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Cong Ma

29 accepted papers

2026

EAPO: Enhancing Policy Optimization with On-Demand Expert Assistance

ICML 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) have recently advanced in reasoning when optimized with reinforcement learning (RL) under verifiable rewards. Existing methods primarily rely on outcome-based supervision to strengthen internal LLM reasoning, often leading to inefficient exploration and sparse rewards. T…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Learning to Answer from Correct Demonstrations

ICLR 2026poster

We study the problem of learning to generate an answer (or completion) to a question (or prompt), where there could be multiple correct answers, any one of which is acceptable at test time. Learning is based on demonstrations of some correct answer to each training question, as in Supervised Fine Tu…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

GeoFormer: Geometry Point Encoder for 3D Object Detection with Graph-based Transformer

ICCV 2025poster

Lidar-based 3D detection is one of the most popular research fields in autonomous driving. 3D detectors typically detect specific targets in a scene according to the pattern formed by the spatial distribution of point clouds. However, existing voxel-based methods usually adopt MLP and global pooling…

2025

Multi-modal contrastive learning adapts to intrinsic dimensions of shared latent variables

NeurIPS 2025poster

Multi-modal contrastive learning as a self-supervised representation learning technique has achieved great success in foundation model training, such as CLIP~\citep{radford2021learning}. In this paper, we study the theoretical properties of the learned representations from multi-modal contrastive l…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

RoboSense: Large-scale Dataset and Benchmark for Egocentric Robot Perception and Navigation in Crowded and Unstructured Environments

CVPR 2025poster

Reliable embodied perception from an egocentric perspective is challenging yet essential for autonomous navigation technology of intelligent mobile agents. With the growing demand of social robotics, near-field scene understanding becomes an important research topic in the areas of egocentric percep…

2025

UniMamba: Unified Spatial-Channel Representation Learning with Group-Efficient Mamba for LiDAR-based 3D Object Detection

CVPR 2025poster

Recent advances in LiDAR 3D detection have demonstrated the effectiveness of Transformer-based frameworks in capturing the global dependencies from point cloud spaces, which serialize the 3D voxels into the flattened 1D sequence for iterative self-attention. However, the spatial structure of 3D voxe…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Born a BabyNet with Hierarchical Parental Supervision for End-to-End Text Image Machine Translation

COLING 2024main

Text image machine translation (TIMT) aims at translating source language texts in images into another target language, which has been proven successful by bridging text image recognition encoder and text translation decoder. However, it is still an open question of how to incorporate fine-grained k…

2024

Document Image Machine Translation with Dynamic Multi-pre-trained Models Assembling

NAACL 2024long

Text image machine translation (TIMT) is a task that translates source texts embedded in the image to target translations. The existing TIMT task mainly focuses on text-line-level images. In this paper, we extend the current TIMT task and propose a novel task, **D**ocument **I**mage **M**achine **T*…

2024

HoloVIC: Large-scale Dataset and Benchmark for Multi-Sensor Holographic Intersection and Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperative

CVPR 2024poster

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) is a popular topic in the field of Autonomous Driving in recent years. Vehicle-infrastructure cooperation (VIC) becomes one of the important research area. Due to the complexity of traffic conditions such as blind spots and occlusion it greatly limits the perception capab…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2024

Maximum Likelihood Estimation is All You Need for Well-Specified Covariate Shift

ICLR 2024poster

A key challenge of modern machine learning systems is to achieve Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization---generalizing to target data whose distribution differs from that of source data. Despite its significant importance, the fundamental question of ``what are the most effective algorithms for OO…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar
2024

SwiftPillars: High-Efficiency Pillar Encoder for Lidar-Based 3D Detection

AAAI 2024technical

Lidar-based 3D Detection is one of the significant components of Autonomous Driving. However, current methods over-focus on improving the performance of 3D Lidar perception, which causes the architecture of networks becoming complicated and hard to deploy. Thus, the methods are difficult to apply in…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

Vector Quantization Knowledge Transfer for End-to-End Text Image Machine Translation

ICASSP 2024accepted

End-to-end text image machine translation (TIMT) aims at translating source language embedded in images into target language without recognizing intermediate texts in images. However, the data scarcity of end-to-end TIMT task limits the translation performance. Existing research explores aligning co…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

$O(T^{-1})$ Convergence of Optimistic-Follow-the-Regularized-Leader in Two-Player Zero-Sum Markov Games

ICLR 2023poster

We prove that the optimistic-follow-the-regularized-leader (OFTRL) algorithm, together with smooth value updates, finds an $O(T^{−1})$ approximate Nash equilibrium in $T$ iterations for two-player zero-sum Markov games with full information. This improves the $\tilde{O}(T^{−5/6})$ convergence rate r…

Cited by 22SourcePDFScholar
2023

CCIM: Cross-modal Cross-lingual Interactive Image Translation

EMNLP 2023short findings

Text image machine translation (TIMT) which translates source language text images into target language texts has attracted intensive attention in recent years. Although the end-to-end TIMT model directly generates target translation from encoded text image features with an efficient architecture, i…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Jump-Start Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2023poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a theoretical framework for continuously improving an agent's behavior via trial and error. However, efficiently learning policies from scratch can be very difficult, particularly for tasks that present exploration challenges. In such settings, it might be desira…

Cited by 145SourcePDFScholar
2023

The Power of Preconditioning in Overparameterized Low-Rank Matrix Sensing

ICML 2023poster

We propose $\textsf{ScaledGD($\lambda$)}$, a preconditioned gradient descent method to tackle the low-rank matrix sensing problem when the true rank is unknown, and when the matrix is possibly ill-conditioned. Using overparametrized factor representations, $\textsf{ScaledGD($\lambda$)}$ starts from…

Cited by 46SourcePDFScholar
2022

A new similarity measure for covariate shift with applications to nonparametric regression

ICML 2022oral

We study covariate shift in the context of nonparametric regression. We introduce a new measure of distribution mismatch between the source and target distributions using the integrated ratio of probabilities of balls at a given radius. We use the scaling of this measure with respect to the radius t…

Cited by 48SourcePDFScholar
2022

Pessimism for Offline Linear Contextual Bandits using $\ell_p$ Confidence Sets

NeurIPS 2022accept

We present a family $\{\widehat{\pi}_p\}_{p\ge 1}$ of pessimistic learning rules for offline learning of linear contextual bandits, relying on confidence sets with respect to different $\ell_p$ norms, where $\widehat{\pi}_2$ corresponds to Bellman-consistent pessimism (BCP), while $\widehat{\pi}_\in…

Cited by 27SourcePDFScholar
2022

Scaling and Scalability: Provable Nonconvex Low-Rank Tensor Completion

AISTATS 2022poster

Tensors, which provide a powerful and flexible model for representing multi-attribute data and multi-way interactions, play an indispensable role in modern data science across various fields in science and engineering. A fundamental task is tensor completion, which aims to faithfully recover the ten…

2021

Bridging Offline Reinforcement Learning and Imitation Learning: A Tale of Pessimism

NeurIPS 2021poster

Offline (or batch) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms seek to learn an optimal policy from a fixed dataset without active data collection. Based on the composition of the offline dataset, two main methods are used: imitation learning which is suitable for expert datasets, and vanilla offline RL…

Cited by 346SourcePDFScholar
2020

BBA-NET: A Bi-Branch Attention Network For Crowd Counting

ICASSP 2020accepted

In the field of crowd counting, the current mainstream CNNbased regression methods simply extract the density information of pedestrians without finding the position of each person. This makes the output of the network often found to contain incorrect responses, which may erroneously estimate the to…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2018

Implicit Regularization in Nonconvex Statistical Estimation: Gradient Descent Converges Linearly for Phase Retrieval and Matrix Completion

ICML 2018oral

Recent years have seen a flurry of activities in designing provably efficient nonconvex optimization procedures for solving statistical estimation problems. For various problems like phase retrieval or low-rank matrix completion, state-of-the-art nonconvex procedures require proper regularization (e…

Cited by 334SourcePDFScholar