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Feng Gao

Publications and source records attributed to Feng Gao.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

From AI-assisted to AI-native Industrial Control: Architecture, Agent Design, and Challenges

The integration of AI and industrial control is rapidly transforming industrial automation. However, current approaches remain predominantly AI-assisted, where AI functions are incorporated as auxiliary components without fundamentally altering the underlying architecture of industrial control systems. Consequently, the potential of AI to enable higher levels of autonomy, adaptability, and continuous evolution remains underutilized. This paper proposes an AI-native industrial control paradigm, which reconceptualizes industrial control systems by positioning AI as the intrinsic core rather than an external enhancement. The proposed paradigm is built upon an AI-native infrastructure and a collection of collaborative agentic AIs, each encapsulating a set of advanced skills. Among them, the industrial control agent plays a central role in orchestrating the system lifecycle. Through this paradigm, industrial control shifts from a closed, capability-oriented, human-driven, and passive engineering process to an open, task-oriented, intent-driven, and autonomous solution delivery mechanism. The paper further analyzes the key challenges of the AI-native paradigm from both AI and industrial control perspectives, including issues related to AI model reliability, formal verification, real-time assurance, and heterogeneous resource orchestration. Overall, this work outlines a forward-looking vision for industrial control in the AI era and identifies critical research directions toward autonomous, evolvable, and adaptive control systems in complex and dynamic industrial environments.

physics.soc-ph↗

LaWAM: Latent World Action Models for Efficient Dynamics-Aware Robot Policies

Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) leverage large-scale vision-language pretraining for semantic robot control, but often lack explicit foresight into how robot actions change the scene. World-Action Models (WAMs) address this limitation by conditioning policies on predicted futures, yet existing approaches typically rely on computationally expensive video generation with substantial pixel-level redundancy. We present LaWAM, a Latent World Action Model that exposes predictive dynamics to robot policies through compact latent visual subgoals instead of reconstructed future video. At the core of LaWAM is a latent-action-conditioned Latent World Model (LaWM). We obtain LaWM by training a latent action model in the latent space of a pretrained vision foundation model and repurposing its forward decoder to predict future observation features for scene evolution. LaWAM then conditions action generation on these predicted latent visual subgoals to enable dynamics-aware robot control. LaWAM achieves state-of-the-art or competitive success rates (SRs) across LIBERO (98.6% SR), RoboTwin (91.22% SR), and real-world manipulation tasks while retaining low-latency inference. LaWAM runs in 187 ms per action-chunk prediction and achieves up to 24x lower wall-clock latency than pixel-space WAMs.

cs.RO↗

Beyond Imitation: Reinforcement Learning-Based Sim-Real Co-Training for VLA Models

Simulation offers a scalable and low-cost way to enrich vision-language-action (VLA) training, reducing reliance on expensive real-robot demonstrations. However, most sim-real co-training methods rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which treats simulation as a static source of demonstrations and does not exploit large-scale closed-loop interaction. Consequently, real-world gains and generalization are often limited. In this paper, we propose an RL-based sim-real Co-training (RL-Co) framework that leverages interactive simulation while preserving real-world capabilities. Our method follows a generic two-stage design: we first warm-start the policy with SFT on a mixture of real and simulated demonstrations, then fine-tune it with reinforcement learning in simulation while adding an auxiliary supervised loss on real-world data to anchor the policy and mitigate catastrophic forgetting. We evaluate our framework on four real-world tabletop manipulation tasks using two representative VLA architectures, OpenVLA and $π_{0.5}$, and observe consistent improvements over real-only fine-tuning and SFT-based co-training, including +24% real-world success on OpenVLA and +20% on $π_{0.5}$. Beyond higher success rates, RL co-training yields stronger generalization to unseen task variations and substantially improved real-world data efficiency, providing a practical and scalable pathway for leveraging simulation to enhance real-robot deployment.

cs.RO↗

USER: A Unified and Extensible System for Real-World Online Policy Learning in Embodied AI

Online policy learning directly in the physical world is a promising yet challenging direction for embodied intelligence. Unlike simulation, real-world systems cannot be arbitrarily accelerated, cheaply reset, or massively replicated, suggesting that real-world policy learning is not merely an algorithmic problem, but inherently a systems problem. We present USER, a \underline{U}nified and extensible \underline{S}yst\underline{E}m for real-world online policy lea\underline{R}ning. On the systems side, USER introduces a hardware abstraction layer for unified robot management and an adaptive communication plane that enables efficient cloud-edge training. On the learning side, USER adopts a fully asynchronous training framework, designs a persistent and cache-aware replay buffer, and provides extensible abstractions for rewards, algorithms, and policies. Experiments in both simulation and the real world demonstrate that USER supports multi-robot coordination, heterogeneous manipulators, cloud-edge training with large models, and long-running asynchronous training. Together, these capabilities establish USER as a unified and extensible systems foundation for real-world online policy learning.

cs.RO↗

STEAM: Self-Supervised Temporal Ensemble Advantage Modeling for Real-World Robot Learning

Real-world robot learning increasingly relies on heterogeneous data, but demonstrations and rollouts often mix useful progress with stalls, corrections, and suboptimal behavior. Effective policy learning therefore requires frame-level advantages that distinguish reliable local progress from failures and regressions. We propose \textbf{S}elf-supervised \textbf{T}emporal \textbf{E}nsemble \textbf{A}dvantage \textbf{M}odeling (\textbf{STEAM}), a label-free method that learns such advantages from expert demonstrations. STEAM trains an ensemble of temporal-offset predictors on frame pairs within expert trajectories, using the normalized temporal offset between two frames as a self-supervised signal. Each predictor maps a frame pair to a distribution over temporal offsets, which is converted into a scalar advantage. STEAM then takes the minimum advantage across the ensemble to score mixed-quality rollout data conservatively. Across real-world bimanual towel folding, chip checkout, table clearing, and cola restocking tasks, STEAM identifies stalls, failures, and recoveries. When combined with CFGRL, STEAM achieves the highest policy success rate on all four tasks, averaging $83.5\%$ against $58.8\%$ for the best baseline. Project page: https://rlinf.github.io/steam/.

cs.RO↗

FM-ReID: Selective Competitive Token Routing for Object Re-Identification

Object re-identification (ReID) faces a recurring challenge: different identities can share highly similar global appearances, while the cues that distinguish them are localized, heterogeneous, and visible only under particular viewpoints. This challenge arises in animal ReID through markings, contours, and scars, in person ReID through subtle clothing and accessory cues, and in vehicle ReID through localized appearance details. Although visual foundation models encode such information in dense tokens, a single holistic descriptor can obscure discriminative local signals. We propose FM-ReID, an end-to-end framework that formulates local representation learning as selective competitive token routing. Its Competitive Fine-grained Mining module uses multiple mining queries and a residual query to compete for dense DINOv3 tokens. Above-prior selection retains tokens preferentially allocated to each mining query, while the residual slot receives tokens excluded from the retrieval descriptors. The resulting multi-query descriptors are jointly trained with a holistic representation for retrieval, without fixed spatial partitions or equal-area constraints. FM-ReID achieves strong results on animal, person, and vehicle ReID benchmarks, supporting competitive token routing as an effective way to augment holistic foundation-model representations.

cs.CV↗

Harness VLA: Steering Frozen VLAs into Reliable Manipulation Primitives via Memory-Guided Agents

Language-conditioned manipulation requires both precise contact-rich control and robust reasoning over language, scenes, and long horizons. End-to-end Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide strong local visuomotor skills, but they are trained on in-distribution task trajectories and often fail under deployment perturbations such as semantic retargeting, goal re-binding, spatial-layout shifts, and unstable local contacts. LLM coding agents provide complementary semantic and compositional reasoning, but purely analytic primitives struggle with irregular grasping, constrained placement, and articulated-object interaction. We present Harness VLA, a memory-augmented agentic framework that exposes a frozen VLA as a retryable contact-rich primitive and composes it with a small fixed library of analytic primitives for grounding, staging, transport, navigation, and release. Rather than expanding the skill library, the harness learns the operating range of these fixed primitives from task-specific execution traces, global success rules, and failure models. By lifting semantic re-grounding, non-contact execution, and VLA re-staging to the planner while reserving the frozen VLA for local contact-rich phases, Harness VLA extends pretrained VLAs beyond their original trajectory distribution without finetuning. Across perturbed tabletop, household kitchen, and clean-to-randomized bimanual manipulation, Harness VLA improves over the strongest relevant baselines by 38.6 and 25.4 percentage points on LIBERO-Pro and RoboCasa365, respectively, and reaches 58.4% on RoboTwin C2R. Real-world demonstrations on dual-Franka robots further show target redirection, grasp recovery, and new task compositions with the same frozen VLA. Code is available at https://github.com/RLinf/RPent.

cs.RO↗

PTCG-Bench: Can LLM Agents Master Pokémon Trading Card Game?

Given a strategically complex board game, human players can quickly learn to devise strategies after playing a few rounds. Autonomous agents require similar capabilities in realistic interactive environments, yet existing agent benchmarks often fail to fully capture such strategic and evolving decision-making scenarios. We present PTCG-Bench, a benchmark built on the Pok'{e}mon Trading Card Game (PTCG) that evaluates LLM agents at two complementary levels: (1) their decision-making performance within a single complex environment, and (2) their ability to self-evolving through accumulated experience. We further include a modular harness ablation to better interpret agent performance without conflating it with model capability. Our experiments show that, although LLM agents can achieve non-trivial gameplay performance, sustained and stable self-evolution remains challenging, and performance is sensitive to harness design. We hope that PTCG-Bench will facilitate future research on harness-aware and self-evolving agents in realistic interactive environments.

cs.AI↗

Energy Harvesting for Self-Powered Microsystems: A Critical Review of Materials, Power Management, and System Integration

The relentless proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT), wearable bioelectronics, and cyber-physical infrastructure has rendered the conventional electrochemical battery the single most prohibitive bottleneck to long-term, maintenance-free autonomous microsystems. Energy harvesting, i.e. the conversion of ambient mechanical, thermal, and radiative energy into usable electrical power, has consequently emerged as a transformative paradigm to realize perpetual, battery-independent operation. This review critically synthesizes the most significant advances in energy harvesting technologies over the recent period, with a focus on triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs), piezoelectric and pyroelectric transducers, indoor photovoltaics, radio-frequency (RF) rectennas, and their multi-source hybrid integrations. We highlight paradigm-shifting breakthroughs, including liquid-solid TENGs that eliminate mechanical wear, nonlinear piezoelectric oscillators that broaden operational bandwidth by over 300%, machine-learning-accelerated material discovery for high charge-density dielectrics, and multiband and broadband RF harvesting enabled by metamaterial architectures. Crucially, we move beyond conventional materials-centric narratives to critically interrogate the "unseen" system-level bottlenecks: ultra-low-voltage cold-start power management integrated circuits (PMICs), the impedance-matching challenges of hybrid energy sources, and the persistent degradation of micro-supercapacitors and thin-film batteries under realistic field conditions.

physics.app-ph↗

Semantic-Guided Fusion Network for Multi-Source Remote Sensing Image Classification

Multi-source remote sensing image classification has attracted increasing attention due to the complementary spectral, structural, and geometric information. However, existing methods still suffer from two limitations: insufficient semantic contextual modeling and unreliable feature fusion caused by slight spatial misalignment. To address these issues, we propose a Semantic-Guided Fusion Network (SGFNet) for multi-source remote sensing image classification. Specifically, the Semantic Mixing Convolution Block (SMCB) is designed to dynamically generate semantic-aware convolution kernels according to contextual relationships among feature representations. In addition, the Frequency Modulated Fusion Block (FMFB) is introduced to perform cross-modal interaction in the frequency domain, which effectively alleviates the influence of slight spatial misalignment and improves complementary information fusion. Extensive experiments conducted on the Augsburg and Houston 2018 datasets demonstrate that the proposed SGFNet consistently outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/oucailab/SGFNet .

eess.IV↗

Vitrification-Devitrification Enables Tunable Photonic and Gas Sorption Properties of Zeolitic Imidazolate Frameworks

Zeolitic imidazolate framework (ZIF) glasses represent an emerging family of melt-quenched glasses, which exhibit immense potential for applications in gas separation, energy storage, and optics. However, their intrinsic porosity remains elusive due to the inherent challenges in resolving their disordered atomistic structures. Here, we systematically investigate the porosity of ZIF-4 and ZIF-62 crystals and their corresponding glasses. CO2 sorption at 195 K enables quantitative assessment of microporosity in both crystalline and glassy states, allowing the accessible micropore volume of the ZIF glasses to be determined. Moreover, establishing a direct relationship between photonic properties and structural porosity in Zn-based ZIF glasses remains challenging. Here we demonstrate striking broadband blue-light emission from ZIF-4 glass annealed under optimized conditions. A pronounced red shift is observed when increasing the annealing temperature above the glass transition temperature. By correlating the evolution of photoluminescence with structural porosity, we reveal the interplay between the photonic and gas sorption properties of ZIF glasses. These findings provide new insights into the structure-property relationships of ZIF glasses and offer a pathway toward the rational design of multifunctional MOF glasses.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Physics-Knowledge-Guided Hybrid Neural Learning for Arctic Sea Ice Concentration Evolution and Short-Range Prediction

Accurate modeling of sea ice concentration (SIC) evolution is essential for polar climate assessment and short?range sea ice prediction. Numerical and data-driven approaches constitute major foundations for SIC modeling, but the former often require complex parameterizations and substantial compu?tation, whereas the latter rarely encode physical dependencies explicitly. This study presents the Physics-Informed Hybrid Ice Model (PIHIM), a differentiable data-driven hybrid ice model for daily SIC evolution that organizes its network structure according to the physical dependencies encoded in the sea ice continuity equation and explicitly accounts for dynamical transport, ther?modynamically driven areal growth and loss, and unresolved local processes. PIHIM preserves the representation capacity of deep learning while providing a process-decomposed formulation of ice displacement, freeze-melt areal change, and local error closure. Two evaluation settings are adopted: reanalysis-forced simulation examines SIC evolution stability under reanalysis forcing, and forecast-forced prediction assesses short-range performance un?der forecast-forced conditions, with reanalysis and observational SIC serving as verification references. Results indicate enhanced ice-edge preservation and error-growth control in reanalysis?forced simulation, while PIHIM retains measurable short-range prediction skill under forecast-forced conditions. Our code will be made publicly available after the paper is accepted.

cs.AI↗

One-Step Evolution for Long-Time Extrapolation: An Error-Bound-Informed and Prior-Guided Neural Residual Framework for Autonomous PDEs

Accurate simulation of the long-time evolution of systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) is central to scientific computing. Among existing deep learning?based approaches for solving PDEs, neural operators typically rely on extensive trajectory data, whereas physics-informed meth?ods often exhibit limited stability during long-time extrapolation. For a well-posed autonomous PDE, long-time trajectories can be generated by repeated composition of a fixed-step evolution operator; hence, long-time extrapolation depends on controlling the approximation error of this operator and the propagation of that error under recursive composition. Accordingly, we propose a numerical-prior-guided, physics-constrained method trained without ground-truth trajectory supervision: a low-cost numerical prior reduces the difficulty of approximating the one?step evolution operator, while a weak-form PDE residual provides a computable proxy for the one-step error term in the error?propagation bound. We validate the method on five benchmark cases spanning four PDE classes and compare it with ten physics?informed learning methods under a unified protocol that excludes ground-truth trajectories from training and model selection. The results indicate that, in all five cases, the proposed method reduces long-time extrapolation error relative to the numerical prior and outperforms the best competing baseline in each case, thereby improving long-time simulation accuracy across different PDEs without ground-truth trajectory supervision. The source code developed for this paper will be made publicly available upon acceptance of the manuscript.

cs.AI↗

Structured Neural Modeling of Daily Arctic Sea-Ice Concentration Evolution: Physical-Trajectory-Driven Learning and Forecast-Domain Adaptation

Accurate modeling of the daily evolution of sea ice concentration (SIC) is central to improving the credibility and operational forecasting capability of deep learning-based sea ice prediction. However, existing deep learning methods often couple the underlying sea ice evolution relationships and data errors within high-dimensional nonlinear mappings, making it difficult to construct a stable and verifiable evolution core and apply it reliably to practical forecasting. To address this issue, this study proposes a reanalysis-forecast dual-domain decoupled framework for learning sea ice evolution operators. The framework builds upon a lightweight physical baseline to generate daily evolution trajectories, employs a temporally constrained joint multi-lead compensation network to com?pensate for unresolved processes, and introduces an ice-mass?aware transport mechanism to suppress numerical dissipation. In the forecasting stage, the parameters of the base evolution core are fixed, while a lightweight variable-semantic adaptation mechanism calibrates inter-domain distributions and evolution responses, thereby separating forecast-domain errors from base evolution errors. Experiments show that the constructed base evolution core can accurately and stably simulate daily sea ice evolution at both short-term and annual scales under reanal?ysis forcing, and can be effectively transferred to the forecast domain through lightweight adaptation, achieving stable prac?tical forecasting capability while preserving the base evolution structure. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/zhangmaqun65535/SNM upon acceptance of this manuscript.

physics.ao-ph↗

Frequency and Edge-Guided Segment Anything Model for Remote Sensing Image Semantic Segmentation

Remote sensing image semantic segmentation (RSISS) has attracted significant attention due to the growing demand for fine-grained land cover information. The Segment Anything Model (SAM), proposed as a foundation vision model, offers strong segmentation performance and generalization capabilities for RSISS tasks. However, existing SAM-based approaches face two limitations: (1) Insufficient adaptation of SAM's features to the diverse characteristics of land cover types. (2) Semantic ambiguity at object boundaries, which hinders accurate delineation. To address these limitations, we propose Frequency and Edge-guided SAM (FE-SAM), a scalable and efficient framework for RSISS. Specifically, we introduce a Frequency-Modulated Adapter (FMA) that adaptively decomposes and modulates frequency-domain features based on the input data. It selectively enhances informative high- and low-frequency components corresponding to different land cover types. Furthermore, to improve SAM's ability to capture fine-grained details, we design EGRefiner, which integrates multi-scale edge-enhanced information extracted from the input image. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that FE-SAM outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The source codes are available at: https://github.com/oucailab/FE-SAM.

cs.CV↗

Dual-Branch State-Displacement Network for Sea Surface Temperature Super-Resolution

Sea surface temperature (SST) is a critical indicator of global climate change, yet satellite-derived SST imagery often suffers from coarse spatial resolution, limiting the ability to capture fine-scale thermal structures such as ocean fronts. To address this, we propose a Dual-Branch State-Displacement Network (DBSD-Net) for SST super-resolution. DBSD-Net adopts a dual-branch architecture: a wavelet frequency branch that explicitly separates low and high-frequency components via discrete wavelet transform for targeted processing, and a VGGUNet branch that extracts multi-scale semantic features from a frozen pre-trained VGG backbone. Within the wavelet branch, we introduce a Structural State Space Module (SSSM) with a Gated Structure Refinement (GSR) unit to efficiently capture long-range dependencies and enhance structural integrity, and a Displacement Gate Module (DGM) that learns a displacement field for geometry-aware modulation of high-frequency details, thereby mitigating spatially varying degradation. Experiments on multiple public SST datasets demonstrate that DBSD-Net outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

eess.IV↗

MobileWAM: Bridging World Action Models to Mobile Manipulation with Chain-of-Foresight

World action models (WAMs) built on video generation backbones are a rising recipe for robot learning, yet remain confined to tabletop manipulation. Mobile manipulation demands simultaneous locomotion and whole-body manipulation amid scene-scale dynamics, yet is still dominated by dynamics-blind visual encoders with hand-crafted coordination. We bridge this gap with MobileWAM, a mixture-of-transformers architecture that fuses a pretrained video diffusion transformer with a lightweight action expert through layerwise joint attention, translating internet-scale motion priors into whole-body control. To reconcile the heterogeneous dynamics of moving and manipulating, each feed-forward layer of the action expert becomes a three-expert mixture of shared, locomotion, and manipulation experts, softly routed by the motion intent in the action tokens. To densify supervision, we further propose Chain-of-Foresight (CoF): intermediate representations sequentially predict a chain of future latent chunks, each step conditioned on its predecessor. CoF pairs naturally with our decoupled video--action denoising scheme. At deployment, the WAM serves as a pure current-frame encoder; foresight acts only through gradients, so at inference the foresight chain and video generation are discarded, leaving only policy-level cost. MobileWAM surpasses state-of-the-art mobile manipulation policies on ManiSkill-HAB and fine-tunes to a real ARX Lift2 mobile manipulator across diverse tasks with strong generalization. Code will be released soon.

cs.CV↗

A Deployment-Friendly Foundational Framework for Efficient Computational Pathology

Pathology foundation models (PFMs) generalize well across computational pathology tasks but remain costly for gigapixel whole-slide image analysis. Here, we present LitePath, a deployment-friendly framework that addresses model over-parameterization and patch-level redundancy. LitePath combines LiteFM, a compact model distilled from Virchow2, H-Optimus-1 and UNI2 using 190 million patches, with the Adaptive Patch Selector for task-specific patch selection. Compared with Virchow2, LitePath uses 28x fewer parameters and 403.5x fewer FLOPs. On an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super, it processes 208 slides per hour, 104.5x faster than Virchow2, and consumes 0.36 kWh per 3,000 slides, 171x less energy than Virchow2 on an RTX 3090 GPU. We evaluated LitePath on 45 multicenter cohorts across four organs and 33 tasks, comprising 37 classification and 8 survival cohorts, including 33 internal, 10 external and 2 prospective cohorts, with 17,837 slides from 9,977 patients disjoint from the pretraining data. Among 22 PFMs, LitePath achieved the best average rank (6.56 vs. 6.58 for Virchow2), retained 99.71% of Virchow2's Macro-AUC across classification cohorts, and improved mean C-index by 2.14 percentage points across survival cohorts (71.91% vs. 69.77%). We further introduce the Deployability Score (D-Score), a weighted geometric mean of normalized task performance and FLOPs. LitePath achieved the highest D-Score (0.8455), outperforming H0-mini (0.7723) and Virchow2 (0.7297). In a randomized paired crossover study of four pathologists and 120 cases, LitePath increased diagnostic accuracy by 4.1-15.8 percentage points and reduced diagnostic time by 10.9-14.2%. These results demonstrate rapid, cost-effective and energy-efficient pathology image analysis on accessible hardware while maintaining competitive performance.

cs.CV↗