Publications

You can also find my articles on my Google Scholar profile.

	Make a Donut: Language-Guided Hierarchical EMD-Space Planning for Zero-shot Deformable Object Manipulation Yang You, Bokui Shen, Congyue Deng, Haoran Geng, He Wang, Leonidas Guibas Arxiv, 2023 arxiv / poster / Project Page / Deformable object manipulation stands as one of the most captivating yet formidable challenges in robotics. While previous techniques have predominantly relied on learning latent dynamics through demonstrations, typically represented as either particles or images, there exists a pertinent limitation: acquiring suitable demonstrations, especially for long-horizon tasks, can be elusive. Moreover, basing learning entirely on demonstrations can hamper the model's ability to generalize beyond the demonstrated tasks. In this work, we introduce a demonstration-free hierarchical planning approach capable of tackling intricate long-horizon tasks without necessitating any training. We employ large language models (LLMs) to articulate a high-level, stage-by-stage plan corresponding to a specified task. For every individual stage, the LLM provides both the tool's name and the Python code to craft intermediate subgoal point clouds. With the tool and subgoal for a particular stage at our disposal, we present a granular closed-loop model predictive control strategy. This leverages Differentiable Physics with Point-to-Point correspondence (DiffPhysics-P2P) loss in the earth mover distance (EMD) space, applied iteratively. Experimental findings affirm that our technique surpasses multiple benchmarks in dough manipulation, spanning both short and long horizons. Remarkably, our model demonstrates robust generalization capabilities to novel and previously unencountered complex tasks without any preliminary demonstrations. We further substantiate our approach with experimental trials on real-world robotic platforms.
	SparseDFF: Sparse-View Feature Distillation for One-Shot Dexterous Manipulation Qianxu Wang, Haotong Zhang, Congyue Deng, Yang You, Hao Dong, Yixin Zhu, Leonidas Guibas Arxiv, 2023 arxiv / Project Page / Humans excel at transferring manipulation skills across diverse object shapes, poses, and appearances due to their understanding of semantic correspondences between different instances. To endow robots with a similar high-level understanding, we develop a DFF for 3D scenes, leveraging large 2D vision models to distill semantic features from multiview images. While current research demonstrates advanced performance in reconstructing DFF from dense views, the development of learning a DFF from sparse views is relatively nascent, despite its prevalence in numerous manipulation tasks with fixed cameras. In this work, we introduce \method, a novel method for acquiring view-consistent 3D Distilled Feature Field from sparse RGBD observations, enabling one-shot learning of dexterous manipulations that are transferable to novel scenes. Specifically, we map the image features to the 3D point cloud, allowing for propagation across the 3D space to establish a dense feature field. At the core of SparseDFF is a lightweight feature refinement network, optimized with a contrastive loss between pairwise views after back-projecting the image features onto the 3D point cloud. Additionally, we implement a point-pruning mechanism to augment feature continuity within each local neighborhood. By establishing coherent feature fields on both source and target scenes, we devise an energy function that facilitates the minimization of feature discrepancies w.r.t. the end-effector parameters between the demonstration and the target manipulation. We evaluate our approach using a dexterous hand, mastering real-world manipulations on both rigid and deformable objects, and showcase robust generalization in the face of object and scene-context variations.
	Bridging the Gap between Human Motion and Action Semantics via Kinematic Phrases Liu, Xinpeng, Yong-Lu Li, Ailing Zeng, Zizheng Zhou, Yang You, Cewu Lu Arxiv, 2023 arxiv / Project Page / The goal of motion understanding is to establish a reliable mapping between motion and action semantics, while it is a challenging many-to-many problem. An abstract action semantic (i.e., walk forwards) could be conveyed by perceptually diverse motions (walk with arms up or swinging), while a motion could carry different semantics w.r.t. its context and intention. This makes an elegant mapping between them difficult. Previous attempts adopted direct-mapping paradigms with limited reliability. Also, current automatic metrics fail to provide reliable assessments of the consistency between motions and action semantics. We identify the source of these problems as the significant gap between the two modalities. To alleviate this gap, we propose Kinematic Phrases (KP) that take the objective kinematic facts of human motion with proper abstraction, interpretability, and generality characteristics. Based on KP as a mediator, we can unify a motion knowledge base and build a motion understanding system. Meanwhile, KP can be automatically converted from motions and to text descriptions with no subjective bias, inspiring Kinematic Prompt Generation (KPG) as a novel automatic motion generation benchmark. In extensive experiments, our approach shows superiority over other methods. Our code and data would be made publicly available.
	CPPF++: Uncertainty-Aware Sim2Real Object Pose Estimation by Vote Aggregation Yang You, Wenhao He, Jin Liu, Hongkai Xiong, Weiming Wang, Cewu Lu Arxiv, 2023 arxiv / code / Object pose estimation constitutes a critical area within the domain of 3D vision. While contemporary state-of-the-art methods that leverage real-world pose annotations have demonstrated commendable performance, the procurement of such real-world training data incurs substantial costs. This paper focuses on a specific setting wherein only 3D CAD models are utilized as a priori knowledge, devoid of any background or clutter information. We introduce a novel method, CPPF++, designed for sim-to-real pose estimation. This method builds upon the foundational point-pair voting scheme of CPPF, reconceptualizing it through a probabilistic lens. To address the challenge of voting collision, we model voting uncertainty by estimating the probabilistic distribution of each point pair within the canonical space. This approach is further augmented by iterative noise filtering, employed to eradicate votes associated with backgrounds or clutters. Additionally, we enhance the context provided by each voting unit by introducing $N$-point tuples. In conjunction with this methodological contribution, we present a new category-level pose estimation dataset, DiversePose 300. This dataset is specifically crafted to facilitate a more rigorous evaluation of current state-of-the-art methods, encompassing a broader and more challenging array of real-world scenarios. Empirical results substantiate the efficacy of our proposed method, revealing a significant reduction in the disparity between simulation and real-world performance.
	CPPF: Towards Robust Category-Level 9D Pose Estimation in the Wild Yang You, Ruoxi Shi, Weiming Wang, Cewu Lu CVPR, 2022 arxiv / code / Project Page / In this paper, we tackle the problem of category-level 9D pose estimation in the wild, given a single RGB-D frame. Drawing inspirations from traditional point pair features (PPFs), in this paper, we design a novel Category-level PPF (CPPF) voting method to achieve accurate, robust and generalizable 9D pose estimation in the wild. To obtain robust pose estimation, we sample numerous point pairs on an object, and for each pair our model predicts necessary SE(3)-invariant voting statistics on object centers, orientations and scales. A novel coarse-to-fine voting algorithm is proposed to eliminate noisy point pair samples and generate final predictions from the population. To get rid of false positives in the orientation voting process, an auxiliary binary disambiguating classification task is introduced for each sampled point pair. In order to detect objects in the wild, we carefully design our sim-to-real pipeline by training on synthetic point clouds only, unless objects have ambiguous poses in geometry.
	UKPGAN: Unsupervised KeyPoint GANeration Yang You, Wenhai Liu, Yong-Lu Li, Weiming Wang, Cewu Lu CVPR, 2022 arxiv / code / Project Page / In this work, we reckon keypoints under an information compression scheme to represent the whole object. Based on this, we propose UKPGAN, an unsupervised 3D keypoint detector where keypoints are detected so that they could reconstruct the original object shape. Two modules: GAN-based keypoint sparsity control and salient information distillation modules are proposed to locate those important keypoints. Extensive experiments show that our keypoints preserve the semantic information of objects and align well with human annotated part and keypoint labels.
	Canonical Voting: Towards Robust Oriented Bounding Box Detection in 3D Scenes Yang You, Zelin Ye, Yujing Lou, Chengkun Li, Yong-Lu Li, Lizhuang Ma, Weiming Wang, Cewu Lu CVPR, 2022 arxiv / code / Project Page / In the work, we disentangle the direct offset into Local Canonical Coordinates (LCC), box scales and box orientations. Only LCC and box scales are regressed while box orientations are generated by a canonical voting scheme. Finally, a LCC-aware back-projection checking algorithm iteratively cuts out bounding boxes from the generated vote maps, with the elimination of false positives. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging large-scale datasets of real point cloud scans: ScanNet, SceneNN with 11.4 and 5.3 mAP improvement respectively.
	PRIN/SPRIN: On Extracting Point-wise Rotation Invariant Features Yang You, Yujing Lou, Ruoxi Shi, Qi Liu, Yu-Wing Tai, Lizhuang Ma, Weiming Wang, Cewu Lu TPAMI, 2021 arxiv / code / Point cloud analysis without pose priors is very challenging in real applications, as the orientations of point clouds are often unknown. In this paper, we propose a brand new point-set learning framework PRIN, namely, Point-wise Rotation Invariant Network, focusing on rotation invariant feature extraction in point clouds analysis. We construct spherical signals by Density Aware Adaptive Sampling to deal with distorted point distributions in spherical space. Spherical Voxel Convolution and Point Re-sampling are proposed to extract rotation invariant features for each point. In addition, we extend PRIN to a sparse version called SPRIN, which directly operates on sparse point clouds. Both PRIN and SPRIN can be applied to tasks ranging from object classification, part segmentation, to 3D feature matching and label alignment. Results show that, on the dataset with randomly rotated point clouds, SPRIN demonstrates better performance than state-of-the-art methods without any data augmentation. We also provide thorough theoretical proof and analysis for point-wise rotation invariance achieved by our methods.
	Understanding Pixel-level 2D Image Semantics with 3D Keypoint Knowledge Engine Yang You, Chengkun Li, Yujing Lou, Zhoujun Cheng, Liangwei Li, Lizhuang Ma, Weiming Wang, Cewu Lu TPAMI, 2021 arxiv / Pixel-level 2D object semantic understanding is an important topic in computer vision and could help machine deeply understand objects (e.g. functionality and affordance) in our daily life. However, most previous methods directly train on correspondences in 2D images, which is end-to-end but loses plenty of information in 3D spaces. In this paper, we propose a new method on predicting image corresponding semantics in 3D domain and then projecting them back onto 2D images to achieve pixel-level understanding. In order to obtain reliable 3D semantic labels that are absent in current image datasets, we build a large scale keypoint knowledge engine called KeypointNet, which contains 103,450 keypoints and 8,234 3D models from 16 object categories. Our method leverages the advantages in 3D vision and can explicitly reason about objects self-occlusion and visibility. We show that our method gives comparative and even superior results on standard semantic benchmarks.
	KeypointNet: A Large-scale 3D Keypoint Dataset Aggregated from Numerous Human Annotations Yang You, Yujing Lou, Chengkun Li, Zhoujun Cheng, Liangwei Li, Lizhuang Ma, Cewu Lu, Weiming Wang CVPR, 2020 arxiv / video / code / Project Page / We present KeypointNet: the first large-scale and diverse 3D keypoint dataset that contains 83,231 keypoints and 8,329 3D models from 16 object categories, by leveraging numerous human annotations. To handle the inconsistency between annotations from different people, we propose a novel method to aggregate these keypoints automatically, through minimization of a fidelity loss. Finally, ten state-of-the-art methods are benchmarked on our proposed dataset.
	Skeleton Merger, an Unsupervised Aligned Keypoint Detector Ruoxi Shi, Zhengrong Xue, Yang You, Cewu Lu CVPR, 2021 arxiv / code / In this paper, we propose an unsupervised aligned keypoint detector, Skeleton Merger, which utilizes skeletons to reconstruct objects. It is based on an Autoencoder architecture. The encoder proposes keypoints and predicts activation strengths of edges between keypoints. The decoder performs uniform sampling on the skeleton and refines it into small point clouds with pointwise offsets. Then the activation strengths are applied and the sub-clouds are merged. Composite Chamfer Distance (CCD) is proposed as a distance between the input point cloud and the reconstruction composed of sub-clouds masked by activation strengths.
	Pointwise Rotation-Invariant Network with Adaptive Sampling and 3D Spherical Voxel Convolution Yang You, Yujing Lou, Qi Liu, Yu-Wing Tai, Lizhuang Ma, Cewu Lu, Weiming Wang AAAI, 2020 arxiv / code / In this paper, we propose a new point-set learning framework named Pointwise Rotation-Invariant Network (PRIN), focusing on achieving rotation-invariance in point clouds. We construct spherical signals by Density-Aware Adaptive Sampling (DAAS) from sparse points and employ Spherical Voxel Convolution (SVC) to extract rotation-invariant features for each point. Our network can be applied to applications ranging from object classification, part segmentation, to 3D feature matching and label alignment.
	CRIN: Rotation-Invariant Point Cloud Analysis and Rotation Estimation via Centrifugal Reference Frame Lou, Yujing and Ye, Zelin and You, Yang and Jiang, Nianjuan and Lu, Jiangbo and Wang, Weiming and Ma, Lizhuang and Lu, Cewu AAAI, 2023 arxiv / code / In this paper, we propose the CRIN, namely Centrifugal Rotation-Invariant Network. CRIN directly takes the coordinates of points as input and transforms local points into rotation-invariant representations via centrifugal reference frames. Aided by centrifugal reference frames, each point corresponds to a discrete rotation so that the information of rotations can be implicitly stored in point features. Unfortunately, discrete points are far from describing the whole rotation space. We further introduce a continuous distribution for 3D rotations based on points. Furthermore, we propose an attention-based down-sampling strategy to sample points invariant to rotations. A relation module is adopted at last for reinforcing the long-range dependencies between sampled points and predicts the anchor point for unsupervised rotation estimation. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves rotation invariance, accurately estimates the object rotation. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of the network design.
	Relative CNN-RNN: Learning relative atmospheric visibility from images Yang You, Cewu Lu, Weiming Wang, Chi-Keung Tang IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2018 PDF / We propose a deep learning approach for directly estimating relative atmospheric visibility from outdoor photos without relying on weather images or data that require expensive sensing or custom capture. Our data-driven approach capitalizes on a large collection of Internet images to learn rich scene and visibility varieties. The relative CNN-RNN coarse-to-fine model, where CNN stands for convolutional neural network and RNN stands for recurrent neural network, exploits the joint power of relative support vector machine, which has a good ranking representation, and the data-driven deep learning features derived from our novel CNN-RNN model.
	Human Correspondence Consensus for 3D Object Semantic Understanding Yujing Lou, Yang You*, Chengkun Li, Zhoujun Cheng, Liangwei Li, Lizhuang Ma, Weiming Wang, Yuwing Tai, Cewu Lu (=equal contribution)* ECCV, 2020 arxiv / We observe that people have a consensus on semantic correspondences between two areas from different objects, but are less certain about the exact semantic meaning of each area. Therefore, we argue that by providing human labeled correspondences between different objects from the same category instead of explicit semantic labels, one can recover rich semantic information of an object. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset named CorresPondenceNet. Based on this dataset, we are able to learn dense semantic embeddings with a novel geodesic consistency loss.
	Combinational Q-Learning for Dou Di Zhu Yang You, Liangwei Li, Baisong Guo, Weiming Wang, Cewu Lu AIIDE, 2020 arxiv / code / In this paper, we study a special class of Asian popular card games called Dou Di Zhu, in which two adversarial groups of agents must consider numerous card combinations at each time step, leading to huge number of actions. We propose a novel method to handle combinatorial actions, which we call combinational Q-learning (CQL). We employ a two-stage network to reduce action space and also leverage order-invariant max-pooling operations to extract relationships between primitive actions.
	Semantic Correspondence via 2D-3D-2D Cycle Yang You, Chengkun Li, Yujing Lou, Zhoujun Cheng, Lizhuang Ma, Cewu Lu, Weiming Wang Preprint, 2020 arxiv / code / Visual semantic correspondence is an important topic in computer vision and could help machine understand objects in our daily life. However, most previous methods directly train on correspondences in 2D images, which is end-to-end but loses plenty of information in 3D spaces. In this paper, we propose a new method on predicting semantic correspondences by leveraging it to 3D domain and then project corresponding 3D models back to 2D domain, with their semantic labels. Our method leverages the advantages in 3D vision and can explicitly reason about objects self-occlusion and visibility.