Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Weiduo Yuan

Publications and source records attributed to Weiduo Yuan.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

Spatial-UMI-Dream: Scaling World Action Models with Metric Geometry for UMI Manipulation

The Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) enables scalable demonstration collection independently of a specific robot. However, its moving, close-range gripper cameras entangle camera and object motion without a stable external view, leaving the metric geometry needed for precise manipulation implicit in RGB. We introduce Spatial-UMI-Dream, a 5B spatial World Action Model (WAM) pretrained on 605 hours of RGB-D UMI data through two-stage training -- world-only adaptation followed by joint world-action learning -- to jointly predict future RGB, fisheye-aligned metric depth, and actions. Stereo-derived depth makes scene scale and spatial relationships explicit within a unified dual-gripper RGB-D representation. Furthermore, evaluating UMI policies requires testing whether UMI's robot-independent demonstration collection translates into policy generalization across robot embodiments, alongside robustness to environmental changes. We introduce RoboTwin-UMI, a twenty-task simulation benchmark built on RoboTwin with UMI wrist-mounted fisheye observations, enabling controlled, repeatable evaluation of UMI policies under environment and embodiment changes separately and jointly without additional fine-tuning. On RoboTwin-UMI, Spatial-UMI-Dream achieves 79.10% in-domain success and 72.15% under combined embodiment and environment shifts, exceeding the strongest evaluated baseline in each setting by 4.65 and 10.30 percentage points, respectively. It also exhibits the smallest success-rate drop under embodiment transfer among the evaluated policies. In a matched pretraining ablation, RGB-only pretraining leads to a 5.75-percentage-point decrease in in-domain success compared with RGB-D pretraining. Across six real-world tasks, Spatial-UMI-Dream achieves 85.0% average success, exceeding the strongest baseline by 24.2 percentage points. Project page: https://weiduoyuan.com/spatial-umi-dream/

cs.RO↗

Large Reward Models: Generalizable Online Robot Reward Generation with Vision-Language Models

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown strong potential for improving robotic manipulation policies, yet its practical use remains bottlenecked by the difficulty of specifying reward functions that are both semantically meaningful and reusable across tasks. In this paper, we propose Large Reward Models (LRMs), a framework that adapts foundation VLMs into frame-level reward generators for robot policy refinement. We specialize a state-of-the-art VLM on a multi-source dataset spanning real-world robot trajectories, human-object interactions, and simulated manipulation environments. Unlike prior approaches that mainly evaluate trajectories post-hoc, LRMs expose multiple reward interfaces from visual observations: progress estimation, task completion, and temporal contrastive comparison. Starting from an imitation-learned policy, we use these VLM-derived rewards to guide PPO refinement on held-out long-horizon manipulation tasks. Our experiments show that LRM progress rewards provide the strongest non-privileged online refinement signal, improving the IL baseline and narrowing the gap to privileged environment rewards. We further deploy progress rewards for progress-weighted behavioral cloning on four real-world manipulation tasks spanning two robot platforms, improving over SFT on all four tasks. These results suggest that modality-specific specialization of foundation VLMs can provide practical visual reward signals for both simulated policy refinement and physical robot self-improvement without hand-coded task rewards.

cs.RO↗

HOTICE: Whole-Body Humanoid Object Transportation in Cluttered Environments

Object transportation is a fundamental capability for humanoid robots operating in real-world, human-centric environments, yet existing methods struggle when clutter constrains free space around both the robot and its carried payload. We present HOTICE, a whole-body humanoid learning framework for transporting objects through such cluttered environments. First, we introduce Humanoid-Object Decoupled Potential Fields, which jointly encode collision-avoidance guidance for the robot and the carried object, enabling coordinated, obstacle-aware motion for both. Second, to address the large action space inherent to whole-body loco-manipulation, we design a dual-agent reinforcement learning architecture that decouples upper- and lower-body control while preserving whole-body coordination via shared state observations and rewards. To train a policy that generalizes across diverse cluttered scenes, we further employ a specialist-to-generalist distillation strategy, in which privileged teacher policies are distilled into a single deployable student policy. We evaluate HOTICE in MuJoCo simulation and on a real Unitree G1 humanoid, demonstrating effective and robust object transportation across cluttered scenarios for objects of varying shapes. Our results show that HOTICE reliably coordinates whole-body motion and object-aware collision avoidance, generalizing effectively to previously unseen cluttered environments while achieving strong performance in sim2real deployment.

cs.RO↗

ICLR: In-Context Imitation Learning with Visual Reasoning

In-context imitation learning enables robots to adapt to new tasks from a small number of demonstrations without additional training. However, existing approaches typically condition only on state-action trajectories and lack explicit representations of task intent. This limitation hinders performance in complex and ambiguous task settings where the same actions may be consistent with different objectives. To address this, we present In-Context Imitation Learning with Visual Reasoning (ICLR), a novel framework that augments demonstration prompts with structured visual reasoning traces representing anticipated future robot trajectories in image space. ICLR also jointly learns to generate reasoning traces and low-level actions within a unified autoregressive transformer, enabling the model to mimic not only action prediction but also the reasoning process that leads to those actions. We extensively evaluate ICLR in both simulation and real-world manipulation tasks and demonstrate consistent improvements in success rates and generalization to unseen tasks and novel object configurations compared to other in-context imitation learning methods. These results suggest that incorporating embodied visual reasoning represents a promising direction for enhancing the robustness and generalization of robotic in-context learning systems.

cs.RO↗

BEVCALIB: LiDAR-Camera Calibration via Geometry-Guided Bird's-Eye View Representations

Accurate LiDAR-camera calibration is fundamental to fusing multi-modal perception in autonomous driving and robotic systems. Traditional calibration methods require extensive data collection in controlled environments and cannot compensate for the transformation changes during the vehicle/robot movement. In this paper, we propose the first model that uses bird's-eye view (BEV) features to perform LiDAR camera calibration from raw data, termed BEVCALIB. To achieve this, we extract camera BEV features and LiDAR BEV features separately and fuse them into a shared BEV feature space. To fully utilize the geometric information from the BEV feature, we introduce a novel feature selector to filter the most important features in the transformation decoder, which reduces memory consumption and enables efficient training. Extensive evaluations on KITTI, NuScenes, and our own dataset demonstrate that BEVCALIB establishes a new state of the art. Under various noise conditions, BEVCALIB outperforms the best baseline in the literature by an average of (47.08%, 82.32%) on KITTI dataset, and (78.17%, 68.29%) on NuScenes dataset, in terms of (translation, rotation), respectively. In the open-source domain, it improves the best reproducible baseline by one order of magnitude. Our code and demo results are available at https://cisl.ucr.edu/BEVCalib.

cs.CV↗

DreamPlan: Efficient Reinforcement Fine-Tuning of Vision-Language Planners via Video World Models

Robotic manipulation requires sophisticated commonsense reasoning, a capability naturally possessed by large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs). While VLMs show promise as zero-shot planners, their lack of grounded physical understanding often leads to compounding errors and low success rates when deployed in complex real-world environments, particularly for challenging tasks like deformable object manipulation. Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) can adapt these planners to specific task dynamics, directly fine-tuning VLMs via real-world interaction is prohibitively expensive, unsafe, and sample-inefficient. To overcome this bottleneck, we introduce DreamPlan, a novel framework for the reinforcement fine-tuning of VLM planners via video world models. Instead of relying on costly physical rollouts, DreamPlan first leverages the zero-shot VLM to collect exploratory interaction data. We demonstrate that this sub-optimal data is sufficient to train an action-conditioned video generation model, which implicitly captures complex real-world physics. Subsequently, the VLM planner is fine-tuned entirely within the "imagination" of this video world model using Odds Ratio Policy Optimization (ORPO). By utilizing these virtual rollouts, physical and task-specific knowledge is efficiently injected into the VLM. Our results indicate that DreamPlan bridges the gap between semantic reasoning and physical grounding, significantly improving manipulation success rates without the need for large-scale real-world data collection. Our project page is https://psi-lab.ai/DreamPlan/.

cs.RO↗

$Ψ_0$: An Open Foundation Model Towards Universal Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

We introduce $Ψ_0$ (Psi-Zero), an open foundation model to address challenging humanoid loco-manipulation tasks. While existing approaches often attempt to address this fundamental problem by co-training on large and diverse human and humanoid data, we argue that this strategy is suboptimal due to the fundamental kinematic and motion disparities between humans and humanoid robots. Therefore, data efficiency and model performance remain unsatisfactory despite the considerable data volume. To address this challenge, \ours\;decouples the learning process to maximize the utility of heterogeneous data sources. Specifically, we propose a staged training paradigm with different learning objectives: First, we autoregressively pre-train a VLM backbone on large-scale egocentric human videos to acquire generalizable visual-action representations. Then, we post-train a flow-based action expert on high-quality humanoid robot data to learn precise robot joint control. Our research further identifies a critical yet often overlooked data recipe: in contrast to approaches that scale with noisy Internet clips or heterogeneous cross-embodiment robot datasets, we demonstrate that pre-training on high-quality egocentric human manipulation data followed by post-training on domain-specific real-world humanoid trajectories yields superior performance. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate that \ours\ achieves the best performance using only about 800 hours of human video data and 30 hours of real-world robot data, outperforming baselines pre-trained on more than 10$\times$ as much data by over 40\% in overall success rate across multiple tasks. We will open-source the entire ecosystem to the community, including a data processing and training pipeline, a humanoid foundation model, and a real-time action inference engine.

cs.RO↗

FuzzingRL: Reinforcement Fuzz-Testing for Revealing VLM Failures

Vision Language Models (VLMs) are prone to errors, and identifying where these errors occur is critical for ensuring the reliability and safety of AI systems. In this paper, we propose an approach that automatically generates questions designed to deliberately induce incorrect responses from VLMs, thereby revealing their vulnerabilities. The core of this approach lies in fuzz testing and reinforcement finetuning: we transform a single input query into a large set of diverse variants through vision and language fuzzing. Based on the fuzzing outcomes, the question generator is further instructed by adversarial reinforcement fine-tuning to produce increasingly challenging queries that trigger model failures. With this approach, we can consistently drive down a target VLM's answer accuracy -- for example, the accuracy of Qwen2.5-VL-32B on our generated questions drops from 86.58\% to 65.53\% in four RL iterations. Moreover, a fuzzing policy trained against a single target VLM transfers to multiple other VLMs, producing challenging queries that degrade their performance as well.

cs.LG↗