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Yi-Ting Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Yi-Ting Chen.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Rule-based hardware-configurable static analysis for quantum programs

The rapid evolution of quantum hardware necessitates an adaptable static analysis framework for validating quantum programs. In this work, we introduce SHARP, a rule-based static analysis framework designed for OpenQASM that decouples hardware-specific constraints from the validation engine. By employing a rule-based approach, SHARP allows quantum computing services to validate programs against evolving instruction set architectures (ISAs) without having to modify the core analysis engine. SHARP achieves this by ingesting ISA descriptions as standalone data, making the validation engine resilient to hardware updates. Furthermore, the framework employs an analysis-driven validation mechanism that enables multi-stage validation, simplifying rule construction and enhancing extensibility. We demonstrate how SHARP supports hardware-specific validation tasks and discuss its impact on quantum software development, including language decoupling, program-level constraint validation, and feature access control. Our findings suggest that SHARP provides a path toward a scalable and maintainable programming interface for quantum computing.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2026

EmbeddingGemma 2: Unified and Efficient Multimodal Representations

We present EmbeddingGemma 2, an open multimodal embedding model which natively represents text, images, audio, video, and combinations thereof in a unified space. Our approach introduces improvements such as simplified per-layer embeddings and a multi-stage curriculum with modality and objective progression which ensure strong quality across unimodal, cross-modal, and mixed-modal evaluations. Notably, in comprehensive embedding benchmarks across all modalities, EmbeddingGemma 2 establishes a new Pareto frontier, outperforming both specialist models and models two to twelve times larger. Furthermore, our design offers flexibility for resource-constrained environments, supporting selective modality encoder loading, adjustable vision token budgets, truncatable embedding dimensions, and quantized weights. We present ablations analyzing key decisions and release EmbeddingGemma 2 to promote further research.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Resource-Optimal Screening for Two-Tier Quantum System Characterization

Quantum processing units (QPUs) require frequent benchmarking to track hardware drift, yet standard protocols such as randomized benchmarking are resource-intensive and compete with application workloads for scarce QPU time. We present a resource-optimal screening strategy that combines a two-tier, risk-based testing architecture with optimal experiment design: a lightweight screening probe runs regularly and triggers expensive full characterization only when statistically significant change is detected, while the probe itself is designed to maximize detection sensitivity under explicit resource constraints. For an exponential fidelity model, we derive closed-form optimal circuit sizes and introduce an effective gate count that renders the analysis hardware-independent. We instantiate the strategy for two applications. For gate-quality verification, we show that optimally designed screening probes outperform randomized benchmarking with optimal experimental design (OED) by more than 4$\times$ in detection rate at equal resource cost. For compiler benchmarking, we formalize compiler comparison as a paired hypothesis test and derive the optimal circuit size for distinguishing compilation strategies. Despite their different observables and test statistics, both applications yield structurally the same closed-form expression for the optimal probe circuit size as a function of gate fidelity, illustrating the generality of the framework. Numerical and hardware experiments on QPUs (Rigetti Ankaa-3, IQM Garnet, IQM Emerald) confirm the theoretical predictions, with observed optimal circuit sizes matching the derived values across all devices.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2026

Predicted Futures Are Not Enough: Learning Executable Goals for Robot Manipulation

Generative world models provide rich predictions of how manipulation scenes may evolve toward task objectives, yet those futures do not directly expose the compact task variables required by control. When training supervises future prediction alone, terminal goal accuracy is not an explicit learning objective, even when geometric recovery is available. We present Entity-Level Goal Readout, a learned prediction-to-execution interface that makes the executable terminal goal an explicit output of a 3D trace world model. It combines object-centric pose prediction with translation grounded in observed depth to produce a compact goal in SE(3). A shared Pose-Native Executor consumes this fixed goal with online object-pose feedback for closed-loop control without rerunning the world model. Across five manipulation tasks, the pipeline achieves a mean success rate of 79.69%. Goal diagnostics directly measure terminal goal accuracy, while controlled translation perturbations characterize how execution degrades under goal error. Zero-shot deployment on a Franka arm achieves 73.33% success on nominal StackCube, 66.67% with distractors, and 75.00% on PickPlate with a target unseen during policy training. These results support treating the prediction-to-execution interface as an explicit learned component of world-model planning rather than incidental post-processing in the control pipeline itself. Project page: https://claire0730.github.io/executable-goals/

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Seeing Through the Displaced Frame: Privileged Noise Distillation for Vision-Force Precision Assembly

Pose error in precision assembly can corrupt not only what a robot observes but also the coordinate frame in which it acts. On the FORGE benchmark, the official state-based policy succeeds in 97% to 99% of episodes with the true pose but only 32% to 60% at the benchmark's $σ=5$ mm pose-noise setting. The same estimated pose enters the observation and anchors the action frame, making the offset unidentifiable from proprioceptive state alone before contact. We supply this missing information during training in two ways. A privileged teacher observes the offset in simulation, while clean demonstrations can instead be relabelled into the displaced frame in closed form. The deployed student is trained with behaviour cloning followed by one DAgger round and receives only noisy state, a raw wrench window, and two RGB cameras at test time. On the unmodified FORGE tasks, the teacher-route student maintains 92% to 99% success across $σ=0$ to 5 mm, while six non-privileged baselines fall to 2% to 80%. A matched behaviour-cloning experiment isolates the source of this robustness. With the same student architecture, data budget, and training procedure, demonstrations generated without offset access yield only 31.5% success at $σ=5$ mm, whereas privileged and relabelled demonstrations reach 88.7% and 95.8%. Deployed zero-shot on a Franka, the student reaches 83.3% pooled success at $σ=5$ mm against 34.4% for the strongest state-based policy. Deployable sensing alone is insufficient. Robustness requires supervision that encodes compensation for the latent frame offset.Project page: https://drychang.github.io/displaced-frame/

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

PhysCaP: Grounding Code-as-Policy Agent with Physics-Informed Exploration

We present PhysCaP, a Physics-Informed Code-as-Policy agent system for active perception in robotic manipulation. While vision-language-action policies excel at imitating demonstrations, they rely on passive observation and fail to infer latent physical properties critical for manipulation. PhysCaP augments code-as-policy frameworks with a physics-informed exploration layer that enables explicit information-seeking through interaction. Our method introduces training-free physical property extraction modules that estimate object mass and stiffness from robot proprioception without additional sensors. To balance exploration costs and the efficiency of information obtained, PhysCaP employs a multi-agent design: a Planner that decides when to explore and when to stop, and a Prioritizer that filters implausible interactions and ranks the remainder using a heuristic priority score, enabling efficient, targeted exploration. We evaluate PhysCaP on three real-world tabletop manipulation tasks and a simulated task in LIBERO. The results show that existing passive and naive interactive baselines either fail when physical properties are hidden or over-explore, whereas PhysCaP achieves comparable performance with fewer interactions and reduced execution time. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of the proposed physical property extraction modules. Project page: https://physcap.github.io

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Direct Action-Head Injection of A Grounded 3D Point Unlocks Spatial and Task Generalization

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leverage large-scale vision-language pretraining for flexible robot manipulation, yet at test time they remain brittle to changed object positions and to familiar scenes paired with different instructions. A growing family of methods addresses this brittleness by supplying the policy with grounding signals, such as 2D pixel coordinates for object localization and placement. However, we find that how the grounding signal is represented and injected matters more than the signal itself. In this work, we propose a lightweight module that represents the grounding signal in 3D and injects the resulting embedding directly into the action head. The module is a two-layer MLP and requires no changes to the VLA backbone or pretraining pipeline, yet it yields substantially larger gains than language- or visual-prompting alternatives. On LIBERO-PRO, our method improves the average success rate of GR00T-N1.6 from $31.2$ to $77.5$ under task perturbation and from $28.1$ to $60.2$ under position perturbation. Comparable gains are also achieved for $π_{0.5}$, demonstrating that the mechanism is backbone-agnostic across VLAs with diffusion-based action heads. We further validate the practical applicability with real-world experiments. Together, these results support our central finding: lifting adequate 2D grounding into 3D and injecting it into the action head enables spatial and instance-level task generalization in VLAs.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Action-Slot: Structured Action-Centric Representation Learning for Multi-Agent Atomic Activity Understanding

Atomic activity understanding aims to recognize and localize structured traffic behaviors that jointly encode motion patterns and their grounding in road topology. Unlike conventional action recognition, atomic activities are multi-agent, multi-label, and topology-aware: multiple activities co-occur while many agents remain inactive. We introduce Action-Slot, a structured action-centric representation learning framework. Slot attention is widely used for object-centric decomposition, but its permutation-invariant design and object-level inductive bias are misaligned with atomic activity semantics. We reformulate slot learning as structured activity decomposition through three designs: (1) category-aligned action slots that anchor slots to predefined activity categories, (2) parallel spatio-temporal slot updating for holistic video-level reasoning, and (3) background and negative-slot regularization that enforces competition between foreground activities and irrelevant regions. Together these establish an activity-centric inductive bias that disentangles concurrent and asynchronous activities directly from raw video. Beyond recognition, the learned representations encode transferable spatio-temporal grounding signals. We further propose an attention-difference-based pseudo mask selection framework that suppresses false positives by measuring attention changes before and after candidate region removal, enabling weakly supervised localization without dense annotations. To support systematic evaluation, we introduce TACO, a balanced synthetic dataset with full atomic activity coverage and pixel-level annotations. Experiments on OATS, TACO, and annotated nuScenes show superior recognition, strong sim-to-real transfer, and state-of-the-art weakly supervised localization.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

ECoSim: Data Efficient Fine-Tuning for Controllable Traffic Simulation

Controllable traffic simulation is critical for testing autonomous driving systems, yet existing approaches often require retraining large generative models with extensive annotated data. We introduce a lightweight control adaptation framework that enables multi-modal controllability (sketch, latent behavior codes, and text) for pretrained state-of-the-art diffusion and autoregressive traffic models. By modulating intermediate features through identity-initialized FiLM layers, our method efficiently adds new control modalities while preserving the base model's generative prior. Evaluated on Waymo Open Sim Agents Challenge, our approach demonstrates strong controllability with less than 1% of the paired control data. Through context-aware condition transfer, our framework enables counterfactual scenario generation and long-tail synthesis while maintaining stable closed-loop driving realism and safety. Our framework unlocks new possibilities for controllable traffic simulation, enabling targeted scenario generation through lightweight adaptation of pretrained generative models. Project page: https://ecosim-web.github.io/

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Gemini Embedding 2: A Native Multimodal Embedding Model from Gemini

We introduce Gemini Embedding 2, a native multimodal embedding model that allows embedding video, audio, image, and text modalities in a unified representation space. We leverage the multimodal capabilities of Gemini to produce embeddings for arbitrary combinations of interleaved inputs across all these modalities that generalize well across a wide variety of tasks. Applying large-scale contrastive learning in a multi-task multi-stage training setup, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on key embedding benchmarks including unimodal, cross-modal, and multimodal retrieval spanning a diverse set of tasks. We show that our embedding model demonstrates strong performance (with a score of 62.9 R@1 on MSCOCO, 68.8 NDCG@10 on Vatex, 69.9 on MTEB multilingual and 84.0 on MTEB Code) across a variety of tasks surpassing the performance of specialized models. These unified capabilities make Gemini Embedding 2 a promising candidate for downstream use cases such as RAG, recommendation and search. Furthermore, its robust zero-shot performance across distinct fields - from astronomy and bioscience to fine arts and the culinary arts - establishes it as a highly reliable, out-of-the-box representation even for specialized domains.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

NudgeVAD: Language-Nudged End-to-End Driving via FiLM Residuals

Natural-language instructions promise controllable end-to-end driving, but their benefit can be hidden when planners already receive reliable high-level commands. We propose NudgeVAD, a frozen-planner residual framework that uses language as a calibrated nudge to a VAD trajectory. With identity-initialized FiLM and a zero-initialized residual head, NudgeVAD is equivalent to the frozen planner at initialization, so learned deviations arise only from language-conditioned residuals. We evaluate NudgeVAD along a command-reliability axis. With reliable commands, language improves the initial planner but becomes nearly redundant once compared against VAD-FT (UNCOND), a compute-matched VAD model fine-tuned without language. With random commands, however, language becomes essential: detaching text degrades ADE6s to 3.166 m, while NudgeVAD with text recovers 2.806 m and outperforms VAD-FT (UNCOND) by 0.312 m. These results show that language is not universally additive; it is most valuable when the categorical command channel is unreliable.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

ADAPT: Benchmarking Commonsense Planning under Unspecified Affordance Constraints

Intelligent embodied agents should not simply follow instructions, as real-world environments often involve unexpected conditions and exceptions. However, existing methods usually focus on directly executing instructions, without considering whether the target objects can actually be manipulated, meaning they fail to assess available affordances. To address this limitation, we introduce DynAfford, a benchmark that evaluates embodied agents in dynamic environments where object affordances may change over time and are not specified in the instruction. DynAfford requires agents to perceive object states, infer implicit preconditions, and adapt their actions accordingly. To enable this capability, we introduce ADAPT, a plug-and-play module that augments existing planners with explicit affordance reasoning. Experiments demonstrate that incorporating ADAPT significantly improves robustness and task success across both seen and unseen environments. We also show that a domain-adapted, LoRA-finetuned vision-language model used as the affordance inference backend outperforms a commercial LLM (GPT-4o), highlighting the importance of task-aligned affordance grounding.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

GRITS: A Spillage-Aware Guided Diffusion Policy for Robot Food Scooping Tasks

Robotic food scooping is a critical manipulation skill for food preparation and service robots. However, existing robot learning algorithms, especially learn-from-demonstration methods, still struggle to handle diverse and dynamic food states, which often results in spillage and reduced reliability. In this work, we introduce GRITS: A Spillage-Aware Guided Diffusion Policy for Robot Food Scooping Tasks. This framework leverages guided diffusion policy to minimize food spillage during scooping and to ensure reliable transfer of food items from the initial to the target location. Specifically, we design a spillage predictor that estimates the probability of spillage given current observation and action rollout. The predictor is trained on a simulated dataset with food spillage scenarios, constructed from four primitive shapes (spheres, cubes, cones, and cylinders) with varied physical properties such as mass, friction, and particle size. At inference time, the predictor serves as a differentiable guidance signal, steering the diffusion sampling process toward safer trajectories while preserving task success. We validate GRITS on a real-world robotic food scooping platform. GRITS is trained on six food categories and evaluated on ten unseen categories with different shapes and quantities. GRITS achieves an 82% task success rate and a 4% spillage rate, reducing spillage by over 40% compared to baselines without guidance, thereby demonstrating its effectiveness. More details are available on our project website: https://hcis-lab.github.io/GRITS/.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Uncertainty-Aware Vision-based Risk Object Identification via Conformal Risk Tube Prediction

We study object importance-based vision risk object identification (Vision-ROI), a key capability for hazard detection in intelligent driving systems. Existing approaches make deterministic decisions and ignore uncertainty, which could lead to safety-critical failures. Specifically, in ambiguous scenarios, fixed decision thresholds may cause premature or delayed risk detection and temporally unstable predictions, especially in complex scenes with multiple interacting risks. Despite these challenges, current methods lack a principled framework to model risk uncertainty jointly across space and time. We propose Conformal Risk Tube Prediction, a unified formulation that captures spatiotemporal risk uncertainty, provides coverage guarantees for true risks, and produces calibrated risk scores with uncertainty estimates. To conduct a systematic evaluation, we present a new dataset and metrics probing diverse scenario configurations with multi-risk coupling effects, which are not supported by existing datasets. We systematically analyze factors affecting uncertainty estimation, including scenario variations, per-risk category behavior, and perception error propagation. Our method delivers substantial improvements over prior approaches, enhancing vision-ROI robustness and downstream performance, such as reducing nuisance braking alerts. For more qualitative results, please visit our project webpage: https://hcis-lab.github.io/CRTP/

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Towards Driver Behavior Understanding: Weakly-Supervised Risk Perception in Driving Scenes

Achieving zero-collision mobility remains a key objective for intelligent vehicle systems, which requires understanding driver risk perception-a complex cognitive process shaped by voluntary response of the driver to external stimuli and the attentiveness of surrounding road users towards the ego-vehicle. To support progress in this area, we introduce RAID (Risk Assessment In Driving scenes)-a large-scale dataset specifically curated for research on driver risk perception and contextual risk assessment. RAID comprises 4,691 annotated video clips, covering diverse traffic scenarios with labels for driver's intended maneuver, road topology, risk situations (e.g., crossing pedestrians), driver responses, and pedestrian attentiveness. Leveraging RAID, we propose a weakly supervised risk object identification framework that models the relationship between driver's intended maneuver and responses to identify potential risk sources. Additionally, we analyze the role of pedestrian attention in estimating risk and demonstrate the value of the proposed dataset. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves 20.6% and 23.1% performance gains over prior state-of-the-art approaches on the RAID and HDDS datasets, respectively.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

HetroD: A High-Fidelity Drone Dataset and Benchmark for Autonomous Driving in Heterogeneous Traffic

We present HetroD, a dataset and benchmark for developing autonomous driving systems in heterogeneous environments. HetroD targets the critical challenge of navi- gating real-world heterogeneous traffic dominated by vulner- able road users (VRUs), including pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists that interact with vehicles. These mixed agent types exhibit complex behaviors such as hook turns, lane splitting, and informal right-of-way negotiation. Such behaviors pose significant challenges for autonomous vehicles but remain underrepresented in existing datasets focused on structured, lane-disciplined traffic. To bridge the gap, we collect a large- scale drone-based dataset to provide a holistic observation of traffic scenes with centimeter-accurate annotations, HD maps, and traffic signal states. We further develop a modular toolkit for extracting per-agent scenarios to support downstream task development. In total, the dataset comprises over 65.4k high- fidelity agent trajectories, 70% of which are from VRUs. HetroD supports modeling of VRU behaviors in dense, het- erogeneous traffic and provides standardized benchmarks for forecasting, planning, and simulation tasks. Evaluation results reveal that state-of-the-art prediction and planning models struggle with the challenges presented by our dataset: they fail to predict lateral VRU movements, cannot handle unstructured maneuvers, and exhibit limited performance in dense and multi-agent scenarios, highlighting the need for more robust approaches to heterogeneous traffic. See our project page for more examples: https://hetroddata.github.io/HetroD/

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Controllable Collision Scenario Generation via Collision Pattern Prediction

Evaluating the safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs) requires diverse, safety-critical scenarios, with collisions being especially important yet rare and unsafe to collect in the real world. Therefore, the community has been focusing on generating safety-critical scenarios in simulation. However, controlling attributes such as collision type and time-to-accident (TTA) remains challenging. We introduce a new task called controllable collision scenario generation, where the goal is to produce trajectories that realize a user-specified collision type and TTA, to investigate the feasibility of automatically generating desired collision scenarios. To support this task, we present COLLIDE, a large-scale collision scenario dataset constructed by transforming real-world driving logs into diverse collisions, balanced across five representative collision types and different TTA intervals. We propose a framework that predicts Collision Pattern, a compact and interpretable representation that captures the spatial configuration of the ego and the adversarial vehicles at impact, before rolling out full adversarial trajectories. Experiments show that our approach outperforms strong baselines in both collision rate and controllability. Furthermore, generated scenarios consistently induce higher planner failure rates, revealing limitations of existing planners. We demonstrate that these scenarios fine-tune planners for robustness improvements, contributing to safer AV deployment in different collision scenarios. Additional generated scenarios are available at our project page: https://plchen86157.github.io/conditional_scenario_generation/

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Affordance-Guided Coarse-to-Fine Exploration for Base Placement in Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation

In open-vocabulary mobile manipulation (OVMM), task success often hinges on the selection of an appropriate base placement for the robot. Existing approaches typically navigate to proximity-based regions without considering affordances, resulting in frequent manipulation failures. We propose Affordance-Guided Coarse-to-Fine Exploration, a zero-shot framework for base placement that integrates semantic understanding from vision-language models (VLMs) with geometric feasibility through an iterative optimization process. Our method constructs cross-modal representations, namely Affordance RGB and Obstacle Map+, to align semantics with spatial context. This enables reasoning that extends beyond the egocentric limitations of RGB perception. To ensure interaction is guided by task-relevant affordances, we leverage coarse semantic priors from VLMs to guide the search toward task-relevant regions and refine placements with geometric constraints, thereby reducing the risk of convergence to local optima. Evaluated on five diverse open-vocabulary mobile manipulation tasks, our system achieves an 85% success rate, significantly outperforming classical geometric planners and VLM-based methods. This demonstrates the promise of affordance-aware and multimodal reasoning for generalizable, instruction-conditioned planning in OVMM.

cs.RO↗