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Zhongliang Qiao

Publications and source records attributed to Zhongliang Qiao.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

Beyond Relative Geometry: Metric-Aware Geometry Perception for Robotics

Recent embodied models increasingly leverage geometric representations to improve spatial reasoning and robotic manipulation. However, existing reconstruction methods only reconstruct relative geometry with arbitrary scales, causing predicted object dimensions and spatial distances to vary across scenes, viewpoints, and input configurations. This inconsistency prevents geometric perception from being directly aligned with robotic actions defined on the real-world scale. To address this limitation, we propose Metric-Aware Geometry Perception (MAGP), an end-to-end, plug-and-play framework for metric geometry reconstruction that can be seamlessly integrated into robotic policies. At its core, Metric Scale Equivariant Augmentation encourages the model to reconstruct metric geometry from camera parameters and depth observations, ensuring that the reconstructed geometry follows the metric scale specified by observations. Flexible Metric Conditioning further enables MAGP to support arbitrary view counts and combinations of camera and depth inputs, improving robustness to heterogeneous robotic sensing configurations. Together, these designs produce geometrically consistent reconstructions with stable object dimensions and spatial distances across scenes and sensing conditions. Experiments on ETH3D, MegaDepth, and ScanNet++ demonstrate that MAGP maintains strong relative geometry accuracy while reducing the absolute error by over an order of magnitude, from 2.01m to 0.07m. When integrated into multiple robotic policies, MAGP consistently improves performance on LIBERO, RoboTwin, and zero-shot LIBERO-Plus, with gains of up to 6.26% on RoboTwin. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of metric geometry for robotic manipulation.

cs.RO↗

Can Machines Really See Objects in Images? A Study Based on Syntactic Distance and Visual Self-Referential Instances

Can a vision model truly see an object, or does it only fit surface-level visual cues? Following Wittgenstein's view that the limits of language are the limits of the world, we view a model's recognition ability as bounded by the descriptive system it has learned. In current vision models, this system is often realized through learned feature representations that exploit local statistical cues. We therefore ask whether a model can still classify correctly when such local cues provide no stable basis for distinction. We formalize this question with syntactic distance, which measures class separability through the symmetry of the operations mapping one class to the other: positive distance exposes exploitable local features, whereas zero distance requires global semantics rather than local rules. We construct a visual self-referential task in maximum-variance binary noise: positive samples contain a closed square, while negative samples contain an otherwise identical square with one flipped boundary pixel. The two classes differ in global semantics but have zero syntactic distance, making local statistical shortcuts unreliable. Experiments on ResNets and Vision Transformers reveal a consistent phase-transition phenomenon, with accuracy collapsing to random guessing once the image scale crosses a critical point and does not recover within the tested range. Larger training sets and models only delay this collapse, while globally attentive ViTs reach it earlier. These results reveal a structural capability boundary of current architectures on global-concept tasks, suggesting that general intelligence may require creating new language, not reusing an existing one.

cs.CV↗

High-speed 4 ${\times}$ 4 silicon photonic electro-optic switch, operating at the 2 μm waveband

The escalating need for expansive data bandwidth, and the resulting capacity constraints of the single mode fiber (SMF) have positioned the 2-$μ$m waveband as a prospective window for emerging applications in optical communication. This has initiated an ecosystem of silicon photonic components in the region driven by CMOS compatibility, low cost, high efficiency and potential for large-scale integration. In this study, we demonstrate a plasma dispersive, 4 ${\times}$ 4 electro-optic switch operating at the 2-$μ$m waveband with the shortest switching times. The demonstrated switch operates across a 45-nm bandwidth, with 10-90% rise and 90-10% fall time of 1.78 ns and 3.02 ns respectively. In a 4 ${\times}$ 4 implementation, crosstalk below -15 dB and power consumption below 19.15 mW across all 16 ports are indicated. The result brings high-speed optical switching to the portfolio of devices at the promising waveband.

physics.optics↗

Linear Optical Modulators for Prospective Communications at the 2 μm Waveband

The 2 μm waveband is an area that could have significant technological consequences, with applications ranging from spectroscopy, LIDAR and free-space communications. The development of the thulium-doped fiber amplifier, hollow-core photonic bandgap fiber and 2 μm GaSb-based diode lasers has highlighted the ability of the waveband in alleviating the fiber capacity crisis in the incumbent communication infrastructure. The above has initiated vibrant development in the silicon photonic-space at 2 μm, where the area is capable of enabling highly-integrated photonic circuits, and potentially at low-cost and high-volumes. However, as of now, modulator linearity at 2 μm has not been addressed. The metric, as characterized by spurious free dynamic range is imperative for numerous applications such as RF photonic links for 5G and digital analog transmission in coherent communications. The development of linear optical modulators will be crucial in bringing these applications to the 2 μm. In view of that, this work is the first to address modulator linearity at the 2 μm, where the ring-assisted Mach-Zehnder modulator is developed, indicating spurious free dynamic range as high as 95 dB.Hz^2/3. It is found that that modulator spurious free dynamic range has a strong dependence on modulator bias voltage where it impacts the linearity of the transfer function in which the input RF signal is applied upon. The demonstrated modulator indicates favorable performance within silicon photonic modulators developed at 2 μm with bandwidth exceeding 17.5 GHz and modulation efficiency ranging from 0.70 to 1.25 V.cm.

physics.app-ph↗