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Cheston Tan

17 accepted papers

2026

10 Open Challenges Steering the Future of Vision-Language-Action Models

AAAI 2026technical

Due to their ability of follow natural language instructions, vision-language-action (VLA) models are increasingly preva- lent in the embodied AI arena, following the widespread suc- cess of their precursors—LLMs and VLMs. In this paper, we discuss 10 principal milestones in the ongoing develop- men

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2026

MEMO: Memory-Augmented Model Context Optimization for Robust Multi-Turn Multi-Agent LLM Games

ICML 2026poster

Multi-turn, multi-agent LLM game evaluations often exhibit substantial run-to-run variance. In long-horizon interactions, small early deviations compound across turns and are amplified by multi-agent coupling, biasing win rate estimates and destabilizing comparative rankings across repeated tourname…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

SPIRAL: Self-Play on Zero-Sum Games Incentivizes Reasoning via Multi-Agent Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2026poster

Recent advances in reinforcement learning have shown that language models can develop sophisticated reasoning through training on tasks with verifiable rewards, but these approaches depend on human-curated problem-answer pairs and domain-specific reward engineering. We introduce SPIRAL, a self-play…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

GroundFlow: A Plug-in Module for Temporal Reasoning on 3D Point Cloud Sequential Grounding

ICCV 2025poster

Sequential grounding in 3D point clouds (SG3D) refers to locating sequences of objects by following text instructions for a daily activity with detailed steps. Current 3D visual grounding (3DVG) methods treat text instructions with multiple steps as a whole, without extracting useful temporal inform…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

How do Transformer Embeddings Represent Compositions? A Functional Analysis

ACL 2025finding

Compositionality is a key aspect of human intelligence, essential for reasoning and generalization. While transformer-based models have become the de facto standard for many language modeling tasks, little is known about how they represent compound words, and whether these representations are compos…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Theory of Mind in Large Language Models: Assessment and Enhancement

ACL 2025long

Theory of Mind (ToM)—the ability to reason about the mental states of oneself and others—is a cornerstone of human social intelligence. As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into daily life, understanding their ability to interpret and respond to human mental states is cruci…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Dissecting Multimodality in VideoQA Transformer Models by Impairing Modality Fusion

ICML 2024poster

While VideoQA Transformer models demonstrate competitive performance on standard benchmarks, the reasons behind their success are not fully understood. Do these models capture the rich multimodal structures and dynamics from video and text jointly? Or are they achieving high scores by exploiting bia…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

LLM-Based Multi-Hop Question Answering with Knowledge Graph Integration in Evolving Environments

EMNLP 2024finding

The important challenge of keeping knowledge in Large Language Models (LLMs) up-to-date has led to the development of various methods for incorporating new facts. However, existing methods for such knowledge editing still face difficulties with multi-hop questions that require accurate fact identifi…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

Learning to Reason Iteratively and Parallelly for Complex Visual Reasoning Scenarios

NeurIPS 2024poster

Complex visual reasoning and question answering (VQA) is a challenging task that requires compositional multi-step processing and higher-level reasoning capabilities beyond the immediate recognition and localization of objects and events. Here, we introduce a fully neural Iterative and Parallel Reas…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

RoboPack: Learning Tactile-Informed Dynamics Models for Dense Packing

RSS 2024poster

Tactile feedback is critical for understanding the dynamics of both rigid and deformable objects in many manipulation tasks, such as non-prehensile manipulation and dense packing. We introduce an approach that combines visual and tactile sensing for robotic manipulation by learning a neural, tactile…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2023

DetermiNet: A Large-Scale Diagnostic Dataset for Complex Visually-Grounded Referencing using Determiners

ICCV 2023poster

State-of-the-art visual grounding models can achieve high detection accuracy, but they are not designed to distinguish between all objects versus only certain objects of interest. In natural language, in order to specify a particular object or set of objects of interest, humans use determiners such…

Cited by 4PDFcodeScholar
2022

A Survey on Machine Learning Approaches for Modelling Intuitive Physics

IJCAI 2022poster

Research in cognitive science has provided extensive evidence of human cognitive ability in performing physical reasoning of objects from noisy perceptual inputs. Such a cognitive ability is commonly known as intuitive physics. With advancements in deep learning, there is an increasing interest in b…

Cited by 30SourcePDFScholar
2022

PIP: Physical Interaction Prediction via Mental Simulation with Span Selection

ECCV 2022poster

"Accurate prediction of physical interaction outcomes is a crucial component of human intelligence and is important for safe and efficient deployments of robots in the real world. While there are existing vision-based intuitive physics models that learn to predict physical interaction outcomes, they…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2022

TDAM: Top-Down Attention Module for Contextually Guided Feature Selection in CNNs

ECCV 2022poster

"Attention modules for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are an effective method to enhance performance on multiple computer-vision tasks. While existing methods appropriately model channel-, spatial- and self-attention, they primarily operate in a feedforward bottom-up manner. Consequently, the…

2021

Fault-Tolerant Federated Reinforcement Learning with Theoretical Guarantee

NeurIPS 2021poster

The growing literature of Federated Learning (FL) has recently inspired Federated Reinforcement Learning (FRL) to encourage multiple agents to federatively build a better decision-making policy without sharing raw trajectories. Despite its promising applications, existing works on FRL fail to I) pro…