arXiv subjects

Zhibin Li

Publications and source records attributed to Zhibin Li.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Phase transition of hot dense QCD Matter from a refined holographic EMD model

In this study, we begin by delineating the Einstein-Maxwell-Dilaton (EMD) model within the holographic QCD framework and deriving the equation of state through holographic renormalization. Subsequently, we utilize the Wald method to determine the first law of thermodynamics for a five-dimensional black hole, thereby confirming the alignment of our EMD model with the thermodynamics of the grand canonical ensemble in the boundary field theory. By employing the $n-2$ form in the Wald method, we proceed to calculate the shear viscosity in Gauss-Bonnet gravity. The results we obtain demonstrate consistency with those from first-order metric perturbation. Furthermore, we construct a refined EMD model that attains quantitative agreement with the lattice QCD equation of state and baryon number susceptibility data at finite density. Using this enhanced model, we delve into the investigation of signals related to the QCD phase transition critical endpoint. At present, no non-monotonic changes in $κσ^2$ have been observed within the 7$\sim$200 GeV collision energy range at STAR. However, our theoretical analysis suggests that if the chemical freeze-out line does not intersect the first-order phase transition line, a peak-like structure in $κσ^2$ is anticipated within the 3$\sim$5 GeV range.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2025

Efficient Learning of A Unified Policy For Whole-body Manipulation and Locomotion Skills

Equipping quadruped robots with manipulators provides unique loco-manipulation capabilities, enabling diverse practical applications. This integration creates a more complex system that has increased difficulties in modeling and control. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising solution to address these challenges by learning optimal control policies through interaction. Nevertheless, RL methods often struggle with local optima when exploring large solution spaces for motion and manipulation tasks. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel approach that integrates an explicit kinematic model of the manipulator into the RL framework. This integration provides feedback on the mapping of the body postures to the manipulator's workspace, guiding the RL exploration process and effectively mitigating the local optima issue. Our algorithm has been successfully deployed on a DeepRobotics X20 quadruped robot equipped with a Unitree Z1 manipulator, and extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of this approach.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Structured and sparse partial least squares coherence for multivariate cortico-muscular analysis

Multivariate cortico-muscular analysis has recently emerged as a promising approach for evaluating the corticospinal neural pathway. However, current multivariate approaches encounter challenges such as high dimensionality and limited sample sizes, thus restricting their further applications. In this paper, we propose a structured and sparse partial least squares coherence algorithm (ssPLSC) to extract shared latent space representations related to cortico-muscular interactions. Our approach leverages an embedded optimization framework by integrating a partial least squares (PLS)-based objective function, a sparsity constraint and a connectivity-based structured constraint, addressing the generalizability, interpretability and spatial structure. To solve the optimization problem, we develop an efficient alternating iterative algorithm within a unified framework and prove its convergence experimentally. Extensive experimental results from one synthetic and several real-world datasets have demonstrated that ssPLSC can achieve competitive or better performance over some representative multivariate cortico-muscular fusion methods, particularly in scenarios characterized by limited sample sizes and high noise levels. This study provides a novel multivariate fusion method for cortico-muscular analysis, offering a transformative tool for the evaluation of corticospinal pathway integrity in neurological disorders.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2025

Splatting Physical Scenes: End-to-End Real-to-Sim from Imperfect Robot Data

Creating accurate, physical simulations directly from real-world robot motion holds great value for safe, scalable, and affordable robot learning, yet remains exceptionally challenging. Real robot data suffers from occlusions, noisy camera poses, dynamic scene elements, which hinder the creation of geometrically accurate and photorealistic digital twins of unseen objects. We introduce a novel real-to-sim framework tackling all these challenges at once. Our key insight is a hybrid scene representation merging the photorealistic rendering of 3D Gaussian Splatting with explicit object meshes suitable for physics simulation within a single representation. We propose an end-to-end optimization pipeline that leverages differentiable rendering and differentiable physics within MuJoCo to jointly refine all scene components - from object geometry and appearance to robot poses and physical parameters - directly from raw and imprecise robot trajectories. This unified optimization allows us to simultaneously achieve high-fidelity object mesh reconstruction, generate photorealistic novel views, and perform annotation-free robot pose calibration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach both in simulation and on challenging real-world sequences using an ALOHA 2 bi-manual manipulator, enabling more practical and robust real-to-simulation pipelines.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Astra: Toward General-Purpose Mobile Robots via Hierarchical Multimodal Learning

Modern robot navigation systems encounter difficulties in diverse and complex indoor environments. Traditional approaches rely on multiple modules with small models or rule-based systems and thus lack adaptability to new environments. To address this, we developed Astra, a comprehensive dual-model architecture, Astra-Global and Astra-Local, for mobile robot navigation. Astra-Global, a multimodal LLM, processes vision and language inputs to perform self and goal localization using a hybrid topological-semantic graph as the global map, and outperforms traditional visual place recognition methods. Astra-Local, a multitask network, handles local path planning and odometry estimation. Its 4D spatial-temporal encoder, trained through self-supervised learning, generates robust 4D features for downstream tasks. The planning head utilizes flow matching and a novel masked ESDF loss to minimize collision risks for generating local trajectories, and the odometry head integrates multi-sensor inputs via a transformer encoder to predict the relative pose of the robot. Deployed on real in-house mobile robots, Astra achieves high end-to-end mission success rate across diverse indoor environments.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Signals of critical end point from jet quenching and quark energy loss in holographic QCD

The jet quenching parameter and energy loss of light and heavy quarks have been investigated in the framework of holographic QCD models with a critical end point (CEP) at finite baryon chemical potential in $N_f=2,2+1,2+1+1$ systems. The properties of the jet quenching parameter and energy loss around CEP have been carefully studied, and some evident signatures for CEP are subtracted. It is found that the dimensionless jet quenching parameter and the energy loss of light and heavy quarks exhibit evident features around CEP. Specifically, all these quantities increase rapidly near the CEP phase transition temperature $T_{CEP}$ with fixed $μ_{CEP}$. Moreover, the velocity dependent behavior of heavy quark energy loss at CEP differs significantly from charged particle energy loss in QED matter. For electromagnetic interaction, the energy loss of charged particle can be described by the Bethe-Bloch formula and the Lindhand-Scharff-Schiott theory at low and high velocities, respectively. However, the heavy quark energy loss at CEP is approximately proportional to velocity at low velocities and aligns with Bjorken's results at high velocities, which indicates that the heavy quark energy loss is predominantly collisional at low velocities and gluon radiation dominant at high velocities. For light quark energy loss, the behavior of the energy loss per unit length and the total energy loss differs significantly. However, the total energy loss and stopping distance exhibit similar behavior. This implies that the stopping distance predominantly determines the total energy loss. Thus, even with increased energy loss per unit length at higher temperatures or chemical potentials, the total energy loss decreases due to the reduced stopping distance.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2025

Scaling Laws in Scientific Discovery with AI and Robot Scientists

Scientific discovery is poised for rapid advancement through advanced robotics and artificial intelligence. Current scientific practices face substantial limitations as manual experimentation remains time-consuming and resource-intensive, while multidisciplinary research demands knowledge integration beyond individual researchers' expertise boundaries. Here, we envision an autonomous generalist scientist (AGS) concept combines agentic AI and embodied robotics to automate the entire research lifecycle. This system could dynamically interact with both physical and virtual environments while facilitating the integration of knowledge across diverse scientific disciplines. By deploying these technologies throughout every research stage -- spanning literature review, hypothesis generation, experimentation, and manuscript writing -- and incorporating internal reflection alongside external feedback, this system aims to significantly reduce the time and resources needed for scientific discovery. Building on the evolution from virtual AI scientists to versatile generalist AI-based robot scientists, AGS promises groundbreaking potential. As these autonomous systems become increasingly integrated into the research process, we hypothesize that scientific discovery might adhere to new scaling laws, potentially shaped by the number and capabilities of these autonomous systems, offering novel perspectives on how knowledge is generated and evolves. The adaptability of embodied robots to extreme environments, paired with the flywheel effect of accumulating scientific knowledge, holds the promise of continually pushing beyond both physical and intellectual frontiers.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

NsBM-GAT: A Non-stationary Block Maximum and Graph Attention Framework for General Traffic Crash Risk Prediction

Accurate prediction of traffic crash risks for individual vehicles is essential for enhancing vehicle safety. While significant attention has been given to traffic crash risk prediction, existing studies face two main challenges: First, due to the scarcity of individual vehicle data before crashes, most models rely on hypothetical scenarios deemed dangerous by researchers. This raises doubts about their applicability to actual pre-crash conditions. Second, some crash risk prediction frameworks were learned from dashcam videos. Although such videos capture the pre-crash behavior of individual vehicles, they often lack critical information about the movements of surrounding vehicles. However, the interaction between a vehicle and its surrounding vehicles is highly influential in crash occurrences. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel non-stationary extreme value theory (EVT), where the covariate function is optimized in a nonlinear fashion using a graph attention network. The EVT component incorporates the stochastic nature of crashes through probability distribution, which enhances model interpretability. Notably, the nonlinear covariate function enables the model to capture the interactive behavior between the target vehicle and its multiple surrounding vehicles, facilitating crash risk prediction across different driving tasks. We train and test our model using 100 sets of vehicle trajectory data before real crashes, collected via drones over three years from merging and weaving segments. We demonstrate that our model successfully learns micro-level precursors of crashes and fits a more accurate distribution with the aid of the nonlinear covariate function. Our experiments on the testing dataset show that the proposed model outperforms existing models by providing more accurate predictions for both rear-end and sideswipe crashes simultaneously.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Motion planning for highly-dynamic unconditioned reflexes based on chained Signed Distance Functions

The unconditioned reflex (e.g., protective reflex), which is the innate reaction of the organism and usually performed through the spinal cord rather than the brain, can enable organisms to escape harms from environments. In this paper, we propose an online, highly-dynamic motion planning algorithm to endow manipulators the highly-dynamic unconditioned reflexes to humans and/or environments. Our method is based on a chained version of Signed Distance Functions (SDFs), which can be pre-computed and stored. Our proposed algorithm is divided into two stages. In the offline stage, we create 3 groups of local SDFs to store the geometric information of the manipulator and its working environment. In the online stage, the pre-computed local SDFs are chained together according the configuration of the manipulator, to provide global geometric information about the environment. While the point clouds of the dynamic objects serve as query points to look up these local SDFs for quickly generating escape velocity. Then we propose a modified geometric Jacobian matrix and use the Jacobian-pseudo-inverse method to generate real-time reflex behaviors to avoid the static and dynamic obstacles in the environment. The benefits of our method are validated in both static and dynamic scenarios. In the static scenario, our method identifies the path solutions with lower time consumption and shorter trajectory length compared to existing solutions. In the dynamic scenario, our method can reliably pursue the dynamic target point, avoid dynamic obstacles, and react to these obstacles within 1ms, which surpasses the unconditioned reflex reaction time of humans.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Discovery of skill switching criteria for learning agile quadruped locomotion

This paper develops a hierarchical learning and optimization framework that can learn and achieve well-coordinated multi-skill locomotion. The learned multi-skill policy can switch between skills automatically and naturally in tracking arbitrarily positioned goals and recover from failures promptly. The proposed framework is composed of a deep reinforcement learning process and an optimization process. First, the contact pattern is incorporated into the reward terms for learning different types of gaits as separate policies without the need for any other references. Then, a higher level policy is learned to generate weights for individual policies to compose multi-skill locomotion in a goal-tracking task setting. Skills are automatically and naturally switched according to the distance to the goal. The proper distances for skill switching are incorporated in reward calculation for learning the high level policy and updated by an outer optimization loop as learning progresses. We first demonstrated successful multi-skill locomotion in comprehensive tasks on a simulated Unitree A1 quadruped robot. We also deployed the learned policy in the real world showcasing trotting, bounding, galloping, and their natural transitions as the goal position changes. Moreover, the learned policy can react to unexpected failures at any time, perform prompt recovery, and resume locomotion successfully. Compared to discrete switch between single skills which failed to transition to galloping in the real world, our proposed approach achieves all the learned agile skills, with smoother and more continuous skill transitions.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

A Vehicle Size-Based Dynamic Model of Artificial Driving Risk Potential Fields and Vehicle Interaction Analysis for Highway Driving

Traditional driving risk potential field model generally assumes uniform vehicle sizes, which fails to reflect the heterogeneity in real-world traffic environment. This study aims to develop an improved model by introducing the vehicle dimensions into the driving risk potential field framework. Vehicles are categorized based on size into standard-sized vehicles, medium-sized vehicles, and large-sized vehicles. And the interactions between two vehicles and the force field excited by the driving risk potential field are investigated in this paper. Our analysis of the risk field contours at various vehicle speeds and sizes reveals that larger and faster vehicles generate more intense and expansive risk fields, necessitating increased following distances. For larger vehicles, the risk field extends into adjacent lanes. Force field analysis demonstrates that vehicles traveling in adjacent lanes undergo changes in their motion state due to the influence of the force field emanating from the neighboring larger vehicles. The model effectively points out that, for adjacent lanes, the regions surrounding the tail and head of high-speed vehicles represent highly risky zones.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2024

Achieving Dexterous Bidirectional Interaction in Uncertain Conditions for Medical Robotics

Medical robotics can help improve and extend the reach of healthcare services. A major challenge for medical robots is the complex physical interaction between the robot and the patients which is required to be safe. This work presents the preliminary evaluation of a recently introduced control architecture based on the Fractal Impedance Control (FIC) in medical applications. The deployed FIC architecture is robust to delay between the master and the replica robots. It can switch online between an admittance and impedance behaviour, and it is robust to interaction with unstructured environments. Our experiments analyse three scenarios: teleoperated surgery, rehabilitation, and remote ultrasound scan. The experiments did not require any adjustment of the robot tuning, which is essential in medical applications where the operators do not have an engineering background required to tune the controller. Our results show that is possible to teleoperate the robot to cut using a scalpel, do an ultrasound scan, and perform remote occupational therapy. However, our experiments also highlighted the need for a better robots embodiment to precisely control the system in 3D dynamic tasks.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Are Large Language Models Strategic Decision Makers? A Study of Performance and Bias in Two-Player Non-Zero-Sum Games

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly used in real-world settings, yet their strategic decision-making abilities remain largely unexplored. To fully benefit from the potential of LLMs, it's essential to understand their ability to function in complex social scenarios. Game theory, which is already used to understand real-world interactions, provides a good framework for assessing these abilities. This work investigates the performance and merits of LLMs in canonical game-theoretic two-player non-zero-sum games, Stag Hunt and Prisoner Dilemma. Our structured evaluation of GPT-3.5, GPT-4-Turbo, GPT-4o, and Llama-3-8B shows that these models, when making decisions in these games, are affected by at least one of the following systematic biases: positional bias, payoff bias, or behavioural bias. This indicates that LLMs do not fully rely on logical reasoning when making these strategic decisions. As a result, it was found that the LLMs' performance drops when the game configuration is misaligned with the affecting biases. When misaligned, GPT-3.5, GPT-4-Turbo, GPT-4o, and Llama-3-8B show an average performance drop of 32\%, 25\%, 34\%, and 29\% respectively in Stag Hunt, and 28\%, 16\%, 34\%, and 24\% respectively in Prisoner's Dilemma. Surprisingly, GPT-4o (a top-performing LLM across standard benchmarks) suffers the most substantial performance drop, suggesting that newer models are not addressing these issues. Interestingly, we found that a commonly used method of improving the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, reduces the biases in GPT-3.5, GPT-4o, and Llama-3-8B but increases the effect of the bias in GPT-4-Turbo, indicating that CoT alone cannot fully serve as a robust solution to this problem. We perform several additional experiments, which provide further insight into these observed behaviours.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Learning Adaptive Hydrodynamic Models Using Neural ODEs in Complex Conditions

Reinforcement learning-based quadruped robots excel across various terrains but still lack the ability to swim in water due to the complex underwater environment. This paper presents the development and evaluation of a data-driven hydrodynamic model for amphibious quadruped robots, aiming to enhance their adaptive capabilities in complex and dynamic underwater environments. The proposed model leverages Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) combined with attention mechanisms to accurately process and interpret real-time sensor data. The model enables the quadruped robots to understand and predict complex environmental patterns, facilitating robust decision-making strategies. We harness real-time sensor data, capturing various environmental and internal state parameters to train and evaluate our model. A significant focus of our evaluation involves testing the quadruped robot's performance across different hydrodynamic conditions and assessing its capabilities at varying speeds and fluid dynamic conditions. The outcomes suggest that the model can effectively learn and adapt to varying conditions, enabling the prediction of force states and enhancing autonomous robotic behaviors in various practical scenarios.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Holographic entanglement properties in the QCD phase diagram from EMD models

In this study, we investigate the behavior of entanglement properties in the QCD phase diagram using holographic Einstein-Maxwell-Dilaton (EMD) models. We consider two representative holographic QCD models and examine various entanglement measures, including entanglement entropy, conditional mutual information, and entanglement of purification. We find that the entanglement entropy obtained using the direct UV-cutoff renormalization method shows significant dependence on the specific model being used. However, the outcomes of other non-divergent entanglement measures, such as cutoff-independent entanglement entropy, conditional mutual information, and entanglement of purification, exhibit congruence in our calculations. When we focus specifically on the temperature range below $300$ MeV, we observe a similar behavior among the three entanglement measures. This may suggests that within this temperature range, the entanglement of QCD matter decreases with increasing temperature. Additionally, we observe distinct phase transition behaviors of entanglement properties at the critical end point (CEP) and first-order phase transitions. This observation highlights the potential of entanglement properties as effective order parameters for QCD matter phase transitions.

hep-th↗

arXiv2024

DexSkills: Skill Segmentation Using Haptic Data for Learning Autonomous Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation Tasks

Effective execution of long-horizon tasks with dexterous robotic hands remains a significant challenge in real-world problems. While learning from human demonstrations have shown encouraging results, they require extensive data collection for training. Hence, decomposing long-horizon tasks into reusable primitive skills is a more efficient approach. To achieve so, we developed DexSkills, a novel supervised learning framework that addresses long-horizon dexterous manipulation tasks using primitive skills. DexSkills is trained to recognize and replicate a select set of skills using human demonstration data, which can then segment a demonstrated long-horizon dexterous manipulation task into a sequence of primitive skills to achieve one-shot execution by the robot directly. Significantly, DexSkills operates solely on proprioceptive and tactile data, i.e., haptic data. Our real-world robotic experiments show that DexSkills can accurately segment skills, thereby enabling autonomous robot execution of a diverse range of tasks.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Revisiting holographic model for thermal and dense QCD with a critical point

To quantitatively provide reliable predictions for the hot and dense QCD matter, a holographic model should be adjusted to describe first-principles lattice results available at vanishing baryon chemical potential. The equation of state from two well-known lattice groups, the HotQCD collaboration and the Wuppertal-Budapest (WB) collaboration, shows visible differences at high temperatures. We revisit the Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton (EMD) holographic model for hot QCD with 2+1 flavors and physical quark masses by fitting lattice QCD data from the WB collaboration. Using the parameterization for the scalar potential and gauge coupling proposed in our work [Phys.Rev.D 106 (2022) 12, L121902], the equation of state, the higher order baryon number susceptibilities, and the chiral condensates are in quantitative agreement with state-of-the-art lattice results. We find that the critical endpoint (CEP) obtained from fitting the WB collaboration data is nearly identical to the one from the HotQCD collaboration, suggesting the robustness of the location of the CEP. Moreover, our holographic prediction for the CEP location is in accord with more recent Bayesian analysis on a large number of holographic EMD models and an effective potential approach of QCD from gap equations.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2024

Distilling Reinforcement Learning Policies for Interpretable Robot Locomotion: Gradient Boosting Machines and Symbolic Regression

Recent advancements in reinforcement learning (RL) have led to remarkable achievements in robot locomotion capabilities. However, the complexity and ``black-box'' nature of neural network-based RL policies hinder their interpretability and broader acceptance, particularly in applications demanding high levels of safety and reliability. This paper introduces a novel approach to distill neural RL policies into more interpretable forms using Gradient Boosting Machines (GBMs), Explainable Boosting Machines (EBMs) and Symbolic Regression. By leveraging the inherent interpretability of generalized additive models, decision trees, and analytical expressions, we transform opaque neural network policies into more transparent ``glass-box'' models. We train expert neural network policies using RL and subsequently distill them into (i) GBMs, (ii) EBMs, and (iii) symbolic policies. To address the inherent distribution shift challenge of behavioral cloning, we propose to use the Dataset Aggregation (DAgger) algorithm with a curriculum of episode-dependent alternation of actions between expert and distilled policies, to enable efficient distillation of feedback control policies. We evaluate our approach on various robot locomotion gaits -- walking, trotting, bounding, and pacing -- and study the importance of different observations in joint actions for distilled policies using various methods. We train neural expert policies for 205 hours of simulated experience and distill interpretable policies with only 10 minutes of simulated interaction for each gait using the proposed method.

cs.RO↗