arXiv subjects

Vu Duong

Publications and source records attributed to Vu Duong.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Finetuning Vision-Language-Action Models Requires Fewer Layers Than You Think

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models pre-trained on massive video-robot datasets have revolutionized robotic manipulation, yet their multi-billion parameter architectures impose prohibitive computational burdens during downstream fine-tuning and real-time inference. In this work, we reveal a highly non-trivial architectural characteristic of these continuous control foundation policies (e.g., pi_0, GR00T-N1.5): despite being trained on diverse physical trajectories, they exhibit severe layer-wise representational redundancy. To exploit this, we introduce a structural compression pipeline that is entirely training-free, bypassing the need of existing methods to load full-scale models to learn optimized token reductions or dynamic layer selectors. Instead, using only a single forward pass via Centered Kernel Alignment to identify redundant layer features, we remove twin layers to permanently compress the model depth by up to 50% across both the VLM backbone and the continuous control policy head. Downstream fine-tuning of this streamlined architecture yields a dual acceleration benefit: a 40-50% reduction in training time and up to 30% faster real-time inference, while matching or exceeding full-scale base model performance. We comprehensively validate our method across three simulation benchmarks (LIBERO, RoboCasa, SimplerEnv) and 10 diverse real-world manipulation tasks across 4 unique robotic embodiments. These results prove that advanced VLAs require significantly fewer layers than previously assumed, offering a highly compute-efficient paradigm for scalable robot learning.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

FOCA: Future-Oriented Conditioning for Data-Efficient Vision-Language-Action Adaptation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable general-purpose robotic control via large-scale multimodal pretraining, yet their effectiveness under few-shot imitation learning remains limited. We conduct a systematic stress test of state-of-the-art VLA models and show that performance degrades sharply as demonstrations are reduced, revealing a key weakness of existing adaptation strategies. To address this, we introduce FOCA, a future-oriented conditioning framework for data-efficient VLA adaptation. FOCA combines explicit prediction of task-grounded future interaction embeddings with implicit alignment to future goal observations, enabling long-horizon reasoning in latent space without pixel-level prediction. This formulation naturally supports action-free co-training with synthetic videos from video world models and can be interpreted as learning a future-conditioned value-like representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate FOCA achieves 95.7% success with 20 demonstrations on LIBERO, improves 7-12% on RoboCasa, and delivers up to 26% absolute gains on real robots, establishing a new state of the art in few-shot VLA adaptation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Enhancing Few-Shot Classification of Benchmark and Disaster Imagery with ABHFA-Net

The rising incidence of natural and human-induced disasters necessitates robust visual recognition systems capable of operating under limited labeled data conditions. However, disaster-related image classification remains challenging due to data scarcity, high intra-class variability, and domain-specific complexities in remote sensing imagery. To address these challenges, we propose the Attention Bhattacharyya Distance-based Feature Aggregation Network (ABHFA-Net), a novel few-shot learning (FSL) framework that models class prototypes as probability distributions and performs classification via Bhattacharyya distance-based comparison. Our approach integrates a spatial channel attention mechanism to enhance discrimiantive feature learning in the few-shot context and introduces a Bhattacharyya-based contrastive softmax loss for improved class separability. Extensive experiments on both benchmark datasets (CIFAR-FS, FC-100, miniImageNet, tieredImageNet) and real-world disaster datasets (AIDER, CDD, MEDIC) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. In particular, ABHFA-Net achieves 80.7% and 92.3% accuracy on CIFAR-FS under 5-way 1-shot and 5-shot settings, respectively, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods. On disaster datasets, the model consistently improves classification performance, achieving up to 68.2% (1-shot) and 78.3% (5-shot) accuracy on AIDER, highlighting its robustness in real-world scenarios. These results establish ABHFA-Net as a strong and practical solution for few-shot disaster image classification, particularly in data-scarce and time-critical remote sensing applications. The code repository for our work is available at https://github.com/GreedYLearner1146/ABHFA-Net.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

DRACO-DehazeNet: An Efficient Image Dehazing Network Combining Detail Recovery and a Novel Contrastive Learning Paradigm

Image dehazing is crucial for clarifying images obscured by haze or fog, but current learning-based approaches is dependent on large volumes of training data and hence consumed significant computational power. Additionally, their performance is often inadequate under non-uniform or heavy haze. To address these challenges, we developed the Detail Recovery And Contrastive DehazeNet, which facilitates efficient and effective dehazing via a dense dilated inverted residual block and an attention-based detail recovery network that tailors enhancements to specific dehazed scene contexts. A major innovation is its ability to train effectively with limited data, achieved through a novel quadruplet loss-based contrastive dehazing paradigm. This approach distinctly separates hazy and clear image features while also distinguish lower-quality and higher-quality dehazed images obtained from each sub-modules of our network, thereby refining the dehazing process to a larger extent. Extensive tests on a variety of benchmarked haze datasets demonstrated the superiority of our approach. The code repository for this work is available at https://github.com/GreedYLearner1146/DRACO-DehazeNet.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Applications of mesoporous silica encapsulated gold nanorods loaded doxorubicin in chemo-photothermal therapy

We investigate chemo-photothermal effects of gold nanorods (GNRs) coated using mesoporous silica (mSiO2) loading doxorubicin (DOX). When the mesoporous silica layer is embedded by doxorubicin drugs, a significant change in absorption spectra enable to quantify the drug loading. We carry out photothermal experiments on saline and livers of mice having GNRs@mSiO2 and GNRs@mSiO2-DOX. We also inject the gold nanostructures into many tumor-implanted mice and use laser illumination on some of them. By measuring weight and size of tumors, the distinct efficiency of photothermal therapy and chemotherapy on treatment is determined. We experimentally confirm the accumulation of gold nanostructures in liver.

physics.bio-ph↗