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Anji Liu

34 accepted papers

2026

Breaking the Factorization Barrier in Diffusion Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Diffusion language models theoretically allow for efficient parallel generation but are practically hindered by the "factorization barrier": the assumption that simultaneously predicted tokens are independent. This limitation forces a trade-off: models must either sacrifice speed by resolving depend…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

DeepHA: Scaling Action Chains Elicits Deep Hierarchical Agents

ICML 2026poster

Prevailing autonomous agents are often constrained by a single, predefined action space, which limits their generalization capabilities across diverse tasks and can introduce compounding errors through decoupled policy execution. To address these limitations, we introduce the Deep Hierarchical Agent…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

OpenHA: A Series of Open-Source Hierarchical Agentic Models in Minecraft

ICML 2026poster

A critical challenge in developing capable AI agents is defining their "action space''—the set of possible actions they can take. These spaces can range widely, from generating code and using language skills to operating on latent representations or raw joystick controls. Through a large-scale study…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Steering Visuomotor Policy in Open Worlds via Cross-View Goal Alignment

AAAI 2026technical

We aim to develop a goal specification method that is semantically clear, spatially sensitive, domain-agnostic, and intuitive for human users to guide agent interactions in 3D environments. Specifically, we propose a novel cross-view goal alignment framework that allows users to specify target objec

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Training One Model to Master Cross-Level Agentic Actions via Reinforcement Learning

CVPR 2026

The paradigm of agentic AI is shifting from engineered complex workflows to post-training native models. However, existing agents are typically confined to static, predefined action spaces--such as exclusively using APIs, GUI events, or robotic commands. This rigidity limits their adaptability in dy

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

GROOT-2: Weakly Supervised Multimodal Instruction Following Agents

ICLR 2025poster

Developing agents that can follow multimodal instructions remains a fundamental challenge in robotics and AI. Although large-scale pre-training on unlabeled datasets has enabled agents to learn diverse behaviors, these agents often struggle with following instructions. While augmenting the dataset w…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

Learning to Discretize Denoising Diffusion ODEs

ICLR 2025oral

Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs) are generative models showing competitive performance in various domains, including image synthesis and 3D point cloud generation. Sampling from pre-trained DPMs involves multiple neural function evaluations (NFEs) to transform Gaussian noise samples into images…

2025

Mitigating Reward Over-optimization in Direct Alignment Algorithms with Importance Sampling

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recently, Direct Alignment Algorithms (DAAs) such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have emerged as alternatives to the standard Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values. Surprisingly, while DAAs do not use a separate proxy…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Open-World Skill Discovery from Unsegmented Demonstration Videos

ICCV 2025poster

Learning skills in open-world environments is essential for developing agents capable of handling a variety of tasks by combining basic skills. Online demonstration videos are typically long but unsegmented, making them difficult to segment and label with skill identifiers. Unlike existing methods t…

2025

Plug-and-Play Context Feature Reuse for Efficient Masked Generation

NeurIPS 2025poster

Masked generative models (MGMs) have emerged as a powerful framework for image synthesis, combining parallel decoding with strong bidirectional context modeling. However, generating high-quality samples typically requires many iterative decoding steps, resulting in high inference costs. A straightfo…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

ROCKET-1: Mastering Open-World Interaction with Visual-Temporal Context Prompting

CVPR 2025poster

Vision-language models (VLMs) have excelled in multimodal tasks, but adapting them to embodied decision-making in open-world environments presents challenges. One critical issue is bridging the gap between discrete entities in low-level observations and the abstract concepts required for effective p…

2025

Rao-Blackwell Gradient Estimators for Equivariant Denoising Diffusion

NeurIPS 2025poster

In domains such as molecular and protein generation, physical systems exhibit inherent symmetries that are critical to model. Two main strategies have emerged for learning invariant distributions: designing equivariant network architectures and using data augmentation to approximate equivariance. Wh…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Tractable Transformers for Flexible Conditional Generation

ICML 2025poster

Non-autoregressive (NAR) generative models are valuable because they can handle diverse conditional generation tasks in a more principled way than their autoregressive (AR) counterparts, which are constrained by sequential dependency requirements. Recent advancements in NAR models, such as diffusion…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Combining Supervised Learning and Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Label Classification Tasks with Partial Labels

ACL 2024long

Traditional supervised learning heavily relies on human-annotated datasets, especially in data-hungry neural approaches. However, various tasks, especially multi-label tasks like document-level relation extraction, pose challenges in fully manual annotation due to the specific domain knowledge and l…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Efficient Adaptation in Mixed-Motive Environments via Hierarchical Opponent Modeling and Planning

ICML 2024poster

Despite the recent successes of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms, efficiently adapting to co-players in mixed-motive environments remains a significant challenge. One feasible approach is to hierarchically model co-players' behavior based on inferring their characteristics. Howev…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

GROOT: Learning to Follow Instructions by Watching Gameplay Videos

ICLR 2024spotlight

We study the problem of building a controller that can follow open-ended instructions in open-world environments. We propose to follow reference videos as instructions, which offer expressive goal specifications while eliminating the need for expensive text-gameplay annotations. A new learning frame…

Cited by 37SourcePDFScholar
2024

Image Inpainting via Tractable Steering of Diffusion Models

ICLR 2024poster

Diffusion models are the current state of the art for generating photorealistic images. Controlling the sampling process for constrained image generation tasks such as inpainting, however, remains challenging since exact conditioning on such constraints is intractable. While existing methods use va…

2024

OmniJARVIS: Unified Vision-Language-Action Tokenization Enables Open-World Instruction Following Agents

NeurIPS 2024poster

This paper presents OmniJARVIS, a novel Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model for open-world instruction-following agents in Minecraft. Compared to prior works that either emit textual goals to separate controllers or produce the control command directly, OmniJARVIS seeks a different path to ensure bot…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

ProAgent: Building Proactive Cooperative Agents with Large Language Models

AAAI 2024technical

Building agents with adaptive behavior in cooperative tasks stands as a paramount goal in the realm of multi-agent systems. Current approaches to developing cooperative agents rely primarily on learning-based methods, whose policy generalization depends heavily on the diversity of teammates they int…

2024

Scaling Tractable Probabilistic Circuits: A Systems Perspective

ICML 2024poster

Probabilistic Circuits (PCs) are a general framework for tractable deep generative models, which support exact and efficient probabilistic inference on their learned distributions. Recent modeling and training advancements have enabled their application to complex real-world tasks. However, the time…

2023

Describe, Explain, Plan and Select: Interactive Planning with LLMs Enables Open-World Multi-Task Agents

NeurIPS 2023poster

In this paper, we study the problem of planning in Minecraft, a popular, democratized yet challenging open-ended environment for developing multi-task embodied agents. We've found two primary challenges of empowering such agents with planning: 1) planning in an open-ended world like Minecraft requir…

2023

Open-World Multi-Task Control Through Goal-Aware Representation Learning and Adaptive Horizon Prediction

CVPR 2023poster

We study the problem of learning goal-conditioned policies in Minecraft, a popular, widely accessible yet challenging open-ended environment for developing human-level multi-task agents. We first identify two main challenges of learning such policies: 1) the indistinguishability of tasks from the st…

2023

Out-of-Distribution Generalization by Neural-Symbolic Joint Training

AAAI 2023technical

This paper develops a novel methodology to simultaneously learn a neural network and extract generalized logic rules. Different from prior neural-symbolic methods that require background knowledge and candidate logical rules to be provided, we aim to induce task semantics with minimal priors. This i…

2023

Scaling Up Probabilistic Circuits by Latent Variable Distillation

ICLR 2023top-5%

Probabilistic Circuits (PCs) are a unified framework for tractable probabilistic models that support efficient computation of various probabilistic queries (e.g., marginal probabilities). One key challenge is to scale PCs to model large and high-dimensional real-world datasets: we observe that as th…

2023

Understanding the Distillation Process from Deep Generative Models to Tractable Probabilistic Circuits

ICML 2023poster

Probabilistic Circuits (PCs) are a general and unified computational framework for tractable probabilistic models that support efficient computation of various inference tasks (e.g., computing marginal probabilities). Towards enabling such reasoning capabilities in complex real-world tasks, Liu et a…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2022

Efficient Meta Reinforcement Learning for Preference-based Fast Adaptation

NeurIPS 2022accept

Learning new task-specific skills from a few trials is a fundamental challenge for artificial intelligence. Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) tackles this problem by learning transferable policies that support few-shot adaptation to unseen tasks. Despite recent advances in meta-RL, most existing…

2021

A Compositional Atlas of Tractable Circuit Operations for Probabilistic Inference

NeurIPS 2021oral

Circuit representations are becoming the lingua franca to express and reason about tractable generative and discriminative models. In this paper, we show how complex inference scenarios for these models that commonly arise in machine learning---from computing the expectations of decision tree ensem…

2020

Watch the Unobserved: A Simple Approach to Parallelizing Monte Carlo Tree Search

ICLR 2020talk

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithms have achieved great success on many challenging benchmarks (e.g., Computer Go). However, they generally require a large number of rollouts, making their applications costly. Furthermore, it is also extremely challenging to parallelize MCTS due to its inheren…

Cited by 39SourcecodeScholar