arXiv subjects

Yingdong Hu

Publications and source records attributed to Yingdong Hu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

When Does Legacy Data Start to Help? Emergent Transfer in Cross-Configuration Robot Learning

Robotic hardware evolves over time, but demonstration data is often tied to a specific sensor and actuator configuration. This raises a practical and underexplored question: when does legacy data begin to benefit an upgraded robot? We study this question on a wheeled humanoid platform across two hardware generations, where both the camera and gripper are changed while the overall morphology remains fixed. Contrary to the common assumption that more cross-configuration data is always helpful, we observe a grokking-like transition: legacy data remains ineffective until the upgraded configuration acquires a minimum level of task competence, after which co-training gains rise sharply before diminishing near saturation. We hypothesize that this task-dependent transition is governed by a transfer threshold and characterize the resulting three-phase pattern. Across real-robot manipulation tasks, we observe all three phases: no measurable benefit at low competence ($10.0\% \rightarrow 10.0\%$), a sharp gain after crossing the threshold ($23.3\% \rightarrow 86.7\%$ on flower insertion), and diminishing returns at high competence ($85.0\% \rightarrow 93.3\%$ on pen insertion). We provide a theoretical account based on gradient alignment and residual policy uncertainty, and derive a phase-aware rule for deciding when to collect more new-hardware data and when to reuse legacy demonstrations. We further validate this three-phase pattern on a mobile dual-arm watering task, with results consistent with our predictions.

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arXiv2026

FA-LAM: Focus-Aware Large Avatar Model for One-Shot 4D Animatable Gaussian Head

We propose FA-LAM, a Focus-Aware Large Avatar Model for one-shot animatable Gaussian head creation, while simultaneously enabling static 3D and dynamic 4D full-head recovery. The core of our method lies in a thorough analysis of the attention mechanisms and the entangled reconstruction and animation training pipeline adopted by prior state-of-the-art approaches. Our analysis identifies two main factors that compromise the quality of 3D full-head generation: (1) incorrect and noisy attention activations, and (2) conflicts between the tasks of reconstruction and animation. To address the first issue, we introduce a symmetric and semantic attention regularization strategy that leverages the inherent semantics and structural symmetry of human heads. To disentangle the objectives of reconstruction and animation, we develop a novel dual-phase training pipeline that separates the model's capabilities for large-view hallucination and animation into distinct modules. Moreover, we enhance our model to support multi-view and streaming 4D reconstruction in an efficient and memory-friendly manner through a core autoregressive modification with tailored visibility-aware token fusion. Collectively, these innovations enable FA-LAM to reconstruct animatable Gaussian full heads with superior quality, particularly in fine facial regions and large viewing angles.

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arXiv2026

OpenHLM: An Empirical Recipe for Whole-Body Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

Whole-body humanoid loco-manipulation requires coordinating the robot's entire kinematic chain. However, most existing systems typically decouple the upper and lower bodies into separate controllers, limiting such coordination and yielding behaviors similar to those of a wheeled dual-arm platform. In this paper, we ask what it takes to build a whole-body native vision-language-action (VLA) model that maps language and pixels directly to all of the humanoid's degrees of freedom. We conduct a systematic empirical study organized as a roadmap of one-variable-at-a-time experiments across three phases: whole-body teleoperation, VLA model design, and heterogeneous co-training. Our study yields several intriguing findings: a joint-based whole-body teleoperation interface outperforms alternatives that only partially expose the humanoid's degrees of freedom; a VLA pretrained on static and wheeled dual-arm platforms transfers surprisingly well to a humanoid's full action space; and co-training with HuMI, the humanoid analog of UMI, extends the policy to new objects and instructions without additional whole-body teleoperation on those targets. Following this roadmap yields OpenHLM, an open-source recipe for whole-body humanoid loco-manipulation. In a challenging long-horizon task that spans a wide vertical range of the humanoid, OpenHLM outperforms two state-of-the-art humanoid VLA baselines (GR00T N1.6 and $\Psi_0$) using less than half the total demonstration time. Our code, training data, and model checkpoints are available at [https://openhlm-project.github.io/].

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arXiv2026

FTP-1: A Generalist Foundation Tactile Policy Across Tactile Sensors for Contact-Rich Manipulation

Despite the success of vision-based generalist robotic policies, existing tactile-based policies remain tied to fixed embodiments and sensor setups. This is because tactile signals are highly heterogeneous across hardware, making cross-sensor generalization difficult. We present FTP-1,the first generalist foundation tactile policy pretrained to acquire transferable tactile manipulation abilities across diverse sensors and embodiments. FTP-1 supports varied tactile inputs, including image-, array-, and state-based signals, by using heterogeneous encoders to project them into unified morphology-aware latent tokens that are jointly modeled by a shared tactile Transformer expert. Pretrained on around 3,000 hours of tactile manipulation data aggregated from 26 data sources, spanning human and robot demonstrations across 21 sensors, FTP-1 learns tactile skills that transfer beyond the sensors seen during pretraining. Across downstream finetuning experiments spanning 5 hardware configurations, FTP-1 improves contact-rich manipulation on seen sensor setups by +17.2% and, surprisingly, transfers to two previously unseen tactile-sensor setups, achieving a +31% gain in success rate. FTP-1 establishes the first unified foundation baseline for tactile manipulation, providing future tactile policies with a shared model-level starting point. Pretrained models, datasets, training code and more visualization at https://ftp1-policy.github.io.

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arXiv2026

A Practical Recipe Towards Improving Sim-and-Real Correlation for VLA Evaluation

Simulation has become an essential tool for evaluating and improving vision-language-action (VLA) policies, offering scalable, reproducible, and controllable alternatives to costly real-world robot evaluation. Recent simulation benchmarks have made substantial progress on realism and diversity, yet these platforms have not been widely adopted as reliable proxies for real-world policy evaluation. In this work, we investigate this issue through the lens of sim-and-real correlation. We conduct a systematic study across multiple simulation platforms, VLA policies, tasks, and perturbation factors, measuring whether simulated evaluation preserves real-world conclusions in terms of policy ranking consistency, performance correlation, and perturbation-wise failure patterns. This analysis allows us to characterize the limitations of existing simulators and identify what kinds of simulation signals are more aligned with real-world deployment. We further examine how users should exploit simulation for policy improvement, including when simulator-based finetuning is beneficial and how the amount of post-training data affects sim-and-real alignment. Overall, our work provides a unified framework for measuring, interpreting, and improving the usefulness of simulation for VLA policies, offering guidance both for simulator designers and for practitioners who use simulation as part of the policy development pipeline.

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arXiv2026

Real-Time Human Frontal View Synthesis from a Single Image

Photorealistic human novel view synthesis from a single image is crucial for democratizing immersive 3D telepresence, eliminating the need for complex multi-camera setups. However, current rendering-centric methods prioritize visual fidelity over explicit geometric understanding and struggle with intricate regions like faces and hands, leading to temporal instability. Meanwhile, human-centric frameworks suffer from memory bottlenecks since they typically rely on an auxiliary model to provide informative structural priors for geometric modeling, which limits real-time performance. To address these challenges, we propose PrismMirror, a geometry-guided framework for instant frontal view synthesis from a single image. By avoiding external geometric modeling and focusing on frontal view synthesis, our model optimizes visual integrity for telepresence. Specifically, PrismMirror introduces a novel cascade learning strategy that enables coarse-to-fine geometric feature learning. It first directly learns coarse geometric features, such as SMPL-X meshes and point clouds, and then refines textures through rendering supervision. To achieve real-time efficiency, we distill this unified framework into a lightweight linear attention model. Notably, PrismMirror is the first monocular human frontal view synthesis model that achieves real-time inference at 24 FPS, significantly outperforming previous methods in both visual authenticity and structural accuracy.

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arXiv2026

Seamless Handover in Direct-to-Device Satellite Networks: From an Interference-Aware Perspective

The direct-to-device (D2D) satellite network is an important 6G evolution direction to enable seamless ubiquitous connectivity. However, the network faces critical handover challenges due to high satellite mobility and wide beam footprints. Conventional handover strategies, mostly designed for terrestrial networks, may encounter excessive co-channel interference (CCI) and service degradation in the satellite environments. To address the issue, this paper introduces a novel handover optimization method to perform dynamic adjustment of an important parameter called elevation angle threshold (EAT) from an interference-aware perspective. Explicitly, we first analyze the trade-off between satellite visibility and CCI. Then, we propose a numerical algorithm to determine the optimal EAT that can achieve seamless coverage with CCI. We validate our method using a customized D2D LEO satellite network simulator in the Network Simulator (NS-3). The results demonstrate that the EAT optimization significantly reduces packet loss and hence enhances handover reliability. The work highlights the importance of interference-aware handover design for improving service continuity in future D2D satellite networks.

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arXiv2026

Learning Native Continuation for Action Chunking Flow Policies

Action chunking enables Vision Language Action (VLA) models to run in real time, but naive chunked execution often exhibits discontinuities at chunk boundaries. Real-Time Chunking (RTC) alleviates this issue but is external to the policy, leading to spurious multimodal switching and trajectories that are not intrinsically smooth. We propose Legato, a training-time continuation method for action-chunked flow-based VLA policies. Specifically, Legato initializes denoising from a schedule-shaped mixture of known actions and noise, exposing the model to partial action information. Moreover, Legato reshapes the learned flow dynamics to ensure that the denoising process remains consistent between training and inference under per-step guidance. Legato further uses randomized schedule condition during training to support varying inference delays and achieve controllable smoothness. Empirically, Legato produces smoother trajectories and reduces spurious multimodal switching during execution, leading to less hesitation and shorter task completion time. Extensive real-world experiments show that Legato consistently outperforms RTC across five manipulation tasks, achieving approximately 10% improvements in both trajectory smoothness and task completion time.

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arXiv2026

Humanoid Manipulation Interface: Humanoid Whole-Body Manipulation from Robot-Free Demonstrations

Current approaches for humanoid whole-body manipulation, primarily relying on teleoperation or visual sim-to-real reinforcement learning, are hindered by hardware logistics and complex reward engineering. Consequently, demonstrated autonomous skills remain limited and are typically restricted to controlled environments. In this paper, we present the Humanoid Manipulation Interface (HuMI), a portable and efficient framework for learning diverse whole-body manipulation tasks across various environments. HuMI enables robot-free data collection by capturing rich whole-body motion using portable hardware. This data drives a hierarchical learning pipeline that translates human motions into dexterous and feasible humanoid skills. Extensive experiments across five whole-body tasks--including kneeling, squatting, tossing, walking, and bimanual manipulation--demonstrate that HuMI achieves a 3x increase in data collection efficiency compared to teleoperation and attains a 70% success rate in unseen environments.

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arXiv2026

Mon3tr: Monocular 3D Telepresence with Pre-built Gaussian Avatars as Amortization

Immersive telepresence aims to transform human interaction in AR/VR applications by enabling lifelike full-body holographic representations for enhanced remote collaboration. However, existing systems rely on hardware-intensive multi-camera setups and demand high bandwidth for volumetric streaming, limiting their real-time performance on mobile devices. To overcome these challenges, we propose Mon3tr, a novel Monocular 3D telepresence framework that integrates 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) based parametric human modeling into telepresence for the first time. Mon3tr adopts an amortized computation strategy, dividing the process into a one-time offline multi-view reconstruction phase to build a user-specific avatar and a monocular online inference phase during live telepresence sessions. A single monocular RGB camera is used to capture body motions and facial expressions in real time to drive the 3DGS-based parametric human model, significantly reducing system complexity and cost. The extracted motion and appearance features are transmitted at < 0.2 Mbps over WebRTC's data channel, allowing robust adaptation to network fluctuations. On the receiver side, e.g., Meta Quest 3, we develop a lightweight 3DGS attribute deformation network to dynamically generate corrective 3DGS attribute adjustments on the pre-built avatar, synthesizing photorealistic motion and appearance at ~ 60 FPS. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method, achieving a PSNR of > 28 dB for novel poses, an end-to-end latency of ~ 80 ms, and > 1000x bandwidth reduction compared to point-cloud streaming, while supporting real-time operation from monocular inputs across diverse scenarios. Our demos can be found at https://mon3tr3d.github.io.

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arXiv2025

Point What You Mean: Visually Grounded Instruction Policy

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models align vision and language with embodied control, but their object referring ability remains limited when relying solely on text prompt, especially in cluttered or out-of-distribution (OOD) scenes. In this study, we introduce the Point-VLA, a plug-and-play policy that augments language instructions with explicit visual cues (e.g., bounding boxes) to resolve referential ambiguity and enable precise object-level grounding. To efficiently scale visually grounded datasets, we further develop an automatic data annotation pipeline requiring minimal human effort. We evaluate Point-VLA on diverse real-world referring tasks and observe consistently stronger performance than text-only instruction VLAs, particularly in cluttered or unseen-object scenarios, with robust generalization. These results demonstrate that Point-VLA effectively resolves object referring ambiguity through pixel-level visual grounding, achieving more generalizable embodied control.

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arXiv2025

Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression with Long-Context Modeling

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a revolutionary 3D representation. However, its substantial data size poses a major barrier to widespread adoption. While feed-forward 3DGS compression offers a practical alternative to costly per-scene per-train compressors, existing methods struggle to model long-range spatial dependencies, due to the limited receptive field of transform coding networks and the inadequate context capacity in entropy models. In this work, we propose a novel feed-forward 3DGS compression framework that effectively models long-range correlations to enable highly compact and generalizable 3D representations. Central to our approach is a large-scale context structure that comprises thousands of Gaussians based on Morton serialization. We then design a fine-grained space-channel auto-regressive entropy model to fully leverage this expansive context. Furthermore, we develop an attention-based transform coding model to extract informative latent priors by aggregating features from a wide range of neighboring Gaussians. Our method yields a $20\times$ compression ratio for 3DGS in a feed-forward inference and achieves state-of-the-art performance among generalizable codecs.

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arXiv2025

Maritime Communication in Evaporation Duct Environment with Ship Trajectory Optimization

In maritime wireless networks, the evaporation duct effect has been known as a preferable condition for long-range transmissions. However, how to effectively utilize the duct effect for efficient communication design is still open for investigation. In this paper, we consider a typical scenario of ship-to-shore data transmission, where a ship collects data from multiple oceanographic buoys, sails from one to another, and transmits the collected data back to a terrestrial base station during its voyage. A novel framework, which exploits priori information of the channel gain map in the presence of evaporation duct, is proposed to minimize the data transmission time and the sailing time by optimizing the ship's trajectory. To this end, a multi-objective optimization problem is formulated and is further solved by a dynamic population PSO-integrated NSGA-II algorithm. Through simulations, it is demonstrated that, compared to the benchmark scheme which ignores useful information of the evaporation duct, the proposed scheme can effectively reduce both the data transmission time and the sailing time.

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arXiv2025

Best of Sim and Real: Decoupled Visuomotor Manipulation via Learning Control in Simulation and Perception in Real

Sim-to-real transfer remains a fundamental challenge in robot manipulation due to the entanglement of perception and control in end-to-end learning. We present a decoupled framework that learns each component where it is most reliable: control policies are trained in simulation with privileged state to master spatial layouts and manipulation dynamics, while perception is adapted only at deployment to bridge real observations to the frozen control policy. Our key insight is that control strategies and action patterns are universal across environments and can be learned in simulation through systematic randomization, while perception is inherently domain-specific and must be learned where visual observations are authentic. Unlike existing end-to-end approaches that require extensive real-world data, our method achieves strong performance with only 10-20 real demonstrations by reducing the complex sim-to-real problem to a structured perception alignment task. We validate our approach on tabletop manipulation tasks, demonstrating superior data efficiency and out-of-distribution generalization compared to end-to-end baselines. The learned policies successfully handle object positions and scales beyond the training distribution, confirming that decoupling perception from control fundamentally improves sim-to-real transfer.

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arXiv2025

Forge4D: Feed-Forward 4D Human Reconstruction and Interpolation from Uncalibrated Sparse-view Videos

Instant reconstruction of dynamic 3D humans from uncalibrated sparse-view videos is critical for numerous downstream applications. Existing methods, however, are either limited by the slow reconstruction speeds or incapable of generating novel-time representations. To address these challenges, we propose Forge4D, a feed-forward 4D human reconstruction and interpolation model that efficiently reconstructs temporally aligned representations from uncalibrated sparse-view videos, enabling both novel view and novel time synthesis. Our model simplifies the 4D reconstruction and interpolation problem as a joint task of streaming 3D Gaussian reconstruction and dense motion prediction. For the task of streaming 3D Gaussian reconstruction, we first reconstruct static 3D Gaussians from uncalibrated sparse-view images and then introduce learnable state tokens to enforce temporal consistency in a memory-friendly manner by interactively updating shared information across different timestamps. For novel time synthesis, we design a novel motion prediction module to predict dense motions for each 3D Gaussian between two adjacent frames, coupled with an occlusion-aware Gaussian fusion process to interpolate 3D Gaussians at arbitrary timestamps. To overcome the lack of the ground truth for dense motion supervision, we formulate dense motion prediction as a dense point matching task and introduce a self-supervised retargeting loss to optimize this module. An additional occlusion-aware optical flow loss is introduced to ensure motion consistency with plausible human movement, providing stronger regularization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets. Project page and code at: https://zhenliuzju.github.io/huyingdong/Forge4D.

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arXiv2025

Do You Need Proprioceptive States in Visuomotor Policies?

Imitation-learning-based visuomotor policies have been widely used in robot manipulation, where both visual observations and proprioceptive states are typically adopted together for precise control. However, in this study, we find that this common practice makes the policy overly reliant on the proprioceptive state input, which causes overfitting to the training trajectories and results in poor spatial generalization. On the contrary, we propose the State-free Policy, removing the proprioceptive state input and predicting actions only conditioned on visual observations. The State-free Policy is built in the relative end-effector action space, and should ensure the full task-relevant visual observations, here provided by dual wide-angle wrist cameras. Empirical results demonstrate that the State-free policy achieves significantly stronger spatial generalization than the state-based policy: in real-world tasks such as pick-and-place, challenging shirt-folding, and complex whole-body manipulation, spanning multiple robot embodiments, the average success rate improves from 0% to 85% in height generalization and from 6% to 64% in horizontal generalization. Furthermore, they also show advantages in data efficiency and cross-embodiment adaptation, enhancing their practicality for real-world deployment. Discover more by visiting: https://statefreepolicy.github.io.

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arXiv2025

MotionTrans: Human VR Data Enable Motion-Level Learning for Robotic Manipulation Policies

Scaling real robot data is a key bottleneck in imitation learning, leading to the use of auxiliary data for policy training. While other aspects of robotic manipulation such as image or language understanding may be learned from internet-based datasets, acquiring motion knowledge remains challenging. Human data, with its rich diversity of manipulation behaviors, offers a valuable resource for this purpose. While previous works show that using human data can bring benefits, such as improving robustness and training efficiency, it remains unclear whether it can realize its greatest advantage: enabling robot policies to directly learn new motions for task completion. In this paper, we systematically explore this potential through multi-task human-robot cotraining. We introduce MotionTrans, a framework that includes a data collection system, a human data transformation pipeline, and a weighted cotraining strategy. By cotraining 30 human-robot tasks simultaneously, we direcly transfer motions of 13 tasks from human data to deployable end-to-end robot policies. Notably, 9 tasks achieve non-trivial success rates in zero-shot manner. MotionTrans also significantly enhances pretraining-finetuning performance (+40% success rate). Through ablation study, we also identify key factors for successful motion learning: cotraining with robot data and broad task-related motion coverage. These findings unlock the potential of motion-level learning from human data, offering insights into its effective use for training robotic manipulation policies. All data, code, and model weights are open-sourced https://motiontrans.github.io/.

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arXiv2025

PanoLAM: Large Avatar Model for Gaussian Full-Head Synthesis from One-shot Unposed Image

We present a feed-forward framework for Gaussian full-head synthesis from a single unposed image. Unlike previous work that relies on time-consuming GAN inversion and test-time optimization, our framework can reconstruct the Gaussian full-head model given a single unposed image in a single forward pass. This enables fast reconstruction and rendering during inference. To mitigate the lack of large-scale 3D head assets, we propose a large-scale synthetic dataset from trained 3D GANs and train our framework using only synthetic data. For efficient high-fidelity generation, we introduce a coarse-to-fine Gaussian head generation pipeline, where sparse points from the FLAME model interact with the image features by transformer blocks for feature extraction and coarse shape reconstruction, which are then densified for high-fidelity reconstruction. To fully leverage the prior knowledge residing in pretrained 3D GANs for effective reconstruction, we propose a dual-branch framework that effectively aggregates the structured spherical triplane feature and unstructured point-based features for more effective Gaussian head reconstruction. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our framework towards existing work. Project page at: https://panolam.github.io/.

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