Abstract:Equipping humanoid robots with versatile interaction skills typically requires either extensive policy training or explicit human-to-robot motion retargeting. However, learning-based policies face prohibitive data collection costs. Meanwhile, retargeting relies on human-centric pose estimation (e.g., SMPL), introducing a morphology gap. Skeletal scale mismatches result in severe spatial misalignments when mapped to robots, compromising interaction success. In this work, we propose Dream2Act, a robot-centric framework enabling zero-shot interaction through generative video synthesis. Given a third-person image of the robot and target object, our framework leverages video generation models to envision the robot completing the task with morphology-consistent motion. We employ a high-fidelity pose extraction system to recover physically feasible, robot-native joint trajectories from these synthesized dreams, subsequently executed via a general-purpose whole-body controller. Operating strictly within the robot-native coordinate space, Dream2Act avoids retargeting errors and eliminates task-specific policy training. We evaluate Dream2Act on the Unitree G1 across four whole-body mobile interaction tasks: ball kicking, sofa sitting, bag punching, and box hugging. Dream2Act achieves a 37.5% overall success rate, compared to 0% for conventional retargeting. While retargeting fails to establish correct physical contacts due to the morphology gap (with errors compounded during locomotion), Dream2Act maintains robot-consistent spatial alignment, enabling reliable contact formation and substantially higher task completion.
Abstract:Recent Audio Multimodal Large Language Models (Audio MLLMs) demonstrate impressive performance on speech benchmarks, yet it remains unclear whether these models genuinely process acoustic signals or rely on text-based semantic inference. To systematically study this question, we introduce DEAF (Diagnostic Evaluation of Acoustic Faithfulness), a benchmark of over 2,700 conflict stimuli spanning three acoustic dimensions: emotional prosody, background sounds, and speaker identity. Then, we design a controlled multi-level evaluation framework that progressively increases textual influence, ranging from semantic conflicts in the content to misleading prompts and their combination, allowing us to disentangle content-driven bias from prompt-induced sycophancy. We further introduce diagnostic metrics to quantify model reliance on textual cues over acoustic signals. Our evaluation of seven Audio MLLMs reveals a consistent pattern of text dominance: models are sensitive to acoustic variations, yet predictions are predominantly driven by textual inputs, revealing a gap between high performance on standard speech benchmarks and genuine acoustic understanding.
Abstract:Understanding and localizing objects in complex 3D environments from natural language descriptions, known as 3D Visual Grounding (3DVG), is a foundational challenge in embodied AI, with broad implications for robotics, augmented reality, and human-machine interaction. Large-scale pre-trained foundation models have driven significant progress on this front, enabling open-vocabulary 3DVG that allows systems to locate arbitrary objects in a given scene. However, their reliance on pre-trained models constrains 3D perception and reasoning within the inherited knowledge boundaries, resulting in limited generalization to unseen spatial relationships and poor robustness to out-of-distribution scenes. In this paper, we replace this constrained perception with training-free visual and geometric reasoning, thereby unlocking open-world 3DVG that enables the localization of any object in any scene beyond the training data. Specifically, the proposed UniGround operates in two stages: a Global Candidate Filtering stage that constructs scene candidates through training-free 3D topology and multi-view semantic encoding, and a Local Precision Grounding stage that leverages multi-scale visual prompting and structured reasoning to precisely identify the target object. Experiments on ScanRefer and EmbodiedScan show that UniGround achieves 46.1\%/34.1\% Acc@0.25/0.5 on ScanRefer and 28.7\% Acc@0.25 on EmbodiedScan, establishing a new state-of-the-art among zero-shot methods on EmbodiedScan without any 3D supervision. We further evaluate UniGround in real-world environments under uncontrolled reconstruction conditions and substantial domain shift, showing training-free reasoning generalizes robustly beyond curated benchmarks.
Abstract:Learning motion priors for physics-based humanoid control is an active research topic. Existing approaches mainly include variational autoencoders (VAE) and adversarial motion priors (AMP). VAE introduces information loss, and random latent sampling may sometimes produce invalid behaviors. AMP suffers from mode collapse and struggles to capture diverse motion skills. We present the Spherical Latent Motion Prior (SLMP), a two-stage method for learning motion priors. In the first stage, we train a high-quality motion tracking controller. In the second stage, we distill the tracking controller into a spherical latent space. A combination of distillation, a discriminator, and a discriminator-guided local semantic consistency constraint shapes a structured latent action space, allowing stable random sampling without information loss. To evaluate SLMP, we collect a two-hour human combat motion capture dataset and show that SLMP preserves fine motion detail without information loss, and random sampling yields semantically valid and stable behaviors. When applied to a two-agent physics-based combat task, SLMP produces human-like and physically plausible combat behaviors only using simple rule-based rewards. Furthermore, SLMP generalizes across different humanoid robot morphologies, demonstrating its transferability beyond a single simulated avatar.
Abstract:Physics-based humanoid control relies on training with motion datasets that have diverse data distributions. However, the fixed difficulty distribution of datasets limits the performance ceiling of the trained control policies. Additionally, the method of acquiring high-quality data through professional motion capture systems is constrained by costs, making it difficult to achieve large-scale scalability. To address these issues, we propose a closed-loop automated motion data generation and iterative framework. It can generate high-quality motion data with rich action semantics, including martial arts, dance, combat, sports, gymnastics, and more. Furthermore, our framework enables difficulty iteration of policies and data through physical metrics and objective evaluations, allowing the trained tracker to break through its original difficulty limits. On the PHC single-primitive tracker, using only approximately 1/10 of the AMASS dataset size, the average failure rate on the test set (2201 clips) is reduced by 45\% compared to the baseline. Finally, we conduct comprehensive ablation and comparative experiments to highlight the rationality and advantages of our framework.
Abstract:Most existing evaluations of text-to-motion generation focus on in-distribution textual inputs and a limited set of evaluation criteria, which restricts their ability to systematically assess model generalization and motion generation capabilities under complex out-of-distribution (OOD) textual conditions. To address this limitation, we propose a benchmark specifically designed for OOD text-to-motion evaluation, which includes a comprehensive analysis of 14 representative baseline models and the two datasets derived from evaluation results. Specifically, we construct an OOD prompt dataset consisting of 1,025 textual descriptions. Based on this prompt dataset, we introduce a unified evaluation framework that integrates LLM-based Evaluation, Multi-factor Motion evaluation, and Fine-grained Accuracy Evaluation. Our experimental results reveal that while different baseline models demonstrate strengths in areas such as text-to-motion semantic alignment, motion generalizability, and physical quality, most models struggle to achieve strong performance with Fine-grained Accuracy Evaluation. These findings highlight the limitations of existing methods in OOD scenarios and offer practical guidance for the design and evaluation of future production-level text-to-motion models.
Abstract:Unified physics-based humanoid controllers are pivotal for robotics and character animation, yet models that excel on gentle, everyday motions still stumble on explosive actions, hampering real-world deployment. We bridge this gap with FARM (Frame-Accelerated Augmentation and Residual Mixture-of-Experts), an end-to-end framework composed of frame-accelerated augmentation, a robust base controller, and a residual mixture-of-experts (MoE). Frame-accelerated augmentation exposes the model to high-velocity pose changes by widening inter-frame gaps. The base controller reliably tracks everyday low-dynamic motions, while the residual MoE adaptively allocates additional network capacity to handle challenging high-dynamic actions, significantly enhancing tracking accuracy. In the absence of a public benchmark, we curate the High-Dynamic Humanoid Motion (HDHM) dataset, comprising 3593 physically plausible clips. On HDHM, FARM reduces the tracking failure rate by 42.8\% and lowers global mean per-joint position error by 14.6\% relative to the baseline, while preserving near-perfect accuracy on low-dynamic motions. These results establish FARM as a new baseline for high-dynamic humanoid control and introduce the first open benchmark dedicated to this challenge. The code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/Colin-Jing/FARM.
Abstract:LiDAR-based 3D single object tracking (3D SOT) is a critical issue in robotics and autonomous driving. It aims to obtain accurate 3D BBox from the search area based on similarity or motion. However, existing 3D SOT methods usually follow the point-based pipeline, where the sampling operation inevitably leads to redundant or lost information, resulting in unexpected performance. To address these issues, we propose PillarTrack, a pillar-based 3D single object tracking framework. Firstly, we transform sparse point clouds into dense pillars to preserve the local and global geometrics. Secondly, we introduce a Pyramid-type Encoding Pillar Feature Encoder (PE-PFE) design to help the feature representation of each pillar. Thirdly, we present an efficient Transformer-based backbone from the perspective of modality differences. Finally, we construct our PillarTrack tracker based above designs. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and nuScenes dataset demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method. Notably, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI and nuScenes dataset and enables real-time tracking speed. We hope our work could encourage the community to rethink existing 3D SOT tracker designs.We will open source our code to the research community in https://github.com/StiphyJay/PillarTrack.