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Wentao Zhu

Publications and source records attributed to Wentao Zhu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Seeing the World and the Self from Egocentric Video

Complete 3D perception from egocentric video requires recovering the surrounding scene and the wearer's full-body motion in a shared metric frame. Existing methods typically address scene reconstruction and motion estimation separately: scene reconstruction methods ignore the wearer, whereas motion estimation methods lack explicit scene geometry and often depend on external trajectories. Joint recovery is challenging because the two tasks exhibit asymmetric visibility and require different prediction paradigms. The largely visible scene supports deterministic geometric regression, whereas the severely occluded body requires generative motion inference. We therefore propose RESELF (REconstructing the Scene and the sELF), a unified framework that couples deterministic metric geometry reconstruction with geometry-conditioned motion generation. RESELF adapts a geometry foundation model pre-trained on large-scale exocentric data to egocentric video using frame-wise scale and relative-pose consistency objectives. The resulting camera trajectory and latent geometric features condition a diffusion model that recovers the wearer's motion. A subsequent closed-loop kinematic feedback stage further refines the camera head while preserving the reconstructed scene geometry. To support training and evaluation, we curate EE4D-JSM from EgoExo4D by aligning egocentric video, sparse metric scene geometry, camera trajectories, and full-body motion annotations. Experiments show that RESELF outperforms state-of-the-art methods designed for the individual tasks across depth estimation, camera tracking, and full-body motion estimation. Code, models, and datasets will be available at https://ka1guan.github.io/RESELF/.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

InstanceSplat: Instance-Aware Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting for Scene Understanding

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables efficient and generalizable 3D reconstruction, but current feed-forward 3DGS methods for scene understanding remain largely category-oriented. In contrast, instance-aware 3DGS methods typically rely on per-scene optimization and often decouple reconstruction from instance and semantic learning, limiting reciprocal interactions among them. We present InstanceSplat, a unified feed-forward 3DGS framework for generalizable 3D reconstruction and instance-aware scene understanding from pose-free multi-view images. In a single forward pass, InstanceSplat constructs an instance-aware Gaussian representation that jointly encodes appearance, geometry, instance identity, and language-aligned semantics. Shared 3D Gaussians ground instance identities across views, producing renderable and cross-view-consistent instance features. To allow reconstruction and scene understanding to benefit from each other, we further design an instance-centric learning strategy that connects reconstruction, instance learning, and semantic learning through shared instance structure. Specifically, instance cues guide reconstruction, language-aligned semantics strengthen the discrimination of confusing same-category instances, and instance regions aggregate semantic evidence into coherent object-level predictions. Experiments on novel-view synthesis, instance segmentation, and open-vocabulary semantic understanding under varying input-view settings and on an unseen dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, practical efficiency, and strong generalization.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Towards the Harness of Embodied Agents

The success of coding agents has established the harness as a paradigm: what an agent achieves depends not on the model alone, but on the infrastructure around it. We ask whether the same paradigm extends to embodied agents in the physical world. We present Thea, a harness in which an agentic loop orchestrates robot capabilities, each wrapped as a callable tool. It inherits the core components of coding agents, modified as the physical world requires. The world, however, withholds two abilities that software grants for free: reading the state of the world, and judging the outcome of an action. To bridge these gaps, Thea introduces Scene Graph as Context, a persistent, symbolic representation of the world, and Evaluation as Exit Codes, which detects when an action should terminate, judges whether it succeeded, and on failure diagnoses the cause. Together they close the loop between the agent and the physical world. Rich behaviors then emerge from the composition of tools, and the closed loop carries long-horizon tasks to completion in real environments.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Semantic Anchoring for Robotic Action Representations

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models inherit rich semantic representations from pretrained Vision-Language Models, yet fine-tuning on limited robot demonstrations degrades this structure and undermines generalization. A fundamental question therefore arises: what constitutes a good action representation? Inspired by the mirror neuron theory's insight that observation and execution share an intention-level encoding, we examine whether a robot's action representations preserve the semantic structure captured by pretrained encoders. Systematic probing confirms that this structure erodes during finetuning, and that its quality synchronizes with both task success and out-of-distribution generalization. We further introduce a plug-and-play method that anchors action representations to a semantic manifold while decomposing representations into a shared semantic channel and a private channel, all discarded at inference, leaving the deployed model unchanged. Validated on different VLA backbones across simulation and real-world benchmarks, our method yields up to +18.7% on real-world in-distribution tasks and +21.5% on out-of-distribution generalization.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Learning 1-Bit LiDAR-based Localization with Auxiliary Objective

6-DoF LiDAR-based localization is a fundamental capability for autonomous systems operating in large-scale outdoor environments. Many deep-learning-based localization methods have achieved promising performance so far. However, as one of the always-on modules competing for limited on-board computational resources, the localization module is expected to consume only a small portion of the overall compute budget. Most existing learning-based methods are still too heavy for this purpose. In contrast, binary neural networks (BNNs) offer an appealing solution, but the 1-bit compression causes severe information loss and performance drop. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing Binarized LiDAR-based Localization (BiLoc), the first binary neural network framework for 6-DoF LiDAR localization. Specifically, we reinterpret the training of BNNs from the perspective of the information-bottleneck principle, aiming at retaining minimal yet sufficient representations for pose estimation while suppressing redundant variations. And we introduce an auxiliary objective that adaptively regulates information retention in the binary encoder, effectively mitigating the information loss caused by binarization. This auxiliary objective provides additional optimization signals that compensate for the limited representational capacity and the gradient mismatch inherent in BNNs. Extensive experiments on large-scale outdoor LiDAR datasets demonstrate that BiLoc establishes a new state of the art for LiDAR localization with BNNs.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Resonant Minds: Closed-Loop Social Avatars with Theory of Mind

Creating lifelike digital humans with genuine social intelligence requires unifying cognitive reasoning and multimodal generation within a coherent framework. Current approaches treat these as separate tasks: Large Language Models excel at dialogue but lack embodied expression, while diffusion-based talking head models achieve visual fidelity but ignore social cognition. To bridge this gap, we propose a closed-loop dual-agent framework integrating perception, social reasoning, and expression into a continuous interaction cycle. The perception module analyzes partners' multimodal behaviors from video, while the social reasoning module infers hidden mental states through Theory of Mind and selects responses via an ensemble mechanism. The expression module then generates emotion-controllable videos that jointly synthesize speaker speech and facial expressions with listener reactive behaviors, capturing bidirectional dynamics absent in prior work. We further construct a hierarchical Persona-Scenario dataset with psychologically grounded personas and private social goals to support evaluation under information asymmetry. Experiments on this dataset demonstrate competitive or superior performance on both dialogue quality and video generation metrics. Notably, our method surpasses even the full-information Script mode on key dialogue quality dimensions, suggesting that explicit mental state inference under uncertainty can elicit more thoughtful dialogue than unrestricted information access. Project page: https://resonantminds.github.io/.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Harsher on Male? Evaluating LLMs on Gender-Asymmetric Moral Framing Across Diverse Conflict Scenarios

Existing studies on gender bias in LLMs have largely focused on stereotypes, occupational associations, or explicit harmful outputs. In this work, we ask whether LLMs apply consistent response standards to the same negative behavior under matched male-actor and female-actor conditions. We introduce GAMA-Bench, a gender-mirrored benchmark of 1,298 scenarios covering intimate relationship and public social conflicts. It constructs gender-neutral misconduct templates through controlled grids and cross-model review, then compiles them into paired first-person prompts with matched actor-gender and role-reference variations. We further design a structured response-framing protocol to measure how models allocate punishment, empathy, escalation, instruction, and blame. Experiments on 10 representative LLMs reveal a consistent male-disadvantaging asymmetry: male actors receive more punitive, escalatory, and blame-centered framing, whereas female actors receive more therapeutic and empathy-oriented framing for the same misconduct. Further analyses show that this pattern persists across model families, scenario tracks, model scale, and explicit thinking-style reasoning. The official code is available at https://github.com/xufeiqiong/GAMA-Bench.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Proprioceptive-visual correspondence enables self-other distinction in humanoid robots

Distinguishing self from others is a prerequisite for social intelligence, yet humanoid robots that increasingly share workspaces with humans still lack this ability. Here we show that a humanoid robot can learn self-other distinction from proprioceptive-visual correspondence, without any identity labels or kinematic models. Once established, this distinction bootstraps a predictive self-model that maps joint configurations to three-dimensional body occupancy, capturing how the robot's body changes with action. In multi-agent scenes involving humans or morphologically identical robots, the system reliably identifies itself, learns a 3D self-model, and supports downstream tasks including target reaching, collision-aware motion planning, and human-to-robot motion retargeting. Together, these results outline a route toward bodily self-representation in robots that act and coordinate alongside others in shared physical environments. Project page: https://euron-zc.github.io/humanoid-self-model/.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

WaterSearch: Exploring Seed Pooling for Improving the Quality-Detectability Trade-off in LLM Watermarking

Watermarking acts as a critical safeguard in text generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). By embedding identifiable signals into model outputs, watermarking enables reliable attribution and enhances the security of machine-generated content. Existing approaches typically embed signals by manipulating token generation probabilities. Despite their effectiveness, these methods inherently face a trade-off between detectability and text quality: the signal strength and randomness required for robust watermarking tend to degrade the performance of downstream tasks. In this paper, we design a novel embedding scheme that controls seed pools to facilitate diverse parallel generation of watermarked text. Based on that scheme, we propose WaterSearch, a sentence-level, search-based watermarking framework adaptable to a wide range of existing methods. WaterSearch enhances text quality by jointly optimizing two key aspects: 1) distribution fidelity and 2) watermark signal characteristics. Furthermore, WaterSearch is complemented by a sentence-level detection method with strong attack robustness. We evaluate our method on three popular LLMs across ten diverse tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves an average performance improvement of 51.01\% over state-of-the-art baselines at a watermark detectability strength of 95\%. In challenging scenarios such as short text generation and low-entropy output generation, our method yields performance gains of 47.78\% and 36.47\%, respectively. Moreover, under different attack senarios including insertion, synonym substitution and paraphrase attasks, WaterSearch maintains high detectability, further validating its robust anti-attack capabilities. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/Yukang-Lin/WaterSearch}{https://github.com/Yukang-Lin/WaterSearch}.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

GazeVLA: Learning Human Intention for Robotic Manipulation

Embodied foundation models have achieved significant breakthroughs in robotic manipulation, yet they still depend heavily on large-scale robot demonstrations. Although recent works have explored leveraging human data to alleviate this dependency, effectively extracting transferable knowledge remains a significant challenge due to the inherent embodiment gap between human and robot. We argue that the intention underlying human actions can serve as a powerful intermediate representation for bridging this gap. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework that explicitly learns and transfers human intention to facilitate robotic manipulation. Specifically, we model intention through gaze, as it naturally precedes physical actions and serves as an observable proxy for human intent. Our model is first pretrained on a large-scale egocentric human dataset to capture human intention and its synergy with action, followed by finetuning on a small set of robot and human data. During inference, the model adopts a Chain-of-Thought reasoning paradigm, sequentially predicting intention before executing the action. Extensive evaluations in simulation and real-world settings, across long-horizon and fine-grained tasks, and under few-shot and robustness benchmarks, show that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines, generalizes better, and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://gazevla.github.io .

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

EgoSelf: From Memory to Personalized Egocentric Assistant

Egocentric assistants often rely on first-person view data to capture user behavior and context for personalized services. Since different users exhibit distinct habits, preferences, and routines, such personalization is essential for truly effective assistance. However, effectively integrating long-term user data for personalization remains a key challenge. To address this, we introduce EgoSelf, a system that includes a graph-based interaction memory constructed from past observations and a dedicated learning task for personalization. The memory captures temporal and semantic relationships among interaction events and entities, from which user-specific profiles are derived. The personalized learning task is formulated as a prediction problem where the model predicts possible future interactions from individual user's historical behavior recorded in the graph. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of EgoSelf as a personalized egocentric assistant. Code is available at https://abie-e.github.io/EgoSelf/.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Electromagnetic Inverse Scattering from a Single Transmitter

Electromagnetic Inverse Scattering Problems (EISP) seek to reconstruct relative permittivity from scattered fields and are fundamental to applications like medical imaging. This inverse process is inherently ill-posed and highly nonlinear, making it particularly challenging, especially under sparse transmitter setups, e.g., with only one transmitter. While recent machine learning-based approaches have shown promising results, they often rely on time-consuming, case-specific optimization and perform poorly under sparse transmitter setups. To address these limitations, we revisit EISP from a data-driven perspective. The scarcity of transmitters leads to an insufficient amount of measured data, which fails to capture adequate physical information for stable inversion. Accordingly, we propose a fully end-to-end and data-driven framework that predicts the relative permittivity of scatterers from measured fields, leveraging data distribution priors to compensate for the incomplete information from sparse measurements. This design enables data-driven training and feed-forward prediction of relative permittivity while maintaining strong robustness to transmitter sparsity. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in reconstruction accuracy and robustness. Notably, we demonstrate, for the first time, high-quality reconstruction from a single transmitter. This work advances practical electromagnetic imaging by providing a new, cost-effective paradigm to inverse scattering. Code and models are released at https://gomenei.github.io/SingleTX-EISP/.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

PP-Motion: Physical-Perceptual Fidelity Evaluation for Human Motion Generation

Human motion generation has found widespread applications in AR/VR, film, sports, and medical rehabilitation, offering a cost-effective alternative to traditional motion capture systems. However, evaluating the fidelity of such generated motions is a crucial, multifaceted task. Although previous approaches have attempted at motion fidelity evaluation using human perception or physical constraints, there remains an inherent gap between human-perceived fidelity and physical feasibility. Moreover, the subjective and coarse binary labeling of human perception further undermines the development of a robust data-driven metric. We address these issues by introducing a physical labeling method. This method evaluates motion fidelity by calculating the minimum modifications needed for a motion to align with physical laws. With this approach, we are able to produce fine-grained, continuous physical alignment annotations that serve as objective ground truth. With these annotations, we propose PP-Motion, a novel data-driven metric to evaluate both physical and perceptual fidelity of human motion. To effectively capture underlying physical priors, we employ Pearson's correlation loss for the training of our metric. Additionally, by incorporating a human-based perceptual fidelity loss, our metric can capture fidelity that simultaneously considers both human perception and physical alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that our metric, PP-Motion, not only aligns with physical laws but also aligns better with human perception of motion fidelity than previous work.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Neural Synchrony Between Socially Interacting Language Models

Neuroscience has uncovered a fundamental mechanism of our social nature: human brain activity becomes synchronized with others in many social contexts involving interaction. Traditionally, social minds have been regarded as an exclusive property of living beings. Although large language models (LLMs) are widely accepted as powerful approximations of human behavior, with multi-LLM system being extensively explored to enhance their capabilities, it remains controversial whether they can be meaningfully compared to human social minds. In this work, we explore neural synchrony between socially interacting LLMs as an empirical evidence for this debate. Specifically, we introduce neural synchrony during social simulations as a novel proxy for analyzing the sociality of LLMs at the representational level. Through carefully designed experiments, we demonstrate that it reliably reflects both social engagement and temporal alignment in their interactions. Our findings indicate that neural synchrony between LLMs is strongly correlated with their social performance, highlighting an important link between neural synchrony and the social behaviors of LLMs. Our work offers a new perspective to examine the "social minds" of LLMs, highlighting surprising parallels in the internal dynamics that underlie human and LLM social interaction.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Restoration Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation on Low Quality Images

In real-world scenarios, the performance of semantic segmentation often deteriorates when processing low-quality (LQ) images, which may lack clear semantic structures and high-frequency details. Although image restoration techniques offer a promising direction for enhancing degraded visual content, conventional real-world image restoration (Real-IR) models primarily focus on pixel-level fidelity and often fail to recover task-relevant semantic cues, limiting their effectiveness when directly applied to downstream vision tasks. Conversely, existing segmentation models trained on high-quality data lack robustness under real-world degradations. In this paper, we propose Restoration Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation (RASS), which effectively integrates semantic image restoration into the segmentation process, enabling high-quality semantic segmentation on the LQ images directly. Specifically, we first propose a Semantic-Constrained Restoration (SCR) model, which injects segmentation priors into the restoration model by aligning its cross-attention maps with segmentation masks, encouraging semantically faithful image reconstruction. Then, RASS transfers semantic restoration knowledge into segmentation through LoRA-based module merging and task-specific fine-tuning, thereby enhancing the model's robustness to LQ images. To validate the effectiveness of our framework, we construct a real-world LQ image segmentation dataset with high-quality annotations, and conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world LQ benchmarks. The results show that SCR and RASS significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods in segmentation and restoration tasks. Code, models, and datasets will be available at https://github.com/Ka1Guan/RASS.git.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

TGC-Net: A Structure-Aware and Semantically-Aligned Framework for Text-Guided Medical Image Segmentation

Text-guided medical segmentation enhances segmentation accuracy by utilizing clinical reports as auxiliary information. However, existing methods typically rely on unaligned image and text encoders, which necessitate complex interaction modules for multimodal fusion. While CLIP provides a pre-aligned multimodal feature space, its direct application to medical imaging is limited by three main issues: insufficient preservation of fine-grained anatomical structures, inadequate modeling of complex clinical descriptions, and domain-specific semantic misalignment. To tackle these challenges, we propose TGC-Net, a CLIP-based framework focusing on parameter-efficient, task-specific adaptations. Specifically, it incorporates a Semantic-Structural Synergy Encoder (SSE) that augments CLIP's ViT with a CNN branch for multi-scale structural refinement, a Domain-Augmented Text Encoder (DATE) that injects large-language-model-derived medical knowledge, and a Vision-Language Calibration Module (VLCM) that refines cross-modal correspondence in a unified feature space. Experiments on five datasets across chest X-ray and thoracic CT modalities demonstrate that TGC-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance with substantially fewer trainable parameters, including notable Dice gains on challenging benchmarks.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

Dynamic PET Image Prediction Using a Network Combining Reversible and Irreversible Modules

Dynamic positron emission tomography (PET) images can reveal the distribution of tracers in the organism and the dynamic processes involved in biochemical reactions, and it is widely used in clinical practice. Despite the high effectiveness of dynamic PET imaging in studying the kinetics and metabolic processes of radiotracers. Pro-longed scan times can cause discomfort for both patients and medical personnel. This study proposes a dynamic frame prediction method for dynamic PET imaging, reduc-ing dynamic PET scanning time by applying a multi-module deep learning framework composed of reversible and irreversible modules. The network can predict kinetic parameter images based on the early frames of dynamic PET images, and then generate complete dynamic PET images. In validation experiments with simulated data, our network demonstrated good predictive performance for kinetic parameters and was able to reconstruct high-quality dynamic PET images. Additionally, in clinical data experiments, the network exhibited good generalization performance and attached that the proposed method has promising clinical application prospects.

eess.IV↗
arXiv2025

Efficient Action Counting with Dynamic Queries

Temporal repetition counting aims to quantify the repeated action cycles within a video. The majority of existing methods rely on the similarity correlation matrix to characterize the repetitiveness of actions, but their scalability is hindered due to the quadratic computational complexity. In this work, we introduce a novel approach that employs an action query representation to localize repeated action cycles with linear computational complexity. Based on this representation, we further develop two key components to tackle the essential challenges of temporal repetition counting. Firstly, to facilitate open-set action counting, we propose the dynamic update scheme on action queries. Unlike static action queries, this approach dynamically embeds video features into action queries, offering a more flexible and generalizable representation. Secondly, to distinguish between actions of interest and background noise actions, we incorporate inter-query contrastive learning to regularize the video representations corresponding to different action queries. As a result, our method significantly outperforms previous works, particularly in terms of long video sequences, unseen actions, and actions at various speeds. On the challenging RepCountA benchmark, we outperform the state-of-the-art method TransRAC by 26.5% in OBO accuracy, with a 22.7% mean error decrease and 94.1% computational burden reduction. Code is available at https://github.com/lizishi/DeTRC.

cs.CV↗