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Xiaoxiang Dong

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaoxiang Dong.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

SemAnCorr: Semantic Anchored Correspondence for Zero-Shot Manipulation Skill Transfer

Transferring manipulation skills across object instances that share functionality but differ in geometry remains a fundamental challenge in robot learning. While recent correspondence methods leverage dense visual descriptors and 3D feature fields, nearest-neighbor feature matching often produces spatially incoherent correspondences that fail to recover the local geometric frames required for reliable skill transfer. We introduce SemAnCorr, a training-free framework that establishes dense correspondence by selecting semantically consistent anchor regions through joint pose-correspondence optimization and propagating these constraints over the object surface using functional maps. The resulting correspondences preserve both semantic consistency and geometric coherence, enabling object-centric manipulation skills to transfer across geometrically diverse instances. We evaluate SemAnCorr on a dense correspondence benchmark built on PartNet-Mobility, achieving 90.8% semantic accuracy in our benchmark evaluation while improving geometric coherence over recent state-of-the-art baselines. Finally, we show that these improvements translate directly into real-world manipulation performance: using a single demonstration, SemAnCorr enables substantially more reliable zero-shot manipulation skill transfer to previously unseen objects than existing correspondence methods. Videos and additional visualizations are available at [https://semancorr.github.io](https://semancorr.github.io) .

cs.RO

Affordance Transfer Across Object Instances via Semantically Anchored Functional Map

Traditional learning from demonstration (LfD) generally demands a cumbersome collection of physical demonstrations, which can be time-consuming and challenging to scale. Recent advances show that robots can instead learn from human videos by extracting interaction cues without direct robot involvement. However, a fundamental challenge remains: how to generalize demonstrated interactions across different object instances that share similar functionality but vary significantly in geometry. In this work, we propose \emph{Semantic Anchored Functional Maps} (SemFM), a framework for transferring affordances across objects from a single visual demonstration. Starting from a coarse mesh reconstructed from an image, our method identifies semantically corresponding functional regions between objects, selects mutually exclusive semantic anchors, and propagates these constraints over the surface using a functional map to obtain a dense, semantically consistent correspondence. This enables demonstrated interaction regions to be transferred across geometrically diverse objects in a lightweight and interpretable manner. Experiments on synthetic object categories and real-world robotic manipulation tasks show that our approach enables accurate affordance transfer with modest computational cost, making it well-suited for practical robotic perception-to-action pipelines.

cs.RO

Joint Flow Trajectory Optimization For Feasible Robot Motion Generation from Video Demonstrations

Learning from human video demonstrations offers a scalable alternative to teleoperation or kinesthetic teaching, but poses challenges for robot manipulators due to embodiment differences and joint feasibility constraints. We address this problem by proposing the Joint Flow Trajectory Optimization (JFTO) framework for grasp pose generation and object trajectory imitation under the video-based Learning-from-Demonstration (LfD) paradigm. Rather than directly imitating human hand motions, our method treats demonstrations as object-centric guides, balancing three objectives: (i) selecting a feasible grasp pose, (ii) generating object trajectories consistent with demonstrated motions, and (iii) ensuring collision-free execution within robot kinematics. To capture the multimodal nature of demonstrations, we extend flow matching to $\SE(3)$ for probabilistic modeling of object trajectories, enabling density-aware imitation that avoids mode collapse. The resulting optimization integrates grasp similarity, trajectory likelihood, and collision penalties into a unified differentiable objective. We validate our approach in both simulation and real-world experiments across diverse real-world manipulation tasks.

cs.RO

Cross-Modal Instructions for Robot Motion Generation

Teaching robots novel behaviors typically requires motion demonstrations via teleoperation or kinaesthetic teaching, that is, physically guiding the robot. While recent work has explored using human sketches to specify desired behaviors, data collection remains cumbersome, and demonstration datasets are difficult to scale. In this paper, we introduce an alternative paradigm, Learning from Cross-Modal Instructions, where robots are shaped by demonstrations in the form of rough annotations, which can contain free-form text labels, and are used in lieu of physical motion. We introduce the CrossInstruct framework, which integrates cross-modal instructions as examples into the context input to a foundational vision-language model (VLM). The VLM then iteratively queries a smaller, fine-tuned model, and synthesizes the desired motion over multiple 2D views. These are then subsequently fused into a coherent distribution over 3D motion trajectories in the robot's workspace. By incorporating the reasoning of the large VLM with a fine-grained pointing model, CrossInstruct produces executable robot behaviors that generalize beyond the environment of in the limited set of instruction examples. We then introduce a downstream reinforcement learning pipeline that leverages CrossInstruct outputs to efficiently learn policies to complete fine-grained tasks. We rigorously evaluate CrossInstruct on benchmark simulation tasks and real hardware, demonstrating effectiveness without additional fine-tuning and providing a strong initialization for policies subsequently refined via reinforcement learning.

cs.RO