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Yuan Meng

Publications and source records attributed to Yuan Meng.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

TS-DP: Reinforcement Speculative Decoding For Temporal Adaptive Diffusion Policy Acceleration

Diffusion Policy (DP) excels in embodied control but suffers from high inference latency and computational cost due to multiple iterative denoising steps. Existing diffusion model (DMs) acceleration methods improve inference speed by reducing computational overhead, as DMs for image generation are computation-bound. In this work, we reveal that DP are I/O bound, and thus propose using speculative decoding, a parallel computing framework, to accelerate DP for the first time. However, it is non-trivial to address the following challenges: (1) How to preserve the denoising quality of the base model at reduced computational cost under time-varying task difficulty in embodied settings; and (2) How to dynamically allocate computation according to task difficulty in such environments. Therefore, we propose Temporal-aware Reinforcement-based Speculative Diffusion Policy (TS-DP), the first framework that enables speculative decoding for DP with temporal adaptivity. First, to handle dynamic environments where task difficulty varies over time, we distill a Transformer-based drafter to imitate the base model and replace its costly denoising calls. Second, an RL-based scheduler further adapts to the time-varying task difficulty by adjusting speculative parameters to maintain accuracy while improving efficiency. Extensive experiments show that TS-DP achieves up to a 4.17x NFE reduction and a 3.2x wall-clock speedup with a draft acceptance rate of over 85% in simulation. Real-world experiments further demonstrate a 3.8x NFE reduction while improving success rates on real-time tasks (e.g., a 23% gain on the conveyor-belt task), reaching an inference frequency of 26 Hz and enabling real-time control while maintaining comparable task performance. The code is available at https://github.com/ChildTang/TS-DP.

cs.LG↗

GUIFlow: Temporal Redundancy-Aware Incremental Inference for GUI Agents

GUI agents built on vision-language models interact with continuously evolving interfaces, yet conventional inference repeatedly recomputes representations of largely overlapping observations and histories. This mismatch makes multi-step interaction costly, while changes in context, interface content, and action arguments prevent straightforward cache reuse. We introduce GUIFlow, a framework for full-pipeline incremental inference in multi-image GUI interaction. Our central insight is that advancing a decision need not require rebuilding all supporting representations: each interaction step can instead selectively update computational states maintained across the trajectory. To support new decisions as the context evolves, GUIFlow adapts how past computation is reused: historical KV states are position-aligned and injected into the current context; change signals guide selective updates of current-observation states in the vision encoder and language model; and earlier action responses serve as speculative drafts verified by the target model. Together, these mechanisms enable cross-step reuse throughout visual encoding, prefill, and decoding without additional training, a separate draft model, or changes to the model-visible inputs and action interface. Experiments demonstrate up to 3.39x geometric-mean speedup across offline multi-image benchmarks and up to 3.49x in online, closed-loop interaction on OSWorld, while maintaining task performance broadly comparable to the dense baseline.

cs.CV↗

Collective Learning for Unified Robotic Manipulation via Predictive Dynamics Adaptation

Learning a collective policy for state-based Cartesian manipulation across diverse robotic embodiments presents a fundamental challenge due to embodiment-dependent transition dynamics. Collective learning aggregates multi-robot experience to discover shared task structure, yet naive aggregation can average incompatible action modes when different embodiments realize the same Cartesian command through different transition behavior. This leads to strategy ambiguity and performance collapse on dynamically outlying embodiments. To address this, we propose PACE, a two-stage collective learning framework that separates shared task-space intent from embodiment-dependent transition dynamics. The first stage employs a representation layer pre-trained on offline trajectories to extract task-level context from collective data. The second stage introduces a decision layer equipped with a predictive dynamics adapter. By forcing the latent state to predict future transitions, this adapter acts as a latent regularizer that grounds the policy in the transition behavior of the executing robot while preserving real-time inference without online planning. Evaluations across simulated embodiments demonstrate that our method prevents performance collapse on distinct robots. It achieves over 93\% overall success and 89\% on dynamically out-of-distribution zero-shot simulated robots, outperforming the Transformer behavior cloning (82\%) and diffusion policy baselines (66\%). Physical KUKA deployment further validates the feasibility of the full state-based pipeline under zero-shot sim-to-real transfer.

cs.RO↗

Robotic Ultra-Long-Horizon Manipulation Skills via Human-guided Lifelong Code Generation

Large language models (LLMs) can translate natural-language instructions for robotic manipulation into executable code, but ambiguity, noisy generations, and limited context windows make ultra-long-horizon tasks unreliable. Closed-loop approaches that rely only on LLM feedback also struggle because LLMs have limited robotic reasoning, even when task errors are obvious to humans. Feedback is often stored in representations that generalize poorly to unseen tasks and can cause catastrophic forgetting as new corrections accumulate. We propose LYRA, a human-guided lifelong skill learning and code generation framework that distills human feedback into modular, reusable skills and incrementally extends their functionality across successive interactions while preserving previously learned behavior. External memory stores learned skills and execution examples; retrieval-augmented generation selects relevant knowledge, while user hints guide reuse when retrieval is insufficient, supporting ultra-long-horizon execution. Experiments on Ravens, Franka Kitchen, LIBERO-long, MetaWorld, and real-world tasks show a 0.93 success rate, up to 27\% higher than baselines, and a 42\% improvement in correction efficiency. LYRA also robustly solves ``build a house'', which requires planning over 20 primitives.

cs.RO↗

RealtimeWAM: How Fast Can I Run My World Action Model?

World Action Models (WAMs) combine visual dynamics modeling with action generation, but their high inference latency limits responsive robot control. Recent efforts accelerate inference by removing explicit future-video generation at test time, as in FastWAM, an approach that requires a specially tailored architectural design. More general caching strategies exploit feature redundancy, but redundancy alone does not capture the changing computational demands of closed-loop control. To address these challenges, we present RealtimeWAM, a general, training-free framework that coordinates parallel execution with adaptive computation for low-latency inference across diverse WAM architectures. We exploit layerwise dependencies to overlap observation processing with prediction. However, concurrent branches still compete for GPU resources, limiting the benefit of parallel execution. We therefore adapt computation throughout the pipeline through selective reuse, caching observation features in visually stable regions and reusing Transformer residuals while reserving additional refinement for small predicted adjustments. We evaluate RealtimeWAM on FastWAM and OpenWAM across RoboTwin, LIBERO, and LIBERO-Plus. On an RTX 4090, measured mean inference latencies are 24.09 and 63.09 ms, corresponding to average speedups of 8.90$\times$ and 10.67$\times$. Average success rates are 82.75% and 87.41%, respectively, within 0.02 and 0.53 percentage points of native inference. Across five real-world tasks, RealtimeWAM improves average success rates over native inference by 17.2 and 37.2 percentage points on FastWAM and OpenWAM, respectively.

cs.RO↗

Robotic Long-Horizon Manipulation with Progressive In-Context Code Generation and Episodic Feedback

Robotic long-horizon manipulation requires robots to compose perception, reasoning, and action over extended task sequences, yet existing language-conditioned frameworks often rely on dense step-wise feedback, learned action policies, or unstructured prompting, which limits robustness and generalization. We propose DAHLIA, a data-agnostic code-generation framework that treats long-horizon manipulation as episodic task planning and evaluation. DAHLIA uses progressively organized in-context examples with chain-of-thought reasoning to guide an LLM in synthesizing executable code plans from language instructions. To improve robustness under partial observability, a VLM-based reporter evaluates task outcomes only after each execution episode and provides structured feedback for replanning, avoiding the overhead of per-step inference. Experiments on LoHoRavens, CALVIN, Franka Kitchen, and real-world manipulation tasks show that DAHLIA achieves strong performance on over 30 long-horizon tasks and improves generalization to unseen scenarios, including cluttered scenes and occluded objects.

cs.RO↗

Robotic Long-Horizon Manipulation with Bayesian Non-parametric Skill Priors

Long-horizon manipulation under sparse rewards remains challenging for reinforcement learning due to delayed feedback and inefficient exploration. Existing skill-based approaches often assume a fixed parametric prior (e.g., a single Gaussian), limiting their ability to capture diverse and multi-modal skill structures required for complex tasks. We propose a Bayesian non-parametric skill prior that models temporally extended skills in a structured latent space using a Dirichlet Process Mixture, enabling adaptive skill discovery without predefining the number of components. Integrated into a hierarchical RL framework, the learned prior guides high-level skill selection while a pretrained decoder generates temporally abstracted actions, improving exploration efficiency in sparse-reward settings. Experiments on Franka Kitchen, LIBERO-Long, Meta-World, and a real robot demonstrate consistent gains in long-horizon manipulation, achieving over 0.8 success rate within 1.5M steps, whereas SAC fails to converge even after 5M steps ($<$0.1). Compared to a single-Gaussian prior baseline, our model yields an average improvement of 21.8\%.

cs.RO↗

VidAct: Learning Manipulation from In-the-Wild Videos with Object-Centric 3D Awareness

Video demonstrations offer a scalable alternative to costly robot data for learning manipulation, yet existing reconstruction-based approaches often rely on constrained camera viewpoints or human-to-robot retargeting, while the reconstructed trajectories are difficult to adapt to new objects configurations without distorting the trajectory shape. Another key limitation is that the resulting policies often lack precise object-level 3D geometry awareness, limiting object grounding and object shape awareness critical for precise manipulation. To bridge these gaps, we propose VidAct, an efficient video-to-robot framework that learns object-centric, 3D-aware manipulation policies from a single monocular video per task and enables zero-shot real-world deployment. VidAct consists of three key components. First, VidAct reconstructs object meshes and motion from arbitrary demo videos and canonicalizes the motion in the static object frame, avoiding embodiment-specific retargeting and accommodating diverse camera viewpoints. Second, VidAct employ residual trajectory transfer for adapting the reconstructed motion to novel object configurations while preserving its motion shape. Finally, as the key policy-learning component, VidAct predicts simulation-provided privileged complete-object point clouds at each frame as an auxiliary task while retaining RGB-only deployment, providing dense object-centric supervision over both object pose and 3D geometry. Experiments on human, robot, generated, and internet videos demonstrate broad video applicability and zero-shot deployment. Per-frame complete-object 3D supervision improves policy generalization and sim-to-real success, while residual trajectory transfer enables reliable trajectory adaptation with better shape preservation.

cs.RO↗

Gaussian Stippling: Efficient Sorting-Free 3D Gaussian Rendering through Hybrid Sampling and Spatiotemporal Reconstruction

Conventional 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) requires depth sorting and ordered alpha blending to correctly render overlapping Gaussian primitives. Stochastic transparency enables sorting-free rendering by replacing fractional alpha contributions with discrete stochastic visibility samples, but produces substantial spatial and temporal noise at low sample counts. We refer to this conversion from continuous Gaussian splats to discrete visibility samples as \textit{Gaussian Stippling}. Based on this, we present an efficient order-independent rendering and reconstruction framework that operates directly on unmodified 3DGS assets. Our method adaptively integrates primitive-based and fragment-based stippling, leveraging their complementary strengths across different rendering regimes to significantly improve rendering throughput. To recover high-quality images from sparse stochastic samples, we further introduce a lightweight Gaussian-aware spatiotemporal reconstruction network. By exploiting the Gaussian attributes retained by each stipple, the network aggregates structured stochastic clues across both space and time, effectively suppressing stippling noise. Experiments show that our hybrid Gaussian stippling method, coupled with a spatiotemporal reconstruction network trained on diverse scenes, generalizes to unseen scenes and enables interactive, temporally stable, and visually plausible rendering on mobile devices without retraining or preprocessing. With scene-specific training and appropriately scaled sampling and network capacity, our method further outperforms the baselines in visual quality, offering a high-fidelity configuration for quality-prioritized applications.

cs.GR↗

DECO: Decoupled Multimodal Diffusion Transformer for Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation with a Plugin Tactile Adapter

Bimanual dexterous manipulation relies on integrating multimodal inputs to perform complex real-world tasks. To address the challenges of effectively combining these modalities, we propose DECO, a decoupled multimodal diffusion transformer that disentangles vision, proprioception, and tactile signals through specialized conditioning pathways, enabling structured and controllable integration of multimodal inputs, with a lightweight adapter for parameter-efficient injection of additional signals. Alongside DECO, we release DECO-50 dataset for bimanual dexterous manipulation with tactile sensing, consisting of 50 hours of data and over 5M frames, collected via teleoperation on real dual-arm robots. We train DECO on DECO-50 and conduct extensive real-world evaluation with over 2,000 robot rollouts. Experimental results show that DECO achieves the best performance across all tasks, with a 72.25% average success rate and a 21% improvement over the baseline. Moreover, the tactile adapter brings an additional 10.25% average success rate across all tasks and a 20% gain on complex contact-rich tasks while tuning less than 10% of the model parameters.

cs.RO↗

Energy Extraction via Magnetic Reconnection from Rotating ModMax Black Holes

Magnetic reconnection has been widely recognized as an important mechanism for extracting energy from rapidly rotating black holes. We find that magnetic reconnection can also efficiently extract energy from slowly rotating ModMax black holes. In this paper, we investigate the magnetic reconnection process of ModMax black holes in both circular and plunging orbits. First, we analyze the fundamental characteristic quantities of the ModMax black hole, including the event horizon, ergosphere radius, and circular photon orbits. The results indicate that the charge parameter $Q$ and screening factor $γ$ exhibit a competing effect on the fundamental characteristic quantities of the ModMax black hole. Furthermore, for the extremal ModMax black hole, a larger $Q$ and a smaller $γ$ lower the minimum allowed spin parameter $a$. Subsequently, we analyze the parameter space $(r,a)$ for energy extraction in circular and plunging orbits. A larger $Q$ and a smaller $γ$ reduce the region for energy extraction and decrease the minimum spin parameter $a$ required for energy extraction. For circular orbits, the minimum allowed spin parameter is $a\simeq 0.50071$, while for plunging orbits, this threshold further decreases to $a\simeq0.22407$. This proves that energy extraction from lower spin ModMax black holes is theoretically feasible. Finally, we compare the energy extraction region, power, and efficiency between circular and plunging orbits. It is found that these quantities in plunging orbits are always higher than those in circular orbits, indicating that energy extraction from plunging orbits via magnetic reconnection may be more efficient.

gr-qc↗

RobotDancing: Residual-Action Reinforcement Learning Enables Robust Long-Horizon Humanoid Motion Tracking

Long-horizon, high-dynamic motion tracking on humanoids remains brittle: retargeted reference motions are typically kinematically plausible but dynamically inconsistent with the robot, so small tracking errors accumulate and eventually destabilize control. We present RobotDancing, a practical single-stage reinforcement learning recipe that tracks retargeted motions by predicting reference-conditioned residual joint targets. By parameterizing actions as residual corrections on top of the reference, the policy can focus on compensating reference--robot dynamics mismatch (e.g., actuation limits, latency, friction, inertia) rather than re-synthesizing the motion. We train one policy per reference sequence while reusing a common training and deployment recipe across motions and platforms. We evaluate RobotDancing on eight LAFAN1 dance motions on Unitree G1 and conduct cross-platform experiments on H1 and H1-2. The resulting G1 policies execute long-horizon, high-energy behaviors on hardware without test-time modifications, and qualitative H1/H1-2 clips further illustrate cross-platform feasibility.

cs.RO↗

Bridging Language and Action: A Survey of Language-Conditioned Robot Manipulation

Language-conditioned robot manipulation is an emerging field aimed at enabling seamless communication and cooperation between humans and robotic agents by teaching robots to comprehend and execute instructions conveyed in natural language. This interdisciplinary area integrates scene understanding, language processing, and policy learning to bridge the gap between human instructions and robot actions. In this comprehensive survey, we systematically explore recent advancements in language-conditioned robot manipulation. We categorize existing methods based on the primary ways language is integrated into the robot system, namely language for state evaluation, language as a policy condition, language for cognitive planning and reasoning, and language in unified vision-language-action models. Specifically, we further analyze state-of-the-art techniques from five axes of action granularity, data and supervision regimes, system cost and latency, environments and evaluations, and task specification. Additionally, we highlight the key debates in the field. Finally, we discuss open challenges and future research directions, focusing on potentially enhancing generalization capabilities and addressing safety issues in language-conditioned robot manipulators.

cs.RO↗

Knowledge Reutilization in Meta-Reinforcement Learning

Meta-reinforcement learning enables fast adaptation by extracting shared structure from related tasks, but existing end-to-end methods often couple task inference with embodiment-specific control. This coupling can obscure non-parametric task semantics, reduce sample efficiency, and limit cross-agent reuse. We propose a meta-knowledge reutilization framework that learns task-level knowledge on a dynamics-simplified agent and transfers it to heterogeneous agents. The framework uses a Bayesian non-parametric prior to organize latent task modes and a high-level policy to generate task-level magnitude guidance. To bridge reusable task knowledge with different embodiments, we introduce a semantic-magnitude interface and a lightweight temporal adaptor, which convert frozen meta-knowledge into temporally aligned subgoals for embodiment-specific low-level controllers. Experiments on multiple locomotion agents show that our framework reduces final-step tracking error by 94.75% -- 99.79% compared with recent state-of-the-art baselines and achieves comparable deployment performance with about 23.8% of their interaction data.

cs.AI↗

ElegantVLA: Learning When to Think for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are a powerful paradigm for generalist robotic control. However, their high computational cost and limited control frequency hinder real-time robotic manipulation, especially when large vision-language backbones and iterative action heads run at every control step. Existing VLA acceleration methods often optimize individual components or rely on fixed acceleration rules, treating different control steps with largely fixed computation and overlooking the non-uniform reasoning demands of sequential embodied control. Inspired by human motor control, where cognitive and feedback resources concentrate on goal-sensitive stages, we argue that VLA models should learn when to invest full computation and when to reuse prior computation. We propose ElegantVLA, a plug-in phase-adaptive inference framework that accelerates VLA models through intra-model dynamic compute scheduling. ElegantVLA introduces a lightweight scheduler that observes temporal representation similarity, robot-motion cues, and episode progress to jointly allocate computation across the vision encoder, LLM, and action head. For perception-language reasoning, the scheduler selects a five-level Vision-LLM compute mode, from full recomputation to multi-step temporal reuse, based on visual-language representation stability. For action generation, it selects a three-level denoising mode, reusing intermediate denoising states during stable motion while preserving full refinement for goal-sensitive stages. By coordinating these decisions, ElegantVLA offers a general acceleration framework for modern VLA pipelines with explicit action-generation modules, without modifying or retraining the base model. Experiments on GR00T and CogACT achieve up to 2.55x and 3.77x speedup, and on six real-world GR00T tasks ElegantVLA cuts computation by 2.18x while raising control frequency from 13.8 Hz to 26.3 Hz.

cs.RO↗

Sparse ActionGen: Accelerating Diffusion Policy with Real-time Pruning

Diffusion Policy has dominated action generation due to its strong capabilities for modeling multi-modal action distributions, but its multi-step denoising processes make it impractical for real-time visuomotor control. Existing caching-based acceleration methods typically rely on $\textit{static}$ schedules that fail to adapt to the $\textit{dynamics}$ of robot-environment interactions, thereby leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose $\underline{\textbf{S}}$parse $\underline{\textbf{A}}$ction$\underline{\textbf{G}}$en ($\textbf{SAG}$) for extremely sparse action generation. To accommodate the iterative interactions, SAG customizes a rollout-adaptive prune-then-reuse mechanism that first identifies prunable computations globally and then reuses cached activations to substitute them during action diffusion. To capture the rollout dynamics, SAG parameterizes an observation-conditioned diffusion pruner for environment-aware adaptation and instantiates it with a highly parameter- and inference-efficient design for real-time prediction. Furthermore, SAG introduces a one-for-all reusing strategy that reuses activations across both timesteps and blocks in a zig-zag manner, minimizing the global redundancy. Extensive experiments on multiple robotic benchmarks demonstrate that SAG achieves up to 4$\times$ generation speedup without sacrificing performance. Project Page: https://sparse-actiongen.github.io.

cs.RO↗

Block-wise Adaptive Caching for Accelerating Diffusion Policy

Diffusion Policy has demonstrated strong visuomotor modeling capabilities, but its high computational cost renders it impractical for real-time robotic control. Despite huge redundancy across repetitive denoising steps, existing diffusion acceleration techniques fail to generalize to Diffusion Policy due to fundamental architectural and data divergences. In this paper, we propose $\textbf{B}$lock-wise $\textbf{A}$daptive $\textbf{C}$aching ($\textbf{BAC}$), a method to accelerate Diffusion Policy by caching intermediate action features. BAC achieves lossless action generation acceleration by adaptively updating and reusing cached features at the block level, based on a key observation that feature similarities exhibit non-uniform temporal dynamics and distinct block-specific patterns. To operationalize this insight, we first design an Adaptive Caching Scheduler to identify optimal update timesteps by maximizing the global feature similarities between cached and skipped features. However, applying this scheduler for each block leads to significant error surges due to the inter-block propagation of caching errors, particularly within Feed-Forward Network (FFN) blocks. To mitigate this issue, we develop the Bubbling Union Algorithm, which truncates these errors by updating the upstream blocks with significant caching errors before downstream FFNs. As a training-free plugin, BAC is readily integrable with existing transformer-based Diffusion Policy and vision-language-action models. Extensive experiments on multiple robotic benchmarks demonstrate that BAC achieves up to 3$\times$ inference speedup for free. Project page: https://block-wise-adaptive-caching.github.io.

cs.AI↗

Test-time Sparsity for Extreme Fast Action Diffusion

Action diffusion excels at high-fidelity action generation but incurs heavy computational costs owing to its iterative denoising nature. Despite current technologies showing promise in accelerating diffusion transformers by reusing the cached features, they struggle to adapt to policy dynamics arising from diverse perceptions and multi-round rollout iterations in open environments. We propose test-time sparsity to tackle this challenge, which aims to accelerate action diffusion by dynamically predicting prunable residual computations for each model forward at test time. However, two bottlenecks remain in this paradigm: 1) repetitive conditional encoding and pruning offset most potential speed gains, and 2) the features cached from previous denoising timesteps cannot constrain large pruning errors under aggressive sparsity. To address the first bottleneck, we design a highly parallelized inference pipeline that minimizes the non-decoder delay to milliseconds. Specifically, we first design a lightweight pruner that shares the encoder with the diffusion transformer. Then, we decouple the encoding and pruning from the autoregressive denoising loop by processing all denoising timesteps in parallel, and overlap the pruner with the decoder forward inference through asynchronism. To overcome the second bottleneck, we introduce an omnidirectional reusing strategy, which achieves 95% sparsity by selectively reusing features cached from the current forward, previous denoising timesteps, and earlier rollout iterations. To learn the rollout-level reusing strategies, we sample a few action trajectories to supervise the sparsified diffusion step by step. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method reduces FLOPs by 92% and accelerates action generation by 5x, achieving lossless performance with an inference frequency of 47.5 Hz. Our code is available at https://github.com/ky-ji/Test-time-Sparsity.

cs.CV↗