arXiv subjects

Zixuan Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Zixuan Chen.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

SegmentDreamer: Towards High-fidelity Text-to-3D Synthesis with Segmented Consistency Trajectory Distillation

Recent advancements in text-to-3D generation improve the visual quality of Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) and its variants by directly connecting Consistency Distillation (CD) to score distillation. However, due to the imbalance between self-consistency and cross-consistency, these CD-based methods inherently suffer from improper conditional guidance, leading to sub-optimal generation results. To address this issue, we present SegmentDreamer, a novel framework designed to fully unleash the potential of consistency models for high-fidelity text-to-3D generation. Specifically, we reformulate SDS through the proposed Segmented Consistency Trajectory Distillation (SCTD), effectively mitigating the imbalance issues by explicitly defining the relationship between self- and cross-consistency. Moreover, SCTD partitions the Probability Flow Ordinary Differential Equation (PF-ODE) trajectory into multiple sub-trajectories and ensures consistency within each segment, which can theoretically provide a significantly tighter upper bound on distillation error. Additionally, we propose a distillation pipeline for a more swift and stable generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our SegmentDreamer outperforms state-of-the-art methods in visual quality, enabling high-fidelity 3D asset creation through 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS).

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

SDD: Self-Degraded Defense against Malicious Fine-tuning

Open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) often employ safety alignment methods to resist harmful instructions. However, recent research shows that maliciously fine-tuning these LLMs on harmful data can easily bypass these safeguards. To counter this, we theoretically uncover why malicious fine-tuning succeeds and identify potential defense strategies. Building on the theoretical analysis, we introduce the Self-Degraded Defense (SDD) framework. SDD encourages LLMs to produce high-quality but irrelevant responses to harmful prompts. When attackers attempt malicious fine-tuning, the general capability of the LLM aligned by SDD will significantly decrease, rendering it incapable of following harmful instructions. Our experimental results confirm SDD's effectiveness against such attacks.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Reactivation: Empirical NTK Dynamics Under Task Shifts

The Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) offers a powerful tool to study the functional dynamics of neural networks. In the so-called lazy, or kernel regime, the NTK remains static during training and the network function is linear in the static neural tangents feature space. The evolution of the NTK during training is necessary for feature learning, a key driver of deep learning success. The study of the NTK dynamics has led to several critical discoveries in recent years, in generalization and scaling behaviours. However, this body of work has been limited to the single task setting, where the data distribution is assumed constant over time. In this work, we present a comprehensive empirical analysis of NTK dynamics in continual learning, where the data distribution shifts over time. Our findings highlight continual learning as a rich and underutilized testbed for probing the dynamics of neural training. At the same time, they challenge the validity of static-kernel approximations in theoretical treatments of continual learning, even at large scale.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

G-DexGrasp: Generalizable Dexterous Grasping Synthesis Via Part-Aware Prior Retrieval and Prior-Assisted Generation

Recent advances in dexterous grasping synthesis have demonstrated significant progress in producing reasonable and plausible grasps for many task purposes. But it remains challenging to generalize to unseen object categories and diverse task instructions. In this paper, we propose G-DexGrasp, a retrieval-augmented generation approach that can produce high-quality dexterous hand configurations for unseen object categories and language-based task instructions. The key is to retrieve generalizable grasping priors, including the fine-grained contact part and the affordance-related distribution of relevant grasping instances, for the following synthesis pipeline. Specifically, the fine-grained contact part and affordance act as generalizable guidance to infer reasonable grasping configurations for unseen objects with a generative model, while the relevant grasping distribution plays as regularization to guarantee the plausibility of synthesized grasps during the subsequent refinement optimization. Our comparison experiments validate the effectiveness of our key designs for generalization and demonstrate the remarkable performance against the existing approaches. Project page: https://g-dexgrasp.github.io/

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Reasoning Language Models: A Blueprint

Reasoning language models (RLMs), also known as Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), such as OpenAI's o1 and o3, DeepSeek-R1, and Alibaba's QwQ, have redefined AI's problem-solving capabilities by extending LLMs with advanced reasoning mechanisms. Yet, their high costs, proprietary nature, and complex architectures - uniquely combining reinforcement learning (RL), search heuristics, and LLMs - present accessibility and scalability challenges. To address these, we propose a comprehensive blueprint that organizes RLM components into a modular framework, based on a survey and analysis of all RLM works. This blueprint incorporates diverse reasoning structures (chains, trees, graphs, and nested forms), reasoning strategies (e.g., Monte Carlo Tree Search, Beam Search), RL concepts (policy, value models and others), supervision schemes (Outcome-Based and Process-Based Supervision), and other related concepts (e.g., Test-Time Compute, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, agent tools). We also provide detailed mathematical formulations and algorithmic specifications to simplify RLM implementation. By showing how schemes like LLaMA-Berry, QwQ, Journey Learning, and Graph of Thoughts fit as special cases, we demonstrate the blueprint's versatility and unifying potential. To illustrate its utility, we introduce x1, a modular implementation for rapid RLM prototyping and experimentation. Using x1 and a literature review, we provide key insights, such as multi-phase training for policy and value models, and the importance of familiar training distributions. Finally, we discuss scalable RLM cloud deployments and we outline how RLMs can integrate with a broader LLM ecosystem. Our work demystifies RLM construction, democratizes advanced reasoning capabilities, and fosters innovation, aiming to mitigate the gap between "rich AI" and "poor AI" by lowering barriers to RLM design and experimentation.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

M$^3$-VOS: Multi-Phase, Multi-Transition, and Multi-Scenery Video Object Segmentation

Intelligent robots need to interact with diverse objects across various environments. The appearance and state of objects frequently undergo complex transformations depending on the object properties, e.g., phase transitions. However, in the vision community, segmenting dynamic objects with phase transitions is overlooked. In light of this, we introduce the concept of phase in segmentation, which categorizes real-world objects based on their visual characteristics and potential morphological and appearance changes. Then, we present a new benchmark, Multi-Phase, Multi-Transition, and Multi-Scenery Video Object Segmentation (M$^3$-VOS), to verify the ability of models to understand object phases, which consists of 479 high-resolution videos spanning over 10 distinct everyday scenarios. It provides dense instance mask annotations that capture both object phases and their transitions. We evaluate state-of-the-art methods on M$^3$-VOS, yielding several key insights. Notably, current appearance-based approaches show significant room for improvement when handling objects with phase transitions. The inherent changes in disorder suggest that the predictive performance of the forward entropy-increasing process can be improved through a reverse entropy-reducing process. These findings lead us to propose ReVOS, a new plug-andplay model that improves its performance by reversal refinement. Our data and code will be publicly available at https://zixuan-chen.github.io/M-cube-VOS.github.io/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

TWIST: Teleoperated Whole-Body Imitation System

Teleoperating humanoid robots in a whole-body manner marks a fundamental step toward developing general-purpose robotic intelligence, with human motion providing an ideal interface for controlling all degrees of freedom. Yet, most current humanoid teleoperation systems fall short of enabling coordinated whole-body behavior, typically limiting themselves to isolated locomotion or manipulation tasks. We present the Teleoperated Whole-Body Imitation System (TWIST), a system for humanoid teleoperation through whole-body motion imitation. We first generate reference motion clips by retargeting human motion capture data to the humanoid robot. We then develop a robust, adaptive, and responsive whole-body controller using a combination of reinforcement learning and behavior cloning (RL+BC). Through systematic analysis, we demonstrate how incorporating privileged future motion frames and real-world motion capture (MoCap) data improves tracking accuracy. TWIST enables real-world humanoid robots to achieve unprecedented, versatile, and coordinated whole-body motor skills--spanning whole-body manipulation, legged manipulation, locomotion, and expressive movement--using a single unified neural network controller. Our project website: https://humanoid-teleop.github.io

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Synthesizing Scoring Functions for Rankings Using Symbolic Gradient Descent

Given a relation and a ranking of its tuples, but no information about the ranking function, we are interested in synthesizing simple scoring functions that reproduce the ranking. Our system RankHow identifies linear scoring functions that minimize position-based error, while supporting flexible constraints on their weights. It is based on a new formulation as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP). While MILP is NP-hard in general, we show that RankHow is orders of magnitude faster than a tree-based algorithm that guarantees polynomial time complexity (PTIME) in the number of input tuples by reducing the MILP problem to many linear programs (LPs). We hypothesize that this is caused by 2 properties: First, the PTIME algorithm is equivalent to a naive evaluation strategy for the MILP program. Second, MILP solvers rely on advanced heuristics to reason holistically about the entire program, while the PTIME algorithm solves many sub-problems in isolation. To further improve RankHow's scalability, we propose a novel approximation technique called symbolic gradient descent (Sym-GD). It exploits problem structure to more quickly find local minima of the error function. Experiments demonstrate that RankHow can solve realistic problems, finding more accurate linear scoring functions than the state of the art.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2025

Learning Getting-Up Policies for Real-World Humanoid Robots

Automatic fall recovery is a crucial prerequisite before humanoid robots can be reliably deployed. Hand-designing controllers for getting up is difficult because of the varied configurations a humanoid can end up in after a fall and the challenging terrains humanoid robots are expected to operate on. This paper develops a learning framework to produce controllers that enable humanoid robots to get up from varying configurations on varying terrains. Unlike previous successful applications of learning to humanoid locomotion, the getting-up task involves complex contact patterns (which necessitates accurately modeling of the collision geometry) and sparser rewards. We address these challenges through a two-phase approach that induces a curriculum. The first stage focuses on discovering a good getting-up trajectory under minimal constraints on smoothness or speed / torque limits. The second stage then refines the discovered motions into deployable (i.e. smooth and slow) motions that are robust to variations in initial configuration and terrains. We find these innovations enable a real-world G1 humanoid robot to get up from two main situations that we considered: a) lying face up and b) lying face down, both tested on flat, deformable, slippery surfaces and slopes (e.g., sloppy grass and snowfield). This is one of the first successful demonstrations of learned getting-up policies for human-sized humanoid robots in the real world.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

UltraFusion: Ultra High Dynamic Imaging using Exposure Fusion

Capturing high dynamic range (HDR) scenes is one of the most important issues in camera design. Majority of cameras use exposure fusion, which fuses images captured by different exposure levels, to increase dynamic range. However, this approach can only handle images with limited exposure difference, normally 3-4 stops. When applying to very high dynamic range scenes where a large exposure difference is required, this approach often fails due to incorrect alignment or inconsistent lighting between inputs, or tone mapping artifacts. In this work, we propose \model, the first exposure fusion technique that can merge inputs with 9 stops differences. The key idea is that we model exposure fusion as a guided inpainting problem, where the under-exposed image is used as a guidance to fill the missing information of over-exposed highlights in the over-exposed region. Using an under-exposed image as a soft guidance, instead of a hard constraint, our model is robust to potential alignment issue or lighting variations. Moreover, by utilizing the image prior of the generative model, our model also generates natural tone mapping, even for very high-dynamic range scenes. Our approach outperforms HDR-Transformer on latest HDR benchmarks. Moreover, to test its performance in ultra high dynamic range scenes, we capture a new real-world exposure fusion benchmark, UltraFusion dataset, with exposure differences up to 9 stops, and experiments show that UltraFusion can generate beautiful and high-quality fusion results under various scenarios. Code and data will be available at https://openimaginglab.github.io/UltraFusion.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

GuardSplat: Efficient and Robust Watermarking for 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently created impressive 3D assets for various applications. However, considering security, capacity, invisibility, and training efficiency, the copyright of 3DGS assets is not well protected as existing watermarking methods are unsuited for its rendering pipeline. In this paper, we propose GuardSplat, an innovative and efficient framework for watermarking 3DGS assets. Specifically, 1) We propose a CLIP-guided pipeline for optimizing the message decoder with minimal costs. The key objective is to achieve high-accuracy extraction by leveraging CLIP's aligning capability and rich representations, demonstrating exceptional capacity and efficiency. 2) We tailor a Spherical-Harmonic-aware (SH-aware) Message Embedding module for 3DGS, seamlessly embedding messages into the SH features of each 3D Gaussian while preserving the original 3D structure. This enables watermarking 3DGS assets with minimal fidelity trade-offs and prevents malicious users from removing the watermarks from the model files, meeting the demands for invisibility and security. 3) We present an Anti-distortion Message Extraction module to improve robustness against various distortions. Experiments demonstrate that GuardSplat outperforms state-of-the-art and achieves fast optimization speed. Project page is at https://narcissusex.github.io/GuardSplat, and Code is at https://github.com/NarcissusEx/GuardSplat.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

GravMAD: Grounded Spatial Value Maps Guided Action Diffusion for Generalized 3D Manipulation

Robots' ability to follow language instructions and execute diverse 3D manipulation tasks is vital in robot learning. Traditional imitation learning-based methods perform well on seen tasks but struggle with novel, unseen ones due to variability. Recent approaches leverage large foundation models to assist in understanding novel tasks, thereby mitigating this issue. However, these methods lack a task-specific learning process, which is essential for an accurate understanding of 3D environments, often leading to execution failures. In this paper, we introduce GravMAD, a sub-goal-driven, language-conditioned action diffusion framework that combines the strengths of imitation learning and foundation models. Our approach breaks tasks into sub-goals based on language instructions, allowing auxiliary guidance during both training and inference. During training, we introduce Sub-goal Keypose Discovery to identify key sub-goals from demonstrations. Inference differs from training, as there are no demonstrations available, so we use pre-trained foundation models to bridge the gap and identify sub-goals for the current task. In both phases, GravMaps are generated from sub-goals, providing GravMAD with more flexible 3D spatial guidance compared to fixed 3D positions. Empirical evaluations on RLBench show that GravMAD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with a 28.63% improvement on novel tasks and a 13.36% gain on tasks encountered during training. Evaluations on real-world robotic tasks further show that GravMAD can reason about real-world tasks, associate them with relevant visual information, and generalize to novel tasks. These results demonstrate GravMAD's strong multi-task learning and generalization in 3D manipulation. Video demonstrations are available at: https://gravmad.github.io.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

RoboHorizon: An LLM-Assisted Multi-View World Model for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

Efficient control in long-horizon robotic manipulation is challenging due to complex representation and policy learning requirements. Model-based visual reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great potential in addressing these challenges but still faces notable limitations, particularly in handling sparse rewards and complex visual features in long-horizon environments. To address these limitations, we propose the Recognize-Sense-Plan-Act (RSPA) pipeline for long-horizon tasks and further introduce RoboHorizon, an LLM-assisted multi-view world model tailored for long-horizon robotic manipulation. In RoboHorizon, pre-trained LLMs generate dense reward structures for multi-stage sub-tasks based on task language instructions, enabling robots to better recognize long-horizon tasks. Keyframe discovery is then integrated into the multi-view masked autoencoder (MAE) architecture to enhance the robot's ability to sense critical task sequences, strengthening its multi-stage perception of long-horizon processes. Leveraging these dense rewards and multi-view representations, a robotic world model is constructed to efficiently plan long-horizon tasks, enabling the robot to reliably act through RL algorithms. Experiments on two representative benchmarks, RLBench and FurnitureBench, show that RoboHorizon outperforms state-of-the-art visual model-based RL methods, achieving a 23.35% improvement in task success rates on RLBench's 4 short-horizon tasks and a 29.23% improvement on 6 long-horizon tasks from RLBench and 3 furniture assembly tasks from FurnitureBench.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Event-assisted 12-stop HDR Imaging of Dynamic Scene

High dynamic range (HDR) imaging is a crucial task in computational photography, which captures details across diverse lighting conditions. Traditional HDR fusion methods face limitations in dynamic scenes with extreme exposure differences, as aligning low dynamic range (LDR) frames becomes challenging due to motion and brightness variation. In this work, we propose a novel 12-stop HDR imaging approach for dynamic scenes, leveraging a dual-camera system with an event camera and an RGB camera. The event camera provides temporally dense, high dynamic range signals that improve alignment between LDR frames with large exposure differences, reducing ghosting artifacts caused by motion. Also, a real-world finetuning strategy is proposed to increase the generalization of alignment module on real-world events. Additionally, we introduce a diffusion-based fusion module that incorporates image priors from pre-trained diffusion models to address artifacts in high-contrast regions and minimize errors from the alignment process. To support this work, we developed the ESHDR dataset, the first dataset for 12-stop HDR imaging with synchronized event signals, and validated our approach on both simulated and real-world data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, successfully extending HDR imaging to 12 stops in dynamic scenes.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Hard-normal Example-aware Template Mutual Matching for Industrial Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detectors are widely used in industrial manufacturing to detect and localize unknown defects in query images. These detectors are trained on anomaly-free samples and have successfully distinguished anomalies from most normal samples. However, hard-normal examples are scattered and far apart from most normal samples, and thus they are often mistaken for anomalies by existing methods. To address this issue, we propose Hard-normal Example-aware Template Mutual Matching (HETMM), an efficient framework to build a robust prototype-based decision boundary. Specifically, HETMM employs the proposed Affine-invariant Template Mutual Matching (ATMM) to mitigate the affection brought by the affine transformations and easy-normal examples. By mutually matching the pixel-level prototypes within the patch-level search spaces between query and template set, ATMM can accurately distinguish between hard-normal examples and anomalies, achieving low false-positive and missed-detection rates. In addition, we also propose PTS to compress the original template set for speed-up. PTS selects cluster centres and hard-normal examples to preserve the original decision boundary, allowing this tiny set to achieve comparable performance to the original one. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HETMM outperforms state-of-the-art methods, while using a 60-sheet tiny set can achieve competitive performance and real-time inference speed (around 26.1 FPS) on a Quadro 8000 RTX GPU. HETMM is training-free and can be hot-updated by directly inserting novel samples into the template set, which can promptly address some incremental learning issues in industrial manufacturing.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Visual Whole-Body Control for Legged Loco-Manipulation

We study the problem of mobile manipulation using legged robots equipped with an arm, namely legged loco-manipulation. The robot legs, while usually utilized for mobility, offer an opportunity to amplify the manipulation capabilities by conducting whole-body control. That is, the robot can control the legs and the arm at the same time to extend its workspace. We propose a framework that can conduct the whole-body control autonomously with visual observations. Our approach, namely Visual Whole-Body Control(VBC), is composed of a low-level policy using all degrees of freedom to track the body velocities along with the end-effector position, and a high-level policy proposing the velocities and end-effector position based on visual inputs. We train both levels of policies in simulation and perform Sim2Real transfer for real robot deployment. We perform extensive experiments and show significant improvements over baselines in picking up diverse objects in different configurations (heights, locations, orientations) and environments.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Learning Smooth Humanoid Locomotion through Lipschitz-Constrained Policies

Reinforcement learning combined with sim-to-real transfer offers a general framework for developing locomotion controllers for legged robots. To facilitate successful deployment in the real world, smoothing techniques, such as low-pass filters and smoothness rewards, are often employed to develop policies with smooth behaviors. However, because these techniques are non-differentiable and usually require tedious tuning of a large set of hyperparameters, they tend to require extensive manual tuning for each robotic platform. To address this challenge and establish a general technique for enforcing smooth behaviors, we propose a simple and effective method that imposes a Lipschitz constraint on a learned policy, which we refer to as Lipschitz-Constrained Policies (LCP). We show that the Lipschitz constraint can be implemented in the form of a gradient penalty, which provides a differentiable objective that can be easily incorporated with automatic differentiation frameworks. We demonstrate that LCP effectively replaces the need for smoothing rewards or low-pass filters and can be easily integrated into training frameworks for many distinct humanoid robots. We extensively evaluate LCP in both simulation and real-world humanoid robots, producing smooth and robust locomotion controllers. All simulation and deployment code, along with complete checkpoints, is available on our project page: https://lipschitz-constrained-policy.github.io.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Prompt-based test-time real image dehazing: a novel pipeline

Existing methods attempt to improve models' generalization ability on real-world hazy images by exploring well-designed training schemes (\eg, CycleGAN, prior loss). However, most of them need very complicated training procedures to achieve satisfactory results. For the first time, we present a novel pipeline called Prompt-based Test-Time Dehazing (PTTD) to help generate visually pleasing results of real-captured hazy images during the inference phase. We experimentally observe that given a dehazing model trained on synthetic data, fine-tuning the statistics (\ie, mean and standard deviation) of encoding features is able to narrow the domain gap, boosting the performance of real image dehazing. Accordingly, we first apply a prompt generation module (PGM) to generate a visual prompt, which is the reference of appropriate statistical perturbations for mean and standard deviation. Then, we employ a feature adaptation module (FAM) into the existing dehazing models for adjusting the original statistics with the guidance of the generated prompt. PTTD is model-agnostic and can be equipped with various state-of-the-art dehazing models trained on synthetic hazy-clean pairs to tackle the real image dehazing task. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our PTTD is effective, achieving superior performance against state-of-the-art dehazing methods in real-world scenarios. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/cecret3350/PTTD-Dehazing}.

cs.CV↗