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Li Zhao

37 accepted papers

2026

From Human Videos to Robot Manipulation: A Survey on Action-Relevant Representation Transfer for Scalable Vision-Language-Action Learning

IJCAI 2026

Recent progress in generalizable embodied control has been driven by large-scale pretraining of Vision–Language–Action (VLA) models. However, most existing approaches rely on large collections of robot demonstrations, which are costly to obtain and tightly coupled to specific embodiments. Human vide

Cited by 0Scholar
2026

IGIANet: Illumination Guided Implicit Alignment Network for Infrared–Visible UAV Detection

AAAI 2026technical

Visible-Infrared (RGB-IR) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) object detection integrates complementary cues from visible and infrared sensors, offering broad application potential. However, due to sensor parallax, it still faces the challenge of weak spatial misalignment, which significantly limits its p

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

MVP-LAM: Learning Action-Centric Latent Action via Cross-Viewpoint Reconstruction

ICML 2026poster

Learning *latent actions* from diverse human videos enables scaling robot learning beyond embodiment-specific robot datasets, and these latent actions have recently been used as pseudo-action labels for vision-language-action (VLA) model pretraining. To make VLA pretraining effective, latent actions…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

MaskAnyNet: Rethinking Masked Image Regions as Valuable Information in Supervised Learning

AAAI 2026technical

In supervised learning, traditional image masking faces two key issues: (i) discarded pixels are underutilized, leading to a loss of valuable contextual information; (ii) masking may remove small or critical features, especially in fine-grained tasks. In contrast, masked image modeling (MIM) has dem

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

villa-X: Enhancing Latent Action Modeling in Vision-Language-Action Models

ICLR 2026poster

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a popular paradigm for learning robot manipulation policies that can follow language instructions and generalize to novel scenarios. Recent works have begun to explore the incorporation of latent actions, abstract representations of motion between…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

AdaptiveStep: Automatically Dividing Reasoning Step through Model Confidence

ICML 2025poster

Current approaches for training Process Reward Models (PRMs) often involve deconposing responses into multiple reasoning steps using rule-based techniques, such as using predefined placeholder tokens or setting the reasoning step's length to a fixed size. These approaches overlook the fact that cert…

2025

DPO Meets PPO: Reinforced Token Optimization for RLHF

ICML 2025spotlight

In the classical Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) framework, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is employed to learn from sparse, sentence-level rewards---a challenging scenario in traditional deep reinforcement learning. Despite the great successes of PPO in the alignment of state-…

2025

Dyn-O: Building Structured World Models with Object-Centric Representations

NeurIPS 2025poster

World models aim to capture the dynamics of the environment, enabling agents to predict and plan for future states. In most scenarios of interest, the dynamics are highly centered on interactions among objects within the environment. This motivates the development of world models that operate on obj…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

One-Shot Reference-based Structure-Aware Image to Sketch Synthesis

AAAI 2025technical

Generating sketches that accurately reflect the content of reference images presents numerous challenges. Current methods either require paired training data or fail to accommodate a wider range and diversity of sketch styles. While pre-trained diffusion models have shown strong text-based control c…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Policy Filtration for RLHF to Mitigate Noise in Reward Models

ICML 2025poster

While direct policy optimization methods exist, pioneering LLMs are fine-tuned with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to generate better responses under the supervision of a reward model learned from preference data. One major challenge of RLHF is the inaccuracy of the intermediate r…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Video In-context Learning: Autoregressive Transformers are Zero-Shot Video Imitators

ICLR 2025poster

People interact with the real-world largely dependent on visual signal, which are ubiquitous and illustrate detailed demonstrations. In this paper, we explore utilizing visual signals as a new interface for models to interact with the environment. Specifically, we choose videos as a representative v…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

What Do Latent Action Models Actually Learn?

NeurIPS 2025poster

Latent action models (LAMs) aim to learn action-relevant changes from unlabeled videos by compressing changes between frames as latents. However, differences between video frames can be caused by \textit{controllable changes} as well as exogenous noise, leading to an important concern -- do latents…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Diversification of Adaptive Policy for Effective Offline Reinforcement Learning

IJCAI 2024poster

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn policies from pre-collected datasets that capture only a subset of the environment's dynamics. The predominant approach has been to solve a constrained optimization formulation, which ensures that the policy visits state-action pairs within the suppo…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Hard Prompts Made Interpretable: Sparse Entropy Regularization for Prompt Tuning with RL

ACL 2024long

With the advent of foundation models, prompt tuning has positioned itself as an important technique for directing model behaviors and eliciting desired responses. Prompt tuning regards selecting appropriate keywords included into the input, thereby adapting to the downstream task without adjusting o…

2024

VSFormer: Visual-Spatial Fusion Transformer for Correspondence Pruning

AAAI 2024technical

Correspondence pruning aims to find correct matches (inliers) from an initial set of putative correspondences, which is a fundamental task for many applications. The process of finding is challenging, given the varying inlier ratios between scenes/image pairs due to significant visual differences. H…

2023

Deep Implicit Distribution Alignment Networks for cross-Corpus Speech Emotion Recognition

ICASSP 2023accepted

In this paper, we propose a novel deep transfer learning method called deep implicit distribution alignment networks (DIDAN) to deal with cross-corpus speech emotion recognition (SER) problem, in which the labeled training (source) and unlabeled testing (target) speech signals come from different co…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Distributional Pareto-Optimal Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) has been proposed to learn control policies over multiple competing objectives with each possible preference over returns. However, current MORL algorithms fail to account for distributional preferences over the multi-variate returns, which are particula…

2023

Dual-Path Dilated Convolutional Recurrent Network with Group Attention for Multi-Channel Speech Enhancement

ICASSP 2023accepted

This paper proposes a dual-path convolutional recurrent network with group attention for ICASSP Signal Processing Grand Challenge: L3DAS23 Challenge. We design a structure based on convolutional encoder-decoder, and frequency-time blocks based on group attention are introduced in the middle. The enc…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

H-TSP: Hierarchically Solving the Large-Scale Traveling Salesman Problem

AAAI 2023technical

We propose an end-to-end learning framework based on hierarchical reinforcement learning, called H-TSP, for addressing the large-scale Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). The proposed H-TSP constructs a solution of a TSP instance starting from the scratch relying on two components: the upper-level pol…

2023

Pointerformer: Deep Reinforced Multi-Pointer Transformer for the Traveling Salesman Problem

AAAI 2023technical

Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), as a classic routing optimization problem originally arising in the domain of transportation and logistics, has become a critical task in broader domains, such as manufacturing and biology. Recently, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has been increasingly employed t…

2023

Robust Situational Reinforcement Learning in Face of Context Disturbances

ICML 2023poster

In many real-world tasks, some parts of state features, called contexts, are independent of action signals, e.g., customer demand in inventory control, speed of lead car in autonomous driving, etc. One of the challenges of reinforcement learning in these applications is that the true context transit…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2023

Towards Generalizable Reinforcement Learning for Trade Execution

IJCAI 2023poster

Optimized trade execution is to sell (or buy) a given amount of assets in a given time with the lowest possible trading cost. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has been applied to optimized trade execution to learn smarter policies from market data. However, we find that many existing RL methods…

2022

An Adaptive Deep RL Method for Non-Stationary Environments with Piecewise Stable Context

NeurIPS 2022accept

One of the key challenges in deploying RL to real-world applications is to adapt to variations of unknown environment contexts, such as changing terrains in robotic tasks and fluctuated bandwidth in congestion control. Existing works on adaptation to unknown environment contexts either assume the co…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2022

Tiered Reinforcement Learning: Pessimism in the Face of Uncertainty and Constant Regret

NeurIPS 2022accept

We propose a new learning framework that captures the tiered structure of many real-world user-interaction applications, where the users can be divided into two groups based on their different tolerance on exploration risks and should be treated separately. In this setting, we simultaneously maintai…

2022

Towards Deployment-Efficient Reinforcement Learning: Lower Bound and Optimality

ICLR 2022spotlight

Deployment efficiency is an important criterion for many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL). Despite the community's increasing interest, there lacks a formal theoretical formulation for the problem. In this paper, we propose such a formulation for deployment-efficient RL (DE-RL)…

Cited by 27SourcePDFScholar
2021

Concept-Based Label Embedding via Dynamic Routing for Hierarchical Text Classification

ACL 2021long

Hierarchical Text Classification (HTC) is a challenging task that categorizes a textual description within a taxonomic hierarchy. Most of the existing methods focus on modeling the text. Recently, researchers attempt to model the class representations with some resources (e.g., external dictionaries…

2021

Cross-Corpus Speech Emotion Recognition Using Joint Distribution Adaptive Regression

ICASSP 2021accepted

In this paper, we focus on the research of cross-corpus speech emotion recognition (SER), in which the training and testing speech signals in cross-corpus SER belong to dierent speech corpus. Due to this fact, mismatched feature distributions may exist between the training and testing speech feature…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2021

Curriculum Offline Imitating Learning

NeurIPS 2021poster

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) tasks require the agent to learn from a pre-collected dataset with no further interactions with the environment. Despite the potential to surpass the behavioral policies, RL-based methods are generally impractical due to the training instability and bootstrapping…

Cited by 42SourcePDFScholar
2021

Distributional Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Dimensional Reward Functions

NeurIPS 2021poster

A growing trend for value-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is to capture more information than scalar value functions in the value network. One of the most well-known methods in this branch is distributional RL, which models return distribution instead of scalar value. In another line of…

2021

Object-Aware Regularization for Addressing Causal Confusion in Imitation Learning

NeurIPS 2021poster

Behavioral cloning has proven to be effective for learning sequential decision-making policies from expert demonstrations. However, behavioral cloning often suffers from the causal confusion problem where a policy relies on the noticeable effect of expert actions due to the strong correlation but no…

2021

Return-Based Contrastive Representation Learning for Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2021poster

Recently, various auxiliary tasks have been proposed to accelerate representation learning and improve sample efficiency in deep reinforcement learning (RL). However, existing auxiliary tasks do not take the characteristics of RL problems into consideration and are unsupervised. By leveraging return…

Cited by 58SourcePDFScholar
2020

RD$^2$: Reward Decomposition with Representation Decomposition

NeurIPS 2020poster

Reward decomposition, which aims to decompose the full reward into multiple sub-rewards, has been proven beneficial for improving sample efficiency in reinforcement learning. Existing works on discovering reward decomposition are mostly policy dependent, which constrains diverse or disentangled beha…

2019

Distributional Reward Decomposition for Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2019poster

Many reinforcement learning (RL) tasks have specific properties that can be leveraged to modify existing RL algorithms to adapt to those tasks and further improve performance, and a general class of such properties is the multiple reward channel. In those environments the full reward can be decompos…

Cited by 23SourcePDFScholar
2019

Fully Parameterized Quantile Function for Distributional Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2019poster

Distributional Reinforcement Learning (RL) differs from traditional RL in that, rather than the expectation of total returns, it estimates distributions and has achieved state-of-the-art performance on Atari Games. The key challenge in practical distributional RL algorithms lies in how to parameteri…

Cited by 203SourcePDFScholar
2016

Speech emotion recognition using transfer non-negative matrix factorization

ICASSP 2016accepted

In practical situations, the emotional speech utterances are often collected from different devices and conditions, which will obviously affect the recognition performance. To address this issue, in this paper, a novel transfer non-negative matrix factorization (TNMF) method is presented for cross-c…

Cited by 0SourceScholar