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Li Erran Li

33 accepted papers

2026

DeepSearch: Overcome the Bottleneck of Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards via Monte Carlo Tree Search

ICLR 2026poster

Although Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become an essential component for developing advanced reasoning skills in language models, contemporary studies have documented training plateaus that emerge following thousands of optimization steps, demonstrating notable decreases…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Proteo-R1: Thinking Foundation Models for De Novo Protein Binder Design

ICML 2026poster

Recent advances in generative diffusion and flow-matching models have revolutionized molecular design, enabling the creation of novel proteins, small molecules, and RNA sequences with unprecedented fidelity. Yet, these models remain intuitive rather than intelligent—they generate without reasoning. …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Rethinking Intermediate Representation for VLM-based Robot Manipulation

CVPR 2026

Vision-Language Model (VLM) is now an important component to enable robust robot manipulation. Yet, using it to translate human instructions into an action-resolvable intermediate representation often needs a tradeoff between VLM-comprehensibility and generalizability. Inspired by context-free gramm

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

TIPS: Turn-level Information-Potential Reward Shaping for Search-Augmented LLMs

ICLR 2026poster

Search-augmented large language models (LLMs) trained with reinforcement learning (RL) have achieved strong results on open-domain question answering (QA), but training still remains a significant challenge. The optimization is often unstable due to sparse rewards and difficult credit assignments ac…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Digi-Q: Learning VLM Q-Value Functions for Training Device-Control Agents

ICLR 2025poster

While a number of existing approaches for building foundation model agents rely on prompting or fine-tuning with human demonstrations, it is not sufficient in dynamic environments (e.g., mobile device control). On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) should address these limitations, but collecting ac…

2025

On the Analysis and Distillation of Emergent Outlier Properties in Pre-trained Language Models

NAACL 2025long

A small subset of dimensions within language Transformers’ representation spaces emerge as “outliers” during pretraining, encoding critical knowledge sparsely. We extend previous findings on emergent outliers to Encoder-Decoder Transformers and instruction-finetuned models, and tackle the problem of…

2025

Proposer-Agent-Evaluator (PAE): Autonomous Skill Discovery For Foundation Model Internet Agents

ICML 2025poster

A generalist foundation model agent needs to have a large and diverse skill repertoire, such as finding directions between two travel locations and buying specific items from the Internet. If each skill needs to be specified manually through a fixed set of human-annotated instructions, the agent’s s…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2024

Embodied Agent Interface: Benchmarking LLMs for Embodied Decision Making

NeurIPS 2024oral

We aim to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) for embodied decision making. While a significant body of work has been leveraging LLMs for decision making in embodied environments, we still lack a systematic understanding of their performance because they are usually applied in different domains, f…

Cited by 33SourcePDFScholar
2024

ImageCaptioner2: Image Captioner for Image Captioning Bias Amplification Assessment

AAAI 2024technical

Most pre-trained learning systems are known to suffer from bias, which typically emerges from the data, the model, or both. Measuring and quantifying bias and its sources is a challenging task and has been extensively studied in image captioning. Despite the significant effort in this direction, we…

2024

SOK-Bench: A Situated Video Reasoning Benchmark with Aligned Open-World Knowledge

CVPR 2024poster

Reasoning from visual dynamics scenes has many real world applications. However existing video reasoning benchmarks are still inadequate since they were mainly designed for factual or situated reasoning and rarely involve broader knowledge in the real world. Our work aims to delve deeper into reason…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2024

Socratic Human Feedback (SoHF): Expert Steering Strategies for LLM Code Generation

EMNLP 2024finding

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for generating code solutions, empowered by features like self-debugging and self-reflection. However, LLMs often struggle with complex programming problems without human guidance. This paper investigates the strategies employed by expert programmer…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

ViGoR: Improving Visual Grounding of Large Vision Language Models with Fine-Grained Reward Modeling

ECCV 2024poster

"By combining natural language understanding, generation capabilities, and breadth of knowledge of large language models with image perception, recent large vision language models (LVLMs) have shown unprecedented visual reasoning capabilities. However, the generated text often suffers from inaccurat…

2023

For Pre-Trained Vision Models in Motor Control, Not All Policy Learning Methods are Created Equal

ICML 2023poster

In recent years, increasing attention has been directed to leveraging pre-trained vision models for motor control. While existing works mainly emphasize the importance of this pre-training phase, the arguably equally important role played by downstream policy learning during control-specific fine-tu…

Cited by 26SourcePDFScholar
2023

GNFactor: Multi-Task Real Robot Learning with Generalizable Neural Feature Fields

CoRL 2023oral

It is a long-standing problem in robotics to develop agents capable of executing diverse manipulation tasks from visual observations in unstructured real-world environments. To achieve this goal, the robot will need to have a comprehensive understanding of the 3D structure and semantics of the scen…

Cited by 88SourcecodeScholar
2023

HRS-Bench: Holistic, Reliable and Scalable Benchmark for Text-to-Image Models

ICCV 2023poster

Designing robust text-to-image (T2I) models have been extensively explored in recent years, especially with the emergence of diffusion models, which achieves state-of-the-art results on T2I synthesis tasks. Despite the significant effort and success in this direction, we observed that the existing m…

Cited by 73PDFcodeScholar
2023

Policy Adaptation From Foundation Model Feedback

CVPR 2023poster

Recent progress on vision-language foundation models have brought significant advancement to building general-purpose robots. By using the pre-trained models to encode the scene and instructions as inputs for decision making, the instruction-conditioned policy can generalize across different objects…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2023

Value Memory Graph: A Graph-Structured World Model for Offline Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2023poster

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are typically applied directly in environments to learn policies. In some complex environments with continuous state-action spaces, sparse rewards, and/or long temporal horizons, learning a good policy in the original environments can be difficult. Focusing on the…

2022

Neural Attentive Circuits

NeurIPS 2022accept

Recent work has seen the development of general purpose neural architectures that can be trained to perform tasks across diverse data modalities. General purpose models typically make few assumptions about the underlying data-structure and are known to perform well in the large-data regime. At the s…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2021

Disentangled Recurrent Wasserstein Autoencoder

ICLR 2021spotlight

Learning disentangled representations leads to interpretable models and facilitates data generation with style transfer, which has been extensively studied on static data such as images in an unsupervised learning framework. However, only a few works have explored unsupervised disentangled sequentia…

Cited by 39SourcePDFScholar
2021

HalentNet: Multimodal Trajectory Forecasting with Hallucinative Intents

ICLR 2021poster

Motion forecasting is essential for making intelligent decisions in robotic navigation. As a result, the multi-agent behavioral prediction has become a core component of modern human-robot interaction applications such as autonomous driving. Due to various intentions and interactions among agents, a…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2021

Motion Forecasting with Unlikelihood Training in Continuous Space

CoRL 2021oral

Motion forecasting is essential for making safe and intelligent decisions in robotic applications such as autonomous driving. Existing methods often formulate it as a sequence-to-sequence prediction problem, solved in an encoder-decoder framework with a maximum likelihood estimation objective. State…

Cited by 17SourceScholar
2021

Retrieval, Analogy, and Composition: A framework for Compositional Generalization in Image Captioning

EMNLP 2021finding

Image captioning systems are expected to have the ability to combine individual concepts when describing scenes with concept combinations that are not observed during training. In spite of significant progress in image captioning with the help of the autoregressive generation framework, current appr…

2021

Robust Multimodal Vehicle Detection in Foggy Weather Using Complementary Lidar and Radar Signals

CVPR 2021poster

Vehicle detection with visual sensors like lidar and camera is one of the critical functions enabling autonomous driving. While they generate fine-grained point clouds or high-resolution images with rich information in good weather conditions, they fail in adverse weather (e.g., fog) where opaque pa…

Cited by 193PDFcodeScholar
2021

Safety-Aware Motion Prediction With Unseen Vehicles for Autonomous Driving

ICCV 2021poster

Motion prediction of vehicles is critical but challenging due to the uncertainties in complex environments and the limited visibility caused by occlusions and limited sensor ranges. In this paper, we study a new task, safety-aware motion prediction with unseen vehicles for autonomous driving. Unlike…

Cited by 32PDFcodeScholar
2021

Top-Down Attention in End-to-End Spoken Language Understanding

ICASSP 2021accepted

Spoken language understanding (SLU) is the task of inferring the semantics of spoken utterances. Traditionally, this has been achieved with a cascading combination of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) modules that are optimized separately, which can lead to…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2020

Deep Stereo Using Adaptive Thin Volume Representation With Uncertainty Awareness

CVPR 2020oral

We present Uncertainty-aware Cascaded Stereo Network (UCS-Net) for 3D reconstruction from multiple RGB images. Multi-view stereo (MVS) aims to reconstruct fine-grained scene geometry from multi-view images. Previous learning-based MVS methods estimate per-view depth using plane sweep volumes (PSVs)…

Cited by 383PDFScholar
2020

Train in Germany, Test in the USA: Making 3D Object Detectors Generalize

CVPR 2020poster

In the domain of autonomous driving, deep learning has substantially improved the 3D object detection accuracy for LiDAR and stereo camera data alike. While deep networks are great at generalization, they are also notorious to overfit to all kinds of spurious artifacts, such as brightness, car sizes…

Cited by 215PDFcodeScholar