arXiv subjects

Yuanfei Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Yuanfei Wang.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

RoboWM-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating World Models in Robotic Manipulation

Recent advances in large-scale video world models have enabled increasingly realistic future prediction, raising the prospect of using generated videos as scalable supervision for robot learning. However, for embodied manipulation, perceptual realism alone is not sufficient: generated interactions must also be physically consistent and executable by robotic agents. Existing benchmarks provide valuable assessments of visual quality and physical plausibility, but they do not systematically evaluate whether predicted behaviors can be translated into executable actions that complete manipulation tasks. We introduce RoboWM-Bench, a manipulation-centric benchmark for embodiment-grounded evaluation of video world models. RoboWM-Bench converts generated human-hand and robotic manipulation videos into embodied action sequences and validates them through execution in physically grounded simulation environments. Built on real-to-sim scene reconstruction and diverse manipulation tasks, RoboWM-Bench enables standardized, reproducible, and scalable evaluation of physical executability. Using RoboWM-Bench, we evaluate state-of-the-art video world models and observe that visual plausibility and embodied executability are not always aligned. Our analysis highlights several recurring factors that affect execution performance, including spatial reasoning, contact prediction, and non-physical geometric distortions, particularly in complex and long-horizon interactions. These findings provide a more fine-grained view of current model capabilities and underscore the value of embodiment-aware evaluation for guiding physically grounded world modeling in robotic manipulation.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

From Seeing to Simulating: Generative High-Fidelity Simulation with Digital Cousins for Generalizable Robot Learning and Evaluation

Learning robust robot policies in real-world environments requires diverse data augmentation, yet scaling real-world data collection is costly due to the need for acquiring physical assets and reconfiguring environments. Therefore, augmenting real-world scenes into simulation has become a practical augmentation for efficient learning and evaluation. We present a generative framework that establishes a generative real-to-sim mapping from real-world panoramas to high-fidelity simulation scenes, and further synthesize diverse cousin scenes via semantic and geometric editing. Combined with high-quality physics engines and realistic assets, the generated scenes support interactive manipulation tasks. Additionally, we incorporate multi-room stitching to construct consistent large-scale environments for long-horizon navigation across complex layouts. Experiments demonstrate a strong sim-to-real correlation validating our platform's fidelity, and show that extensively scaling up data generation leads to significantly better generalization to unseen scene and object variations, demonstrating the effectiveness of Digital Cousins for generalizable robot learning and evaluation.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

IPD: Boosting Sequential Policy with Imaginary Planning Distillation in Offline Reinforcement Learning

Decision transformer based sequential policies have emerged as a powerful paradigm in offline reinforcement learning (RL), yet their efficacy remains constrained by the quality of static datasets and inherent architectural limitations. Specifically, these models often struggle to effectively integrate suboptimal experiences and fail to explicitly plan for an optimal policy. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{Imaginary Planning Distillation (IPD)}, a novel framework that seamlessly incorporates offline planning into data generation, supervised training, and online inference. Our framework first learns a world model equipped with uncertainty measures and a quasi-optimal value function from the offline data. These components are utilized to identify suboptimal trajectories and augment them with reliable, imagined optimal rollouts generated via Model Predictive Control (MPC). A Transformer-based sequential policy is then trained on this enriched dataset, complemented by a value-guided objective that promotes the distillation of the optimal policy. By replacing the conventional, manually-tuned return-to-go with the learned quasi-optimal value function, IPD improves both decision-making stability and performance during inference. Empirical evaluations on the D4RL benchmark demonstrate that IPD significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art value-based and transformer-based offline RL methods across diverse tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Communication-Efficient Desire Alignment for Embodied Agent-Human Adaptation

While embodied agents have made significant progress in performing complex physical tasks, real-world applications demand more than pure task execution. The agents must collaborate with unfamiliar agents and human users, whose goals are often vague and implicit. In such settings, interpreting ambiguous instructions and uncovering underlying desires is essential for effective assistance. Therefore, fast and accurate desire alignment becomes a critical capability for embodied agents. In this work, we first develop a home assistance simulation environment HA-Desire that integrates an LLM-driven proxy human user exhibiting realistic value-driven goal selection and communication. The ego agent must interact with this proxy user to infer and adapt to the user's latent desires. To achieve this, we present a novel framework FAMER for fast desire alignment, which introduces a desire-based mental reasoning mechanism to identify user intent and filter desire-irrelevant actions. We further design a reflection-based communication module that reduces redundant inquiries, and incorporate goal-relevant information extraction with memory persistence to improve information reuse and reduce unnecessary exploration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly enhances both task execution and communication efficiency, enabling embodied agents to quickly adapt to user-specific desires in complex embodied environments.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Adaptive Articulated Object Manipulation On The Fly with Foundation Model Reasoning and Part Grounding

Articulated objects pose diverse manipulation challenges for robots. Since their internal structures are not directly observable, robots must adaptively explore and refine actions to generate successful manipulation trajectories. While existing works have attempted cross-category generalization in adaptive articulated object manipulation, two major challenges persist: (1) the geometric diversity of real-world articulated objects complicates visual perception and understanding, and (2) variations in object functions and mechanisms hinder the development of a unified adaptive manipulation strategy. To address these challenges, we propose AdaRPG, a novel framework that leverages foundation models to extract object parts, which exhibit greater local geometric similarity than entire objects, thereby enhancing visual affordance generalization for functional primitive skills. To support this, we construct a part-level affordance annotation dataset to train the affordance model. Additionally, AdaRPG utilizes the common knowledge embedded in foundation models to reason about complex mechanisms and generate high-level control codes that invoke primitive skill functions based on part affordance inference. Simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate AdaRPG's strong generalization ability across novel articulated object categories.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models: An Action Tokenization Perspective

The remarkable advancements of vision and language foundation models in multimodal understanding, reasoning, and generation has sparked growing efforts to extend such intelligence to the physical world, fueling the flourishing of vision-language-action (VLA) models. Despite seemingly diverse approaches, we observe that current VLA models can be unified under a single framework: vision and language inputs are processed by a series of VLA modules, producing a chain of \textit{action tokens} that progressively encode more grounded and actionable information, ultimately generating executable actions. We further determine that the primary design choice distinguishing VLA models lies in how action tokens are formulated, which can be categorized into language description, code, affordance, trajectory, goal state, latent representation, raw action, and reasoning. However, there remains a lack of comprehensive understanding regarding action tokens, significantly impeding effective VLA development and obscuring future directions. Therefore, this survey aims to categorize and interpret existing VLA research through the lens of action tokenization, distill the strengths and limitations of each token type, and identify areas for improvement. Through this systematic review and analysis, we offer a synthesized outlook on the broader evolution of VLA models, highlight underexplored yet promising directions, and contribute guidance for future research, hoping to bring the field closer to general-purpose intelligence.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Boosting Universal LLM Reward Design through Heuristic Reward Observation Space Evolution

Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as promising tools for automated reinforcement learning (RL) reward design, owing to their robust capabilities in commonsense reasoning and code generation. By engaging in dialogues with RL agents, LLMs construct a Reward Observation Space (ROS) by selecting relevant environment states and defining their internal operations. However, existing frameworks have not effectively leveraged historical exploration data or manual task descriptions to iteratively evolve this space. In this paper, we propose a novel heuristic framework that enhances LLM-driven reward design by evolving the ROS through a table-based exploration caching mechanism and a text-code reconciliation strategy. Our framework introduces a state execution table, which tracks the historical usage and success rates of environment states, overcoming the Markovian constraint typically found in LLM dialogues and facilitating more effective exploration. Furthermore, we reconcile user-provided task descriptions with expert-defined success criteria using structured prompts, ensuring alignment in reward design objectives. Comprehensive evaluations on benchmark RL tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of the proposed framework. Code and video demos are available at jingjjjjjie.github.io/LLM2Reward.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

AdaManip: Adaptive Articulated Object Manipulation Environments and Policy Learning

Articulated object manipulation is a critical capability for robots to perform various tasks in real-world scenarios. Composed of multiple parts connected by joints, articulated objects are endowed with diverse functional mechanisms through complex relative motions. For example, a safe consists of a door, a handle, and a lock, where the door can only be opened when the latch is unlocked. The internal structure, such as the state of a lock or joint angle constraints, cannot be directly observed from visual observation. Consequently, successful manipulation of these objects requires adaptive adjustment based on trial and error rather than a one-time visual inference. However, previous datasets and simulation environments for articulated objects have primarily focused on simple manipulation mechanisms where the complete manipulation process can be inferred from the object's appearance. To enhance the diversity and complexity of adaptive manipulation mechanisms, we build a novel articulated object manipulation environment and equip it with 9 categories of objects. Based on the environment and objects, we further propose an adaptive demonstration collection and 3D visual diffusion-based imitation learning pipeline that learns the adaptive manipulation policy. The effectiveness of our designs and proposed method is validated through both simulation and real-world experiments. Our project page is available at: https://adamanip.github.io

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Fast Peer Adaptation with Context-aware Exploration

Fast adapting to unknown peers (partners or opponents) with different strategies is a key challenge in multi-agent games. To do so, it is crucial for the agent to probe and identify the peer's strategy efficiently, as this is the prerequisite for carrying out the best response in adaptation. However, exploring the strategies of unknown peers is difficult, especially when the games are partially observable and have a long horizon. In this paper, we propose a peer identification reward, which rewards the learning agent based on how well it can identify the behavior pattern of the peer over the historical context, such as the observation over multiple episodes. This reward motivates the agent to learn a context-aware policy for effective exploration and fast adaptation, i.e., to actively seek and collect informative feedback from peers when uncertain about their policies and to exploit the context to perform the best response when confident. We evaluate our method on diverse testbeds that involve competitive (Kuhn Poker), cooperative (PO-Overcooked), or mixed (Predator-Prey-W) games with peer agents. We demonstrate that our method induces more active exploration behavior, achieving faster adaptation and better outcomes than existing methods.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2022

Joint Open Knowledge Base Canonicalization and Linking

Open Information Extraction (OIE) methods extract a large number of OIE triples (noun phrase, relation phrase, noun phrase) from text, which compose large Open Knowledge Bases (OKBs). However, noun phrases (NPs) and relation phrases (RPs) in OKBs are not canonicalized and often appear in different paraphrased textual variants, which leads to redundant and ambiguous facts. To address this problem, there are two related tasks: OKB canonicalization (i.e., convert NPs and RPs to canonicalized form) and OKB linking (i.e., link NPs and RPs with their corresponding entities and relations in a curated Knowledge Base (e.g., DBPedia). These two tasks are tightly coupled, and one task can benefit significantly from the other. However, they have been studied in isolation so far. In this paper, we explore the task of joint OKB canonicalization and linking for the first time, and propose a novel framework JOCL based on factor graph model to make them reinforce each other. JOCL is flexible enough to combine different signals from both tasks, and able to extend to fit any new signals. A thorough experimental study over two large scale OIE triple data sets shows that our framework outperforms all the baseline methods for the task of OKB canonicalization (OKB linking) in terms of average F1 (accuracy).

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

ToM2C: Target-oriented Multi-agent Communication and Cooperation with Theory of Mind

Being able to predict the mental states of others is a key factor to effective social interaction. It is also crucial for distributed multi-agent systems, where agents are required to communicate and cooperate. In this paper, we introduce such an important social-cognitive skill, i.e. Theory of Mind (ToM), to build socially intelligent agents who are able to communicate and cooperate effectively to accomplish challenging tasks. With ToM, each agent is capable of inferring the mental states and intentions of others according to its (local) observation. Based on the inferred states, the agents decide "when" and with "whom" to share their intentions. With the information observed, inferred, and received, the agents decide their sub-goals and reach a consensus among the team. In the end, the low-level executors independently take primitive actions to accomplish the sub-goals. We demonstrate the idea in two typical target-oriented multi-agent tasks: cooperative navigation and multi-sensor target coverage. The experiments show that the proposed model not only outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on reward and communication efficiency, but also shows good generalization across different scales of the environment.

cs.MA↗