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Researcher profile

Cheng Chi

Cheng Chi contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
RoboticsComputer VisionArtificial IntelligenceDiscrete MathematicsMachine Learningmath.COmath.OC

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Published work

14 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Action-Sketcher: From Reasoning to Action via Visual Sketches for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

Long-horizon robotic manipulation is increasingly important for real-world deployment, requiring spatial disambiguation in complex layouts and temporal resilience under dynamic interaction. However, existing end-to-end and hierarchical Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies often rely on text-only cues while keeping plan intent latent, which undermines referential grounding in cluttered or underspecified scenes, impedes effective task decomposition of long-horizon goals with close-loop interaction, and limits causal explanation by obscuring the rationale behind action choices. To address these issues, we first introduce Visual Sketch, an implausible visual intermediate that renders points, boxes, arrows, and typed relations in the robot's current views to externalize spatial intent, connect language to scene geometry. Building on Visual Sketch, we present Action-Sketcher, a VLA framework that operates in a cyclic See-Think-Sketch-Act workflow coordinated by adaptive token-gated strategy for reasoning triggers, sketch revision, and action issuance, thereby supporting reactive corrections and human interaction while preserving real-time action prediction. To enable scalable training and evaluation, we curate diverse corpus with interleaved images, text, Visual Sketch supervision, and action sequences, and train Action-Sketcher with a multi-stage curriculum recipe that combines interleaved sequence alignment for modality unification, language-to-sketch consistency for precise linguistic grounding, and imitation learning augmented with sketch-to-action reinforcement for robustness. Extensive experiments on cluttered scenes and multi-object tasks, in simulation and on real-world tasks, show improved long-horizon success, stronger robustness to dynamic scene changes, and enhanced interpretability via editable sketches and step-wise plans. Project website: https://action-sketcher.github.io

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Do You Have Freestyle? Expressive Humanoid Locomotion via Audio Control

Humans intuitively move to sound, but current humanoid robots lack expressive improvisational capabilities, confined to predefined motions or sparse commands. Generating motion from audio and then retargeting it to robots relies on explicit motion reconstruction, leading to cascaded errors, high latency, and disjointed acoustic-actuation mapping. We propose RoboPerform, the first unified audio-to-locomotion framework that can directly generate music-driven dance and speech-driven co-speech gestures from audio. Guided by the core principle of "motion = content + style", the framework treats audio as implicit style signals and eliminates the need for explicit motion reconstruction. RoboPerform integrates a ResMoE teacher policy for adapting to diverse motion patterns and a diffusion-based student policy for audio style injection. This retargeting-free design ensures low latency and high fidelity. Experimental validation shows that RoboPerform achieves promising results in physical plausibility and audio alignment, successfully transforming robots into responsive performers capable of reacting to audio.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

PointForward: Feedforward Driving Reconstruction through Point-Aligned Representations

High-fidelity reconstruction of driving scenes is crucial for autonomous driving. While recent feedforward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods enable fast reconstruction, their per-pixel Gaussian prediction paradigm often suffers from multi-view inconsistency and layering artifacts. Moreover, existing methods often model dynamic instances via dense flow prediction, which lacks explicit cross-view correspondence and instance-level consistency. In this paper, we propose PointForward, a feedforward driving reconstruction framework through point-aligned representations. Unlike pixel-aligned methods, we initialize sparse 3D queries in world space and aggregate multi-view image information via spatial-temporal fusion onto these queries, enforcing explicit cross-view consistency in a single feedforward pass. To handle scene dynamics, we introduce scene graphs that explicitly organize moving instances during reconstruction. By leveraging 3D bounding boxes, our method enables instance-level motion propagation and temporally consistent dynamic representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PointForward achieves state-of-the-art performance on large-scale driving benchmarks. The code will be available upon the publication of the paper.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

RoboMirror: Understand Before You Imitate for Video to Humanoid Locomotion

Humans learn locomotion through visual observation, interpreting visual content first before imitating actions. However, state-of-the-art humanoid locomotion systems rely on either curated motion capture trajectories or sparse text commands, leaving a critical gap between visual understanding and control. Text-to-motion methods suffer from semantic sparsity and staged pipeline errors, while video-based approaches only perform mechanical pose mimicry without genuine visual understanding. We propose RoboMirror, the first retargeting-free video-to-locomotion framework embodying "understand before you imitate". Leveraging VLMs, it distills raw egocentric/third-person videos into visual motion intents, which directly condition a diffusion-based policy to generate physically plausible, semantically aligned locomotion without explicit pose reconstruction or retargeting. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of RoboMirror, it enables telepresence via egocentric videos, drastically reduces third-person control latency by 80%, and achieves a 3.7% higher task success rate than baselines. By reframing humanoid control around video understanding, we bridge the visual understanding and action gap.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

RoboRefer: Towards Spatial Referring with Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Robotics

Spatial referring is a fundamental capability of embodied robots to interact with the 3D physical world. However, even with the powerful pretrained vision language models (VLMs), recent approaches are still not qualified to accurately understand the complex 3D scenes and dynamically reason about the instruction-indicated locations for interaction. To this end, we propose RoboRefer, a 3D-aware VLM that can first achieve precise spatial understanding by integrating a disentangled but dedicated depth encoder via supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Moreover, RoboRefer advances generalized multi-step spatial reasoning via reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT), with metric-sensitive process reward functions tailored for spatial referring tasks. To support SFT and RFT training, we introduce RefSpatial, a large-scale dataset of 20M QA pairs (2x prior), covering 31 spatial relations (vs. 15 prior) and supporting complex reasoning processes (up to 5 steps). In addition, we introduce RefSpatial-Bench, a challenging benchmark filling the gap in evaluating spatial referring with multi-step reasoning. Experiments show that SFT-trained RoboRefer achieves state-of-the-art spatial understanding, with an average success rate of 89.6%. RFT-trained RoboRefer further outperforms all other baselines by a large margin, even surpassing Gemini-2.5-Pro by 17.4% in average accuracy on RefSpatial-Bench. Notably, RoboRefer can be integrated with various control policies to execute long-horizon, dynamic tasks across diverse robots (e,g., UR5, G1 humanoid) in cluttered real-world scenes.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

RoboTracer: Mastering Spatial Trace with Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Robotics

Spatial tracing, as a fundamental embodied interaction ability for robots, is inherently challenging as it requires multi-step metric-grounded reasoning compounded with complex spatial referring and real-world metric measurement. However, existing methods struggle with this compositional task. To this end, we propose RoboTracer, a 3D-aware VLM that first achieves both 3D spatial referring and measuring via a universal spatial encoder and a regression-supervised decoder to enhance scale awareness during supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Moreover, RoboTracer advances multi-step metric-grounded reasoning via reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) with metric-sensitive process rewards, supervising key intermediate perceptual cues to accurately generate spatial traces. To support SFT and RFT training, we introduce TraceSpatial, a large-scale dataset of 30M QA pairs, spanning outdoor/indoor/tabletop scenes and supporting complex reasoning processes (up to 9 steps). We further present TraceSpatial-Bench, a challenging benchmark filling the gap to evaluate spatial tracing. Experimental results show that RoboTracer surpasses baselines in spatial understanding, measuring, and referring, with an average success rate of 79.1%, and also achieves SOTA performance on TraceSpatial-Bench by a large margin, exceeding Gemini-2.5-Pro by 36% accuracy. Notably, RoboTracer can be integrated with various control policies to execute long-horizon, dynamic tasks across diverse robots (UR5, G1 humanoid) in cluttered real-world scenes. See the project page at https://zhoues.github.io/RoboTracer.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Xiaomi EV World Model: A Joint World Model Integrating Reconstruction and Generation for Autonomous Driving

This report presents a unified technical system addressing the two core capabilities of world models for autonomous driving: world representation and world generation. For world representation, we propose WorldRec, a feed-forward reconstruction architecture driven by sparse scene queries. WorldRec initializes structured queries in 3D space, leveraging them to aggregate cross-view, cross-temporal features, thereby naturally enforcing spatial consistency across frames and yielding compact yet high-fidelity 3D Gaussian scene representations. For world generation, we propose WorldGen, a two-stage training framework of bidirectional pretraining followed by causal fine-tuning through three progressive stages (Teacher Forcing, ODE distillation, and DMD), enabling high-quality online causal video generation in as few as 4 denoising steps. Building on both modules, we further introduce the JWM, which deeply integrates WorldRec and WorldGen to achieve synergistic gains in generation stability, cross-frame consistency, and visual fidelity, providing a solid foundation for closed-loop simulation, data synthesis, and end-to-end training in autonomous driving.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2023arXiv

A Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework For Column Generation

Column Generation (CG) is an iterative algorithm for solving linear programs (LPs) with an extremely large number of variables (columns). CG is the workhorse for tackling large-scale \textit{integer} linear programs, which rely on CG to solve LP relaxations within a branch and price algorithm. Two canonical applications are the Cutting Stock Problem (CSP) and Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW). In VRPTW, for example, each binary variable represents the decision to include or exclude a \textit{route}, of which there are exponentially many; CG incrementally grows the subset of columns being used, ultimately converging to an optimal solution. We propose RLCG, the first Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach for CG. Unlike typical column selection rules which myopically select a column based on local information at each iteration, we treat CG as a sequential decision-making problem: the column selected in a given iteration affects subsequent column selections. This perspective lends itself to a Deep Reinforcement Learning approach that uses Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to represent the variable-constraint structure in the LP of interest. We perform an extensive set of experiments using the publicly available BPPLIB benchmark for CSP and Solomon benchmark for VRPTW. RLCG converges faster and reduces the number of CG iterations by 22.4\% for CSP and 40.9\% for VRPTW on average compared to a commonly used greedy policy. Our code is available at https://github.com/chichengmessi/reinforcement-learning-for-column-generation.git.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

DextAIRity: Deformable Manipulation Can be a Breeze

This paper introduces DextAIRity, an approach to manipulate deformable objects using active airflow. In contrast to conventional contact-based quasi-static manipulations, DextAIRity allows the system to apply dense forces on out-of-contact surfaces, expands the system's reach range, and provides safe high-speed interactions. These properties are particularly advantageous when manipulating under-actuated deformable objects with large surface areas or volumes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DextAIRity through two challenging deformable object manipulation tasks: cloth unfolding and bag opening. We present a self-supervised learning framework that learns to effectively perform a target task through a sequence of grasping or air-based blowing actions. By using a closed-loop formulation for blowing, the system continuously adjusts its blowing direction based on visual feedback in a way that is robust to the highly stochastic dynamics. We deploy our algorithm on a real-world three-arm system and present evidence suggesting that DextAIRity can improve system efficiency for challenging deformable manipulation tasks, such as cloth unfolding, and enable new applications that are impractical to solve with quasi-static contact-based manipulations (e.g., bag opening). Video is available at https://youtu.be/_B0TpAa5tVo

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Iterative Residual Policy: for Goal-Conditioned Dynamic Manipulation of Deformable Objects

This paper tackles the task of goal-conditioned dynamic manipulation of deformable objects. This task is highly challenging due to its complex dynamics (introduced by object deformation and high-speed action) and strict task requirements (defined by a precise goal specification). To address these challenges, we present Iterative Residual Policy (IRP), a general learning framework applicable to repeatable tasks with complex dynamics. IRP learns an implicit policy via delta dynamics -- instead of modeling the entire dynamical system and inferring actions from that model, IRP learns delta dynamics that predict the effects of delta action on the previously-observed trajectory. When combined with adaptive action sampling, the system can quickly optimize its actions online to reach a specified goal. We demonstrate the effectiveness of IRP on two tasks: whipping a rope to hit a target point and swinging a cloth to reach a target pose. Despite being trained only in simulation on a fixed robot setup, IRP is able to efficiently generalize to noisy real-world dynamics, new objects with unseen physical properties, and even different robot hardware embodiments, demonstrating its excellent generalization capability relative to alternative approaches. Video is available at https://youtu.be/7h3SZ3La-oA

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

Occlusion-robust Deformable Object Tracking without Physics Simulation

Estimating the state of a deformable object is crucial for robotic manipulation, yet accurate tracking is challenging when the object is partially-occluded. To address this problem, we propose an occlusion-robust RGBD sequence tracking framework based on Coherent Point Drift (CPD). To mitigate the effects of occlusion, our method 1) Uses a combination of locally linear embedding and constrained optimization to regularize the output of CPD, thus enforcing topological consistency when occlusions create disconnected pieces of the object; 2) Reasons about the free-space visible by an RGBD sensor to better estimate the prior on point location and to detect tracking failures during occlusion; and 3) Uses shape descriptors to find the most relevant previous state of the object to use for tracking after a severe occlusion. Our method does not rely on physics simulation or a physical model of the object, which can be difficult to obtain in unstructured environments. Despite having no physical model, our experiments demonstrate that our method achieves improved accuracy in the presence of occlusion as compared to a physics-based CPD method while maintaining adequate run-time.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-based and Anchor-free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection

Object detection has been dominated by anchor-based detectors for several years. Recently, anchor-free detectors have become popular due to the proposal of FPN and Focal Loss. In this paper, we first point out that the essential difference between anchor-based and anchor-free detection is actually how to define positive and negative training samples, which leads to the performance gap between them. If they adopt the same definition of positive and negative samples during training, there is no obvious difference in the final performance, no matter regressing from a box or a point. This shows that how to select positive and negative training samples is important for current object detectors. Then, we propose an Adaptive Training Sample Selection (ATSS) to automatically select positive and negative samples according to statistical characteristics of object. It significantly improves the performance of anchor-based and anchor-free detectors and bridges the gap between them. Finally, we discuss the necessity of tiling multiple anchors per location on the image to detect objects. Extensive experiments conducted on MS COCO support our aforementioned analysis and conclusions. With the newly introduced ATSS, we improve state-of-the-art detectors by a large margin to $50.7\%$ AP without introducing any overhead. The code is available at https://github.com/sfzhang15/ATSS

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Loss Function Search for Face Recognition

In face recognition, designing margin-based (e.g., angular, additive, additive angular margins) softmax loss functions plays an important role in learning discriminative features. However, these hand-crafted heuristic methods are sub-optimal because they require much effort to explore the large design space. Recently, an AutoML for loss function search method AM-LFS has been derived, which leverages reinforcement learning to search loss functions during the training process. But its search space is complex and unstable that hindering its superiority. In this paper, we first analyze that the key to enhance the feature discrimination is actually \textbf{how to reduce the softmax probability}. We then design a unified formulation for the current margin-based softmax losses. Accordingly, we define a novel search space and develop a reward-guided search method to automatically obtain the best candidate. Experimental results on a variety of face recognition benchmarks have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method over the state-of-the-art alternatives.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access