a real-world setting, we propose CMDBench, a benchmark modeling the complexity of enterprise data platforms. We adapt existing datasets and benchmarks in open-domain -- from question answering and complex reasoning tasks to natural language querying over structured data -- to evaluate coarse- and fine-grained data discovery and task execution performance. Our experiments reveal the impact of data retriever design on downstream task performance -- a 46% drop in task accuracy on average -- across various modalities, data sources, and task difficulty. The results indicate the need to develop optimization strategies to identify appropriate LLM agents and retrievers for efficient execution of CASs over enterprise data.

cs.DB

Resource Aware Person Re-identification across Multiple Resolutions

Not all people are equally easy to identify: color statistics might be enough for some cases while others might require careful reasoning about high- and low-level details. However, prevailing person re-identification(re-ID) methods use one-size-fits-all high-level embeddings from deep convolutional networks for all cases. This might limit their accuracy on difficult examples or makes them needlessly expensive for the easy ones. To remedy this, we present a new person re-ID model that combines effective embeddings built on multiple convolutional network layers, trained with deep-supervision. On traditional re-ID benchmarks, our method improves substantially over the previous state-of-the-art results on all five datasets that we evaluate on. We then propose two new formulations of the person re-ID problem under resource-constraints, and show how our model can be used to effectively trade off accuracy and computation in the presence of resource constraints. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/mileyan/DARENet.

cs.CV

Minibatch Gibbs Sampling on Large Graphical Models

Gibbs sampling is the de facto Markov chain Monte Carlo method used for inference and learning on large scale graphical models. For complicated factor graphs with lots of factors, the performance of Gibbs sampling can be limited by the computational cost of executing a single update step of the Markov chain. This cost is proportional to the degree of the graph, the number of factors adjacent to each variable. In this paper, we show how this cost can be reduced by using minibatching: subsampling the factors to form an estimate of their sum. We introduce several minibatched variants of Gibbs, show that they can be made unbiased, prove bounds on their convergence rates, and show that under some conditions they can result in asymptotic single-update-run-time speedups over plain Gibbs sampling.

cs.LG