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Researcher profile

Yizhou Zhao

Yizhou Zhao contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Artificial IntelligenceComputer VisionComputation and LanguageMachine LearningRoboticsGraphicsInformation Theorymath.ITComputational GeometryCryptography and SecurityHuman-Computer Interaction

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Trust 21 - EmergingVerification L1Unclaimed author
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Published work

15 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

ConsistNav: Closing the Action Consistency Gap in Zero-Shot Object Navigation with Semantic Executive Control

Zero-shot object navigation has advanced rapidly with open-vocabulary detectors, image--text models, and language-guided exploration. However, even after current methods detect a plausible target hypothesis, the agent may still oscillate between exploration and pursuit, or abandon the object near success. We identify this failure mode as an action consistency gap: semantic evidence is repeatedly reinterpreted at each step without persistent commitment across the episode. We introduce ConsistNav, a training-free zero-shot ObjectNav framework built around a semantic executive composed of three coordinated modules: Finite-State Executive Controller stages target pursuit through guarded semantic phases; Persistent Candidate Memory accumulates cross-frame target evidence into stable object hypotheses; and Stability-Aware Action Control suppresses rotational stagnation, ineffective pursuit, and unverified stopping. This design changes neither the detector nor the low-level planner; instead, it controls when semantic evidence should influence navigation and when it should be suppressed or revisited. We conduct extensive experiments on HM3D and MP3D, where ConsistNav achieves state-of-the-art results among compared zero-shot ObjectNav methods and improves SR by 11.4% and SPL by 7.9% over the controlled baseline on MP3D. Ablation studies and real-world deployment experiments further demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed executive mechanism.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Geometry Aware Operator Transformer as an Efficient and Accurate Neural Surrogate for PDEs on Arbitrary Domains

The very challenging task of learning solution operators of PDEs on arbitrary domains accurately and efficiently is of vital importance to engineering and industrial simulations. Despite the existence of many operator learning algorithms to approximate such PDEs, we find that accurate models are not necessarily computationally efficient and vice versa. We address this issue by proposing a geometry aware operator transformer (GAOT) for learning PDEs on arbitrary domains. GAOT combines novel multiscale attentional graph neural operator encoders and decoders, together with geometry embeddings and (vision) transformer processors to accurately map information about the domain and the inputs into a robust approximation of the PDE solution. Multiple innovations in the implementation of GAOT also ensure computational efficiency and scalability. We demonstrate this significant gain in both accuracy and efficiency of GAOT over several baselines on a large number of learning tasks from a diverse set of PDEs, including achieving state of the art performance on three large scale three-dimensional industrial CFD datasets.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Multi-Rollout On-Policy Distillation via Peer Successes and Failures

Large language models are often post-trained with sparse verifier rewards, which indicate whether a sampled trajectory succeeds but provide limited guidance about where reasoning succeeds or fails. On-policy distillation (OPD) offers denser token-level supervision by training on student-generated trajectories, yet existing methods typically distill each rollout independently and ignore the other attempts sampled for the same prompt. We introduce Multi-Rollout On-Policy Distillation (MOPD), a peer-conditioned distillation framework that uses the student's local rollout group to construct more informative teacher signals. MOPD conditions the teacher on both successful and failed peer rollouts: successes provide positive evidence for valid reasoning patterns, while failures provide structured negative evidence about plausible mistakes to avoid. We study two peer-context constructions: positive peer imitation and contrastive success-failure conditioning. Experiments on competitive programming, mathematical reasoning, scientific question answering, and tool-use benchmarks show that MOPD consistently improves over standard on-policy baselines. Further teacher-signal analysis shows that mixed success-failure contexts better align teacher scores with verifier rewards, indicating that the gains arise from more faithful, instance-adaptive supervision. These results indicate that effective on-policy distillation should exploit the student's multi-rollout trial-and-error behavior rather than treating rollouts as isolated samples.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

RigMo: Unifying Rig and Motion Learning for Generative Animation

Despite significant progress in 4D generation, rig and motion, the core structural and dynamic components of animation are typically modeled as separate problems. Existing pipelines rely on ground-truth skeletons and skinning weights for motion generation and treat auto-rigging as an independent process, undermining scalability and interpretability. We present RigMo, a unified generative framework that jointly learns rig and motion directly from raw mesh sequences, without any human-provided rig annotations. RigMo encodes per-vertex deformations into two compact latent spaces: a rig latent that decodes into explicit Gaussian bones and skinning weights, and a motion latent that produces time-varying SE(3) transformations. Together, these outputs define an animatable mesh with explicit structure and coherent motion, enabling feed-forward rig and motion inference for deformable objects. Beyond unified rig-motion discovery, we introduce a Motion-DiT model operating in RigMo's latent space and demonstrate that these structure-aware latents can naturally support downstream motion generation tasks. Experiments on DeformingThings4D, Objaverse-XL, and TrueBones demonstrate that RigMo learns smooth, interpretable, and physically plausible rigs, while achieving superior reconstruction and category-level generalization compared to existing auto-rigging and deformation baselines. RigMo establishes a new paradigm for unified, structure-aware, and scalable dynamic 3D modeling.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

RoboAlign-R1: Distilled Multimodal Reward Alignment for Robot Video World Models

Existing robot video world models are typically trained with low-level objectives such as reconstruction and perceptual similarity, which are poorly aligned with the capabilities that matter most for robot decision making, including instruction following, manipulation success, and physical plausibility. They also suffer from error accumulation in long-horizon autoregressive prediction. We present RoboAlign-R1, a framework that combines reward-aligned post-training with stabilized long-horizon inference for robot video world models. We construct RobotWorldBench, a benchmark of 10,000 annotated video-instruction pairs collected from four robot data sources, and train a multimodal teacher judge, RoboAlign-Judge, to provide fine-grained six-dimensional evaluation of generated videos. We then distill the teacher into a lightweight student reward model for efficient reinforcement-learning-based post-training. To reduce long-horizon rollout drift, we further introduce Sliding Window Re-encoding (SWR), a training-free inference strategy that periodically refreshes the generation context. Under our in-domain evaluation protocol, RoboAlign-R1 improves the aggregate six-dimension score by 10.1% over the strongest baseline, including gains of 7.5% on Manipulation Accuracy and 4.6% on Instruction Following; these ranking improvements are further supported by an external VLM-based cross-check and a blinded human study. Meanwhile, SWR improves long-horizon prediction quality with only about 1% additional latency, yielding a 2.8% gain in SSIM and a 9.8% reduction in LPIPS. Together, these results show that reward-aligned post-training and stabilized long-horizon decoding improve task consistency, physical realism, and long-horizon prediction quality in robot video world models.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Alignment-guided Temporal Attention for Video Action Recognition

Temporal modeling is crucial for various video learning tasks. Most recent approaches employ either factorized (2D+1D) or joint (3D) spatial-temporal operations to extract temporal contexts from the input frames. While the former is more efficient in computation, the latter often obtains better performance. In this paper, we attribute this to a dilemma between the sufficiency and the efficiency of interactions among various positions in different frames. These interactions affect the extraction of task-relevant information shared among frames. To resolve this issue, we prove that frame-by-frame alignments have the potential to increase the mutual information between frame representations, thereby including more task-relevant information to boost effectiveness. Then we propose Alignment-guided Temporal Attention (ATA) to extend 1-dimensional temporal attention with parameter-free patch-level alignments between neighboring frames. It can act as a general plug-in for image backbones to conduct the action recognition task without any model-specific design. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the superiority and generality of our module.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Secure Summation: Capacity Region, Groupwise Key, and Feasibility

The secure summation problem is considered, where $K$ users, each holds an input, wish to compute the sum of their inputs at a server securely, i.e., without revealing any information beyond the sum even if the server may collude with any set of up to $T$ users. First, we prove a folklore result for secure summation - to compute $1$ bit of the sum securely, each user needs to send at least $1$ bit to the server, each user needs to hold a key of at least $1$ bit, and all users need to hold collectively some key variables of at least $K-1$ bits. Next, we focus on the symmetric groupwise key setting, where every group of $G$ users share an independent key. We show that for symmetric groupwise keys with group size $G$, when $G > K-T$, the secure summation problem is not feasible; when $G \leq K-T$, to compute $1$ bit of the sum securely, each user needs to send at least $1$ bit to the server and the size of each groupwise key is at least $(K-T-1)/\binom{K-T}{G}$ bits. Finally, we relax the symmetry assumption on the groupwise keys and the colluding user sets; we allow any arbitrary group of users to share an independent key and any arbitrary group of users to collude with the server. For such a general groupwise key and colluding user setting, we show that secure summation is feasible if and only if the hypergraph, where each node is a user and each edge is a group of users sharing the same key, is connected after removing the nodes corresponding to any colluding set of users and their incident edges.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Semantic-aligned Fusion Transformer for One-shot Object Detection

One-shot object detection aims at detecting novel objects according to merely one given instance. With extreme data scarcity, current approaches explore various feature fusions to obtain directly transferable meta-knowledge. Yet, their performances are often unsatisfactory. In this paper, we attribute this to inappropriate correlation methods that misalign query-support semantics by overlooking spatial structures and scale variances. Upon analysis, we leverage the attention mechanism and propose a simple but effective architecture named Semantic-aligned Fusion Transformer (SaFT) to resolve these issues. Specifically, we equip SaFT with a vertical fusion module (VFM) for cross-scale semantic enhancement and a horizontal fusion module (HFM) for cross-sample feature fusion. Together, they broaden the vision for each feature point from the support to a whole augmented feature pyramid from the query, facilitating semantic-aligned associations. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our framework. Without fine-tuning on novel classes, it brings significant performance gains to one-stage baselines, lifting state-of-the-art results to a higher level.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

SocAoG: Incremental Graph Parsing for Social Relation Inference in Dialogues

Inferring social relations from dialogues is vital for building emotionally intelligent robots to interpret human language better and act accordingly. We model the social network as an And-or Graph, named SocAoG, for the consistency of relations among a group and leveraging attributes as inference cues. Moreover, we formulate a sequential structure prediction task, and propose an $α$-$β$-$γ$ strategy to incrementally parse SocAoG for the dynamic inference upon any incoming utterance: (i) an $α$ process predicting attributes and relations conditioned on the semantics of dialogues, (ii) a $β$ process updating the social relations based on related attributes, and (iii) a $γ$ process updating individual's attributes based on interpersonal social relations. Empirical results on DialogRE and MovieGraph show that our model infers social relations more accurately than the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the ablation study shows the three processes complement each other, and the case study demonstrates the dynamic relational inference.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Towards Socially Intelligent Agents with Mental State Transition and Human Utility

Building a socially intelligent agent involves many challenges. One of which is to track the agent's mental state transition and teach the agent to make decisions guided by its value like a human. Towards this end, we propose to incorporate mental state simulation and value modeling into dialogue agents. First, we build a hybrid mental state parser that extracts information from both the dialogue and event observations and maintains a graphical representation of the agent's mind; Meanwhile, the transformer-based value model learns human preferences from the human value dataset, ValueNet. Empirical results show that the proposed model attains state-of-the-art performance on the dialogue/action/emotion prediction task in the fantasy text-adventure game dataset, LIGHT. We also show example cases to demonstrate: (i) how the proposed mental state parser can assist the agent's decision by grounding on the context like locations and objects, and (ii) how the value model can help the agent make decisions based on its personal priorities.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Triangular Character Animation Sampling with Motion, Emotion, and Relation

Dramatic progress has been made in animating individual characters. However, we still lack automatic control over activities between characters, especially those involving interactions. In this paper, we present a novel energy-based framework to sample and synthesize animations by associating the characters' body motions, facial expressions, and social relations. We propose a Spatial-Temporal And-Or graph (ST-AOG), a stochastic grammar model, to encode the contextual relationship between motion, emotion, and relation, forming a triangle in a conditional random field. We train our model from a labeled dataset of two-character interactions. Experiments demonstrate that our method can recognize the social relation between two characters and sample new scenes of vivid motion and emotion using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) given the social relation. Thus, our method can provide animators with an automatic way to generate 3D character animations, help synthesize interactions between Non-Player Characters (NPCs), and enhance machine emotion intelligence (EQ) in virtual reality (VR).

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

VRKitchen2.0-IndoorKit: A Tutorial for Augmented Indoor Scene Building in Omniverse

With the recent progress of simulations by 3D modeling software and game engines, many researchers have focused on Embodied AI tasks in the virtual environment. However, the research community lacks a platform that can easily serve both indoor scene synthesis and model benchmarking with various algorithms. Meanwhile, computer graphics-related tasks need a toolkit for implementing advanced synthesizing techniques. To facilitate the study of indoor scene building methods and their potential robotics applications, we introduce INDOORKIT: a built-in toolkit for NVIDIA OMNIVERSE that provides flexible pipelines for indoor scene building, scene randomizing, and animation controls. Besides, combining Python coding in the animation software INDOORKIT assists researchers in creating real-time training and controlling avatars and robotics. The source code for this toolkit is available at https://github.com/realvcla/VRKitchen2.0-Tutorial, and the tutorial along with the toolkit is available at https://vrkitchen20-tutorial.readthedocs.io/en/

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

Information Theoretic Secure Aggregation with User Dropouts

In the robust secure aggregation problem, a server wishes to learn and only learn the sum of the inputs of a number of users while some users may drop out (i.e., may not respond). The identity of the dropped users is not known a priori and the server needs to securely recover the sum of the remaining surviving users. We consider the following minimal two-round model of secure aggregation. Over the first round, any set of no fewer than $U$ users out of $K$ users respond to the server and the server wants to learn the sum of the inputs of all responding users. The remaining users are viewed as dropped. Over the second round, any set of no fewer than $U$ users of the surviving users respond (i.e., dropouts are still possible over the second round) and from the information obtained from the surviving users over the two rounds, the server can decode the desired sum. The security constraint is that even if the server colludes with any $T$ users and the messages from the dropped users are received by the server (e.g., delayed packets), the server is not able to infer any additional information beyond the sum in the information theoretic sense. For this information theoretic secure aggregation problem, we characterize the optimal communication cost. When $U \leq T$, secure aggregation is not feasible, and when $U > T$, to securely compute one symbol of the sum, the minimum number of symbols sent from each user to the server is $1$ over the first round, and $1/(U-T)$ over the second round.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

ValueNet: A New Dataset for Human Value Driven Dialogue System

Building a socially intelligent agent involves many challenges, one of which is to teach the agent to speak guided by its value like a human. However, value-driven chatbots are still understudied in the area of dialogue systems. Most existing datasets focus on commonsense reasoning or social norm modeling. In this work, we present a new large-scale human value dataset called ValueNet, which contains human attitudes on 21,374 text scenarios. The dataset is organized in ten dimensions that conform to the basic human value theory in intercultural research. We further develop a Transformer-based value regression model on ValueNet to learn the utility distribution. Comprehensive empirical results show that the learned value model could benefit a wide range of dialogue tasks. For example, by teaching a generative agent with reinforcement learning and the rewards from the value model, our method attains state-of-the-art performance on the personalized dialog generation dataset: Persona-Chat. With values as additional features, existing emotion recognition models enable capturing rich human emotions in the context, which further improves the empathetic response generation performance in the EmpatheticDialogues dataset. To the best of our knowledge, ValueNet is the first large-scale text dataset for human value modeling, and we are the first one trying to incorporate a value model into emotionally intelligent dialogue systems. The dataset is available at https://liang-qiu.github.io/ValueNet/.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Joint Mind Modeling for Explanation Generation in Complex Human-Robot Collaborative Tasks

Human collaborators can effectively communicate with their partners to finish a common task by inferring each other's mental states (e.g., goals, beliefs, and desires). Such mind-aware communication minimizes the discrepancy among collaborators' mental states, and is crucial to the success in human ad-hoc teaming. We believe that robots collaborating with human users should demonstrate similar pedagogic behavior. Thus, in this paper, we propose a novel explainable AI (XAI) framework for achieving human-like communication in human-robot collaborations, where the robot builds a hierarchical mind model of the human user and generates explanations of its own mind as a form of communications based on its online Bayesian inference of the user's mental state. To evaluate our framework, we conduct a user study on a real-time human-robot cooking task. Experimental results show that the generated explanations of our approach significantly improves the collaboration performance and user perception of the robot. Code and video demos are available on our project website: https://xfgao.github.io/xCookingWeb/.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access