Kavli Affiliate: Wei Gao| Summary:Conventionally, robotic perception relies heavily on cameras due to the rich semantic texture they provide. However, their performance degrades significantly in low-light or high-dynamic-range environments. Conversely, while Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) captures illumination-invariant geometric and intensity properties, the resulting data are typically single-channel and sparse, creating a significant modality gap […]

Kavli Affiliate: Wei Gao| Summary:Multimodal signals, such as visual, audio, and tactile data, are increasingly maintained as persistent digital assets in immersive communication systems and digital twins. In these settings, the same multimodal content is repeatedly accessed by heterogeneous receivers with varying modality and bandwidth requirements. Existing compression and Joint Source-Channel Coding (JSCC) methods typically […]

Kavli Affiliate: Dimitri Mawet| Summary:The Keck/NIRC2 infrared imager was upgraded in 2025 with dual-beam polarimetric observing modes spanning approximately 1.1–4.1 microns (JHKL’ bands). We present a preliminary JHK calibration of NIRC2 Polarimetry using a wavelength-dependent Mueller matrix model of the Keck tertiary mirror (M3), half-wave plate (HWP), image rotator (IMR), downstream optics, and Wollaston prism. […]

Kavli Affiliate: Wei Gao| Summary:Vision-language models (VLMs) enable embodied agents to reason and act from visual observations and language instructions. Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training enhances these capabilities using task feedback, but current on-policy RL runtimes execute rollout, reference scoring, and actor training in strict serial phases. While effective for text-only RL, this phase-granular execution is […]

Kavli Affiliate: Wei Gao| Summary:Collaborative perception breaks through single-view limitations via multi-agent information exchange. However, multi-source noise such as pose errors and communication delays degrades fusion feature quality, constraining perception performance. Joint training of detection and BEV segmentation provides a natural remedy, where segmented road regions help constrain target distributions and detection bounding boxes help […]

Kavli Affiliate: Dimitri Mawet| Summary:The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is a future NASA flagship mission concept identified by the Astro2020 Decadal Survey as the highest priority for large space missions. HWO should conduct "transformative astrophysics" and search for biosignatures in the atmospheres of approximately 25 potentially Earth-like planets. To further the early-stage development of HWO, […]

Kavli Affiliate: Wei Gao| Summary:While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has advanced open vocabulary scene understanding, existing methods remain confined to explicit queries. They struggle to interpret implicit intents, complex spatial constraints, and commonsense reasoning required for practical embodied interactions. To address this gap, we introduce the task of reasoning 3D Gaussian segmentation and construct two […]