arXiv subjects

Yiming Zeng

Publications and source records attributed to Yiming Zeng.

35 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

PromptSculptor: Multi-Agent Based Text-to-Image Prompt Optimization

The rapid advancement of generative AI has democratized access to powerful tools such as Text-to-Image models. However, to generate high-quality images, users must still craft detailed prompts specifying scene, style, and context-often through multiple rounds of refinement. We propose PromptSculptor, a novel multi-agent framework that automates this iterative prompt optimization process. Our system decomposes the task into four specialized agents that work collaboratively to transform a short, vague user prompt into a comprehensive, refined prompt. By leveraging Chain-of-Thought reasoning, our framework effectively infers hidden context and enriches scene and background details. To iteratively refine the prompt, a self-evaluation agent aligns the modified prompt with the original input, while a feedback-tuning agent incorporates user feedback for further refinement. Experimental results demonstrate that PromptSculptor significantly enhances output quality and reduces the number of iterations needed for user satisfaction. Moreover, its model-agnostic design allows seamless integration with various T2I models, paving the way for industrial applications.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2025

RAPID Hand: A Robust, Affordable, Perception-Integrated, Dexterous Manipulation Platform for Generalist Robot Autonomy

This paper addresses the scarcity of low-cost but high-dexterity platforms for collecting real-world multi-fingered robot manipulation data towards generalist robot autonomy. To achieve it, we propose the RAPID Hand, a co-optimized hardware and software platform where the compact 20-DoF hand, robust whole-hand perception, and high-DoF teleoperation interface are jointly designed. Specifically, RAPID Hand adopts a compact and practical hand ontology and a hardware-level perception framework that stably integrates wrist-mounted vision, fingertip tactile sensing, and proprioception with sub-7 ms latency and spatial alignment. Collecting high-quality demonstrations on high-DoF hands is challenging, as existing teleoperation methods struggle with precision and stability on complex multi-fingered systems. We address this by co-optimizing hand design, perception integration, and teleoperation interface through a universal actuation scheme, custom perception electronics, and two retargeting constraints. We evaluate the platform's hardware, perception, and teleoperation interface. Training a diffusion policy on collected data shows superior performance over prior works, validating the system's capability for reliable, high-quality data collection. The platform is constructed from low-cost and off-the-shelf components and will be made public to ensure reproducibility and ease of adoption.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

NaviDiffusor: Cost-Guided Diffusion Model for Visual Navigation

Visual navigation, a fundamental challenge in mobile robotics, demands versatile policies to handle diverse environments. Classical methods leverage geometric solutions to minimize specific costs, offering adaptability to new scenarios but are prone to system errors due to their multi-modular design and reliance on hand-crafted rules. Learning-based methods, while achieving high planning success rates, face difficulties in generalizing to unseen environments beyond the training data and often require extensive training. To address these limitations, we propose a hybrid approach that combines the strengths of learning-based methods and classical approaches for RGB-only visual navigation. Our method first trains a conditional diffusion model on diverse path-RGB observation pairs. During inference, it integrates the gradients of differentiable scene-specific and task-level costs, guiding the diffusion model to generate valid paths that meet the constraints. This approach alleviates the need for retraining, offering a plug-and-play solution. Extensive experiments in both indoor and outdoor settings, across simulated and real-world scenarios, demonstrate zero-shot transfer capability of our approach, achieving higher success rates and fewer collisions compared to baseline methods. Code will be released at https://github.com/SYSU-RoboticsLab/NaviD.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Prior Does Matter: Visual Navigation via Denoising Diffusion Bridge Models

Recent advancements in diffusion-based imitation learning, which show impressive performance in modeling multimodal distributions and training stability, have led to substantial progress in various robot learning tasks. In visual navigation, previous diffusion-based policies typically generate action sequences by initiating from denoising Gaussian noise. However, the target action distribution often diverges significantly from Gaussian noise, leading to redundant denoising steps and increased learning complexity. Additionally, the sparsity of effective action distributions makes it challenging for the policy to generate accurate actions without guidance. To address these issues, we propose a novel, unified visual navigation framework leveraging the denoising diffusion bridge models named NaviBridger. This approach enables action generation by initiating from any informative prior actions, enhancing guidance and efficiency in the denoising process. We explore how diffusion bridges can enhance imitation learning in visual navigation tasks and further examine three source policies for generating prior actions. Extensive experiments in both simulated and real-world indoor and outdoor scenarios demonstrate that NaviBridger accelerates policy inference and outperforms the baselines in generating target action sequences. Code is available at https://github.com/hren20/NaiviBridger.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

OPG-Policy: Occluded Push-Grasp Policy Learning with Amodal Segmentation

Goal-oriented grasping in dense clutter, a fundamental challenge in robotics, demands an adaptive policy to handle occluded target objects and diverse configurations. Previous methods typically learn policies based on partially observable segments of the occluded target to generate motions. However, these policies often struggle to generate optimal motions due to uncertainties regarding the invisible portions of different occluded target objects across various scenes, resulting in low motion efficiency. To this end, we propose OPG-Policy, a novel framework that leverages amodal segmentation to predict occluded portions of the target and develop an adaptive push-grasp policy for cluttered scenarios where the target object is partially observed. Specifically, our approach trains a dedicated amodal segmentation module for diverse target objects to generate amodal masks. These masks and scene observations are mapped to the future rewards of grasp and push motion primitives via deep Q-learning to learn the motion critic. Afterward, the push and grasp motion candidates predicted by the critic, along with the relevant domain knowledge, are fed into the coordinator to generate the optimal motion implemented by the robot. Extensive experiments conducted in both simulated and real-world environments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in generating motion sequences for retrieving occluded targets, outperforming other baseline methods in success rate and motion efficiency.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Infant Agent: A Tool-Integrated, Logic-Driven Agent with Cost-Effective API Usage

Despite the impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs), they currently exhibit two primary limitations, \textbf{\uppercase\expandafter{\romannumeral 1}}: They struggle to \textbf{autonomously solve the real world engineering problem}. \textbf{\uppercase\expandafter{\romannumeral 2}}: They remain \textbf{challenged in reasoning through complex logic problems}. To address these challenges, we developed the \textsc{Infant Agent}, integrating task-aware functions, operators, a hierarchical management system, and a memory retrieval mechanism. Together, these components enable large language models to sustain extended reasoning processes and handle complex, multi-step tasks efficiently, all while significantly reducing API costs. Using the \textsc{Infant Agent}, GPT-4o's accuracy on the SWE-bench-lite dataset rises from $\mathbf{0.33\%}$ to $\mathbf{30\%}$, and in the AIME-2024 mathematics competition, it increases GPT-4o's accuracy from $\mathbf{13.3\%}$ to $\mathbf{37\%}$.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Dynamic 3D Point Cloud Sequences as 2D Videos

Dynamic 3D point cloud sequences serve as one of the most common and practical representation modalities of dynamic real-world environments. However, their unstructured nature in both spatial and temporal domains poses significant challenges to effective and efficient processing. Existing deep point cloud sequence modeling approaches imitate the mature 2D video learning mechanisms by developing complex spatio-temporal point neighbor grouping and feature aggregation schemes, often resulting in methods lacking effectiveness, efficiency, and expressive power. In this paper, we propose a novel generic representation called \textit{Structured Point Cloud Videos} (SPCVs). Intuitively, by leveraging the fact that 3D geometric shapes are essentially 2D manifolds, SPCV re-organizes a point cloud sequence as a 2D video with spatial smoothness and temporal consistency, where the pixel values correspond to the 3D coordinates of points. The structured nature of our SPCV representation allows for the seamless adaptation of well-established 2D image/video techniques, enabling efficient and effective processing and analysis of 3D point cloud sequences. To achieve such re-organization, we design a self-supervised learning pipeline that is geometrically regularized and driven by self-reconstructive and deformation field learning objectives. Additionally, we construct SPCV-based frameworks for both low-level and high-level 3D point cloud sequence processing and analysis tasks, including action recognition, temporal interpolation, and compression. Extensive experiments demonstrate the versatility and superiority of the proposed SPCV, which has the potential to offer new possibilities for deep learning on unstructured 3D point cloud sequences. Code will be released at https://github.com/ZENGYIMING-EAMON/SPCV.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

LVDiffusor: Distilling Functional Rearrangement Priors from Large Models into Diffusor

Object rearrangement, a fundamental challenge in robotics, demands versatile strategies to handle diverse objects, configurations, and functional needs. To achieve this, the AI robot needs to learn functional rearrangement priors in order to specify precise goals that meet the functional requirements. Previous methods typically learn such priors from either laborious human annotations or manually designed heuristics, which limits scalability and generalization. In this work, we propose a novel approach that leverages large models to distill functional rearrangement priors. Specifically, our approach collects diverse arrangement examples using both LLMs and VLMs and then distills the examples into a diffusion model. During test time, the learned diffusion model is conditioned on the initial configuration and guides the positioning of objects to meet functional requirements. In this manner, we create a handshaking point that combines the strengths of conditional generative models and large models. Extensive experiments on multiple domains, including real-world scenarios, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in generating compatible goals for object rearrangement tasks, significantly outperforming baseline methods.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

Entanglement Routing over Quantum Networks Using Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger Measurements

Generating a long-distance quantum entanglement is one of the most essential functions of a quantum network to support quantum communication and computing applications. The successful entanglement rate during a probabilistic entanglement process decreases dramatically with distance, and swapping is a widely-applied quantum technique to address this issue. Most existing entanglement routing protocols use a classic entanglement-swapping method based on Bell State measurements that can only fuse two successful entanglement links. This paper appeals to a more general and efficient swapping method, namely n-fusion based on Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger measurements that can fuse n successful entanglement links, to maximize the entanglement rate for multiple quantum-user pairs over a quantum network. We propose efficient entanglement routing algorithms that utilize the properties of n-fusion for quantum networks with general topologies. Evaluation results highlight that our proposed algorithm under n-fusion can greatly improve the network performance compared with existing ones.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2023

Flattening-Net: Deep Regular 2D Representation for 3D Point Cloud Analysis

Point clouds are characterized by irregularity and unstructuredness, which pose challenges in efficient data exploitation and discriminative feature extraction. In this paper, we present an unsupervised deep neural architecture called Flattening-Net to represent irregular 3D point clouds of arbitrary geometry and topology as a completely regular 2D point geometry image (PGI) structure, in which coordinates of spatial points are captured in colors of image pixels. \mr{Intuitively, Flattening-Net implicitly approximates a locally smooth 3D-to-2D surface flattening process while effectively preserving neighborhood consistency.} \mr{As a generic representation modality, PGI inherently encodes the intrinsic property of the underlying manifold structure and facilitates surface-style point feature aggregation.} To demonstrate its potential, we construct a unified learning framework directly operating on PGIs to achieve \mr{diverse types of high-level and low-level} downstream applications driven by specific task networks, including classification, segmentation, reconstruction, and upsampling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our methods perform favorably against the current state-of-the-art competitors. We will make the code and data publicly available at https://github.com/keeganhk/Flattening-Net.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

One-Bit Compressive Sensing: Can We Go Deep and Blind?

One-bit compressive sensing is concerned with the accurate recovery of an underlying sparse signal of interest from its one-bit noisy measurements. The conventional signal recovery approaches for this problem are mainly developed based on the assumption that an exact knowledge of the sensing matrix is available. In this work, however, we present a novel data-driven and model-based methodology that achieves blind recovery; i.e., signal recovery without requiring the knowledge of the sensing matrix. To this end, we make use of the deep unfolding technique and develop a model-driven deep neural architecture which is designed for this specific task. The proposed deep architecture is able to learn an alternative sensing matrix by taking advantage of the underlying unfolded algorithm such that the resulting learned recovery algorithm can accurately and quickly (in terms of the number of iterations) recover the underlying compressed signal of interest from its one-bit noisy measurements. In addition, due to the incorporation of the domain knowledge and the mathematical model of the system into the proposed deep architecture, the resulting network benefits from enhanced interpretability, has a very small number of trainable parameters, and requires very small number of training samples, as compared to the commonly used black-box deep neural network alternatives for the problem at hand.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2022

CorrI2P: Deep Image-to-Point Cloud Registration via Dense Correspondence

Motivated by the intuition that the critical step of localizing a 2D image in the corresponding 3D point cloud is establishing 2D-3D correspondence between them, we propose the first feature-based dense correspondence framework for addressing the image-to-point cloud registration problem, dubbed CorrI2P, which consists of three modules, i.e., feature embedding, symmetric overlapping region detection, and pose estimation through the established correspondence. Specifically, given a pair of a 2D image and a 3D point cloud, we first transform them into high-dimensional feature space and feed the resulting features into a symmetric overlapping region detector to determine the region where the image and point cloud overlap each other. Then we use the features of the overlapping regions to establish the 2D-3D correspondence before running EPnP within RANSAC to estimate the camera's pose. Experimental results on KITTI and NuScenes datasets show that our CorrI2P outperforms state-of-the-art image-to-point cloud registration methods significantly. We will make the code publicly available.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Multi-Entanglement Routing Design over Quantum Networks

Quantum networks are considered as a promising future platform for quantum information exchange and quantum applications, which have capabilities far beyond the traditional communication networks. Remote quantum entanglement is an essential component of a quantum network. How to efficiently design a multi-routing entanglement protocol is a fundamental yet challenging problem. In this paper, we study a quantum entanglement routing problem to simultaneously maximize the number of quantum-user pairs and their expected throughput. Our approach is to formulate the problem as two sequential integer programming steps. We propose efficient entanglement routing algorithms for the two integer programming steps and analyze their time complexity and performance bounds. Results of evaluation highlight that our approach outperforms existing solutions in both served quantum-user pairs numbers and the network expected throughput.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2022

WarpingGAN: Warping Multiple Uniform Priors for Adversarial 3D Point Cloud Generation

We propose WarpingGAN, an effective and efficient 3D point cloud generation network. Unlike existing methods that generate point clouds by directly learning the mapping functions between latent codes and 3D shapes, Warping-GAN learns a unified local-warping function to warp multiple identical pre-defined priors (i.e., sets of points uniformly distributed on regular 3D grids) into 3D shapes driven by local structure-aware semantics. In addition, we also ingeniously utilize the principle of the discriminator and tailor a stitching loss to eliminate the gaps between different partitions of a generated shape corresponding to different priors for boosting quality. Owing to the novel generating mechanism, WarpingGAN, a single lightweight network after one-time training, is capable of efficiently generating uniformly distributed 3D point clouds with various resolutions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our WarpingGAN over state-of-the-art methods in terms of quantitative metrics, visual quality, and efficiency. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/yztang4/WarpingGAN.git.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

IDEA-Net: Dynamic 3D Point Cloud Interpolation via Deep Embedding Alignment

This paper investigates the problem of temporally interpolating dynamic 3D point clouds with large non-rigid deformation. We formulate the problem as estimation of point-wise trajectories (i.e., smooth curves) and further reason that temporal irregularity and under-sampling are two major challenges. To tackle the challenges, we propose IDEA-Net, an end-to-end deep learning framework, which disentangles the problem under the assistance of the explicitly learned temporal consistency. Specifically, we propose a temporal consistency learning module to align two consecutive point cloud frames point-wisely, based on which we can employ linear interpolation to obtain coarse trajectories/in-between frames. To compensate the high-order nonlinear components of trajectories, we apply aligned feature embeddings that encode local geometry properties to regress point-wise increments, which are combined with the coarse estimations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on various point cloud sequences and observe large improvement over state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and visually. Our framework can bring benefits to 3D motion data acquisition. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/ZENGYIMING-EAMON/IDEA-Net.git.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

CorrNet3D: Unsupervised End-to-end Learning of Dense Correspondence for 3D Point Clouds

Motivated by the intuition that one can transform two aligned point clouds to each other more easily and meaningfully than a misaligned pair, we propose CorrNet3D -- the first unsupervised and end-to-end deep learning-based framework -- to drive the learning of dense correspondence between 3D shapes by means of deformation-like reconstruction to overcome the need for annotated data. Specifically, CorrNet3D consists of a deep feature embedding module and two novel modules called correspondence indicator and symmetric deformer. Feeding a pair of raw point clouds, our model first learns the pointwise features and passes them into the indicator to generate a learnable correspondence matrix used to permute the input pair. The symmetric deformer, with an additional regularized loss, transforms the two permuted point clouds to each other to drive the unsupervised learning of the correspondence. The extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets of rigid and non-rigid 3D shapes show our CorrNet3D outperforms state-of-the-art methods to a large extent, including those taking meshes as input. CorrNet3D is a flexible framework in that it can be easily adapted to supervised learning if annotated data are available. The source code and pre-trained model will be available at https://github.com/ZENGYIMING-EAMON/CorrNet3D.git.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

MOPS-Net: A Matrix Optimization-driven Network forTask-Oriented 3D Point Cloud Downsampling

This paper explores the problem of task-oriented downsampling over 3D point clouds, which aims to downsample a point cloud while maintaining the performance of subsequent applications applied to the downsampled sparse points as much as possible. Designing from the perspective of matrix optimization, we propose MOPS-Net, a novel interpretable deep learning-based method, which is fundamentally different from the existing deep learning-based methods due to its interpretable feature. The optimization problem is challenging due to its discrete and combinatorial nature. We tackle the challenges by relaxing the binary constraint of the variables, and formulate a constrained and differentiable matrix optimization problem. We then design a deep neural network to mimic the matrix optimization by exploring both the local and global structures of the input data. MOPS-Net can be end-to-end trained with a task network and is permutation-invariant, making it robust to the input. We also extend MOPS-Net such that a single network after one-time training is capable of handling arbitrary downsampling ratios. Extensive experimental results show that MOPS-Net can achieve favorable performance against state-of-the-art deep learning-based methods over various tasks, including classification, reconstruction, and registration. Besides, we validate the robustness of MOPS-Net on noisy data.

cs.CV↗