Peking University, China
Abstract:Humans naturally leverage diverse sensing modalities to interact with the physical world, while most Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for robotics rely solely on RGB observations. This limits their ability to perceive physical properties that are difficult or impossible to infer from RGB cameras, such as temperature, sound, or radar response. We present MuseVLA, an adaptive multimodal sensing VLA model that integrates novel sensors as on-demand tools for robotic manipulation. Given a task instruction and visual context, MuseVLA first generates a sensor token and target description that select the sensing modality to invoke and what to attend to, analogous to a tool call with arguments. It then converts the selected sensor measurement into a grounded sensor image, a unified intermediate representation that encodes heterogeneous readings for multimodal fusion and action generation. This design decouples sensor-specific processing from the VLA backbone, enabling efficient integration of diverse modalities. To reduce the need for expensive multisensory robot datasets, we further introduce a data synthesis pipeline that augments existing RGB video datasets with grounded sensor images, enabling generalization to unseen sensor-guided tasks. We evaluate MuseVLA on a real-world robot across challenging dexterous hand manipulation tasks that require multimodal sensing inputs, including temperature-guided pick-and-place, audio-driven object search, and radar-assisted hidden object retrieval. MuseVLA achieves 80.6% success rate on average, outperforming RGB-only and multisensory VLA baselines significantly, and exhibits strong zero-shot capabilities on unseen tasks.
Abstract:The widespread use of earphones has enabled various sensing applications, including activity recognition, health monitoring, and context-aware computing. Among these, earphone-based user authentication has become a key technique by leveraging unique biometric features. However, existing earphone-based authentication systems face key limitations: they either require explicit user interaction or active speaker output, or suffer from poor accessibility and vulnerability to environmental noise, which hinders large-scale deployment. In this paper, we propose a passive authentication system, called AccLock, which leverages distinctive features extracted from in-ear BCG signals to enable secure and unobtrusive user verification. Our system offers several advantages over previous systems, including zero-involvement for both the device and the user, ubiquitous, and resilient to environmental noise. To realize this, we first design a two-stage denoising scheme to suppress both inherent and sporadic interference. To extract user-specific features, we then propose a disentanglement-based deep learning model, HIDNet, which explicitly separates user-specific features from shared nuisance components. Lastly, we develop a scalable authentication framework based on a Siamese network that eliminates the need for per-user classifier training. We conduct extensive experiments with 33 participants, achieving an average FAR of 3.13% and FRR of 2.99%, which demonstrates the practical feasibility of AccLock.
Abstract:Sensors are key components enabling various applications, e.g., home intrusion detection and environmental monitoring. While various software defenses and physical protections are used to prevent sensor manipulation, this paper introduces a new threat vector, PowerRadio, that bypasses existing protections and changes sensor readings from a distance. PowerRadio leverages interconnected ground (GND) wires, a standard practice for electrical safety at home, to inject malicious signals. The injected signal is coupled by the sensor's analog measurement wire and eventually survives the noise filters, inducing incorrect measurement. We present three methods to manipulate sensors by inducing static bias, periodical signals, or pulses. For instance, we show adding stripes into the captured images of a surveillance camera or injecting inaudible voice commands into conference microphones. We study the underlying principles of PowerRadio and identify its root causes: (1) the lack of shielding between ground and data signal wires and (2) the asymmetry of circuit impedance that enables interference to bypass filtering. We validate PowerRadio against a surveillance system, broadcast systems, and various sensors. We believe that PowerRadio represents an emerging threat, exhibiting the advantages of both radiated and conducted EMI, e.g., expanding the effective attack distance of radiated EMI yet eliminating the requirement of line-of-sight or approaching physically. Our insights shall provide guidance for enhancing the sensors' security and power wiring during the design phases.
Abstract:RFID localization is considered the key enabler of automating the process of inventory tracking and management for high-performance logistic network. A practical and deployable RFID localization system needs to meet reliability, throughput, and range requirements. This paper presents RF-Chord, the first RFID localization system that simultaneously meets all three requirements. RF-Chord features a one-shot multisine-constructed wideband design that can process RF signal with a 200 MHz bandwidth in real-time to facilitate one-shot localization at scale. In addition, multiple SINR enhancement techniques are designed for range extension. On top of that, a kernel-layer-based near-field localization framework and a multipath-suppression algorithm are proposed to reduce the 99% long-tail errors. Our empirical results show that RF-Chord can localize more than 180 tags 6 m away from a reader within 1 second and with 99% long-tail error of 0.786 m, achieving a 0% miss reading rate and ~0.01% cross-reading rate in the warehouse and fresh food delivery store deployment.