Jian Tang
Publications
RoboGene: Boosting VLA Pre-training via Diversity-Driven Agentic Framework for Real-World Task Generation
The pursuit of general-purpose robotic manipulation is hindered by the scarcity of diverse, real-world interaction data. Unlike data collection from web in vision or language, robotic data collection is an active process incurring prohibitive physical costs. Consequently, automated task curation to maximize data value remains a critical yet under-explored challenge. Existing manual methods are unscalable and biased toward common tasks, while off-the-shelf foundation models often hallucinate physically infeasible instructions. To address this, we introduce RoboGene, an agentic framework designed to automate the generation of diverse, physically plausible manipulation tasks across single-arm, dual-arm, and mobile robots. RoboGene integrates three core components: diversity-driven sampling for broad task coverage, self-reflection mechanisms to enforce physical constraints, and human-in-the-loop refinement for continuous improvement. We conduct extensive quantitative analysis and large-scale real-world experiments, collecting datasets of 18k trajectories and introducing novel metrics to assess task quality, feasibility, and diversity. Results demonstrate that RoboGene significantly outperforms state-of-the-art foundation models (e.g., GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro). Furthermore, real-world experiments show that VLA models pre-trained with RoboGene achieve higher success rates and superior generalization, underscoring the importance of high-quality task generation. Our project is available at https://robogene-boost-vla.github.io.
MeshMimic: Geometry-Aware Humanoid Motion Learning through 3D Scene Reconstruction
Humanoid motion control has witnessed significant breakthroughs in recent years, with deep reinforcement learning (RL) emerging as a primary catalyst for achieving complex, human-like behaviors. However, the high dimensionality and intricate dynamics of humanoid robots make manual motion design impractical, leading to a heavy reliance on expensive motion capture (MoCap) data. These datasets are not only costly to acquire but also frequently lack the necessary geometric context of the surrounding physical environment. Consequently, existing motion synthesis frameworks often suffer from a decoupling of motion and scene, resulting in physical inconsistencies such as contact slippage or mesh penetration during terrain-aware tasks. In this work, we present MeshMimic, an innovative framework that bridges 3D scene reconstruction and embodied intelligence to enable humanoid robots to learn coupled "motion-terrain" interactions directly from video. By leveraging state-of-the-art 3D vision models, our framework precisely segments and reconstructs both human trajectories and the underlying 3D geometry of terrains and objects. We introduce an optimization algorithm based on kinematic consistency to extract high-quality motion data from noisy visual reconstructions, alongside a contact-invariant retargeting method that transfers human-environment interaction features to the humanoid agent. Experimental results demonstrate that MeshMimic achieves robust, highly dynamic performance across diverse and challenging terrains. Our approach proves that a low-cost pipeline utilizing only consumer-grade monocular sensors can facilitate the training of complex physical interactions, offering a scalable path toward the autonomous evolution of humanoid robots in unstructured environments.