UTTG_ A Universal Teleoperation Approach via Online Trajectory Generation

Teleoperation is crucial for hazardous environment operations and serves as a key tool for collecting expert demonstrations in robot learning. However, existing methods face robotic hardware dependency and control frequency mismatches between teleoperation devices and robotic platforms. Our approach automatically extracts kinematic parameters from unified robot description format (URDF) files, and enables pluggable deployment across diverse robots through uniform interfaces. The proposed interpolation algorithm bridges the frequency gap between low-rate human inputs and high-frequency robotic control commands through online continuous trajectory generation, \n{while requiring no access to the closed, bottom-level control loop}. To enhance trajectory smoothness, we introduce a minimum-stretch spline that optimizes the motion quality. The system further provides precision and rapid modes to accommodate different task requirements. Experiments across various robotic platforms including dual-arm ones demonstrate generality and smooth operation performance of our methods. The code is developed in C++ with python interface, and available at https://github.com/IRMV-Manipulation-Group/UTTG.

UrbanPlanBench: A Comprehensive Urban Planning Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) holds promise for revolutionizing various fields traditionally dominated by human expertise. Urban planning, a professional discipline that fundamentally shapes our daily surroundings, is one such field heavily relying on multifaceted domain knowledge and experience of human experts. The extent to which LLMs can assist human practitioners in urban planning remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark, UrbanPlanBench, tailored to evaluate the efficacy of LLMs in urban planning, which encompasses fundamental principles, professional knowledge, and management and regulations, aligning closely with the qualifications expected of human planners. Through extensive evaluation, we reveal a significant imbalance in the acquisition of planning knowledge among LLMs, with even the most proficient models falling short of meeting professional standards. For instance, we observe that 70% of LLMs achieve subpar performance in understanding planning regulations compared to other aspects. Besides the benchmark, we present the largest-ever supervised fine-tuning (SFT) dataset, UrbanPlanText, comprising over 30,000 instruction pairs sourced from urban planning exams and textbooks. Our findings demonstrate that fine-tuned models exhibit enhanced performance in memorization tests and comprehension of urban planning knowledge, while there exists significant room for improvement, particularly in tasks requiring domain-specific terminology and reasoning. By making our benchmark, dataset, and associated evaluation and fine-tuning toolsets publicly available at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/PlanBench, we aim to catalyze the integration of LLMs into practical urban planning, fostering a symbiotic collaboration between human expertise and machine intelligence.

Compliance while resisting: a shear-thickening fluid controller for physical human-robot interaction

Physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) is widely needed in many fields, such as industrial manipulation, home services, and medical rehabilitation, and puts higher demands on the safety of robots. Due to the uncertainty of the working environment, the pHRI may receive unexpected impact interference, which affects the safety and smoothness of the task execution. The commonly used linear admittance control (L-AC) can cope well with high-frequency small-amplitude noise, but for medium-frequency high-intensity impact, the effect is not as good. Inspired by the solid-liquid phase change nature of shear-thickening fluid, we propose a Shear-thickening Fluid Control (SFC) that can achieve both an easy human-robot collaboration and resistance to impact interference. The SFC's stability, passivity, and phase trajectory are analyzed in detail, the frequency and time domain properties are quantified, and parameter constraints in discrete control and coupled stability conditions are provided. We conducted simulations to compare the frequency and time domain characteristics of L-AC, nonlinear admittance controller (N-AC), and SFC, and validated their dynamic properties. In real-world experiments, we compared the performance of L-AC, N-AC, and SFC in both fixed and mobile manipulators. L-AC exhibits weak resistance to impact. N-AC can resist moderate impacts but not high-intensity ones, and may exhibit self-excited oscillations. In contrast, SFC demonstrated superior impact resistance and maintained stable collaboration, enhancing comfort in cooperative water delivery tasks. Additionally, a case study was conducted in a factory setting, further affirming the SFC's capability in facilitating human-robot collaborative manipulation and underscoring its potential in industrial applications.

Guided Real Image Dehazing using YCbCr Color Space

Image dehazing, particularly with learning-based methods, has gained significant attention due to its importance in real-world applications. However, relying solely on the RGB color space often fall short, frequently leaving residual haze. This arises from two main issues: the difficulty in obtaining clear textural features from hazy RGB images and the complexity of acquiring real haze/clean image pairs outside controlled environments like smoke-filled scenes. To address these issues, we first propose a novel Structure Guided Dehazing Network (SGDN) that leverages the superior structural properties of YCbCr features over RGB. It comprises two key modules: Bi-Color Guidance Bridge (BGB) and Color Enhancement Module (CEM). BGB integrates a phase integration module and an interactive attention module, utilizing the rich texture features of the YCbCr space to guide the RGB space, thereby recovering clearer features in both frequency and spatial domains. To maintain tonal consistency, CEM further enhances the color perception of RGB features by aggregating YCbCr channel information. Furthermore, for effective supervised learning, we introduce a Real-World Well-Aligned Haze (RW$^2$AH) dataset, which includes a diverse range of scenes from various geographical regions and climate conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods across multiple real-world smoke/haze datasets. Code and Dataset: \textcolor{blue}{\url{https://github.com/fiwy0527/AAAI25_SGDN.}}

REFOL: Resource-Efficient Federated Online Learning for Traffic Flow Forecasting

Multiple federated learning (FL) methods are proposed for traffic flow forecasting (TFF) to avoid heavy-transmission and privacy-leaking concerns resulting from the disclosure of raw data in centralized methods. However, these FL methods adopt offline learning which may yield subpar performance, when concept drift occurs, i.e., distributions of historical and future data vary. Online learning can detect concept drift during model training, thus more applicable to TFF. Nevertheless, the existing federated online learning method for TFF fails to efficiently solve the concept drift problem and causes tremendous computing and communication overhead. Therefore, we propose a novel method named Resource-Efficient Federated Online Learning (REFOL) for TFF, which guarantees prediction performance in a communication-lightweight and computation-efficient way. Specifically, we design a data-driven client participation mechanism to detect the occurrence of concept drift and determine clients' participation necessity. Subsequently, we propose an adaptive online optimization strategy, which guarantees prediction performance and meanwhile avoids meaningless model updates. Then, a graph convolution-based model aggregation mechanism is designed, aiming to assess participants' contribution based on spatial correlation without importing extra communication and computing consumption on clients. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets to demonstrate the superiority of REFOL in terms of prediction improvement and resource economization.

Gaussian-Det: Learning Closed-Surface Gaussians for 3D Object Detection

Skins wrapping around our bodies, leathers covering over the sofa, sheet metal coating the car - it suggests that objects are enclosed by a series of continuous surfaces, which provides us with informative geometry prior for objectness deduction. In this paper, we propose Gaussian-Det which leverages Gaussian Splatting as surface representation for multi-view based 3D object detection. Unlike existing monocular or NeRF-based methods which depict the objects via discrete positional data, Gaussian-Det models the objects in a continuous manner by formulating the input Gaussians as feature descriptors on a mass of partial surfaces. Furthermore, to address the numerous outliers inherently introduced by Gaussian splatting, we accordingly devise a Closure Inferring Module (CIM) for the comprehensive surface-based objectness deduction. CIM firstly estimates the probabilistic feature residuals for partial surfaces given the underdetermined nature of Gaussian Splatting, which are then coalesced into a holistic representation on the overall surface closure of the object proposal. In this way, the surface information Gaussian-Det exploits serves as the prior on the quality and reliability of objectness and the information basis of proposal refinement. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that Gaussian-Det outperforms various existing approaches, in terms of both average precision and recall.

OPONeRF: One-Point-One NeRF for Robust Neural Rendering

In this paper, we propose a One-Point-One NeRF (OPONeRF) framework for robust scene rendering. Existing NeRFs are designed based on a key assumption that the target scene remains unchanged between the training and test time. However, small but unpredictable perturbations such as object movements, light changes and data contaminations broadly exist in real-life 3D scenes, which lead to significantly defective or failed rendering results even for the recent state-of-the-art generalizable methods. To address this, we propose a divide-and-conquer framework in OPONeRF that adaptively responds to local scene variations via personalizing appropriate point-wise parameters, instead of fitting a single set of NeRF parameters that are inactive to test-time unseen changes. Moreover, to explicitly capture the local uncertainty, we decompose the point representation into deterministic mapping and probabilistic inference. In this way, OPONeRF learns the sharable invariance and unsupervisedly models the unexpected scene variations between the training and testing scenes. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we construct benchmarks from both realistic and synthetic data with diverse test-time perturbations including foreground motions, illumination variations and multi-modality noises, which are more challenging than conventional generalization and temporal reconstruction benchmarks. Experimental results show that our OPONeRF outperforms state-of-the-art NeRFs on various evaluation metrics through benchmark experiments and cross-scene evaluations. We further show the efficacy of the proposed method via experimenting on other existing generalization-based benchmarks and incorporating the idea of One-Point-One NeRF into other advanced baseline methods.

Uncovering the Secrets of Human-Like Movement: A Fresh Perspective on Motion Planning

This article explores human-like movement from a fresh perspective on motion planning. We analyze the coordinated and compliant movement mechanisms of the human body from the perspective of biomechanics. Based on these mechanisms, we propose an optimal control framework that integrates compliant control dynamics, optimizing robotic arm motion through a response time matrix. This matrix sets the timing parameters for joint movements, turning the system into a time-parameterized optimal control problem. The model focuses on the interaction between active and passive joints under external disturbances, improving adaptability and compliance. This method achieves optimal trajectory generation and balances precision and compliance. Experimental results on both a manipulator and a humanoid robot validate the approach.

Large-scale Urban Facility Location Selection with Knowledge-informed Reinforcement Learning

The facility location problem (FLP) is a classical combinatorial optimization challenge aimed at strategically laying out facilities to maximize their accessibility. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning method tailored to solve large-scale urban FLP, capable of producing near-optimal solutions at superfast inference speed. We distill the essential swap operation from local search, and simulate it by intelligently selecting edges on a graph of urban regions, guided by a knowledge-informed graph neural network, thus sidestepping the need for heavy computation of local search. Extensive experiments on four US cities with different geospatial conditions demonstrate that our approach can achieve comparable performance to commercial solvers with less than 5\% accessibility loss, while displaying up to 1000 times speedup. We deploy our model as an online geospatial application at https://huggingface.co/spaces/randommmm/MFLP.

SFR-GNN: Simple and Fast Robust GNNs against Structural Attacks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated commendable performance for graph-structured data. Yet, GNNs are often vulnerable to adversarial structural attacks as embedding generation relies on graph topology. Existing efforts are dedicated to purifying the maliciously modified structure or applying adaptive aggregation, thereby enhancing the robustness against adversarial structural attacks. It is inevitable for a defender to consume heavy computational costs due to lacking prior knowledge about modified structures. To this end, we propose an efficient defense method, called Simple and Fast Robust Graph Neural Network (SFR-GNN), supported by mutual information theory. The SFR-GNN first pre-trains a GNN model using node attributes and then fine-tunes it over the modified graph in the manner of contrastive learning, which is free of purifying modified structures and adaptive aggregation, thus achieving great efficiency gains. Consequently, SFR-GNN exhibits a 24%--162% speedup compared to advanced robust models, demonstrating superior robustness for node classification tasks.