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Joyce Chai

38 accepted papers

2026

RoboMME: Benchmarking and Understanding Memory for Robotic Generalist Policies

ICML 2026oral

Memory is critical for long-horizon and history-dependent robotic manipulation. Such tasks often involve counting repeated actions or manipulating objects that become temporarily occluded. Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models have begun to incorporate memory mechanisms; however, their evaluati…

Cited by 21SourcecodeScholar
2026

Tracing the Emergence of Symbol Grounding in Multimodal Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Symbol grounding (Harnad, 1990) describes how symbols such as words acquire their meanings by connecting to real-world sensorimotor experiences. Recent work has shown preliminary evidence that grounding may emerge in (vision-)language models trained at scale without using explicit grounding objectiv…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

3D-GRAND: A Million-Scale Dataset for 3D-LLMs with Better Grounding and Less Hallucination

CVPR 2025poster

The integration of language and 3D perception is crucial for embodied agents and robots that comprehend and interact with the physical world. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive language understanding and generation capabilities, their adaptation to 3D environments (3D-LL…

2025

4D-LRM: Large Space-Time Reconstruction Model From and To Any View at Any Time

NeurIPS 2025poster

Can we scale 4D pretraining to learn general space-time representations that reconstruct an object from a few views at some times to any view at any time? We provide an affirmative answer with 4D-LRM, the first large-scale 4D reconstruction model that takes input from unconstrained views and timesta…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

AimBot: A Simple Auxiliary Visual Cue to Enhance Spatial Awareness of Visuomotor Policies

CoRL 2025poster

In this paper, we propose AimBot, a lightweight visual augmentation technique that provides explicit spatial cues to improve visuomotor policy learning in robotic manipulation. AimBot overlays shooting lines and scope reticles onto multi-view RGB images, offering auxiliary visual guidance that encod…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Babysit A Language Model From Scratch: Interactive Language Learning by Trials and Demonstrations

NAACL 2025long

Humans are efficient language learners and inherently social creatures. Our language development is largely shaped by our social interactions, for example, the demonstration and feedback from caregivers. Contrary to human language learning, recent advancements in large language models have primarily…

2025

Benchmarking and Improving LLM Robustness for Personalized Generation

EMNLP 2025

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in personalizing the responses of large language models (LLMs). While existing evaluations primarily focus on whether a response aligns with a user’s preferences, we argue that factuality is an equally important yet often overlooked dimension. In the co

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Do Vision-Language Models Represent Space and How? Evaluating Spatial Frame of Reference under Ambiguities

ICLR 2025oral

Spatial expressions in situated communication can be ambiguous, as their meanings vary depending on the frames of reference (FoR) adopted by speakers and listeners. While spatial language understanding and reasoning by vision-language models (VLMs) have gained increasing attention, potential ambigui…

2025

Fast3R: Towards 3D Reconstruction of 1000+ Images in One Forward Pass

CVPR 2025poster

Multi-view 3D reconstruction remains a core challenge in computer vision, particularly in applications requiring accurate and scalable representations across diverse perspectives. Current leading methods such as DUSt3R employ a fundamentally pairwise approach, processing images in pairs and necessit…

2025

Position: Towards Bidirectional Human-AI Alignment

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recent advances in general-purpose AI underscore the urgent need to align AI systems with human goals and values. Yet, the lack of a clear, shared understanding of what constitutes "alignment" limits meaningful progress and cross-disciplinary collaboration. In this position paper, we argue that the…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Proactive Assistant Dialogue Generation from Streaming Egocentric Videos

EMNLP 2025

Recent advances in conversational AI have been substantial, but developing real-time systems for perceptual task guidance remains challenging. These systems must provide interactive, proactive assistance based on streaming visual inputs, yet their development is constrained by the costly and labor-i

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

RACER: Rich Language-Guided Failure Recovery Policies for Imitation Learning

ICRA 2025

Developing robust and correctable visuomotor policies for robotic manipulation is challenging due to the lack of self-recovery mechanisms from failures and the limitations of simple language instructions in guiding robot actions. To address these issues, we propose a scalable data generation pipelin

Cited by 39SourcecodeScholar
2025

Training Turn-by-Turn Verifiers for Dialogue Tutoring Agents: The Curious Case of LLMs as Your Coding Tutors

ACL 2025finding

Intelligent tutoring agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly explored to deliver personalized knowledge in areas such as language learning and science education. However, their capabilities in guiding users to solve complex real-world tasks remain underexplored. To addr…

2025

Transparent and Coherent Procedural Mistake Detection

EMNLP 2025

Procedural mistake detection (PMD) is a challenging problem of classifying whether a human user (observed through egocentric video) has successfully executed a task (specified by a procedural text). Despite significant recent efforts, machine performance in the wild remains nonviable, and the reason

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

DriVLMe: Enhancing LLM-based Autonomous Driving Agents with Embodied and Social Experiences

IROS 2024poster

Recent advancements in foundation models (FMs) have unlocked new prospects in autonomous driving, yet the experimental settings of these studies are preliminary, oversimplified, and fail to capture the complexity of real-world driving scenarios in human environments. It remains under-explored whethe…

Cited by 20SourcecodeScholar
2024

GROUNDHOG: Grounding Large Language Models to Holistic Segmentation

CVPR 2024poster

Most multimodal large language models (MLLMs) learn language-to-object grounding through causal language modeling where grounded objects are captured by bounding boxes as sequences of location tokens. This paradigm lacks pixel-level representations that are important for fine-grained visual understa…

Cited by 47SourcePDFScholar
2024

Inversion-Free Image Editing with Language-Guided Diffusion Models

CVPR 2024poster

Despite recent advances in inversion-based editing text-guided image manipulation remains challenging for diffusion models. The primary bottlenecks include 1) the time-consuming nature of the inversion process; 2) the struggle to balance consistency with accuracy; 3) the lack of compatibility with e…

2024

LLM-Grounder: Open-Vocabulary 3D Visual Grounding with Large Language Model as an Agent

ICRA 2024poster

3D visual grounding is a critical skill for household robots, enabling them to navigate, manipulate objects, and answer questions based on their environment. While existing approaches often rely on extensive labeled data or exhibit limitations in handling complex language queries, we propose LLM-Gro…

Cited by 100SourcecodeScholar
2024

Multi-Object Hallucination in Vision Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large vision language models (LVLMs) often suffer from object hallucination, producing objects not present in the given images. While current benchmarks for object hallucination primarily concentrate on the presence of a single object class rather than individual entities, this work systematically…

2024

Teaching Embodied Reinforcement Learning Agents: Informativeness and Diversity of Language Use

EMNLP 2024main

In real-world scenarios, it is desirable for embodied agents to have the ability to leverage human language to gain explicit or implicit knowledge for learning tasks. Despite recent progress, most previous approaches adopt simple low-level instructions as language inputs, which may not reflect natur…

2024

Think, Act, and Ask: Open-World Interactive Personalized Robot Navigation

ICRA 2024poster

Zero-Shot Object Navigation (ZSON) enables agents to navigate towards open-vocabulary objects in unknown environments. The existing works of ZSON mainly focus on following individual instructions to find generic object classes, neglecting the utilization of natural language interaction and the compl…

Cited by 31SourcecodeScholar
2023

Can Foundation Models Watch, Talk and Guide You Step by Step to Make a Cake?

EMNLP 2023long findings

Despite tremendous advances in AI, it remains a significant challenge to develop interactive task guidance systems that can offer situated, personalized guidance and assist humans in various tasks. These systems need to have a sophisticated understanding of the user as well as the environment, and…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

CycleNet: Rethinking Cycle Consistency in Text-Guided Diffusion for Image Manipulation

NeurIPS 2023poster

Diffusion models (DMs) have enabled breakthroughs in image synthesis tasks but lack an intuitive interface for consistent image-to-image (I2I) translation. Various methods have been explored to address this issue, including mask-based methods, attention-based methods, and image-conditioning. However…

2023

From Heuristic to Analytic: Cognitively Motivated Strategies for Coherent Physical Commonsense Reasoning

EMNLP 2023long main

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown impressive performance in various language tasks. However, they are prone to spurious correlations, and often generate illusory information. In real-world applications, PLMs should justify decisions with formalized, coherent reasoning chains, but this ch…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Grounding Visual Illusions in Language: Do Vision-Language Models Perceive Illusions Like Humans?

EMNLP 2023long main

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are trained on vast amounts of data captured by humans emulating our understanding of the world. However, known as visual illusions, human's perception of reality isn't always faithful to the physical world. This raises a key question: do VLMs have the similar kind of i…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Human Inspired Progressive Alignment and Comparative Learning for Grounded Word Acquisition

ACL 2023long

Human language acquisition is an efficient, supervised, and continual process. In this work, we took inspiration from how human babies acquire their first language, and developed a computational process for word acquisition through comparative learning. Motivated by cognitive findings, we generated…

2023

In-Context Analogical Reasoning with Pre-Trained Language Models

ACL 2023long

Analogical reasoning is a fundamental capacity of human cognition that allows us to reason abstractly about novel situations by relating them to past experiences. While it is thought to be essential for robust reasoning in AI systems, conventional approaches require significant training and/or hard-…

2023

MetaReVision: Meta-Learning with Retrieval for Visually Grounded Compositional Concept Acquisition

EMNLP 2023long findings

Humans have the ability to learn novel compositional concepts by recalling primitive concepts acquired from past experience and generalizing these primitive concepts to novel compositions. Inspired by the above human’s compositional learning procedure, in this paper, we propose MetaReVision, a retr…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

NLP Reproducibility For All: Understanding Experiences of Beginners

ACL 2023long

As natural language processing (NLP) has recently seen an unprecedented level of excitement, and more people are eager to enter the field, it is unclear whether current research reproducibility efforts are sufficient for this group of beginners to apply the latest developments. To understand their n…

2023

Towards A Holistic Landscape of Situated Theory of Mind in Large Language Models

EMNLP 2023long findings

Large Language Models (LLMs) have generated considerable interest and debate regarding their potential emergence of Theory of Mind (ToM). Several recent inquiries reveal a lack of robust ToM in these models and pose a pressing demand to develop new benchmarks, as current ones primarily focus on diff…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Towards Collaborative Plan Acquisition through Theory of Mind Modeling in Situated Dialogue

IJCAI 2023poster

Collaborative tasks often begin with partial task knowledge and incomplete plans from each partner. To complete these tasks, partners need to engage in situated communication with their partners and coordinate their partial plans towards a complete plan to achieve a joint task goal. While such c…

2023

World-to-Words: Grounded Open Vocabulary Acquisition through Fast Mapping in Vision-Language Models

ACL 2023long

The ability to connect language units to their referents in the physical world, referred to as grounding, is crucial to learning and understanding grounded meanings of words. While humans demonstrate fast mapping in new word learning, it remains unclear whether modern vision-language models can trul…

2022

DANLI: Deliberative Agent for Following Natural Language Instructions

EMNLP 2022main

Recent years have seen an increasing amount of work on embodied AI agents that can perform tasks by following human language instructions. However, most of these agents are reactive, meaning that they simply learn and imitate behaviors encountered in the training data. These reactive agents are insu…

2022

DOROTHIE: Spoken Dialogue for Handling Unexpected Situations in Interactive Autonomous Driving Agents

EMNLP 2022finding

In the real world, autonomous driving agents navigate in highly dynamic environments full of unexpected situations where pre-trained models are unreliable. In these situations, what is immediately available to vehicles is often only human operators. Empowering autonomous driving agents with the abil…

2021

MindCraft: Theory of Mind Modeling for Situated Dialogue in Collaborative Tasks

EMNLP 2021main

An ideal integration of autonomous agents in a human world implies that they are able to collaborate on human terms. In particular, theory of mind plays an important role in maintaining common ground during human collaboration and communication. To enable theory of mind modeling in situated interact…

Cited by 74SourcePDFScholar
2021

Tiered Reasoning for Intuitive Physics: Toward Verifiable Commonsense Language Understanding

EMNLP 2021finding

Large-scale, pre-trained language models (LMs) have achieved human-level performance on a breadth of language understanding tasks. However, evaluations only based on end task performance shed little light on machines’ true ability in language understanding and reasoning. In this paper, we highlight…