Jiaqi Liang
Publications
Towards Trustworthy Embodied Intelligence: A Systems Framework and Graded Trustworthiness Levels
Embodied intelligence integrates learned perception and decision making with real-time computation, control, and physical interaction. Because failures can cause immediate physical or operational harm, task completion alone does not establish trustworthiness. We define trustworthy embodied intelligence as the sustained capacity to execute specified tasks reliably under environmental and system variation while maintaining risk within acceptable bounds. We term this objective sustained safe success. Its supporting mechanisms are organized into four interdependent layers. The model layer generates task-competent action proposals with calibrated uncertainty and explicit safety preferences. The system layer realizes authorized actions dependably through integrated sensing, computation, control, hardware safeguards, fault containment, and fallback. The evidence layer substantiates bounded claims through evaluation, verification, validation, traceability, and structured assurance arguments. The deployment layer maintains claim validity through runtime monitoring, authority management, intervention, incident response, and controlled updates. Because assumptions and failures propagate across these layers, neither model capability, isolated safeguards, nor benchmark performance alone can establish end-to-end trustworthiness. Drawing on embodied AI, robotics, control, dependable computing, distributed systems, and autonomous driving, we further propose a non-normative hierarchy of trustworthiness levels. This hierarchy grades the strength of bounded deployment claims across task capability, safety, system assurance, operational governance, and supporting evidence, providing a basis for bounded deployment, comparative evaluation, research prioritization, and future standardization.
GarmentPile++: Affordance-Driven Cluttered Garments Retrieval with Vision-Language Reasoning
Garment manipulation has attracted increasing attention due to its critical role in home-assistant robotics. However, the majority of existing garment manipulation works assume an initial state consisting of only one garment, while piled garments are far more common in real-world settings. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel garment retrieval pipeline that can not only follow language instruction to execute safe and clean retrieval but also guarantee exactly one garment is retrieved per attempt, establishing a robust foundation for the execution of downstream tasks (e.g., folding, hanging, wearing). Our pipeline seamlessly integrates vision-language reasoning with visual affordance perception, fully leveraging the high-level reasoning and planning capabilities of VLMs alongside the generalization power of visual affordance for low-level actions. To enhance the VLM's comprehensive awareness of each garment's state within a garment pile, we employ visual segmentation model (SAM2) to execute object segmentation on the garment pile for aiding VLM-based reasoning with sufficient visual cues. A mask fine-tuning mechanism is further integrated to address scenarios where the initial segmentation results are suboptimal. In addition, a dual-arm cooperation framework is deployed to address cases involving large or long garments, as well as excessive garment sagging caused by incorrect grasping point determination, both of which are strenuous for a single arm to handle. The effectiveness of our pipeline are consistently demonstrated across diverse tasks and varying scenarios in both real-world and simulation environments. Project page: https://garmentpile2.github.io/.
A3D: Adaptive Affordance Assembly with Dual-Arm Manipulation
Furniture assembly is a crucial yet challenging task for robots, requiring precise dual-arm coordination where one arm manipulates parts while the other provides collaborative support and stabilization. To accomplish this task more effectively, robots need to actively adapt support strategies throughout the long-horizon assembly process, while also generalizing across diverse part geometries. We propose A3D, a framework which learns adaptive affordances to identify optimal support and stabilization locations on furniture parts. The method employs dense point-level geometric representations to model part interaction patterns, enabling generalization across varied geometries. To handle evolving assembly states, we introduce an adaptive module that uses interaction feedback to dynamically adjust support strategies during assembly based on previous interactions. We establish a simulation environment featuring 50 diverse parts across 8 furniture types, designed for dual-arm collaboration evaluation. Experiments demonstrate that our framework generalizes effectively to diverse part geometries and furniture categories in both simulation and real-world settings.