arXiv subjects

Yongqing Liang

Publications and source records attributed to Yongqing Liang.

15 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Vision-Force Admittance Learning for Peg Insertion into a Movable Hole

Precise manipulation in dynamic environments, whether induced by a mobile robot base or a target with unknown motion, remains a major challenge in robotics. Manipulation in dynamic environments introduces substantial uncertainty, which fundamentally conflicts with the tight precision requirement of precise tasks such as peg-in-the-hole. We propose a Vision-Force Admittance Learning (VFAL) framework that fuses asynchronous visual feedback with a high-frequency force-based model, using visual pose estimations as a regularization term. VFAL adapts insertion strategies online to dynamic motion while maintaining millimeter-level precision. To obtain robust, low-frequency pose information, we employ state-of-the-art vision foundation models for visual pose estimation. Additionally, we incorporate failure recovery mechanisms to enhance overall robustness. We validate our approach in real-world experiments, demonstrating high success rates and strong adaptability to various pegs and dynamic environments.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Chain-SLAM: Globally Consistent Backend for Multi-Session LiDAR SLAM via Chained Loop Closure

Maintaining consistency over long spatial and temporal horizons remains a fundamental challenge in large-scale LiDAR SLAM, particularly when integrating maps collected across multiple sessions. We present Chain-SLAM, a LiDAR SLAM backend enabling online multi-session map alignment and reuse with global consistency at large scale. We implement a chained loop closure mechanism that efficiently propagates geometric constraints across inter-session keyframes through an adjacency graph, enabling robust long-horizon consistency triggered by reliable short-horizon loop closures. The system initializes inter-session alignment with GNSS-proximity place recognition, then performs on-the-fly loop closure detections and joint optimization of loaded maps and newly acquired trajectories within a unified factor graph, maintaining both inter- and intra-session geometric consistency without dynamic object removal, and cross-platform robustness with minimal hyperparameter tuning. Experimental results show improved trajectory accuracy and robust multi-session integration on large-scale datasets. We release our source code to support reproducible research in large-scale multi-session LiDAR SLAM. Project site: https://ai4ce.github.io/Chain-SLAM/

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

SCD4VPR: Multi-modal Scene Change Detection for Long-term Visual Place Recognition Database Update

Long-term autonomy in mobile robotics requires maps that remain accurate as environments change over time. Visual Place Recognition (VPR), a core localization capability, degrades sharply as the temporal gap between query and database images grows, particularly across seasonal transitions. Scene Change Detection (SCD) offers a principled mechanism for database maintenance, but existing methods rely on binary, uni-modal visual features that cannot distinguish structural changes from viewpoint-induced differences - a distinction essential for correct update decisions. We propose SCD4VPR, a scene change detection that jointly reasons about what has changed and distinguishes genuine change from viewpoint-induced difference in a unified vision-language framework. SCD4VPR fuses VLM-generated semantic descriptions with visual features via cross-modal attention and refines predictions with geometric-semantic matching, producing multi-class change masks that separately identify object changes, appearance changes, and viewpoint-induced changes. We introduce NYC-CD, the first real-world street-view SCD benchmark with pixel-level multi-class annotations across 8,122 image pairs. Experiments across four SCD benchmarks show that SCD4VPR consistently improves three architecturally distinct backbones. In a controlled VPR database maintenance experiment on NYU-VPR spanning summer through late winter, we confirm that retrieval performance deteriorates substantially when the database is left unchanged, and show that SCD4VPR-guided updates recover most of this loss (+30.1 R@1 at the largest time gap) while keeping the database far more compact than naive append.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

A Survey on Computational Solutions for Reconstructing Complete Objects by Reassembling Their Fractured Parts

Reconstructing a complete object from its parts is a fundamental problem in many scientific domains. The purpose of this article is to provide a systematic survey on this topic. The reassembly problem requires understanding the attributes of individual pieces and establishing matches between different pieces. Many approaches also model priors of the underlying complete object. Existing approaches are tightly connected problems of shape segmentation, shape matching, and learning shape priors. We provide existing algorithms in this context and emphasize their similarities and differences to general-purpose approaches. We also survey the trends from early non-deep learning approaches to more recent deep learning approaches. In addition to algorithms, this survey will also describe existing datasets, open-source software packages, and applications. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive survey on this topic in computer graphics.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Skull-to-Face: Anatomy-Guided 3D Facial Reconstruction and Editing

Deducing the 3D face from a skull is a challenging task in forensic science and archaeology. This paper proposes an end-to-end 3D face reconstruction pipeline and an exploration method that can conveniently create textured, realistic faces that match the given skull. To this end, we propose a tissue-guided face creation and adaptation scheme. With the help of the state-of-the-art text-to-image diffusion model and parametric face model, we first generate an initial reference 3D face, whose biological profile aligns with the given skull. Then, with the help of tissue thickness distribution, we modify these initial faces to match the skull through a latent optimization process. The joint distribution of tissue thickness is learned on a set of skull landmarks using a collection of scanned skull-face pairs. We also develop an efficient face adaptation tool to allow users to interactively adjust tissue thickness either globally or at local regions to explore different plausible faces. Experiments conducted on a real skull-face dataset demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed pipeline in terms of reconstruction accuracy, diversity, and stability. Our project page is https://xmlyqing00.github.io/skull-to-face-page.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

SolidGS: Consolidating Gaussian Surfel Splatting for Sparse-View Surface Reconstruction

Gaussian splatting has achieved impressive improvements for both novel-view synthesis and surface reconstruction from multi-view images. However, current methods still struggle to reconstruct high-quality surfaces from only sparse view input images using Gaussian splatting. In this paper, we propose a novel method called SolidGS to address this problem. We observed that the reconstructed geometry can be severely inconsistent across multi-views, due to the property of Gaussian function in geometry rendering. This motivates us to consolidate all Gaussians by adopting a more solid kernel function, which effectively improves the surface reconstruction quality. With the additional help of geometrical regularization and monocular normal estimation, our method achieves superior performance on the sparse view surface reconstruction than all the Gaussian splatting methods and neural field methods on the widely used DTU, Tanks-and-Temples, and LLFF datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

AURORA: Automated Unleash of 3D Room Outlines for VR Applications

Creating realistic VR experiences is challenging due to the labor-intensive process of accurately replicating real-world details into virtual scenes, highlighting the need for automated methods that maintain spatial accuracy and provide design flexibility. In this paper, we propose AURORA, a novel method that leverages RGB-D images to automatically generate both purely virtual reality (VR) scenes and VR scenes combined with real-world elements. This approach can benefit designers by streamlining the process of converting real-world details into virtual scenes. AURORA integrates advanced techniques in image processing, segmentation, and 3D reconstruction to efficiently create realistic and detailed interior designs from real-world environments. The design of this integration ensures optimal performance and precision, addressing key challenges in automated indoor design generation by uniquely combining and leveraging the strengths of foundation models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through experiments, both on self-captured data and public datasets, showcasing its potential to enhance virtual reality (VR) applications by providing interior designs that conform to real-world positioning.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

CLAP: Concave Linear APproximation for Quadratic Graph Matching

Solving point-wise feature correspondence in visual data is a fundamental problem in computer vision. A powerful model that addresses this challenge is to formulate it as graph matching, which entails solving a Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) with node-wise and edge-wise constraints. However, solving such a QAP can be both expensive and difficult due to numerous local extreme points. In this work, we introduce a novel linear model and solver designed to accelerate the computation of graph matching. Specifically, we employ a positive semi-definite matrix approximation to establish the structural attribute constraint.We then transform the original QAP into a linear model that is concave for maximization. This model can subsequently be solved using the Sinkhorn optimal transport algorithm, known for its enhanced efficiency and numerical stability compared to existing approaches. Experimental results on the widely used benchmark PascalVOC showcase that our algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly improved efficiency. Source code: https://github.com/xmlyqing00/clap

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Disentangled Clothed Avatar Generation from Text Descriptions

In this paper, we introduce a novel text-to-avatar generation method that separately generates the human body and the clothes and allows high-quality animation on the generated avatar. While recent advancements in text-to-avatar generation have yielded diverse human avatars from text prompts, these methods typically combine all elements-clothes, hair, and body-into a single 3D representation. Such an entangled approach poses challenges for downstream tasks like editing or animation. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel disentangled 3D avatar representation named Sequentially Offset-SMPL (SO-SMPL), building upon the SMPL model. SO-SMPL represents the human body and clothes with two separate meshes but associates them with offsets to ensure the physical alignment between the body and the clothes. Then, we design a Score Distillation Sampling (SDS)-based distillation framework to generate the proposed SO-SMPL representation from text prompts. Our approach not only achieves higher texture and geometry quality and better semantic alignment with text prompts, but also significantly improves the visual quality of character animation, virtual try-on, and avatar editing. Project page: https://shanemankiw.github.io/SO-SMPL/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Deep video representation learning: a survey

This paper provides a review on representation learning for videos. We classify recent spatiotemporal feature learning methods for sequential visual data and compare their pros and cons for general video analysis. Building effective features for videos is a fundamental problem in computer vision tasks involving video analysis and understanding. Existing features can be generally categorized into spatial and temporal features. Their effectiveness under variations of illumination, occlusion, view and background are discussed. Finally, we discuss the remaining challenges in existing deep video representation learning studies.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Enhancing Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Multi-modal Foundation Models: An End-to-End Approach

Semantic segmentation is a core computer vision problem, but the high costs of data annotation have hindered its wide application. Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) offers a cost-efficient workaround to extensive labeling in comparison to fully-supervised methods by using partial or incomplete labels. Existing WSSS methods have difficulties in learning the boundaries of objects leading to poor segmentation results. We propose a novel and effective framework that addresses these issues by leveraging visual foundation models inside the bounding box. Adopting a two-stage WSSS framework, our proposed network consists of a pseudo-label generation module and a segmentation module. The first stage leverages Segment Anything Model (SAM) to generate high-quality pseudo-labels. To alleviate the problem of delineating precise boundaries, we adopt SAM inside the bounding box with the help of another pre-trained foundation model (e.g., Grounding-DINO). Furthermore, we eliminate the necessity of using the supervision of image labels, by employing CLIP in classification. Then in the second stage, the generated high-quality pseudo-labels are used to train an off-the-shelf segmenter that achieves the state-of-the-art performance on PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Neural Parametric Surfaces for Shape Modeling

The recent surge of utilizing deep neural networks for geometric processing and shape modeling has opened up exciting avenues. However, there is a conspicuous lack of research efforts on using powerful neural representations to extend the capabilities of parametric surfaces, which are the prevalent surface representations in product design, CAD/CAM, and computer animation. We present Neural Parametric Surfaces, the first piecewise neural surface representation that allows coarse patch layouts of arbitrary $n$-sided surface patches to model complex surface geometries with high precision, offering greater flexibility over traditional parametric surfaces. By construction, this new surface representation guarantees $G^0$ continuity between adjacent patches and empirically achieves $G^1$ continuity, which cannot be attained by existing neural patch-based methods. The key ingredient of our neural parametric surface is a learnable feature complex $\mathcal{C}$ that is embedded in a high-dimensional space $\mathbb{R}^D$ and topologically equivalent to the patch layout of the surface; each face cell of the complex is defined by interpolating feature vectors at its vertices. The learned feature complex is mapped by an MLP-encoded function $f:\mathcal{C} \rightarrow \mathcal{S}$ to produce the neural parametric surface $\mathcal{S}$. We present a surface fitting algorithm that optimizes the feature complex $\mathcal{C}$ and trains the neural mapping $f$ to reconstruct given target shapes with high accuracy. We further show that the proposed representation along with a compact-size neural net can learn a plausible shape space from a shape collection, which can be used for shape interpolation or shape completion from noisy and incomplete input data. Extensive experiments show that neural parametric surfaces offer greater modeling capabilities than traditional parametric surfaces.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2021

The network asymmetry caused by the degree correlation and its effect on the bimodality in control

Our ability to control a whole network can be achieved via a small set of driver nodes. While the minimum number of driver nodes needed for control is fixed in a given network, there are multiple choices for the driver node set. A quantity used to investigate this multiplicity is the fraction of redundant nodes in the network, referring to nodes that do not need any external control. Previous work has discovered a bimodality feature characterized by a bifurcation diagram: networks with the same statistical property would stay with equal probability to have a large or small fraction of redundant nodes. Here we find that this feature is rooted in the symmetry of the directed network, where both the degree distribution and the degree correlation can play a role. The in-in and out-out degree correlation will suppress the bifurcation, as networks with such degree correlations are asymmetric under network transpose. The out-in and in-out degree correlation do not change the network symmetry, hence the bimodality feature is preserved. However, the out-in degree correlation will change the critical average degree needed for the bifurcation. Hence by fixing the average degree of networks and tuning out-in degree correlation alone, we can observe a similar bifurcation diagram. We conduct analytical analyses that adequately explain the emergence of bimodality caused by out-in degree correlation. We also propose a quantity, taking both degree distribution and degree correlation into consideration, to predict if a network would be at the upper or lower branch of the bifurcation. As is well known that most real networks are not neutral, our results extend our understandings of the controllability of complex networks.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2020

Salient Object Detection with Convex Hull Overlap

Salient object detection plays an important part in a vision system to detect important regions. Convolutional neural network (CNN) based methods directly train their models with large-scale datasets, but what is the crucial feature for saliency is still a problem. In this paper, we establish a novel bottom-up feature named convex hull overlap (CHO), combining with appearance contrast features, to detect salient objects. CHO feature is a kind of enhanced Gestalt cue. Psychologists believe that surroundedness reflects objects overlap relationship. An object which is on the top of the others is attractive. Our method significantly differs from other earlier works in (1) We set up a hand-crafted feature to detect salient object that our model does not need to be trained by large-scale datasets; (2) Previous works only focus on appearance features, while our CHO feature makes up the gap between the spatial object covering and the object's saliency. Our experiments on a large number of public datasets have obtained very positive results.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Video Object Segmentation with Adaptive Feature Bank and Uncertain-Region Refinement

We propose a new matching-based framework for semi-supervised video object segmentation (VOS). Recently, state-of-the-art VOS performance has been achieved by matching-based algorithms, in which feature banks are created to store features for region matching and classification. However, how to effectively organize information in the continuously growing feature bank remains under-explored, and this leads to inefficient design of the bank. We introduce an adaptive feature bank update scheme to dynamically absorb new features and discard obsolete features. We also design a new confidence loss and a fine-grained segmentation module to enhance the segmentation accuracy in uncertain regions. On public benchmarks, our algorithm outperforms existing state-of-the-arts.

cs.CV↗