Peiran Liu
Publications
Heracles: Bridging Precise Tracking and Generative Synthesis for General Humanoid Control
Achieving general-purpose humanoid control requires a delicate balance between the precise execution of commanded motions and the flexible, anthropomorphic adaptability needed to recover from unpredictable environmental perturbations. Current general controllers predominantly formulate motion control as a rigid reference-tracking problem. While effective in nominal conditions, these trackers often exhibit brittle, non-anthropomorphic failure modes under severe disturbances, lacking the generative adaptability inherent to human motor control. To overcome this limitation, we propose Heracles, a novel state-conditioned diffusion middleware that bridges precise motion tracking and generative synthesis. Rather than relying on rigid tracking paradigms or complex explicit mode-switching, Heracles operates as an intermediary layer between high-level reference motions and low-level physics trackers. By conditioning on the robot's real-time state, the diffusion model implicitly adapts its behavior: it approximates an identity map when the state closely aligns with the reference, preserving zero-shot tracking fidelity. Conversely, when encountering significant state deviations, it seamlessly transitions into a generative synthesizer to produce natural, anthropomorphic recovery trajectories. Our framework demonstrates that integrating generative priors into the control loop not only significantly enhances robustness against extreme perturbations but also elevates humanoid control from a rigid tracking paradigm to an open-ended, generative general-purpose architecture.
IPD: Boosting Sequential Policy with Imaginary Planning Distillation in Offline Reinforcement Learning
Decision transformer based sequential policies have emerged as a powerful paradigm in offline reinforcement learning (RL), yet their efficacy remains constrained by the quality of static datasets and inherent architectural limitations. Specifically, these models often struggle to effectively integrate suboptimal experiences and fail to explicitly plan for an optimal policy. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{Imaginary Planning Distillation (IPD)}, a novel framework that seamlessly incorporates offline planning into data generation, supervised training, and online inference. Our framework first learns a world model equipped with uncertainty measures and a quasi-optimal value function from the offline data. These components are utilized to identify suboptimal trajectories and augment them with reliable, imagined optimal rollouts generated via Model Predictive Control (MPC). A Transformer-based sequential policy is then trained on this enriched dataset, complemented by a value-guided objective that promotes the distillation of the optimal policy. By replacing the conventional, manually-tuned return-to-go with the learned quasi-optimal value function, IPD improves both decision-making stability and performance during inference. Empirical evaluations on the D4RL benchmark demonstrate that IPD significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art value-based and transformer-based offline RL methods across diverse tasks.
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.