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Haochen Shi

Haochen Shi contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

9 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Evolving Programmatic Skill Networks

We study continual skill acquisition in open-ended embodied environments where an agent must construct, refine, and reuse an expanding library of executable skills. We introduce the Programmatic Skill Network (PSN), a framework in which skills are executable symbolic programs forming a compositional network that evolves through experience. PSN defines three core mechanisms instantiated via large language models: (1)REFLECT for structured fault localization over skill compositions, (2) progressive optimization with maturity-aware update gating that stabilizes reliable skills while maintaining plasticity for uncertain ones, and (3) canonical structural refactoring under rollback validation that maintains network compactness. We further show that PSN's learning dynamics exhibit structural parallels to neural network training. Experiments on MineDojo and Crafter demonstrate robust skill reuse, rapid adaptation, and strong generalization across open-ended task distributions.\footnote{We plan to open-source the code.

preprint2026arXiv

Locomotion Beyond Feet

Most locomotion methods for humanoid robots focus on leg-based gaits, yet natural bipeds frequently rely on hands, knees, and elbows to establish additional contacts for stability and support in complex environments. This paper introduces Locomotion Beyond Feet, a comprehensive system for whole-body humanoid locomotion across extremely challenging terrains, including low-clearance spaces under chairs, knee-high walls, knee-high platforms, and steep ascending and descending stairs. Our approach addresses two key challenges: contact-rich motion planning and generalization across diverse terrains. To this end, we combine physics-grounded keyframe animation with reinforcement learning. Keyframes encode human knowledge of motor skills, are embodiment-specific, and can be readily validated in simulation or on hardware, while reinforcement learning transforms these references into robust, physically accurate motions. We further employ a hierarchical framework consisting of terrain-specific motion-tracking policies, failure recovery mechanisms, and a vision-based skill planner. Real-world experiments demonstrate that Locomotion Beyond Feet achieves robust whole-body locomotion and generalizes across obstacle sizes, obstacle instances, and terrain sequences.

preprint2026arXiv

PerfCodeBench: Benchmarking LLMs for System-Level High-Performance Code Optimization

Large language models (LLMs) can often generate functionally correct code, but their ability to produce efficient implementations for performance-critical systems tasks remains limited. Existing code benchmarks mainly emphasize correctness or algorithmic problem solving, while realistic systems-level optimization is still underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce PerfCodeBench, an executable benchmark for evaluating LLMs on high-performance code optimization. The tasks require system-level implementation choices, hardware-aware optimization, and careful handling of performance bottlenecks. Each task includes executable correctness checks, a baseline implementation, and a reference optimized solution. This allows us to evaluate both correctness and runtime-oriented efficiency. Our evaluation on a broad set of state-of-the-art LLMs shows a clear gap between model-generated code and expert-optimized implementations. The gap is especially large on tasks involving parallelism and GPU operations. Current models also show weaknesses in cross-language robustness and in consistently reaching expert-level efficiency. These results suggest that performance-aware evaluation are still needed. LLMs should move beyond generating merely correct code toward producing efficient systems software. We submit the benchmark data, evaluation infrastructure, and complete logs of all LLMs-generated code at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/perfcodebench-7CDE.

preprint2022arXiv

BOSS: Bottom-up Cross-modal Semantic Composition with Hybrid Counterfactual Training for Robust Content-based Image Retrieval

Content-Based Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to search for a target image by concurrently comprehending the composition of an example image and a complementary text, which potentially impacts a wide variety of real-world applications, such as internet search and fashion retrieval. In this scenario, the input image serves as an intuitive context and background for the search, while the corresponding language expressly requests new traits on how specific characteristics of the query image should be modified in order to get the intended target image. This task is challenging since it necessitates learning and understanding the composite image-text representation by incorporating cross-granular semantic updates. In this paper, we tackle this task by a novel \underline{\textbf{B}}ottom-up cr\underline{\textbf{O}}ss-modal \underline{\textbf{S}}emantic compo\underline{\textbf{S}}ition (\textbf{BOSS}) with Hybrid Counterfactual Training framework, which sheds new light on the CIR task by studying it from two previously overlooked perspectives: \emph{implicitly bottom-up composition of visiolinguistic representation} and \emph{explicitly fine-grained correspondence of query-target construction}. On the one hand, we leverage the implicit interaction and composition of cross-modal embeddings from the bottom local characteristics to the top global semantics, preserving and transforming the visual representation conditioned on language semantics in several continuous steps for effective target image search. On the other hand, we devise a hybrid counterfactual training strategy that can reduce the model's ambiguity for similar queries.

preprint2022arXiv

Consensus Graph Representation Learning for Better Grounded Image Captioning

The contemporary visual captioning models frequently hallucinate objects that are not actually in a scene, due to the visual misclassification or over-reliance on priors that resulting in the semantic inconsistency between the visual information and the target lexical words. The most common way is to encourage the captioning model to dynamically link generated object words or phrases to appropriate regions of the image, i.e., the grounded image captioning (GIC). However, GIC utilizes an auxiliary task (grounding objects) that has not solved the key issue of object hallucination, i.e., the semantic inconsistency. In this paper, we take a novel perspective on the issue above - exploiting the semantic coherency between the visual and language modalities. Specifically, we propose the Consensus Rraph Representation Learning framework (CGRL) for GIC that incorporates a consensus representation into the grounded captioning pipeline. The consensus is learned by aligning the visual graph (e.g., scene graph) to the language graph that consider both the nodes and edges in a graph. With the aligned consensus, the captioning model can capture both the correct linguistic characteristics and visual relevance, and then grounding appropriate image regions further. We validate the effectiveness of our model, with a significant decline in object hallucination (-9% CHAIRi) on the Flickr30k Entities dataset. Besides, our CGRL also evaluated by several automatic metrics and human evaluation, the results indicate that the proposed approach can simultaneously improve the performance of image captioning (+2.9 Cider) and grounding (+2.3 F1LOC).

preprint2022arXiv

Dilated Context Integrated Network with Cross-Modal Consensus for Temporal Emotion Localization in Videos

Understanding human emotions is a crucial ability for intelligent robots to provide better human-robot interactions. The existing works are limited to trimmed video-level emotion classification, failing to locate the temporal window corresponding to the emotion. In this paper, we introduce a new task, named Temporal Emotion Localization in videos~(TEL), which aims to detect human emotions and localize their corresponding temporal boundaries in untrimmed videos with aligned subtitles. TEL presents three unique challenges compared to temporal action localization: 1) The emotions have extremely varied temporal dynamics; 2) The emotion cues are embedded in both appearances and complex plots; 3) The fine-grained temporal annotations are complicated and labor-intensive. To address the first two challenges, we propose a novel dilated context integrated network with a coarse-fine two-stream architecture. The coarse stream captures varied temporal dynamics by modeling multi-granularity temporal contexts. The fine stream achieves complex plots understanding by reasoning the dependency between the multi-granularity temporal contexts from the coarse stream and adaptively integrates them into fine-grained video segment features. To address the third challenge, we introduce a cross-modal consensus learning paradigm, which leverages the inherent semantic consensus between the aligned video and subtitle to achieve weakly-supervised learning. We contribute a new testing set with 3,000 manually-annotated temporal boundaries so that future research on the TEL problem can be quantitatively evaluated. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our approach on temporal emotion localization. The repository of this work is at https://github.com/YYJMJC/Temporal-Emotion-Localization-in-Videos.

preprint2022arXiv

MAGIC: Multimodal relAtional Graph adversarIal inferenCe for Diverse and Unpaired Text-based Image Captioning

Text-based image captioning (TextCap) requires simultaneous comprehension of visual content and reading the text of images to generate a natural language description. Although a task can teach machines to understand the complex human environment further given that text is omnipresent in our daily surroundings, it poses additional challenges in normal captioning. A text-based image intuitively contains abundant and complex multimodal relational content, that is, image details can be described diversely from multiview rather than a single caption. Certainly, we can introduce additional paired training data to show the diversity of images' descriptions, this process is labor-intensive and time-consuming for TextCap pair annotations with extra texts. Based on the insight mentioned above, we investigate how to generate diverse captions that focus on different image parts using an unpaired training paradigm. We propose the Multimodal relAtional Graph adversarIal inferenCe (MAGIC) framework for diverse and unpaired TextCap. This framework can adaptively construct multiple multimodal relational graphs of images and model complex relationships among graphs to represent descriptive diversity. Moreover, a cascaded generative adversarial network is developed from modeled graphs to infer the unpaired caption generation in image-sentence feature alignment and linguistic coherence levels. We validate the effectiveness of MAGIC in generating diverse captions from different relational information items of an image. Experimental results show that MAGIC can generate very promising outcomes without using any image-caption training pairs.

preprint2022arXiv

RoboCraft: Learning to See, Simulate, and Shape Elasto-Plastic Objects with Graph Networks

Modeling and manipulating elasto-plastic objects are essential capabilities for robots to perform complex industrial and household interaction tasks (e.g., stuffing dumplings, rolling sushi, and making pottery). However, due to the high degree of freedom of elasto-plastic objects, significant challenges exist in virtually every aspect of the robotic manipulation pipeline, e.g., representing the states, modeling the dynamics, and synthesizing the control signals. We propose to tackle these challenges by employing a particle-based representation for elasto-plastic objects in a model-based planning framework. Our system, RoboCraft, only assumes access to raw RGBD visual observations. It transforms the sensing data into particles and learns a particle-based dynamics model using graph neural networks (GNNs) to capture the structure of the underlying system. The learned model can then be coupled with model-predictive control (MPC) algorithms to plan the robot's behavior. We show through experiments that with just 10 minutes of real-world robotic interaction data, our robot can learn a dynamics model that can be used to synthesize control signals to deform elasto-plastic objects into various target shapes, including shapes that the robot has never encountered before. We perform systematic evaluations in both simulation and the real world to demonstrate the robot's manipulation capabilities and ability to generalize to a more complex action space, different tool shapes, and a mixture of motion modes. We also conduct comparisons between RoboCraft and untrained human subjects controlling the gripper to manipulate deformable objects in both simulation and the real world. Our learned model-based planning framework is comparable to and sometimes better than human subjects on the tested tasks.

preprint2021arXiv

CollisionIK: A Per-Instant Pose Optimization Method for Generating Robot Motions with Environment Collision Avoidance

In this work, we present a per-instant pose optimization method that can generate configurations that achieve specified pose or motion objectives as best as possible over a sequence of solutions, while also simultaneously avoiding collisions with static or dynamic obstacles in the environment. We cast our method as a multi-objective, non-linear constrained optimization-based IK problem where each term in the objective function encodes a particular pose objective. We demonstrate how to effectively incorporate environment collision avoidance as a single term in this multi-objective, optimization-based IK structure, and provide solutions for how to spatially represent and organize external environments such that data can be efficiently passed to a real-time, performance-critical optimization loop. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by comparing it to various state-of-the-art methods in a testbed of simulation experiments and discuss the implications of our work based on our results.