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Kun Shao

24 accepted papers

2026

Adaptive Theory of Mind for LLM-based Multi-Agent Coordination

AAAI 2026technical

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability to reason about others’ mental states, and higher-order ToM involves considering that others also possess their own ToM. Equipping large language model (LLM)-driven agents with ToM has long been considered to improve their coordination in multiagent collabo

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

AgentSwift: Efficient LLM Agent Design via Value-Guided Hierarchical Search

AAAI 2026technical

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong capabilities across diverse domains, yet automated agent design remains a significant challenge. Current automated agent design approaches are often constrained by limited search spaces that primarily optimize workflows but fail to integrate

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

DR-MMSearchAgent: Deepening Reasoning in Multimodal Search Agents

ICML 2026poster

Agentic multimodal models have garnered significant attention for their ability to leverage external tools to tackle complex tasks. However, it is observed that such agents often meet premature interaction collapse, caused by two primary reasons: 1) the terminal reward often appending on the last to…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

K²-Agent: Co-Evolving Know-What and Know-How for Hierarchical Mobile Device Control

ICLR 2026poster

Existing mobile device control agents often perform poorly when solving complex tasks requiring long-horizon planning and precise operations, typically due to a lack of relevant task experience or unfamiliarity with skill execution. We propose $\textbf{K²-Agent}$, a hierarchical framework that model…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

ResMAS: Resilience Optimization in LLM-based Multi-agent Systems

AAAI 2026technical

Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-based MAS), where multiple LLM agents collaborate to solve complex tasks, have shown impressive performance in many areas. However, MAS are typically distributed across different devices or environments, making them vulnerable to perturbations such

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

SpatialViz-Bench: A Cognitively-Grounded Benchmark for Diagnosing Spatial Visualization in MLLMs

ICLR 2026poster

Humans can imagine and manipulate visual images mentally, a capability known as \textit{spatial visualization}. While many multi-modal benchmarks assess reasoning on visible visual information, the ability to infer unseen relationships through spatial visualization remains insufficiently evaluated…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

ViMo: A Generative Visual GUI World Model for App Agents

ICLR 2026poster

App agents, which autonomously operate mobile Apps through GUIs, have gained significant interest in real-world applications. Yet, they often struggle with long-horizon planning, failing to find the optimal actions for complex tasks with longer steps. To address this, world models are used to predic…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

DistRL: An Asynchronous Distributed Reinforcement Learning Framework for On-Device Control Agent

ICLR 2025poster

On-device control agents, especially on mobile devices, are responsible for operating mobile devices to fulfill users' requests, enabling seamless and intuitive interactions. Integrating Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) into these agents enhances their ability to understand and execute compl…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2025

Learning Precise Affordances from Egocentric Videos for Robotic Manipulation

ICCV 2025poster

Affordance, defined as the potential actions that an object offers, is crucial for embodied AI agents. For example, such knowledge directs an agent to grasp a knife by the handle for cutting or by the blade for safe handover. While existing approaches have made notable progress, affordance research…

2025

Lightweight Neural App Control

ICLR 2025spotlight

This paper introduces a novel mobile phone control architecture, Lightweight Multi-modal App Control (LiMAC), for efficient interactions and control across various Android apps. LiMAC takes as input a textual goal and a sequence of past mobile observations, such as screenshots and corresponding UI…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2025

SPA-BENCH: A COMPREHENSIVE BENCHMARK FOR SMARTPHONE AGENT EVALUATION

ICLR 2025spotlight

Smartphone agents are increasingly important for helping users control devices efficiently, with (Multimodal) Large Language Model (MLLM)-based approaches emerging as key contenders. Fairly comparing these agents is essential but challenging, requiring a varied task scope, the integration of agents…

2025

Succeed or Learn Slowly: Sample Efficient Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning for Mobile App Control

NeurIPS 2025poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) using foundation models for policy approximations in multi-turn tasks remains challenging. We identify two main limitations related to sparse reward settings and policy gradient updates, based on which we formulate a key insight: updates from positive samples with high re…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

ThinkBench: Dynamic Out-of-Distribution Evaluation for Robust LLM Reasoning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) poses significant challenges, particularly due to issues of data contamination and the leakage of correct answers. To address these challenges, we introduce ThinkBench, a novel evaluation framework designed to robustly evaluate the reasoning capability of LLMs…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Uncertainty-quantified Rollout Policy Adaptation for Unlabelled Cross-domain Video Temporal Grounding

NeurIPS 2025poster

Video Temporal Grounding (TG) aims to temporally locate video segments matching a natural language description (a query) in a long video. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are effective at holistic semantic matching, they often struggle with fine-grained temporal localisation. Recently, Group Rela…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Distilling Morphology-Conditioned Hypernetworks for Efficient Universal Morphology Control

ICML 2024poster

Learning a universal policy across different robot morphologies can significantly improve learning efficiency and enable zero-shot generalization to unseen morphologies. However, learning a highly performant universal policy requires sophisticated architectures like transformers (TF) that have large…

2023

ChessGPT: Bridging Policy Learning and Language Modeling

NeurIPS 2023poster

When solving decision-making tasks, humans typically depend on information from two key sources: (1) Historical policy data, which provides interaction replay from the environment, and (2) Analytical insights in natural language form, exposing the invaluable thought process or strategic consideratio…

2023

Learning to Shape Rewards Using a Game of Two Partners

AAAI 2023technical

Reward shaping (RS) is a powerful method in reinforcement learning (RL) for overcoming the problem of sparse or uninformative rewards. However, RS typically relies on manually engineered shaping-reward functions whose construc- tion is time-consuming and error-prone. It also requires domain knowledg…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2023

Timing is Everything: Learning to Act Selectively with Costly Actions and Budgetary Constraints

ICLR 2023poster

Many real-world settings involve costs for performing actions; transaction costs in financial systems and fuel costs being common examples. In these settings, performing actions at each time step quickly accumulates costs leading to vastly suboptimal outcomes. Additionally, repeatedly acting produce…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2023

Traj-MAE: Masked Autoencoders for Trajectory Prediction

ICCV 2023poster

Trajectory prediction has been a crucial task in building a reliable autonomous driving system by anticipating possible dangers. One key issue is to generate consistent trajectory predictions without colliding. To overcome the challenge, we propose an efficient masked autoencoder for trajectory pred…

Cited by 57PDFScholar
2022

Multiagent Q-learning with Sub-Team Coordination

NeurIPS 2022accept

In many real-world cooperative multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) tasks, teams of agents can rehearse together before deployment, but then communication constraints may force individual agents to execute independently when deployed. Centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE) is in…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2022

Promoting Quality and Diversity in Population-based Reinforcement Learning via Hierarchical Trajectory Space Exploration

ICRA 2022poster

Quality Diversity (QD) algorithms in population-based reinforcement learning aim to optimize agents' returns and diversity among the population simultaneously. It is conducive to solving exploration problems in reinforcement learning and potentially getting multiple good and diverse strategies. Howe…

Cited by 5SourceScholar
2022

Socially-Attentive Policy Optimization in Multi-Agent Self-Driving System

CoRL 2022poster

As increasing numbers of autonomous vehicles (AVs) are being deployed, it is important to construct a multi-agent self-driving (MASD) system for navigating traffic flows of AVs. In an MASD system, AVs not only navigate themselves to pursue their own goals, but also interact with each other to preven…

Cited by 12SourceScholar
2020

Multi-Agent Determinantal Q-Learning

ICML 2020poster

Centralized training with decentralized execution has become an important paradigm in multi-agent learning. Though practical, current methods rely on restrictive assumptions to decompose the centralized value function across agents for execution. In this paper, we eliminate this restriction by propo…

2020

SMARTS: An Open-Source Scalable Multi-Agent RL Training School for Autonomous Driving

CoRL 2020

Interaction is fundamental in autonomous driving (AD). Despite more than a decade of intensive R&D in AD, how to dynamically interact with diverse road users in various contexts still remains unsolved. Multi-agent learning has recently seen big breakthroughs and has much to offer towards solving rea