arXiv subjects

Yixin Zhu

Publications and source records attributed to Yixin Zhu.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

TacMan-Turbo: Proactive Tactile Control for Robust and Efficient Articulated Object Manipulation

Adept manipulation of articulated objects is essential for robots to operate successfully in human environments. Such manipulation requires both effectiveness--reliable operation despite uncertain object structures--and efficiency--swift execution with minimal redundant steps and smooth actions. Existing approaches struggle to achieve both objectives simultaneously: methods relying on predefined kinematic models lack effectiveness when encountering structural variations, while tactile-informed approaches achieve robust manipulation without kinematic priors but compromise efficiency through reactive, step-by-step exploration-compensation cycles. This paper introduces TacMan-Turbo, a novel proactive tactile control framework for articulated object manipulation that mitigates this fundamental trade-off. Unlike previous approaches that treat tactile contact deviations merely as error signals requiring compensation, our method interprets these deviations as rich sources of local kinematic information. This new perspective enables our controller to predict optimal future interactions and make proactive adjustments, significantly enhancing manipulation efficiency. In comprehensive evaluations across 200 diverse simulated articulated objects and real-world experiments, our approach maintains a 100% success rate while significantly outperforming the previous tactile-informed method in time efficiency, action efficiency, and trajectory smoothness (all p-values < 0.0001). These results demonstrate that the long-standing trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency in articulated object manipulation can be successfully resolved without relying on prior kinematic knowledge.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

IntrinsicWeather: Controllable Weather Editing in Intrinsic Space

We present IntrinsicWeather, a diffusion-based framework for controllable weather editing in intrinsic space. Our framework includes two components based on diffusion priors: an inverse renderer that estimates material properties, scene geometry, and lighting as intrinsic maps from an input image, and a forward renderer that utilizes these geometry and material maps along with a text prompt that describes specific weather conditions to generate a final image. The intrinsic maps enhance controllability compared to traditional pixel-space editing approaches. We propose an intrinsic map-aware attention mechanism that improves spatial correspondence and decomposition quality in large outdoor scenes. For forward rendering, we leverage CLIP-space interpolation of weather prompts to achieve fine-grained weather control. We also introduce a synthetic and a real-world dataset, containing 38k and 18k images under various weather conditions, each with intrinsic map annotations. IntrinsicWeather outperforms state-of-the-art pixel-space editing approaches, weather restoration methods, and rendering-based methods, showing promise for downstream tasks such as autonomous driving, enhancing the robustness of detection and segmentation in challenging weather scenarios.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Overhang Tower: Resource-Rational Adaptation in Sequential Physical Planning

Humans effortlessly navigate the physical world by predicting how objects behave under gravity and contact forces, yet how such judgments support sequential physical planning under resource constraints remains poorly understood. Research on intuitive physics debates whether prediction relies on the Intuitive Physics Engine (IPE) or fast, cue-based heuristics; separately, decision-making research debates deliberative lookahead versus myopic strategies. These debates have proceeded in isolation, leaving the cognitive architecture of sequential physical planning underspecified. How physical prediction mechanisms and planning strategies jointly adapt under limited cognitive resources remains an open question. Here we show that humans exhibit a dual transition under resource pressure, simultaneously shifting both physical prediction mechanism and planning strategy to match cognitive budget. Using Overhang Tower, a construction task requiring participants to maximize horizontal overhang while maintaining stability, we find that IPE-based simulation dominates early stages while CNN-based visual heuristics prevail as complexity grows; concurrently, time pressure truncates deliberative lookahead, shifting planning toward shallower horizons: a dual transition unpredicted by prior single-mechanism accounts. These findings reveal a hierarchical, resource-rational architecture that flexibly trades computational cost against predictive fidelity. Our results unify two long-standing debates (simulation vs. heuristics and myopic vs. deliberative planning) as a dynamic repertoire reconfigured by cognitive budget.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Vi-TacMan: Articulated Object Manipulation via Vision and Touch

Autonomous manipulation of articulated objects remains a fundamental challenge for robots in human environments. Vision-based methods can infer hidden kinematics but can yield imprecise estimates on unfamiliar objects. Tactile approaches achieve robust control through contact feedback but require accurate initialization. This suggests a natural synergy: vision for global guidance, touch for local precision. Yet no framework systematically exploits this complementarity for generalized articulated manipulation. Here we present Vi-TacMan, which uses vision to propose grasps and coarse directions that seed a tactile controller for precise execution. By incorporating surface normals as geometric priors and modeling directions via von Mises-Fisher distributions, our approach achieves significant gains over baselines (all p<0.0001). Critically, manipulation succeeds without explicit kinematic models -- the tactile controller refines coarse visual estimates through real-time contact regulation. Tests on more than 50,000 simulated and diverse real-world objects confirm robust cross-category generalization. This work establishes that coarse visual cues suffice for reliable manipulation when coupled with tactile feedback, offering a scalable paradigm for autonomous systems in unstructured environments.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

T-800: An 800 Hz Data Glove for Precise Hand Gesture Tracking

Human dexterity relies on rapid, sub-second motor adjustments, yet capturing these high-frequency dynamics remains an enduring challenge in biomechanics and robotics. Existing motion capture paradigms are compromised by a trade-off between temporal resolution and visual occlusion, failing to record the fine-grained hand motion of fast, contact-rich manipulation. Here we introduce T-800, a high-bandwidth data glove system that achieves synchronized, full-hand motion tracking at 800 Hz. By integrating a novel broadcast-based synchronization mechanism with a mechanical stress isolation architecture, our system maintains sub-frame temporal alignment across 18 distributed inertial measurement units (IMUs) during extended, vigorous movements. We demonstrate that T-800 recovers fine-grained manipulation details previously lost to temporal undersampling. Our analysis reveals that human dexterity exhibits significantly high-frequency motion energy (>100 Hz) that was fundamentally inaccessible due to the Nyquist sampling limit imposed by previous hardware constraints. To validate the system's utility for robotic manipulation, we implement a kinematic retargeting algorithm that maps T-800's high-fidelity human gestures onto dexterous robotic hand models. This demonstrates that the high-frequency motion data can be accurately translated while respecting the kinematic constraints of robotic hands, providing the rich behavioral data necessary for training robust control policies in the future.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Visual Distraction Undermines Moral Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

Moral reasoning is fundamental to safe Artificial Intelligence (AI), yet ensuring its consistency across modalities becomes critical as AI systems evolve from text-based assistants to embodied agents. Current safety techniques demonstrate success in textual contexts, but concerns remain about generalization to visual inputs. Existing moral evaluation benchmarks rely on textonly formats and lack systematic control over variables that influence moral decision-making. Here we show that visual inputs fundamentally alter moral decision-making in state-of-the-art (SOTA) Vision-Language Models (VLMs), bypassing text-based safety mechanisms. We introduce Moral Dilemma Simulation (MDS), a multimodal benchmark grounded in Moral Foundation Theory (MFT) that enables mechanistic analysis through orthogonal manipulation of visual and contextual variables. The evaluation reveals that the vision modality activates intuition-like pathways that override the more deliberate and safer reasoning patterns observed in text-only contexts. These findings expose critical fragilities where language-tuned safety filters fail to constrain visual processing, demonstrating the urgent need for multimodal safety alignment.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

OmniClone: Engineering a Robust, All-Rounder Whole-Body Humanoid Teleoperation System

Whole-body humanoid teleoperation enables humans to remotely control humanoid robots, serving as both a real-time operational tool and a scalable engine for collecting demonstrations for autonomous learning. Despite recent advances, existing systems are validated using aggregate metrics that conflate distinct motion regimes, masking critical failure modes. This lack of diagnostic granularity, compounded by tightly coupled and labor-intensive system configurations, hinders robust real-world deployment. A key open challenge is building a teleoperation system that is simultaneously robust, versatile, and affordable for practical use. Here we present OmniClone, a whole-body humanoid teleoperation system that achieves high-fidelity, multi-skill control on a single consumer GPU with modest data requirements. Central to our approach is OmniBench, a diagnostic benchmark that evaluates policies across stratified motion categories and difficulty levels on unseen motions, exposing the narrow specialization of prior systems. Guided by these diagnostics, we identify an optimized training data recipe and integrate system-level improvements: subject-agnostic retargeting and robust communication, that collectively reduce Mean Per-Joint Position Error (MPJPE) by over 66% while requiring orders-of-magnitude fewer computational resources than comparable methods. Crucially, OmniClone is control-source-agnostic: a single unified policy supports real-time teleoperation, generated motion playback, and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, while generalizing across operators of vastly different body proportions. By uniting diagnostic evaluation with practical engineering, OmniClone provides an accessible foundation for scalable humanoid teleoperation and autonomous learning.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

NarrativeLoom: Enhancing Creative Storytelling through Multi-Persona Collaborative Improvisation

Large Language Models show promise for AI-assisted storytelling, yet current tools often generate predictable, unoriginal narratives. To address this limitation, we present NarrativeLoom, a multi-persona co-creative system grounded in Campbell's Blind Variation and Selective Retention theory. NarrativeLoom deploys specialized AI personas to generate diverse narrative options (blind variation), while users act as creative directors to select and refine them (selective retention). We designed a controlled study with 50 participants and found that stories co-authored with NarrativeLoom were not only perceived by users as more novel and diverse but were also objectively rated by experts as significantly better across all Torrance Test creativity dimensions: fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. Stories are significantly longer with richer settings and more dialogue. Writing expertise emerged as a moderator: novices benefited more from structured scaffolding. This demonstrates the value of theory-informed co-creative systems and the importance of adapting them to varying user expertise.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

LessMimic: Long-Horizon Humanoid Interaction with Unified Distance Field Representations

Humanoid robots that autonomously interact with physical environments over extended horizons represent a central goal of embodied intelligence. Existing approaches rely on reference motions or task-specific rewards, tightly coupling policies to particular object geometries and precluding multi-skill generalization within a single framework. A unified interaction representation enabling reference-free inference, geometric generalization, and long-horizon skill composition within one policy remains an open challenge. Here we show that Distance Field (DF) provides such a representation: LessMimic conditions a single whole-body policy on DF-derived geometric cues--surface distances, gradients, and velocity decompositions--removing the need for motion references, with interaction latents encoded via a Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) and post-trained using Adversarial Interaction Priors (AIP) under Reinforcement Learning (RL). Through DAgger-style distillation that aligns DF latents with egocentric depth features, LessMimic further transfers seamlessly to vision-only deployment without motion capture (MoCap) infrastructure. A single LessMimic policy achieves 80--100% success across object scales from 0.4x to 1.6x on PickUp and SitStand where baselines degrade sharply, attains 62.1% success on 5 task instances trajectories, and remains viable up to 40 sequentially composed tasks. By grounding interaction in local geometry rather than demonstrations, LessMimic offers a scalable path toward humanoid robots that generalize, compose skills, and recover from failures in unstructured environments.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Learning Physics-Grounded 4D Dynamics with Neural Gaussian Force Fields

Predicting physical dynamics from raw visual data remains a major challenge in AI. While recent video generation models have achieved impressive visual quality, they still cannot consistently generate physically plausible videos due to a lack of modeling of physical laws. Recent approaches combining 3D Gaussian splatting and physics engines can produce physically plausible videos, but are hindered by high computational costs in both reconstruction and simulation, and often lack robustness in complex real-world scenarios. To address these issues, we introduce Neural Gaussian Force Field (NGFF), an end-to-end neural framework that integrates 3D Gaussian perception with physics-based dynamic modeling to generate interactive, physically realistic 4D videos from multi-view RGB inputs, achieving two orders of magnitude faster than prior Gaussian simulators. To support training, we also present GSCollision, a 4D Gaussian dataset featuring diverse materials, multi-object interactions, and complex scenes, totaling over 640k rendered physical videos (~4 TB). Evaluations on synthetic and real 3D scenarios show NGFF's strong generalization and robustness in physical reasoning, advancing video prediction towards physics-grounded world models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Neural Force Field: Few-shot Learning of Generalized Physical Reasoning

Physical reasoning is a remarkable human ability that enables rapid learning and generalization from limited experience. Current AI models, despite extensive training, still struggle to achieve similar generalization, especially in Out-of-distribution (OOD) settings. This limitation stems from their inability to abstract core physical principles from observations. A key challenge is developing representations that can efficiently learn and generalize physical dynamics from minimal data. Here we present Neural Force Field (NFF), a framework extending Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (NODE) to learn complex object interactions through force field representations, which can be efficiently integrated through an Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solver to predict object trajectories. Unlike existing approaches that rely on discrete latent spaces, NFF captures fundamental physical concepts such as gravity, support, and collision in continuous explicit force fields. Experiments on three challenging physical reasoning tasks demonstrate that NFF, trained with only a few examples, achieves strong generalization to unseen scenarios. This physics-grounded representation enables efficient forward-backward planning and rapid adaptation through interactive refinement. Our work suggests that incorporating physics-inspired representations into learning systems can help bridge the gap between artificial and human physical reasoning capabilities.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Simultaneous Tactile-Visual Perception for Learning Multimodal Robot Manipulation

Robotic manipulation requires both rich multimodal perception and effective learning frameworks to handle complex real-world tasks. See-through-skin (STS) sensors, which combine tactile and visual perception, offer promising sensing capabilities, while modern imitation learning provides powerful tools for policy acquisition. However, existing STS designs lack simultaneous multimodal perception and suffer from unreliable tactile tracking. Furthermore, integrating these rich multimodal signals into learning-based manipulation pipelines remains an open challenge. We introduce TacThru, an STS sensor enabling simultaneous visual perception and robust tactile signal extraction, and TacThru-UMI, an imitation learning framework that leverages these multimodal signals for manipulation. Our sensor features a fully transparent elastomer, persistent illumination, novel keyline markers, and efficient tracking, while our learning system integrates these signals through a Transformer-based Diffusion Policy. Experiments on five challenging real-world tasks show that TacThru-UMI achieves an average success rate of 85.5%, significantly outperforming the baselines of tactile policy(66.3%) and vision-only policy (55.4%). The system excels in critical scenarios, including contact detection with thin and soft objects and precision manipulation requiring multimodal coordination. This work demonstrates that combining simultaneous multimodal perception with modern learning frameworks enables more precise, adaptable robotic manipulation.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Interactive Spatial-Frequency Fusion Mamba for Multi-Modal Image Fusion

Multi-Modal Image Fusion (MMIF) aims to combine images from different modalities to produce fused images, retaining texture details and preserving significant information. Recently, some MMIF methods incorporate frequency domain information to enhance spatial features. However, these methods typically rely on simple serial or parallel spatial-frequency fusion without interaction. In this paper, we propose a novel Interactive Spatial-Frequency Fusion Mamba (ISFM) framework for MMIF. Specifically, we begin with a Modality-Specific Extractor (MSE) to extract features from different modalities. It models long-range dependencies across the image with linear computational complexity. To effectively leverage frequency information, we then propose a Multi-scale Frequency Fusion (MFF). It adaptively integrates low-frequency and high-frequency components across multiple scales, enabling robust representations of frequency features. More importantly, we further propose an Interactive Spatial-Frequency Fusion (ISF). It incorporates frequency features to guide spatial features across modalities, enhancing complementary representations. Extensive experiments are conducted on six MMIF datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our ISFM can achieve better performances than other state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/Namn23/ISFM.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Code over Words: Overcoming Semantic Inertia via Code-Grounded Reasoning

LLMs struggle with Semantic Inertia: the inability to inhibit pre-trained priors (e.g., "Lava is Dangerous") when dynamic, in-context rules contradict them. We probe this phenomenon using Baba Is You, where physical laws are mutable text rules, enabling precise evaluation of models' ability to override learned priors when rules change. We quantatively observe that larger models can exhibit inverse scaling: they perform worse than smaller models when natural language reasoning requires suppressing pre-trained associations (e.g., accepting "Lava is Safe"). Our analysis attributes this to natural language encoding, which entangles descriptive semantics and logical rules, leading to persistent hallucinations of familiar physics despite explicit contradictory rules. Here we show that representing dynamics as executable code, rather than descriptive text, reverses this trend and enables effective prior inhibition. We introduce Code-Grounded Vistas (LCV), which fine-tunes models on counterfactual pairs and identifies states with contradictory rules, thereby forcing attention to logical constraints rather than visual semantics. This training-time approach outperforms expensive inference-time search methods in both efficiency and accuracy. Our results demonstrate that representation fundamentally determines whether scaling improves or impairs contextual reasoning. This challenges the assumption that larger models are universally better, with implications for domains that require dynamic overriding of learned priors.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

BotzoneBench: Scalable LLM Evaluation via Graded AI Anchors

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in interactive environments requiring strategic decision-making, yet systematic evaluation of these capabilities remains challenging. Existing benchmarks for LLMs primarily assess static reasoning through isolated tasks and fail to capture dynamic strategic abilities. Recent game-based evaluations employ LLM-vs-LLM tournaments that produce relative rankings dependent on transient model pools, incurring quadratic computational costs and lacking stable performance anchors for longitudinal tracking. The central challenge is establishing a scalable evaluation framework that measures LLM strategic reasoning against consistent, interpretable standards rather than volatile peer models. Here we show that anchoring LLM evaluation to fixed hierarchies of skill-calibrated game Artificial Intelligence (AI) enables linear-time absolute skill measurement with stable cross-temporal interpretability. Built on the Botzone platform's established competitive infrastructure, our BotzoneBench evaluates LLMs across eight diverse games spanning deterministic perfect-information board games to stochastic imperfect-information card games. Through systematic assessment of 177,047 state-action pairs from five flagship models, we reveal significant performance disparities and identify distinct strategic behaviors, with top-performing models achieving proficiency comparable to mid-to-high-tier specialized game AI in multiple domains. This anchored evaluation paradigm generalizes beyond games to any domain with well-defined skill hierarchies, establishing a scalable and reusable framework for assessing interactive AI capabilities.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

UniAct: Unified Motion Generation and Action Streaming for Humanoid Robots

A long-standing objective in humanoid robotics is the realization of versatile agents capable of following diverse multimodal instructions with human-level flexibility. Despite advances in humanoid control, bridging high-level multimodal perception with whole-body execution remains a significant bottleneck. Existing methods often struggle to translate heterogeneous instructions -- such as language, music, and trajectories -- into stable, real-time actions. Here we show that UniAct, a two-stage framework integrating a fine-tuned MLLM with a causal streaming pipeline, enables humanoid robots to execute multimodal instructions with sub-500 ms latency. By unifying inputs through a shared discrete codebook via FSQ, UniAct ensures cross-modal alignment while constraining motions to a physically grounded manifold. This approach yields a 19% improvement in the success rate of zero-shot tracking of imperfect reference motions. We validate UniAct on UniMoCap, our 20-hour humanoid motion benchmark, demonstrating robust generalization across diverse real-world scenarios. Our results mark a critical step toward responsive, general-purpose humanoid assistants capable of seamless interaction through unified perception and control.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

DrivAerStar: An Industrial-Grade CFD Dataset for Vehicle Aerodynamic Optimization

Vehicle aerodynamics optimization has become critical for automotive electrification, where drag reduction directly determines electric vehicle range and energy efficiency. Traditional approaches face an intractable trade-off: computationally expensive Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations requiring weeks per design iteration, or simplified models that sacrifice production-grade accuracy. While machine learning offers transformative potential, existing datasets exhibit fundamental limitations -- inadequate mesh resolution, missing vehicle components, and validation errors exceeding 5% -- preventing deployment in industrial workflows. We present DrivAerStar, comprising 12,000 industrial-grade automotive CFD simulations generated using STAR-CCM+${}^\unicode{xAE}$ software. The dataset systematically explores three vehicle configurations through 20 Computer Aided Design (CAD) parameters via Free Form Deformation (FFD) algorithms, including complete engine compartments and cooling systems with realistic internal airflow. DrivAerStar achieves wind tunnel validation accuracy below 1.04% -- a five-fold improvement over existing datasets -- through refined mesh strategies with strict wall $y^+$ control. Benchmarks demonstrate that models trained on this data achieve production-ready accuracy while reducing computational costs from weeks to minutes. This represents the first dataset bridging academic machine learning research and industrial CFD practice, establishing a new standard for data-driven aerodynamic optimization in automotive development. Beyond automotive applications, DrivAerStar demonstrates a paradigm for integrating high-fidelity physics simulations with Artificial Intelligence (AI) across engineering disciplines where computational constraints currently limit innovation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Cross-Scenario Unified Modeling of User Interests at Billion Scale

User interests on content platforms are inherently diverse, manifesting through complex behavioral patterns across heterogeneous scenarios such as search, feed browsing, and content discovery. Traditional recommendation systems typically prioritize business metric optimization within isolated specific scenarios, neglecting cross-scenario behavioral signals and struggling to integrate advanced techniques like LLMs at billion-scale deployments, which finally limits their ability to capture holistic user interests across platform touchpoints. We propose RED-Rec, an LLM-enhanced hierarchical Recommender Engine for Diversified scenarios, tailored for industry-level content recommendation systems. RED-Rec unifies user interest representations across multiple behavioral contexts by aggregating and synthesizing actions from varied scenarios, resulting in comprehensive item and user modeling. At its core, a two-tower LLM-powered framework enables nuanced, multifaceted representations with deployment efficiency, and a scenario-aware dense mixing and querying policy effectively fuses diverse behavioral signals to capture cross-scenario user intent patterns and express fine-grained, context-specific intents during serving. We validate RED-Rec through online A/B testing on hundreds of millions of users in RedNote through online A/B testing, showing substantial performance gains in both content recommendation and advertisement targeting tasks. We further introduce a million-scale sequential recommendation dataset, RED-MMU, for comprehensive offline training and evaluation. Our work advances unified user modeling, unlocking deeper personalization and fostering more meaningful user engagement in large-scale UGC platforms.

cs.IR↗