Robot Manipulation

Garment manipulation (e.g. unfolding folding and hanging clothes) is essential for future robots to accomplish home-assistant tasks while highly challenging due to the diversity of garment configurations geometries and deformations. Although able to manipulate similar shaped garments in a certain task previous works mostly have to design different policies for different tasks could not generalize to garments with diverse geometries and often rely heavily on human-annotated data. In this paper we leverage the property that garments in a certain category have similar structures and then learn the topological dense (point-level) visual correspondence among garments in the category level with different deformations in the self-supervised manner. The topological correspondence can be easily adapted to the functional correspondence to guide the manipulation policies for various downstream tasks within only one or few-shot demonstrations. Experiments over garments in 3 different categories on 3 representative tasks in diverse scenarios using one or two arms taking one or more steps inputting flat or messy garments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Project page: https://warshallrho.github.io/unigarmentmanip.

In recent years image manipulation localization has attracted increasing attention due to its pivotal role in ensuring social media security. However effectively identifying forged regions remains an open challenge. The high acquisition cost and the severe scarcity of high-quality data are major factors hindering the performance improvement of modern image manipulation localization systems. To address this issue we propose a novel paradigm termed as CAAA to automatically and accurately annotate the manually forged images from the web at the pixel-level. We further propose a novel metric termed as QES to assist in filtering out unreliable annotations. With CAAA and QES we construct a large-scale diverse and high-quality dataset comprising 123150 manually forged images with mask annotations. Furthermore we develop a new model termed as APSC-Net for accurate image manipulation localization. According to extensive experiments our methods outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods our dataset significantly improves the performance of various models on the widely-used benchmarks. The dataset and codes are publicly available at https://github.com/qcf-568/MIML.

Reinforcement learning (RL) with dense rewards and imitation learning (IL) with human-generated trajectories are the most widely used approaches for training modern embodied agents. RL requires extensive reward shaping and auxiliary losses and is often too slow and ineffective for long-horizon tasks. While IL with human supervision is effective collecting human trajectories at scale is extremely expensive. In this work we show that imitating shortest-path planners in simulation produces agents that given a language instruction can proficiently navigate explore and manipulate objects in both simulation and in the real world using only RGB sensors (no depth map or GPS coordinates). This surprising result is enabled by our end-to-end transformer-based SPOC architecture powerful visual encoders paired with extensive image augmentation and the dramatic scale and diversity of our training data: millions of frames of shortest-path-expert trajectories collected inside approximately 200000 procedurally generated houses containing 40000 unique 3D assets. Our models data training code and newly proposed 10-task benchmarking suite CHORES are available at https://spoc-robot.github.io/.

We introduced StyleEntity a zero-shot image manipulation model that utilizes named entities as proxies during its training phase. This strategy enables our model to manipulate images using unseen textual descriptions during inference all within a single training phase. Additionally we proposed an inference technique termed Prompt Ensemble Latent Averaging (PELA). PELA averages the manipulation directions derived from various named entities during inference effectively eliminating the noise directions thus achieving stable manipulation. In our experiments StyleEntity exhibited superior performance in a zero-shot setting compared to other methods. The code model weights and datasets is available at https://github.com/feng-zhida/StyleEntity.

Robot manipulation relies on accurately predicting contact points and end-effector directions to ensure successful operation. However learning-based robot manipulation trained on a limited category within a simulator often struggles to achieve generalizability especially when confronted with extensive categories. Therefore we introduce an innovative approach for robot manipulation that leverages the robust reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to enhance the stability and generalization of manipulation. By fine-tuning the injected adapters we preserve the inherent common sense and reasoning ability of the MLLMs while equipping them with the ability for manipulation. The fundamental insight lies in the introduced fine-tuning paradigm encompassing object category understanding affordance prior reasoning and object-centric pose prediction to stimulate the reasoning ability of MLLM in manipulation. During inference our approach utilizes an RGB image and text prompt to predict the end effector's pose in chain of thoughts. After the initial contact is established an active impedance adaptation policy is introduced to plan the upcoming waypoints in a closed-loop manner. Moreover in real world we design a test-time adaptation (TTA) strategy for manipulation to enable the model better adapt to the current real-world scene configuration. Experiments in simulator and real-world show the promising performance of ManipLLM. More details and demonstrations can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/manipllm.

Speech-preserving facial expression manipulation (SPFEM) aims to modify facial emotions while meticulously maintaining the mouth animation associated with spoken content. Current works depend on inaccessible paired training samples for the person where two aligned frames exhibit the same speech content yet differ in emotional expression limiting the SPFEM applications in real-world scenarios. In this work we discover that speakers who convey the same content with different emotions exhibit highly correlated local facial animations providing valuable supervision for SPFEM. To capitalize on this insight we propose a novel adaptive spatial coherent correlation learning (ASCCL) algorithm which models the aforementioned correlation as an explicit metric and integrates the metric to supervise manipulating facial expression and meanwhile better preserving the facial animation of spoken contents. To this end it first learns a spatial coherent correlation metric ensuring the visual disparities of adjacent local regions of the image belonging to one emotion are similar to those of the corresponding counterpart of the image belonging to another emotion. Recognizing that visual disparities are not uniform across all regions we have also crafted a disparity-aware adaptive strategy that prioritizes regions that present greater challenges. During SPFEM model training we construct the adaptive spatial coherent correlation metric between corresponding local regions of the input and output images as addition loss to supervise the generation process. We conduct extensive experiments on variant datasets and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ASCCL algorithm. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/jianmanlincjx/ASCCL

This paper introduces Hierarchical Diffusion Policy (HDP) a hierarchical agent for multi-task robotic manipulation. HDP factorises a manipulation policy into a hierarchical structure: a high-level task-planning agent which predicts a distant next-best end-effector pose (NBP) and a low-level goal-conditioned diffusion policy which generates optimal motion trajectories. The factorised policy representation allows HDP to tackle both long-horizon task planning while generating fine-grained low-level actions. To generate context-aware motion trajectories while satisfying robot kinematics constraints we present a novel kinematics-aware goal-conditioned control agent Robot Kinematics Diffuser (RK-Diffuser). Specifically RK-Diffuser learns to generate both the end-effector pose and joint position trajectories and distill the accurate but kinematics-unaware end-effector pose diffuser to the kinematics-aware but less accurate joint position diffuser via differentiable kinematics. Empirically we show that HDP achieves a significantly higher success rate than the state-of-the-art methods in both simulation and real-world.

This paper presents GenH2R a framework for learning generalizable vision-based human-to-robot (H2R) handover skills. The goal is to equip robots with the ability to reliably receive objects with unseen geometry handed over by humans in various complex trajectories. We acquire such generalizability by learning H2R handover at scale with a comprehensive solution including procedural simulation assets creation automated demonstration generation and effective imitation learning. We leverage large-scale 3D model repositories dexterous grasp generation methods and curve-based 3D animation to create an H2R handover simulation environment named GenH2R-Sim surpassing the number of scenes in existing simulators by three orders of magnitude. We further introduce a distillation-friendly demonstration generation method that automatically generates a million high-quality demonstrations suitable for learning. Finally we present a 4D imitation learning method augmented by a future forecasting objective to distill demonstrations into a visuo-motor handover policy. Experimental evaluations in both simulators and the real world demonstrate significant improvements (at least +10% success rate) over baselines in all cases.

Generative models are gaining increasing popularity and the demand for precisely generating images is on the rise. However generating an image that perfectly aligns with users' expectations is extremely challenging. The shapes of objects the poses of animals the structures of landscapes and more may not match the user's desires and this applies to real images as well. This is where point-based image editing becomes essential. An excellent image editing method needs to meet the following criteria: user-friendly interaction high performance and good generalization capability. Due to the limitations of StyleGAN DragGAN exhibits limited robustness across diverse scenarios while DragDiffusion lacks user-friendliness due to the necessity of LoRA fine-tuning and masks. In this paper we introduce a novel interactive point-based image editing framework called EasyDrag that leverages pretrained diffusion models to achieve high-quality editing outcomes and user-friendship. Extensive experimentation demonstrates that our approach surpasses DragDiffusion in terms of both image quality and editing precision for point-based image manipulation tasks.

We introduce CyberDemo a novel approach to robotic imitation learning that leverages simulated human demonstrations for real-world tasks. By incorporating extensive data augmentation in a simulated environment CyberDemo outperforms traditional in-domain real-world demonstrations when transferred to the real world handling diverse physical and visual conditions. Regardless of its affordability and convenience in data collection CyberDemo outperforms baseline methods in terms of success rates across various tasks and exhibits generalizability with previously unseen objects. For example it can rotate novel tetra-valve and penta-valve despite human demonstrations only involving tri-valves. Our research demonstrates the significant potential of simulated human demonstrations for real world dexterous manipulation tasks. More details can be found at https://cyber-demo.github.io/

The ability to associate touch with other modalities has huge implications for humans and computational systems. However multimodal learning with touch remains challenging due to the expensive data collection process and non-standardized sensor outputs. We introduce UniTouch a unified tactile model for vision-based touch sensors connected to multiple modalities including vision language and sound. We achieve this by aligning our UniTouch embeddings to pretrained image embeddings already associated with a variety of other modalities. We further propose learnable sensor-specific tokens allowing the model to learn from a set of heterogeneous tactile sensors all at the same time. UniTouch is capable of conducting various touch sensing tasks in the zero-shot setting from robot grasping prediction to touch image question answering. To the best of our knowledge UniTouch is the first to demonstrate such capabilities.

Facial action unit (AU) intensity plays a pivotal role in quantifying fine-grained expression behaviors which is an effective condition for facial expression manipulation. However publicly available datasets containing intensity annotations for multiple AUs remain severely limited often featuring a restricted number of subjects. This limitation places challenges to the AU intensity manipulation in images due to disentanglement issues leading researchers to resort to other large datasets with pretrained AU intensity estimators for pseudo labels. In addressing this constraint and fully leveraging manual annotations of AU intensities for precise manipulation we introduce AUEditNet. Our proposed model achieves impressive intensity manipulation across 12 AUs trained effectively with only 18 subjects. Utilizing a dual-branch architecture our approach achieves comprehensive disentanglement of facial attributes and identity without necessitating additional loss functions or implementing with large batch sizes. This approach offers a potential solution to achieve desired facial attribute editing despite the dataset's limited subject count. Our experiments demonstrate AUEditNet's superior accuracy in editing AU intensities affirming its capability in disentangling facial attributes and identity within a limited subject pool. AUEditNet allows conditioning by either intensity values or target images eliminating the need for constructing AU combinations for specific facial expression synthesis. Moreover AU intensity estimation as a downstream task validates the consistency between real and edited images confirming the effectiveness of our proposed AU intensity manipulation method.