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Javen Qinfeng Shi

22 accepted papers

2026

Beyond DAGs: A Latent Partial Causal Model for Multimodal Learning

ICLR 2026poster

Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) are a standard tool in causal modeling, but their suitability for capturing the complexity of large-scale multimodal data is questionable. In practice, real-world multimodal datasets are often collected from heterogeneous generative processes that do not conform to a s…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Boundary Embedding Shaping with Adaptive Contrastive Learning for Graph Structural Disentanglement

ICML 2026poster

Graph neural networks (GNNs) excel at aggregating neighbor information for classification, yet their performance is hindered by graph structural entanglement, where spurious correlations from semantically irrelevant neighbors contaminate node embeddings. This challenge is most acute for nodes near c…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

I Predict Therefore I Am: Is Next Token Prediction Enough to Learn Human-Interpretable Concepts from Data?

ICLR 2026poster

Recent empirical evidence shows that LLM representations encode human-interpretable concepts. Nevertheless, the mechanisms by which these representations emerge remain largely unexplored. To shed further light on this, we introduce a novel generative model that generates tokens on the basis of such…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

The Geometric Mechanics of Contrastive Representation Learning: Alignment Potentials, Entropic Dispersion, and Cross-Modal Divergence

ICML 2026poster

While InfoNCE powers modern contrastive learning, its geometric mechanisms remain under-characterized beyond the canonical alignment--uniformity decomposition. We present a measure-theoretic framework that models learning as the evolution of representation measures on a fixed embedding manifold. By …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

What Makes a Good Representation for Single-Cell Perturbation Prediction?

ICML 2026poster

Single-cell perturbation modeling is fundamental for understanding and predicting cellular responses to genetic perturbations. However, existing approaches, from causal representation learning to foundation models, often struggle with an overlooked challenge: gene expression is dominated by perturba…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Analytic DAG Constraints for Differentiable DAG Learning

ICLR 2025poster

Recovering the underlying Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structures from observational data presents a formidable challenge, partly due to the combinatorial nature of the DAG-constrained optimization problem. Recently, researchers have identified gradient vanishing as one of the primary obstac…

2025

Causal Disentanglement and Cross-Modal Alignment for Enhanced Few-Shot Learning

ICCV 2025poster

Few-shot learning (FSL) often requires effective adaptation of models using limited labeled data. However, most existing FSL methods rely on entangled representations, requiring the model to implicitly recover the unmixing process to obtain disentangled representations using only limited supervision…

2025

On the Value of Cross-Modal Misalignment in Multimodal Representation Learning

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Multimodal representation learning, exemplified by multimodal contrastive learning (MMCL) using image-text pairs, aims to learn powerful representations by aligning cues across modalities. This approach relies on the core assumption that the exemplar image-text pairs constitute two representations o…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Solving the Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem via Trace-Guided Cost Augmentation

NeurIPS 2025poster

The Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem (ATSP) ranks among the most fundamental and notoriously difficult problems in combinatorial optimization. We propose a novel continuous relaxation framework for the Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem (ATSP) by leveraging differentiable constraints that en…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Augmented Commonsense Knowledge for Remote Object Grounding

AAAI 2024technical

The vision-and-language navigation (VLN) task necessitates an agent to perceive the surroundings, follow natural language instructions, and act in photo-realistic unseen environments. Most of the existing methods employ the entire image or object features to represent navigable viewpoints. However,…

2024

CLAP: Isolating Content from Style through Contrastive Learning with Augmented Prompts

ECCV 2024poster

"Contrastive vision-language models, such as CLIP, have garnered considerable attention for various dowmsteam tasks, mainly due to the remarkable ability of the learned features for generalization. However, the features they learned often blend content and style information, which somewhat limits th…

2024

Identifiable Latent Polynomial Causal Models through the Lens of Change

ICLR 2024poster

Causal representation learning aims to unveil latent high-level causal representations from observed low-level data. One of its primary tasks is to provide reliable assurance of identifying these latent causal models, known as \textit{identifiability}. A recent breakthrough explores identifiability…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar
2024

Semantic Role Labeling Guided Out-of-distribution Detection

COLING 2024main

Identifying unexpected domain-shifted instances in natural language processing is crucial in real-world applications. Previous works identify the out-of-distribution (OOD) instance by leveraging a single global feature embedding to represent the sentence, which cannot characterize subtle OOD pattern…

2022

Active Learning by Feature Mixing

CVPR 2022poster

The promise of active learning (AL) is to reduce labelling costs by selecting the most valuable examples to annotate from a pool of unlabelled data. Identifying these examples is especially challenging with high-dimensional data (e. g. images, videos) and in low-data regimes. In this paper, we propo…

Cited by 132PDFcodeScholar
2022

Bayesian Learning with Information Gain Provably Bounds Risk for a Robust Adversarial Defense

ICML 2022spotlight

We present a new algorithm to learn a deep neural network model robust against adversarial attacks. Previous algorithms demonstrate an adversarially trained Bayesian Neural Network (BNN) provides improved robustness. We recognize the learning approach for approximating the multi-modal posterior dist…

2022

Implicit Sample Extension for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification

CVPR 2022poster

Most existing unsupervised person re-identification (Re-ID) methods use clustering to generate pseudo labels for model training. Unfortunately, clustering sometimes mixes different true identities together or splits the same identity into two or more sub clusters. Training on these noisy clusters su…

Cited by 135PDFcodeScholar
2022

Learning Bayesian Sparse Networks With Full Experience Replay for Continual Learning

CVPR 2022poster

Continual Learning (CL) methods aim to enable machine learning models to learn new tasks without catastrophic forgetting of those that have been previously mastered. Existing CL approaches often keep a buffer of previously-seen samples, perform knowledge distillation, or use regularization technique…

Cited by 54PDFScholar
2022

Truncated Matrix Power Iteration for Differentiable DAG Learning

NeurIPS 2022accept

Recovering underlying Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structures from observational data is highly challenging due to the combinatorial nature of the DAG-constrained optimization problem. Recently, DAG learning has been cast as a continuous optimization problem by characterizing the DAG constraint as a…

2021

Consistency-Aware Graph Network for Human Interaction Understanding

ICCV 2021poster

Compared with the progress made on human activity classification, much less success has been achieved on human interaction understanding (HIU). Apart from the latter task is much more challenging, the main cause is that recent approaches learn human interactive relations via shallow graphical models…

Cited by 12PDFcodeScholar
2021

Memory-Augmented Dynamic Neural Relational Inference

ICCV 2021poster

Dynamic interacting systems are prevalent in vision tasks. These interactions are usually difficult to observe and measure directly, and yet understanding latent interactions is essential for performing inference tasks on dynamic systems like forecasting. Neural relational inference (NRI) techniques…

Cited by 13PDFScholar
2020

Counterfactual Vision-and-Language Navigation: Unravelling the Unseen

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

The task of vision-and-language navigation (VLN) requires an agent to follow text instructions to find its way through simulated household environments. A prominent challenge is to train an agent capable of generalising to new environments at test time, rather than one that simply memorises trajecto…

Cited by 45SourcePDFScholar