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Tao Kong

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23 papers
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23

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

BridgeVLA: Input-Output Alignment for Efficient 3D Manipulation Learning with Vision-Language Models

  • Peiyan Li
  • Yixiang Chen
  • Hongtao Wu
  • Xiao Ma
  • Xiangnan Wu
  • Yan Huang
  • Liang Wang
  • Tao Kong

Recently, leveraging pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) for building vision-language-action (VLA) models has emerged as a promising approach to effective robot manipulation learning. However, only few methods incorporate 3D signals into VLMs for action prediction, and they do not fully leverage the spatial structure inherent in 3D data, leading to low data efficiency. In this paper, we introduce a new paradigm for constructing 3D VLAs. Specifically, we first pre-train the VLM backbone to take 2D images as input and produce 2D heatmaps as output. Using this pre-trained VLM as the backbone, we then fine-tune the entire VLA model while maintaining alignment between inputs and outputs by: (1) projecting raw point cloud inputs into multi-view images, and (2) predicting heatmaps before generating the final action. Extensive experiments show that the resulting model, BridgeVLA, can learn 3D manipulation both efficiently and effectively. BridgeVLA outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across three simulation benchmarks. In RLBench, it improves the average success rate from 81. 4\% to 88. 2\%. In COLOSSEUM, it demonstrates significantly better performance in challenging generalization settings, boosting the average success rate from 56. 7\% to 64. 0\%. In GemBench, it surpasses all the comparing baseline methods in terms of average success rate. In real-robot experiments, BridgeVLA outperforms a state-of-the-art baseline method by 32\% on average. It generalizes robustly in multiple out-of-distribution settings, including visual disturbances and unseen instructions. Remarkably, it is able to achieve a success rate of 95. 4\% on 10+ tasks with only 3 trajectories per task, while other VLA methods such as $\pi_{0}$ fail completely. Project Website: https: //bridgevla. github. io/.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Chain-of-Action: Trajectory Autoregressive Modeling for Robotic Manipulation

  • Wenbo Zhang
  • Tianrun Hu
  • Hanbo Zhang
  • Yanyuan Qiao
  • Yuchu Qin
  • Yang Li
  • Jiajun Liu
  • Tao Kong

We present Chain-of-Action (CoA), a novel visuomotor policy paradigm built upon Trajectory Autoregressive Modeling. Unlike conventional approaches that predict next step action(s) forward, CoA generates an entire trajectory by explicit backward reasoning with task-specific goals through an action-level Chain-of-Thought (CoT) process. This process is unified within a single autoregressive structure: (1) the first token corresponds to a stable keyframe action that encodes the task-specific goals; and (2) subsequent action tokens are generated autoregressively, conditioned on the initial keyframe and previously predicted actions. This backward action reasoning enforces a global-to-local structure, allowing each local action to be tightly constrained by the final goal. To further realize the action reasoning structure, CoA incorporates four complementary designs: continuous action token representation; dynamic stopping for variable-length trajectory generation; reverse temporal ensemble; and multi-token prediction to balance action chunk modeling with global structure. As a result, CoA gives strong spatial generalization capabilities while preserving the flexibility and simplicity of a visuomotor policy. Empirically, we observe that CoA outperforms representative imitation learning algorithms such as ACT and Diffusion Policy across 60 RLBench tasks and 8 real-world tasks.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Flow-Based Policy for Online Reinforcement Learning

  • Lei Lyu
  • Yunfei Li
  • Yu Luo
  • Fuchun Sun
  • Tao Kong
  • Jiafeng Xu
  • Xiao Ma

We present $\textbf{FlowRL}$, a novel framework for online reinforcement learning that integrates flow-based policy representation with Wasserstein-2-regularized optimization. We argue that in addition to training signals, enhancing the expressiveness of the policy class is crucial for the performance gains in RL. Flow-based generative models offer such potential, excelling at capturing complex, multimodal action distributions. However, their direct application in online RL is challenging due to a fundamental objective mismatch: standard flow training optimizes for static data imitation, while RL requires value-based policy optimization through a dynamic buffer, leading to difficult optimization landscapes. FlowRL first models policies via a state-dependent velocity field, generating actions through deterministic ODE integration from noise. We derive a constrained policy search objective that jointly maximizes Q through the flow polciy while bounding the Wasserstein-2 distance to a behavior-optimal policy implicitly derived from the replay buffer. This formulation effectively aligns the flow optimization with the RL objective, enabling efficient and value-aware policy learning despite the complexity of the policy class. Empirical evaluations on DMControl and Humanoidbench demonstrate that FlowRL achieves competitive performance in online reinforcement learning benchmarks.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Human-assisted Robotic Policy Refinement via Action Preference Optimization

  • Wenke Xia
  • Yichu Yang
  • Hongtao Wu
  • Xiao Ma
  • Tao Kong
  • Di Hu

Establishing a reliable and iteratively refined robotic system is essential for deploying real-world applications. While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are widely recognized as the foundation model for such robotic deployment, their reliance on offline expert demonstrations critically limits their capacity for post-deployment refinement. To mitigate this limitation, we introduce Action Preference Optimization (APO), a method designed to refine VLA models by human-assisted preference alignment gathered through interaction with environments. This method begins with a human-robot collaboration framework for reliable failure correction and interaction trajectory collection through human intervention. However, directly leveraging these interaction trajectories for preference optimization is non-trivial due to the challenges of irreversible robotic actions and token distribution mismatch. To solve this, APO proposes an adaptive reweighting algorithm with binary desirability signals derived from interaction, empowering VLA models effectively suppress failure-prone actions while enhancing corrective action adaptation. Ultimately, APO equips VLA models with the crucial capability to learn from failure, paving the way for their iterative refinement and reliable deployment in dynamic environments. The experiments conducted in simulation and real-world scenarios prove superior generalization and robustness of our human-assisted framework across a variety of manipulation tasks. We believe this work could bring insights for efficient and stable optimization of VLA models through human-robot collaboration. The code and dataset are released at https: //github. com/GeWu-Lab/Action-Preference-Optimization.

ICRA Conference 2025 Conference Paper

World Model-Based Perception for Visual Legged Locomotion

  • Hang Lai
  • Jiahang Cao
  • Jiafeng Xu
  • Hongtao Wu
  • Yunfeng Lin
  • Tao Kong
  • Yong Yu 0001
  • Weinan Zhang 0001

Legged locomotion over various terrains is challenging and requires precise perception of the robot and its surroundings from both proprioception and vision. However, learning directly from high-dimensional visual input is often data-inefficient and intricate. To address this issue, traditional methods attempt to learn a teacher policy with access to privileged information first and then learn a student policy to imitate the teacher's behavior with visual input. Despite some progress, this imitation framework prevents the student policy from achieving optimal performance due to the information gap between inputs. Furthermore, the learning process is unnatural since animals intuitively learn to traverse different terrains based on their understanding of the world without privileged knowledge. Inspired by this natural ability, we propose a simple yet effective method, World Model-based Perception (WMP), which builds a world model of the environment and learns a policy based on the world model. We illustrate that though completely trained in simulation, the world model can make accurate predictions of real-world trajectories, thus providing informative signals for the policy controller. Extensive simulated and real-world experiments demonstrate that WMP outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in traversability and robustness. Videos and Code are available at: https://wmp-loco.github.io/.

ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Exploring Target Representations for Masked Autoencoders

  • Xingbin Liu
  • Jinghao Zhou
  • Tao Kong
  • Xianming Lin
  • Rongrong Ji

Masked autoencoders have become popular training paradigms for self-supervised visual representation learning. These models randomly mask a portion of the input and reconstruct the masked portion according to assigned target representations. In this paper, we show that a careful choice of the target representation is unnecessary for learning good visual representation since different targets tend to derive similarly behaved models. Driven by this observation, we propose a multi-stage masked distillation pipeline and use a randomly initialized model as the teacher, enabling us to effectively train high-capacity models without any effort to carefully design the target representation. On various downstream tasks, the proposed method to perform masked knowledge distillation with bootstrapped teachers (dbot) outperforms previous self-supervised methods by nontrivial margins. We hope our findings, as well as the proposed method, could motivate people to rethink the roles of target representations in pre-training masked autoencoders.

ICRA Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Towards Unified Interactive Visual Grounding in The Wild

  • Jie Xu
  • Hanbo Zhang
  • Qingyi Si
  • Yifeng Li
  • Xuguang Lan
  • Tao Kong

Interactive visual grounding in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is challenging yet practical due to the inevitable ambiguity in natural languages. It requires robots to disambiguate the user’s input by active information gathering. Previous approaches often rely on predefined templates to ask disambiguation questions, resulting in performance reduction in realistic interactive scenarios. In this paper, we propose TiO, an end-to-end system for interactive visual grounding in human-robot interaction. Benefiting from a unified formulation of visual dialog and grounding, our method can be trained on a joint of extensive public data, and show superior generality to diversified and challenging open-world scenarios. In the experiments, we validate TiO on GuessWhat? ! and InViG benchmarks, setting new state-of-the-art performance by a clear margin. Moreover, we conduct HRI experiments on the carefully selected 150 challenging scenes as well as real-robot platforms. Results show that our method demonstrates superior generality to diversified visual and language inputs with a high success rate. Codes and demos are available on https://jxu124.github.io/TiO/.

ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Unleashing Large-Scale Video Generative Pre-training for Visual Robot Manipulation

  • Hongtao Wu
  • Ya Jing
  • Chilam Cheang
  • Guangzeng Chen
  • Jiafeng Xu
  • Xinghang Li
  • Minghuan Liu
  • Hang Li

Generative pre-trained models have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in language and vision domains by learning useful representations. In this paper, we extend the scope of this effectiveness by showing that visual robot manipulation can significantly benefit from large-scale video generative pre-training. We introduce GR-1, a GPT-style model designed for multi-task language-conditioned visual robot manipulation. GR-1 takes as inputs a language instruction, a sequence of observation images, and a sequence of robot states. It predicts robot actions as well as future images in an end-to-end manner. Thanks to a flexible design, GR-1 can be seamlessly finetuned on robot data after pre-trained on a large-scale video dataset. We perform extensive experiments on the challenging CALVIN benchmark and a real robot. On CALVIN benchmark, our method outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods and improves the success rate from 88.9% to 94.9%. In the setting of zero-shot unseen scene generalization, GR-1 improves the success rate from 53.3% to 85.4%. In real robot experiments, GR-1 also outperforms baseline methods and shows strong potentials in generalization to unseen scenes and objects. We provide inaugural evidence that a unified GPT-style transformer, augmented with large-scale video generative pre-training, exhibits remarkable generalization to multi-task visual robot manipulation. Project page: https://GR1-Manipulation.github.io

ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Vision-Language Foundation Models as Effective Robot Imitators

  • Xinghang Li
  • Minghuan Liu
  • Hanbo Zhang
  • Cunjun Yu
  • Jie Xu
  • Hongtao Wu
  • Chilam Cheang
  • Ya Jing

Recent progress in vision language foundation models has shown their ability to understand multimodal data and resolve complicated vision language tasks, including robotics manipulation. We seek a straightforward way of making use of existing vision-language models (VLMs) with simple fine-tuning on robotics data. To this end, we derive a simple and novel vision-language manipulation framework, dubbed RoboFlamingo, built upon the open-source VLMs, OpenFlamingo. Unlike prior works, RoboFlamingo utilizes pre-trained VLMs for single-step vision-language comprehension, models sequential history information with an explicit policy head, and is slightly fine-tuned by imitation learning only on language-conditioned manipulation datasets. Such a decomposition provides RoboFlamingo the flexibility for open-loop control and deployment on low-performance platforms. By exceeding the state-of-the-art performance with a large margin on the tested benchmark, we show RoboFlamingo can be an effective and competitive alternative to adapt VLMs to robot control. Our extensive experimental results also reveal several interesting conclusions regarding the behavior of different pre-trained VLMs on manipulation tasks. We believe RoboFlamingo has the potential to be a cost-effective and easy-to-use solution for robotics manipulation, empowering everyone with the ability to fine-tune their own robotics policy. Our code will be made public upon acceptance.

IROS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Exploring Visual Pre-training for Robot Manipulation: Datasets, Models and Methods

  • Ya Jing
  • Xuelin Zhu
  • Xingbin Liu
  • Qie Sima
  • Taozheng Yang
  • Yunhai Feng
  • Tao Kong

Visual pre-training with large-scale real-world data has made great progress in recent years, showing great potential in robot learning with pixel observations. However, the recipes of visual pre-training for robot manipulation tasks are yet to be built. In this paper, we thoroughly investigate the effects of visual pre-training strategies on robot manipulation tasks from three fundamental perspectives: pre-training datasets, model architectures and training methods. Several significant experimental findings are provided that are beneficial for robot learning. Further, we propose a visual pre-training scheme for robot manipulation termed Vi-PRoM, which combines self-supervised learning and supervised learning. Concretely, the former employs contrastive learning to acquire underlying patterns from large-scale unlabeled data, while the latter aims learning visual semantics and temporal dynamics. Extensive experiments on robot manipulations in various simulation environments and the real robot demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme. Videos and more details can be found on https://explore-pretrain-robot.github.io.

ICRA Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Learning to Explore Informative Trajectories and Samples for Embodied Perception

  • Ya Jing
  • Tao Kong

We are witnessing significant progress on perception models, specifically those trained on large-scale internet images. However, efficiently generalizing these perception models to unseen embodied tasks is insufficiently studied, which will help various relevant applications (e. g. , home robots). Unlike static perception methods trained on pre-collected images, the embodied agent can move around in the environment and obtain images of objects from any viewpoints. Therefore, efficiently learning the exploration policy and collection method to gather informative training samples is the key to this task. To do this, we first build a 3D semantic distribution map to train the exploration policy self-supervised by introducing the semantic distribution disagreement and the semantic distribution uncertainty rewards. Note that the map is generated from multi-view observations and can weaken the impact of misidentification from an unfamiliar viewpoint. Our agent is then encouraged to explore the objects with different semantic distributions across viewpoints, or uncertain semantic distributions. With the explored informative trajectories, we propose to select hard samples on trajectories based on the semantic distribution uncertainty to reduce unnecessary observations that can be correctly identified. Experiments show that the perception model fine-tuned with our method outperforms the baselines trained with other exploration policies. Further, we demonstrate the robustness of our method in real-robot experiments.

IROS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

MOMA-Force: Visual-Force Imitation for Real-World Mobile Manipulation

  • Taozheng Yang
  • Ya Jing
  • Hongtao Wu
  • Jiafeng Xu
  • Kuankuan Sima
  • Guangzeng Chen
  • Qie Sima
  • Tao Kong

In this paper, we present a novel method for mobile manipulators to perform multiple contact-rich manipulation tasks. While learning-based methods have the potential to generate actions in an end-to-end manner, they often suffer from insufficient action accuracy and robustness against noise. On the other hand, classical control-based methods can enhance system robustness, but at the cost of extensive parameter tuning. To address these challenges, we present MOMA-Force, a visual-force imitation method that seamlessly combines representation learning for perception, imitation learning for complex motion generation, and admittance whole-body control for system robustness and controllability. MOMA-Force enables a mobile manipulator to learn multiple complex contact-rich tasks with high success rates and small contact forces. In a real household setting, our method outperforms baseline methods in terms of task success rates. Moreover, our method achieves smaller contact forces and smaller force variances compared to baseline methods without force imitation. Overall, we offer a promising approach for efficient and robust mobile manipulation in the real world. Videos and more details can be found on https://visual-force-imitation.github.io.

ICRA Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Towards Open-World Interactive Disambiguation for Robotic Grasping

  • Yuchen Mo
  • Hanbo Zhang
  • Tao Kong

Language-based communications are essential in human-robot interaction, especially for the majority of non-expert users. In this paper, we present SeeAsk, an open-world interactive visual grounding system to grasp specified targets with ambiguous natural language instructions. The main contribution of SeeAsk is that it can robustly handle open-world scenes in terms of both open-set objects and open-vocabulary interactions. Specifically, our SeeAsk is built upon modern large-scale vision-language pre-trained models and traditional decision-making process, and shows promising results to be deployed in real-world scenarios. SeeAsk outperforms previous state-of-the-art algorithms with a clear margin in terms of not only success rate but also asking smarter and more informative questions. User studies also demonstrate its advantages over previous works.

ICLR Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Image BERT Pre-training with Online Tokenizer

  • Jinghao Zhou
  • Chen Wei 0005
  • Huiyu Wang
  • Wei Shen 0002
  • Cihang Xie
  • Alan L. Yuille
  • Tao Kong

The success of language Transformers is primarily attributed to the pretext task of masked language modeling (MLM), where texts are first tokenized into semantically meaningful pieces. In this work, we study masked image modeling (MIM) and indicate the necessity and challenges of using a semantically meaningful visual tokenizer. We present a self-supervised framework iBOT that can perform masked prediction with an online tokenizer. Specifically, we perform self-distillation on masked patch tokens and take the teacher network as the online tokenizer, along with self-distillation on the class token to acquire visual semantics. The online tokenizer is jointly learnable with the MIM objective and dispenses with a multi-stage training pipeline where the tokenizer needs to be pre-trained beforehand. We show the prominence of iBOT by achieving an 82.3% linear probing accuracy and an 87.8% fine-tuning accuracy evaluated on ImageNet-1K. Beyond the state-of-the-art image classification results, we underline emerging local semantic patterns, which helps the models to obtain strong robustness against common corruptions and achieve leading results on dense downstream tasks, e.g., object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation.

ICRA Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Learning Design and Construction with Varying-Sized Materials via Prioritized Memory Resets

  • Yunfei Li 0005
  • Tao Kong
  • Lei Li 0005
  • Yi Wu 0013

Can a robot autonomously learn to design and construct a bridge from varying-sized blocks without a blueprint? It is a challenging task with long horizon and sparse reward - the robot has to figure out physically stable design schemes and feasible actions to manipulate and transport blocks. Due to diverse block sizes, the state space and action trajectories are vast to explore. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical approach for this problem. It consists of a reinforcement-learning designer to propose high-level building instructions and a motion-planning-based action generator to manipulate blocks at the low level. For high-level learning, we develop a novel technique, prioritized memory resetting (PMR) to improve exploration. PMR adaptively resets the state to those most critical configurations from a replay buffer so that the robot can resume training on partial architectures instead of from scratch. Furthermore, we augment PMR with auxiliary training objectives and fine-tune the designer with the locomotion generator. Our experiments in simulation and on a real deployed robotic system demonstrate that it is able to effectively construct bridges with blocks of varying sizes at a high success rate. Demos can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/bridge-pmr.

IROS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Navigating to Objects in Unseen Environments by Distance Prediction

  • Minzhao Zhu
  • Binglei Zhao
  • Tao Kong

Object Goal Navigation (ObjectNav) task is to navigate an agent to an object category in unseen environments without a pre-built map. In this paper, we solve this task by predicting the distance to the target using semantically-related objects as cues. Based on the estimated distance to the target object, our method directly choose optimal midterm goals that are more likely to have a shorter path to the target. Specifically, based on the learned knowledge, our model takes a bird's-eye view semantic map as input, and estimates the path length from the frontier map cells to the target object. With the estimated distance map, the agent could simultaneously explore the environment and navigate to the target objects based on a simple human-designed strategy. Empirical results in visually realistic simulation environments show that the proposed method outperforms a wide range of baselines on success rate and efficiency. Real-robot experiment also demonstrates that our method generalizes well to the real world.

ICML Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Adversarial Option-Aware Hierarchical Imitation Learning

  • Mingxuan Jing
  • Wenbing Huang 0001
  • Fuchun Sun 0001
  • Xiaojian Ma 0001
  • Tao Kong
  • Chuang Gan 0001
  • Lei Li 0005

It has been a challenge to learning skills for an agent from long-horizon unannotated demonstrations. Existing approaches like Hierarchical Imitation Learning(HIL) are prone to compounding errors or suboptimal solutions. In this paper, we propose Option-GAIL, a novel method to learn skills at long horizon. The key idea of Option-GAIL is modeling the task hierarchy by options and train the policy via generative adversarial optimization. In particular, we propose an Expectation-Maximization(EM)-style algorithm: an E-step that samples the options of expert conditioned on the current learned policy, and an M-step that updates the low- and high-level policies of agent simultaneously to minimize the newly proposed option-occupancy measurement between the expert and the agent. We theoretically prove the convergence of the proposed algorithm. Experiments show that Option-GAIL outperforms other counterparts consistently across a variety of tasks.

IROS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Learning to Design and Construct Bridge without Blueprint

  • Yunfei Li 0005
  • Tao Kong
  • Lei Li 0005
  • Yifeng Li
  • Yi Wu 0013

Autonomous assembly has been a desired functionality of many intelligent robot systems. We study a new challenging assembly task, designing and constructing a bridge without a blueprint. In this task, the robot needs to first design a feasible bridge architecture for arbitrarily wide cliffs and then manipulate the blocks reliably to construct a stable bridge according to the proposed design. In this paper, we propose a bi-level approach to tackle this task. At the high level, the system learns a bridge blueprint policy in a physical simulator using deep reinforcement learning and curriculum learning. A policy is represented as an attention-based neural network with object-centric input, which enables generalization to different number of blocks and cliff widths. For low-level control, we implement a motion-planning-based policy for real-robot motion control, which can be directly combined with a trained blueprint policy for real-world bridge construction without tuning. In our field study, our bi-level robot system demonstrates the capability of manipulating blocks to construct a diverse set of bridges with different architectures.

IROS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Simultaneous Semantic and Collision Learning for 6-DoF Grasp Pose Estimation

  • Yiming Li
  • Tao Kong
  • Ruihang Chu
  • Yifeng Li
  • Peng Wang 0024
  • Lei Li 0005

Grasping in cluttered scenes has always been a great challenge for robots, due to the requirement of the ability to well understand the scene and object information. Previous works usually assume that the geometry information of the objects is available, or utilize a step-wise, multi-stage strategy to predict the feasible 6-DoF grasp poses. In this work, we propose to formalize the 6-DoF grasp pose estimation as a simultaneous multi-task learning problem. In a unified framework, we jointly predict the feasible 6-DoF grasp poses, instance semantic segmentation, and collision information. The whole framework is jointly optimized and end-to-end differentiable. Our model is evaluated on large-scale benchmarks as well as the real robot system. On the public dataset, our method outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods by a large margin (+4. 08 AP). We also demonstrate the implementation of our model on a real robotic platform and show that the robot can accurately grasp target objects in cluttered scenarios with a high success rate. Project link: https://openbyterobotics.github.io/sscl.

NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

SOLOv2: Dynamic and Fast Instance Segmentation

  • Xinlong Wang
  • Rufeng Zhang
  • Tao Kong
  • Lei Li
  • Chunhua Shen

In this work, we design a simple, direct, and fast framework for instance segmentation with strong performance. To this end, we propose a novel and effective approach, termed SOLOv2, following the principle of the SOLO method [32]. First, our new framework is empowered by an efficient and holistic instance mask representation scheme, which dynamically segments each instance in the image, without resorting to bounding box detection. Specifically, the object mask generation is decoupled into a mask kernel prediction and mask feature learning, which are responsible for generating convolution kernels and the feature maps to be convolved with, respectively. Second, SOLOv2 significantly reduces inference overhead with our novel matrix non-maximum suppression (NMS) technique. Our Matrix NMS performs NMS with parallel matrix operations in one shot, and yields better results. We demonstrate that the proposed SOLOv2 achieves the state-of-the- art performance with high efficiency, making it suitable for both mobile and cloud applications. A light-weight version of SOLOv2 executes at 31. 3 FPS and yields 37. 1% AP on COCO test-dev. Moreover, our state-of-the-art results in object detection (from our mask byproduct) and panoptic segmentation show the potential of SOLOv2 to serve as a new strong baseline for many instance-level recognition tasks. Code is available at https: //git. io/AdelaiDet

AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Task-Aware Monocular Depth Estimation for 3D Object Detection

  • Xinlong Wang
  • Wei Yin
  • Tao Kong
  • Yuning Jiang
  • Lei Li
  • Chunhua Shen

Monocular depth estimation enables 3D perception from a single 2D image, thus attracting much research attention for years. Almost all methods treat foreground and background regions (“things and stuff”) in an image equally. However, not all pixels are equal. Depth of foreground objects plays a crucial role in 3D object recognition and localization. To date how to boost the depth prediction accuracy of foreground objects is rarely discussed. In this paper, we first analyze the data distributions and interaction of foreground and background, then propose the foreground-background separated monocular depth estimation (ForeSeE) method, to estimate the foreground and background depth using separate optimization objectives and decoders. Our method significantly improves the depth estimation performance on foreground objects. Applying ForeSeE to 3D object detection, we achieve 7. 5 AP gains and set new state-of-the-art results among other monocular methods. Code will be available at: https: //github. com/WXinlong/ForeSeE.

ICRA Conference 2017 Conference Paper

A hybrid deep architecture for robotic grasp detection

  • Di Guo 0002
  • Fuchun Sun 0001
  • Huaping Liu 0001
  • Tao Kong
  • Bin Fang 0003
  • Ning Xi 0001

The robotic grasp detection is a great challenge in the area of robotics. Previous work mainly employs the visual approaches to solve this problem. In this paper, a hybrid deep architecture combining the visual and tactile sensing for robotic grasp detection is proposed. We have demonstrated that the visual sensing and tactile sensing are complementary to each other and important for the robotic grasping. A new THU grasp dataset has also been collected which contains the visual, tactile and grasp configuration information. The experiments conducted on a public grasp dataset and our collected dataset show that the performance of the proposed model is superior to state of the art methods. The results also indicate that the tactile data could help to enable the network to learn better visual features for the robotic grasp detection task.

ICRA Conference 2016 Conference Paper

Object discovery and grasp detection with a shared convolutional neural network

  • Di Guo 0002
  • Tao Kong
  • Fuchun Sun 0001
  • Huaping Liu 0001

Grasp an object from a stack of objects in real-time is still a challenge in robotics. This requires the robot to have the ability of both fast object discovery and grasp detection: a target object should be picked out from the stack first and then a proper grasp configuration is applied to grasp the object. In this paper, we propose a shared convolutional neural network (CNN) which can simultaneously implement these two tasks in real-time. The processing speed of the model is about 100 frames per second on a GPU which largely satisfies the requirement. Meanwhile, we also establish a labeled RGBD dataset which contains scenes of stacked objects for robotic grasping. At last, we demonstrate the implementation of our shared CNN model on a real robotic platform and show that the robot can accurately discover a target object from the stack and successfully grasp it.

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