arXiv subjects

Zhihao Cao

Publications and source records attributed to Zhihao Cao.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

CoMo3R-SLAM: Collaborative Monocular Dense SLAM with Learned 3D Reconstruction Priors for Outdoor Multi-Agent Systems

Outdoor robot teams need a shared dense map despite limited overlap, independent reference frames, and uncertain monocular scale. Collaborative dense SLAM systems typically resolve this with depth sensors, which add payload, power, and calibration cost. We present CoMo3R-SLAM, a collaborative monocular dense SLAM system that places learned feed-forward 3D reconstruction priors at the center of the multi-agent problem: their dense pointmaps anchor scale across agents and supply correspondences strong enough to verify inter-agent links geometrically. Each agent tracks and fuses its own keyframes from a single RGB stream, while a coordinator retrieves cross-agent keyframes over the prior's encoder features, verifies them by bidirectional dense pointmap matching, synchronizes the independent similarity gauges in closed form, and refines every keyframe in one unified multi-agent sim(3) graph. Finally, a pose-depth alternation over geometry-aware segments lets inter-agent observations constrain dense structure as well as trajectories. Requiring neither measured depth nor supplied intrinsics, CoMo3R-SLAM attains the lowest trajectory error on three of four Tanks and Temples scenes, and competitive accuracy on Waymo driving sequences, while running at approximately 6-8 FPS on RTX 3080 Ti. A long-horizon traversal, independently captured day and night streams, and teams of up to four agents further map its operating range.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

MCGS-SLAM: A Multi-Camera SLAM Framework Using Gaussian Splatting for High-Fidelity Mapping

Recent progress in dense SLAM has primarily targeted monocular setups, often at the expense of robustness and geometric coverage. We present MCGS-SLAM, the first purely RGB-based multi-camera SLAM system built on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Unlike prior methods relying on sparse maps or inertial data, MCGS-SLAM fuses dense RGB inputs from multiple viewpoints into a unified, continuously optimized Gaussian map. A multi-camera bundle adjustment (MCBA) jointly refines poses and depths via dense photometric and geometric residuals, while a scale consistency module enforces metric alignment across views using low-rank priors. The system supports RGB input and maintains real-time performance at large scale. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that MCGS-SLAM consistently yields accurate trajectories and photorealistic reconstructions, usually outperforming monocular baselines. Notably, the wide field of view from multi-camera input enables reconstruction of side-view regions that monocular setups miss, critical for safe autonomous operation. These results highlight the promise of multi-camera Gaussian Splatting SLAM for high-fidelity mapping in robotics and autonomous driving.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

PAINT: Partner-Agnostic Intent-Aware Cooperative Transport with Legged Robots

Collaborative transport requires robots to infer partner intent through physical interaction while maintaining stable loco-manipulation. This becomes particularly challenging in complex environments, where interaction signals are difficult to capture and model. We present PAINT, a hierarchical learning framework for partner-agnostic intent-aware collaborative legged transport that represents partner intent as an explicit interaction wrench and recovers it from payload-coupled proprioceptive histories. PAINT decouples intent understanding from terrain-robust locomotion: A high-level policy uses the inferred interaction wrench for transport and reconstructs it through teacher-student training, while a low-level locomotion backbone ensures robust execution. This enables lightweight deployment without external force-torque sensing or payload tracking. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate compliant cooperative transport across diverse terrains, payloads, and partners. Furthermore, we show that PAINT can reuse the same single-agent policy for decentralized multi-robot transport by mechanically combining team interactions into a common wrench space, and supports heterogeneous-team transport. Our results suggest that payload-coupled proprioceptive interaction provides a physically grounded interface for partner-agnostic intent-aware collaborative transport.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

MAGS-SLAM: Monocular Multi-Agent Gaussian Splatting SLAM for Geometrically and Photometrically Consistent Reconstruction

Collaborative photorealistic 3D reconstruction from multiple agents enables rapid large-scale scene capture for virtual production and cooperative multi-robot exploration. While recent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) SLAM algorithms can generate high-fidelity real-time mapping, most of the existing multi-agent Gaussian SLAM methods still rely on RGB-D sensors to obtain metric depth and simplify cross-agent alignment, limiting their deployment on low-cost or power-constrained robotic platforms, especially given the wider availability of RGB cameras. To address this challenge, we propose MAGS-SLAM, the first RGB-only multi-agent 3DGS SLAM framework for collaborative scene reconstruction. Each agent independently builds local monocular Gaussian submaps and transmits compact submap summaries rather than raw observations or dense maps. To facilitate robust collaboration in the presence of monocular scale ambiguity, our framework integrates compact submap communication, geometry- and appearance-aware loop verification, and occupancy-aware Gaussian fusion, enabling coherent global reconstruction without active depth sensors. We further introduce ReplicaMultiagent Plus, a benchmark containing larger robot teams for evaluating collaborative Gaussian SLAM. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that MAGS-SLAM achieves tracking accuracy and rendering quality competitive with or superior to those of state-of-the-art RGB-D collaborative Gaussian SLAM methods using RGB images alone.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Grounding Before Generalizing: How AI Differs from Humans in Causal Transfer

Extracting abstract causal structures and applying them to novel situations is a hallmark of human intelligence. While Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong performance on a wide range of reasoning tasks, their capacity for interactive causal learning -- inducing latent structures through sequential exploration and transferring them across contexts -- remains uncharacterized. Human learners accomplish such transfer after minimal exposure, whereas classical Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents fail catastrophically. Whether state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI) models possess human-like mechanisms for abstract causal structure transfer is an open question. Using the OpenLock paradigm requiring sequential discovery of Common Cause (CC) and Common Effect (CE) structures, here we show that models exhibit fundamentally delayed or absent transfer: even successful models require initial environmental-specific mapping -- what we term environmental grounding -- before efficiency gains emerge, whereas humans leverage prior structural knowledge from the very first solution attempt. In the text-only condition, models matched or exceeded human discovery efficiency. In contrast, visual information -- in both the image-only and text-and-image conditions -- overall degraded rather than enhanced performance, revealing a broad reliance on symbolic processing rather than integrated multimodal reasoning. Models further exhibited systematic CC/CE asymmetries absent in humans, suggesting heuristic biases rather than direction-neutral causal abstraction. These findings reveal that large-scale statistical learning does not produce the decontextualized causal schemas underpinning human analogical reasoning, establishing grounding-dependent transfer as a fundamental limitation of current LLMs and VLMs.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Smart Help: Strategic Opponent Modeling for Proactive and Adaptive Robot Assistance in Households

Despite the significant demand for assistive technology among vulnerable groups (e.g., the elderly, children, and the disabled) in daily tasks, research into advanced AI-driven assistive solutions that genuinely accommodate their diverse needs remains sparse. Traditional human-machine interaction tasks often require machines to simply help without nuanced consideration of human abilities and feelings, such as their opportunity for practice and learning, sense of self-improvement, and self-esteem. Addressing this gap, we define a pivotal and novel challenge Smart Help, which aims to provide proactive yet adaptive support to human agents with diverse disabilities and dynamic goals in various tasks and environments. To establish this challenge, we leverage AI2-THOR to build a new interactive 3D realistic household environment for the Smart Help task. We introduce an innovative opponent modeling module that provides a nuanced understanding of the main agent's capabilities and goals, in order to optimize the assisting agent's helping policy. Rigorous experiments validate the efficacy of our model components and show the superiority of our holistic approach against established baselines. Our findings illustrate the potential of AI-imbued assistive robots in improving the well-being of vulnerable groups.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Calibration of Deep Learning Classification Models in fNIRS

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a valuable non-invasive tool for monitoring brain activity. The classification of fNIRS data in relation to conscious activity holds significance for advancing our understanding of the brain and facilitating the development of brain-computer interfaces (BCI). Many researchers have turned to deep learning to tackle the classification challenges inherent in fNIRS data due to its strong generalization and robustness. In the application of fNIRS, reliability is really important, and one mathematical formulation of the reliability of confidence is calibration. However, many researchers overlook the important issue of calibration. To address this gap, we propose integrating calibration into fNIRS field and assess the reliability of existing models. Surprisingly, our results indicate poor calibration performance in many proposed models. To advance calibration development in the fNIRS field, we summarize three practical tips. Through this letter, we hope to emphasize the critical role of calibration in fNIRS research and argue for enhancing the reliability of deep learning-based predictions in fNIRS classification tasks. All data from our experimental process are openly available on GitHub.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Simple But Effective: Rethinking the Ability of Deep Learning in fNIRS to Exclude Abnormal Input

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a non-invasive technique for monitoring brain activity. To better understand the brain, researchers often use deep learning to address the classification challenges of fNIRS data. Our study shows that while current networks in fNIRS are highly accurate for predictions within their training distribution, they falter at identifying and excluding abnormal data which is out-of-distribution, affecting their reliability. We propose integrating metric learning and supervised methods into fNIRS research to improve networks capability in identifying and excluding out-of-distribution outliers. This method is simple yet effective. In our experiments, it significantly enhances the performance of various networks in fNIRS, particularly transformer-based one, which shows the great improvement in reliability. We will make our experiment data available on GitHub.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2023

Mobile App Crowdsourced Test Report Consistency Detection via Deep Image-and-Text Fusion Understanding

Crowdsourced testing, as a distinct testing paradigm, has attracted much attention in software testing, especially in mobile application (app) testing field. Compared with in-house testing, crowdsourced testing shows superiority with the diverse testing environments when faced with the mobile testing fragmentation problem. However, crowdsourced testing also encounters the low-quality test report problem caused by unprofessional crowdworkers involved with different expertise. In order to handle the submitted reports of uneven quality, app developers have to distinguish high-quality reports from low-quality ones to help the bug inspection. One kind of typical low-quality test report is inconsistent test reports, which means the textual descriptions are not focusing on the attached bug-occurring screenshots. According to our empirical survey, only 18.07% crowdsourced test reports are consistent. Inconsistent reports cause waste on mobile app testing. To solve the inconsistency problem, we propose ReCoDe to detect the consistency of crowdsourced test reports via deep image-and-text fusion understanding. ReCoDe is a two-stage approach that first classifies the reports based on textual descriptions into different categories according to the bug feature. In the second stage, ReCoDe has a deep understanding of the GUI image features of the app screenshots and then applies different strategies to handle different types of bugs to detect the consistency of the crowdsourced test reports. We conduct an experiment on a dataset with over 22k test reports to evaluate ReCoDe, and the results show the effectiveness of ReCoDe in detecting the consistency of crowdsourced test reports. Besides, a user study is conducted to prove the practical value of ReCoDe in effectively helping app developers improve the efficiency of reviewing the crowdsourced test reports.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2022

Simulation-based Modelling of Growth and Pollination of Greenhouse Strawberry

The cultivated strawberry Fragaria ananassa Duch. is widely planted in greenhouses in China. Its production heavily depends on pollination services. Compared with artificial pollination, bee pollination can significantly improve fruit quality and save considerable labor requirement. Multiple factors such as bee foraging behavior, planting pattern and the spatial complexity of the greenhouse environment interacting over time and space are major obstacles to understanding of bee pollination dynamics. We propose a spatially-explicit agent-based simulation model which allows users to explore how various factors including bee foraging behavior and strawberry phenology conditions as well as the greenhouse environment influence pollination efficiency and fruit quality. Simulation experiments allowed us to compare pollination efficiencies in different conditions. Especially, the cause of bee pollination advantage, optimal bee density and bee hive location were discussed based on sensitivity analysis. In addition, simulation results provide some insights for strawberry planting in a greenhouse. The firmly validated open-source model is a useful tool for hypothesis testing and theory development for strawberry pollination research.

q-bio.PE↗

arXiv2019

Tree Recognition APP of Mount Tai Based on CNN

Mount Tai has abundant sunshine, abundant rainfall and favorable climatic conditions, forming dense vegetation with various kinds of trees. In order to make it easier for tourists to understand each tree and experience the culture of Mount Tai, this paper develops an App for tree recognition of Mount Tai based on convolution neural network (CNN), taking advantage of CNN efficient image recognition ability and easy-to-carry characteristics of Android mobile phone. The APP can accurately identify several common trees in Mount Tai, and give a brief introduction for tourists.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Image retrieval method based on CNN and dimension reduction

An image retrieval method based on convolution neural network and dimension reduction is proposed in this paper. Convolution neural network is used to extract high-level features of images, and to solve the problem that the extracted feature dimensions are too high and have strong correlation, multilinear principal component analysis is used to reduce the dimension of features. The features after dimension reduction are binary hash coded for fast image retrieval. Experiments show that the method proposed in this paper has better retrieval effect than the retrieval method based on principal component analysis on the e-commerce image datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Image Recognition of Tea Leaf Diseases Based on Convolutional Neural Network

In order to identify and prevent tea leaf diseases effectively, convolution neural network (CNN) was used to realize the image recognition of tea disease leaves. Firstly, image segmentation and data enhancement are used to preprocess the images, and then these images were input into the network for training. Secondly, to reach a higher recognition accuracy of CNN, the learning rate and iteration numbers were adjusted frequently and the dropout was added properly in the case of over-fitting. Finally, the experimental results show that the recognition accuracy of CNN is 93.75%, while the accuracy of SVM and BP neural network is 89.36% and 87.69% respectively. Therefore, the recognition algorithm based on CNN is better in classification and can improve the recognition efficiency of tea leaf diseases effectively.

cs.CV↗