and Other Contributors
Abstract:The proliferation of recursive training on synthetic data can alleviate data scarcity but risks model collapse, where repeated training erodes distributional tails and homogenizes outputs. Data selection is widely viewed as a remedy, yet its reliability depends critically on the reference distribution used by the verifier. We show that in low-resource verification regimes, where each verifier observes only a small, fragmented, and biased slice of the target manifold, selection itself becomes biased. This situation naturally arises in low-resource data silos such as healthcare consortia or proprietary financial institutions, where raw data cannot be pooled and local references are inherently incomplete. As a result, selection preferentially retains samples aligned with the local manifold while pruning globally relevant tail modes, turning from a safeguard against collapse into a mechanism that precipitates it. We theoretically prove that such siloed selection accelerates collapse and induces power-law diversity decay. As an initial mitigation, we construct Wasserstein proxy references from multiple silos without sharing raw data. Empirical results confirm that local-reference selection fails on skewed distributions, whereas collaborative proxy references mitigate diversity degradation, suggesting that recursive synthetic-data pipelines require particular caution when real-data coverage is fragmented or scarce.
Abstract:Simulation is central to robot learning, yet the sim-to-real gap remains a major bottleneck.Existing approaches often tackle visual or dynamic gaps separately, overlooking how these individual mismatches accumulate and propagate throughout the robot's state evolution.In this paper, we introduce QuadVerse, an integrated framework that uses reconstructed scenes as a calibration substrate for aligning visual perception, physical interaction, and actuator dynamics.From captured RGB videos, we reconstruct geometry-constrained 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) scenes that support batched photorealistic ego-view rendering and collision-ready semantic mesh extraction. The meshes further enable contact calibration by initializing spatially varying friction priors and refining them through trajectory-based posterior search.To address remaining actuator discrepancies, QuadVerse trains a residual dynamics compensator by replaying real-world trajectories on the contact-calibrated terrain, reducing the entanglement between terrain-induced contact errors and actuator non-idealities.Experiments show that QuadVerse improves reconstruction quality and locomotion tracking over relevant baselines.Leveraging this foundation, we demonstrate robust zero-shot visual-navigation policy deployment without task-specific real-world rollouts.
Abstract:Simulation-based RL for contemporary robot control is increasingly organized around GPU-resident simulation: physics, rollout collection, and learning are placed on a single GPU-centric execution path. This paradigm has greatly improved training speed, but it has also encouraged a default assumption that efficient training requires physics to reside on the GPU. We revisit this assumption. Our view is that, in simulation-dominated robot control, the essential question is not which processor runs physics, but whether simulation throughput, policy learning, and runtime synchronization form an efficient end-to-end loop. We present UniLab, a heterogeneous CPU-simulation / GPU-learning architecture that decouples CPU-parallel simulation from GPU policy updates through a unified runtime for data movement, buffering, and synchronization. UniLab is implemented as a complete and extensible training system using MuJoCoUni and MotrixSim CPU-batched physics backends, supporting PPO, FastSAC, FlashSAC, and APPO. On representative simulation-based robot control tasks, UniLab improves end-to-end training efficiency by 3--10$\times$ under the same hardware configuration, while reducing dependence on the NVIDIA CUDA-based software stack and supporting cross-platform execution on the Apple macOS platform and the AMD ROCm and Intel XPU accelerator backends. These results show that GPU simulation is an effective path to efficient training, but not a necessary one, broadening the practical system choices available for robot RL training. Project page: https://unilabsim.github.io.
Abstract:Continual supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the de facto recipe for adapting large language models (LLMs) to a stream of downstream tasks, but it suffers from catastrophic forgetting of earlier capabilities. Recent work shows that on-policy signals -- training on the model's own outputs -- reduce forgetting more reliably than off-policy supervision. Existing on-policy methods route this signal through a new training objective (e.g., self-distillation losses with a teacher copy), inheriting an extra forward pass, schedule sensitivity, and stylistic drift from the teacher.We instead route the on-policy signal through the training data source. Our method, On-Policy Replay (OPR), rolls out the most recent checkpoint on a small budget of historical prompts, filters the generations by a task reward, and replays the surviving (prompt, model response) pairs as ordinary SFT examples. There is no teacher, no auxiliary loss, and no on-the-fly distillation. Across three 7--8B instruction-tuned backbones (Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, Qwen3-8B, Llama3.1-8B-Instruct) on the TRACE continual-learning benchmark, OPR consistently reduces forgetting; on the sharpest stress test (Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, Sequential SFT BWT -13.93), OPR lifts BWT to -0.65 at a 10% replay budget and to -2.29 at a 1% budget -- a 46% reduction in |BWT| over a tuned Vanilla Replay baseline, with 42--46% reductions observed across all three backbones. We give a KL-shrinkage interpretation that places OPR and prior on-policy distillation methods on a single axis, and we present a counterintuitive finding that explains why Vanilla Replay is already a strong baseline: low-score replay is uniformly worse than Vanilla Replay, demonstrating that the active ingredient in OPR is the on-policy distribution, not the response quality alone.Our code is available at https://github.com/Yancey2024/OnPolicyReplay.
Abstract:Simulation-based RL for contemporary robot control is increasingly organized around GPU-resident simulation: physics, rollout collection, and learning are placed on a single GPU-centric execution path. This paradigm has greatly improved training speed, but it has also encouraged a default assumption that efficient training requires physics to reside on the GPU. We revisit this assumption. Our view is that, in simulation-dominated robot control, the essential question is not which processor runs physics, but whether simulation throughput, policy learning, and runtime synchronization form an efficient end-to-end loop. We present UniLab, a heterogeneous CPU-simulation / GPU-learning architecture that decouples CPU-parallel simulation from GPU policy updates through a unified runtime for data movement, buffering, and synchronization. UniLab is implemented as a complete and extensible training system using MuJoCoUni and MotrixSim CPU-batched physics backends, supporting PPO, SAC, FlashSAC, TD3, and APPO. On representative simulation-based robot control tasks, UniLab improves end-to-end training efficiency by 3--10$\times$ under the same hardware configuration, while reducing dependence on the NVIDIA CUDA-based software stack and supporting cross-platform execution on the Apple macOS platform and the AMD ROCm and Intel XPU accelerator backends. These results show that GPU simulation is an effective path to efficient training, but not a necessary one, broadening the practical system choices available for robot RL training. Project page: https://github.com/unilabsim/UniLab.
Abstract:Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for general-purpose robot manipulation by unifying perception and action. However, existing VLA systems primarily rely on textual instructions and struggle to resolve spatial ambiguity in complex scenes with multiple similar objects. To address this limitation, we introduce gesture as a parallel instruction modality and propose a Gesture-aware Vision-Language-Action model (GesVLA). Our approach encodes gesture features directly into the latent space, enabling them to participate in both high-level reasoning and low-level action generation, and adopts a dual-VLM architecture to achieve tight coupling between gesture representations and action policies. At the data level, we construct a scalable gesture data generation pipeline by rendering hand models onto real-world scene images. This reduces the sim-to-real visual gap while producing rich data with diverse motion patterns and corresponding pointing annotations. In addition, we employ a two-stage training strategy to equip the model with both gesture perception and action prediction capabilities. We evaluate our approach on multiple real-world robotic tasks, including a controlled block manipulation task for validation and more practical scenarios such as product and produce selection. Experimental results show that incorporating gesture consistently improves target grounding accuracy and human-robot interaction efficiency, especially in complex and cluttered environments. Project page: https://gwxuan.github.io/GesVLA/.
Abstract:Explicit software architecture models are essential artifacts for communicating, analyzing, and evolving complex software-intensive systems. In ROS~2-based robotic systems, however, structural (de-)composition and integration semantics are often only implicitly encoded across distributed artifacts such as source code and launch files, making recovery of hierarchical architecture particularly difficult. Existing approaches mainly focus on node-level entities and communication wiring, while providing limited support for recovering hierarchical structural (de-)composition across multiple abstraction levels. In this paper, we extend our previously proposed blueprint-guided LLM-assisted architecture recovery pipeline for ROS~2 systems through two major enhancements: (1) refined prompting to improve the consistency and controllability of architecture synthesis, and (2) a staged recovery strategy based on multi-level intermediate architectural representations that incorporate the atomic ROS node list and launch file dependencies, thereby enabling structurally constrained reconstruction across multiple abstraction levels. The approach is evaluated on a real-world automated product disassembly system based on cooperative robotic arms and heterogeneous ROS~2 artifacts. Compared to our previous work, the considered case study exhibits substantially higher integration complexity and richer functionality. The results demonstrate improved structural consistency, scalability, and robustness of architecture recovery, while also revealing remaining challenges related to dynamic integration semantics in large-scale ROS~2 systems.
Abstract:Deep learning (DL) compilers rely on cost models and auto-tuning to optimize tensor programs for target hardware. However, existing approaches depend on large offline datasets, incurring high collection costs and offering suboptimal transferability across platforms. In this paper, we introduce TCL, a novel efficient and transferable compiler framework for fast tensor program optimization across diverse hardware platforms to address these challenges. Specifically, TCL is built on three core enablers: (1) the RDU Sampler, a data-efficient active learning strategy that selects only 10% of tensor programs by jointly optimizing Representativeness, Diversity, and Uncertainty, substantially reducing data collection costs while maintaining near-original model accuracy; (2) a new Mamba-based cost model that efficiently captures long-range schedule dependencies while achieving a favorable trade-off between prediction accuracy and computational cost through reduced parameterization and lightweight sequence modeling; and (3) a continuous knowledge distillation framework that effectively and progressively transfers knowledge across multiple hardware platforms while avoiding the parameter explosion and data dependency issues typically caused by traditional multi-task learning. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of each individual enabler and the holistic TCL framework. When optimizing a range of mainstream DL models on both CPU and GPU platforms, TCL achieves, on average, 16.8x and 12.48x faster tuning time, and 1.20x and 1.13x lower inference latency, respectively, compared to Tenset-MLP.
Abstract:Accurate forecasting of three-dimensional (3D) cloud fields is important for atmospheric analysis and short-range numerical weather prediction, yet it remains challenging because cloud evolution involves cross-layer interactions, nonlocal dependencies, and multiscale spatiotemporal dynamics. Existing spatiotemporal prediction models based on convolutions, recurrence, or attention often rely on locality-biased representations and therefore struggle to preserve fine cloud structures in volumetric forecasting tasks. To address this issue, we propose QENO, a hybrid quantum-inspired spatiotemporal forecasting framework for 3D cloud fields. The proposed architecture consists of four components: a classical spatiotemporal encoder for compact latent representation, a topology-aware quantum enhancement block for modeling nonlocal couplings in latent space, a dynamic fusion temporal unit for integrating measurement-derived quantum features with recurrent memory, and a decoder for reconstructing future cloud volumes. Experiments on CMA-MESO 3D cloud fields show that QENO consistently outperforms representative baselines, including ConvLSTM, PredRNN++, Earthformer, TAU, and SimVP variants, in terms of MSE, MAE, RMSE, SSIM, and threshold-based detection metrics. In particular, QENO achieves an MSE of 0.2038, an RMSE of 0.4514, and an SSIM of 0.6291, while also maintaining a compact parameter budget. These results indicate that topology-aware hybrid quantum-classical feature modeling is a promising direction for 3D cloud structure forecasting and atmospheric Earth observation data analysis.
Abstract:The attention mechanism has been the core component in modern transformer architectures. However, the computation of standard full attention scales quadratically with the sequence length, serving as a major bottleneck in long-context language modeling. Sliding window attention restricts the context length for better efficiency at the cost of narrower receptive fields. While existing efforts attempt to take the benefits from both sides by building hybrid models, they often resort to static, heuristically designed alternating patterns that limit efficient allocation of computation in various scenarios. In this paper, we propose Switch Attention (SwiAttn), a novel hybrid transformer that enables dynamic and fine-grained routing between full attention and sliding window attention. For each token at each transformer layer, SwiAttn dynamically routes the computation to either a full-attention branch for global information aggregation or a sliding-window branch for efficient local pattern matching. An adaptive regularization objective is designed to encourage the model towards efficiency. Moreover, we adopt continual pretraining to optimize the model, transferring the full attention architecture to the hybrid one. Extensive experiments are conducted on twenty-three benchmark datasets across both regular (4K) and long (32K) context lengths, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.