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Meng Cao

60 accepted papers

2026

Beyond Observations: Reconstruction Error-Guided Irregularly Sampled Time Series Representation Learning

AAAI 2026technical

Irregularly sampled time series (ISTS), characterized by non-uniform time intervals with natural missingness, are prevalent in real-world applications. Existing approaches for ISTS modeling primarily rely on observed values to impute unobserved ones or infer latent dynamics. However, these methods o

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Bring Your Dreams to Life: Continual Text-to-Video Customization

AAAI 2026technical

Customized text-to-video generation (CTVG) has recently witnessed great progress in generating tailored videos from user-specific text. However, most CTVG methods assume that personalized concepts remain static and do not expand incrementally over time. Additionally, they struggle with forgetting an

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

CARE What Fails: Contrastive Anchored-REflection for Verifiable Multimodal Reasoning

CVPR 2026

Group-relative reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) often wastes the most informative data it already has--the failures. When all rollouts are wrong, gradients stall; when one happens to be correct, the update usually ignores why the others are close-but-wrong, and credit can be mis

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

IV-Bench: A Benchmark for Image-Grounded Video Perception and Reasoning in Multimodal LLMs

ICLR 2026poster

Existing evaluation frameworks for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) primarily focus on image reasoning or general video understanding tasks, largely overlooking the significant role of image context in video comprehension. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{IV-Bench}, the first comprehen…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

ScaleLong: A Multi-Timescale Benchmark for Long Video Understanding

ICLR 2026poster

Understanding long videos requires Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to grasp multi-timescale information, often organized in hierarchies. However, current long-video understanding benchmarks either overlook multi-timescale design or distribute questions targeting different timescales across…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Thinking with Drafts: Speculative Temporal Reasoning for Efficient Long Video Understanding

CVPR 2026

Long video understanding is essential for human-like intelligence, enabling coherent perception and reasoning over extended temporal contexts. While the emerging thinking-with-frames paradigm--which alternates between global temporal reasoning and local frame examination--has advanced the reasoning

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Video SimpleQA: Towards Factuality Evaluation in Large Video Language Models

AAAI 2026technical

Recent advancements in Large Video Language Models (LVLMs) have highlighted their potential for multi-modal understanding, yet evaluating their factual grounding in videos remains a critical unsolved challenge. To address this gap, we introduce Video SimpleQA, the first comprehensive benchmark tailo

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Video Spatial Reasoning with Object-Centric 3D Rollout

AAAI 2026technical

Recent advances in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have showcased remarkable capabilities in vision-language understanding. However, enabling robust video spatial reasoning—the ability to comprehend object locations, orientations, and inter-object relationships in dynamic 3D scenes—remains

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

AnyTalk: Multi-modal Driven Multi-domain Talking Head Generation

AAAI 2025technical

Cross-domain talking head generation, such as animating a static cartoon animal photo with real human video, is crucial for personalized content creation. However, prior works typically rely on domain-specific frameworks and paired videos, limiting its utility and complicating its architecture with…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Can LLMs Reason Abstractly Over Math Word Problems Without CoT? Disentangling Abstract Formulation From Arithmetic Computation

EMNLP 2025

Final-answer-based metrics are commonly used for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on math word problems, often taken as proxies for reasoning ability. However, such metrics conflate two distinct sub-skills: abstract formulation (capturing mathematical relationships using expressions) and arit

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Checklists Are Better Than Reward Models For Aligning Language Models

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Language models must be adapted to understand and follow user instructions. Reinforcement learning is widely used to facilitate this —typically using fixed criteria such as "helpfulness" and "harmfulness". In our work, we instead propose using flexible, instruction-specific criteria as a means of br…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Contrastive Localized Language-Image Pre-Training

ICML 2025poster

CLIP has been a celebrated method for training vision encoders to generate image/text representations facilitating various applications. Recently, it has been widely adopted as the vision backbone of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). The success of CLIP relies on aligning web-crawled noisy t…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2025

ETVA: Evaluation of Text-to-Video Alignment via Fine-grained Question Generation and Answering

ICCV 2025poster

Precisely evaluating semantic alignment between text prompts and generated videos remains a challenge in Text-to-Video (T2V) Generation. Existing text-to-video alignment metrics like CLIPScore only generate coarse-grained scores without fine-grained alignment details, failing to align with human pre…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

EvaGaussians: Event Stream Assisted Gaussian Splatting from Blurry Images

ICCV 2025poster

3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) has demonstrated exceptional capabilities in synthesizing novel views of 3D scenes. However, its training is heavily reliant on high-quality images and precise camera poses. Meeting these criteria can be challenging in non-ideal real-world conditions, where motion-blurr…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

MMAU: A Holistic Benchmark of Agent Capabilities Across Diverse Domains

NAACL 2025findings

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have increased the demand for comprehensive benchmarks to evaluate their capabilities as human-like agents. Existing benchmarks, while useful, often focus on specific application scenarios, emphasizing task completion but failing to dissect the underly…

2025

MR. Judge: Multimodal Reasoner as a Judge

EMNLP 2025

The paradigm of using Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) as evaluative judges has emerged as an effective approach in RLHF and inference-time scaling. In this work, we propose Multimodal Reasoner as a Judge (MR. Judge), a paradigm for empowering general-purpose

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

MUSE: Mamba Is Efficient Multi-scale Learner for Text-video Retrieval

AAAI 2025technical

Text-Video Retrieval (TVR) aims to align and associate relevant video content with corresponding natural language queries. Most existing TVR methods are based on large-scale pre-trained vision-language models (e.g., CLIP). However, due to CLIP's inherent plain structure, few TVR methods explore the…

2025

PhyBlock: A Progressive Benchmark for Physical Understanding and Planning via 3D Block Assembly

NeurIPS 2025poster

While vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in reasoning and planning for embodied agents, their ability to comprehend physical phenomena, particularly within structured 3D environments, remains severely limited. To close this gap, we introduce PhyBlock, a progressiv…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Revisit Large-Scale Image-Caption Data in Pre-training Multimodal Foundation Models

ICLR 2025poster

Recent advancements in multimodal models highlight the value of rewritten captions for improving performance, yet key challenges remain. For example, while synthetic captions often provide superior quality and image-text alignment, it is not clear whether they can fully replace AltTexts: the role of…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2025

See the World, Discover Knowledge: A Chinese Factuality Evaluation for Large Vision Language Models

ACL 2025finding

The evaluation of factual accuracy in large vision language models (LVLMs) has lagged behind their rapid development, making it challenging to fully reflect these models’ knowledge capacity and reliability. In this paper, we introduce the first factuality-based visual question-answering benchmark in…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Stochastic Chameleons: Irrelevant Context Hallucinations Reveal Class-Based (Mis)Generalization in LLMs

ACL 2025long

The widespread success of LLMs on NLP benchmarks has been accompanied by concerns that LLMs function primarily as stochastic parrots that reproduce texts similar to what they saw during pre-training, often erroneously. But what is the nature of their errors, and do these errors exhibit any regularit…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

StreamBridge: Turning Your Offline Video Large Language Model into a Proactive Streaming Assistant

NeurIPS 2025poster

We present StreamBridge, a simple yet effective framework that seamlessly transforms offline Video-LLMs into streaming-capable models. It addresses two fundamental challenges in adapting existing models into online scenarios: (1) limited capability for multi-turn real-time understanding, and (2) lac…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

SuperGPQA: Scaling LLM Evaluation across 285 Graduate Disciplines

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in mainstream academic disciplines such as mathematics, physics, and computer science. However, human knowledge encompasses over 200 specialized disciplines, far exceeding the scope of existing benchmarks. The capabilities of LLMs…

Cited by 215SourceScholar
2025

TIS-DPO: Token-level Importance Sampling for Direct Preference Optimization With Estimated Weights

ICLR 2025poster

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has been widely adopted for preference alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) due to its simplicity and effectiveness. However, DPO is derived as a bandit problem in which the whole response is treated as a single arm, ignoring the importance differences betw…

2025

The Reasoning-Memorization Interplay in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction

ACL 2025finding

Large language models (LLMs) excel on a variety of reasoning benchmarks, but previous studies suggest they sometimes struggle to generalize to unseen questions, potentially due to over-reliance on memorized training examples. However, the precise conditions under which LLMs switch between reasoning…

2025

TimeCHEAT: A Channel Harmony Strategy for Irregularly Sampled Multivariate Time Series Analysis

AAAI 2025technical

Irregularly sampled multivariate time series (ISMTS) are prevalent in reality. Due to their non-uniform intervals between successive observations and varying sampling rates among series, the channel-independent (CI) strategy, which has been demonstrated more desirable for complete multivariate time…

2025

Token Preference Optimization with Self-Calibrated Visual-Anchored Rewards for Hallucination Mitigation

EMNLP 2025

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has been demonstrated to be highly effective in mitigating hallucinations in Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) by aligning their outputs more closely with human preferences. Despite the recent progress, existing methods suffer from two drawbacks: 1) Lack of sc

2025

Where Did That Come From? Sentence-Level Error-Tolerant Attribution

EMNLP 2025

Attribution is the process of identifying which parts of the source support a generated output. While attribution can help users verify content and assess faithfulness, existing task definitions typically exclude unsupported or hallucinated content leaving them unattributed, overlooking the potentia

2024

Direct Large Language Model Alignment Through Self-Rewarding Contrastive Prompt Distillation

ACL 2024long

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human expectations without human-annotated preference data is an important problem. In this paper, we propose a method to evaluate the response preference by using the output probabilities of response pairs under contrastive prompt pairs, which could achiev…

2024

Efficient ConvBN Blocks for Transfer Learning and Beyond

ICLR 2024spotlight

Convolution-BatchNorm (ConvBN) blocks are integral components in various computer vision tasks and other domains. A ConvBN block can operate in three modes: Train, Eval, and Deploy. While the Train mode is indispensable for training models from scratch, the Eval mode is suitable for transfer learnin…

2024

Enhancing Reinforcement Learning with Dense Rewards from Language Model Critic

EMNLP 2024main

Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only a single reward for an entire output. This sparsity of rewards can lead to i…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2024

Exploiting Auxiliary Caption for Video Grounding

AAAI 2024technical

Video grounding aims to locate a moment of interest matching the given query sentence from an untrimmed video. Previous works ignore the sparsity dilemma in video annotations, which fails to provide the context information between potential events and query sentences in the dataset. In this paper, w…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2024

How to Continually Adapt Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Flexible Customization?

NeurIPS 2024poster

Custom diffusion models (CDMs) have attracted widespread attention due to their astonishing generative ability for personalized concepts. However, most existing CDMs unreasonably assume that personalized concepts are fixed and cannot change over time. Moreover, they heavily suffer from catastrophic…

2024

Mechanistic Understanding and Mitigation of Language Model Non-Factual Hallucinations

EMNLP 2024finding

State-of-the-art language models (LMs) sometimes generate that misalign with world knowledge. To explore the mechanistic causes of these hallucinations, we create diagnostic datasets with subject-relation queries and adapt interpretability methods to trace hallucinations through internal model repre…

2024

RAP: Efficient Text-Video Retrieval with Sparse-and-Correlated Adapter

ACL 2024findings

Text-Video Retrieval (TVR) aims to align relevant video content with natural language queries. To date, most of the state-of-the-art TVR methods learn image-to-video transfer learning based on the large-scale pre-trained vision-language models (e.g., CLIP). However, fully fine-tuning these pre-train…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2024

Real-Time Exposure Correction via Collaborative Transformations and Adaptive Sampling

CVPR 2024poster

Most of the previous exposure correction methods learn dense pixel-wise transformations to achieve promising results but consume huge computational resources. Recently Learnable 3D lookup tables (3D LUTs) have demonstrated impressive performance and efficiency for image enhancement. However these me…

2024

Successor Features for Efficient Multi-Subject Controlled Text Generation

ICML 2024poster

While large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance in generating fluent and realistic text, controlling the generated text so that it exhibits properties such as safety, factuality, and non-toxicity remains challenging. Existing decoding-based controllable text generation method…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Uncertainty-aware sign language video retrieval with probability distribution modeling

ECCV 2024poster

"Sign language video retrieval plays a key role in facilitating information access for the deaf community. Despite significant advances in video-text retrieval, the complexity and inherent uncertainty of sign language preclude direct applications of these techniques. Previous methods achieve mapping…

2024

VeCLIP: Improving CLIP Training via Visual-enriched Captions

ECCV 2024poster

"Large-scale web-crawled datasets are fundamental for the success of pre-training vision-language models, such as CLIP. However, the inherent noise and potential irrelevance of web-crawled AltTexts pose challenges in achieving precise image-text alignment. Existing methods utilizing large language m…

2023

G2L: Semantically Aligned and Uniform Video Grounding via Geodesic and Game Theory

ICCV 2023oral

The recent video grounding works attempt to introduce vanilla contrastive learning into video grounding. However, we claim that this naive solution is suboptimal. Contrastive learning requires two key properties: (1) alignment of features of similar samples, and (2) uniformity of the induced distrib…

Cited by 52PDFScholar
2023

Iterative Proposal Refinement for Weakly-Supervised Video Grounding

CVPR 2023poster

Weakly-Supervised Video Grounding (WSVG) aims to localize events of interest in untrimmed videos with only video-level annotations. To date, most of the state-of-the-art WSVG methods follow a two-stage pipeline, i.e., firstly generating potential temporal proposals and then grounding with these prop…

2023

RGI: robust GAN-inversion for mask-free image inpainting and unsupervised pixel-wise anomaly detection

ICLR 2023poster

Generative adversarial networks (GANs), trained on a large-scale image dataset, can be a good approximator of the natural image manifold. GAN-inversion, using a pre-trained generator as a deep generative prior, is a promising tool for image restoration under corruptions. However, the performance of…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2023

Responsible AI Considerations in Text Summarization Research: A Review of Current Practices

EMNLP 2023long findings

AI and NLP publication venues have increasingly encouraged researchers to reflect on possible ethical considerations, adverse impacts, and other responsible AI issues their work might engender. However, for specific NLP tasks our understanding of how prevalent such issues are, or when and why these…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Systematic Rectification of Language Models via Dead-end Analysis

ICLR 2023poster

With adversarial or otherwise normal prompts, existing large language models (LLM) can be pushed to generate toxic discourses. One way to reduce the risk of LLMs generating undesired discourses is to alter the training of the LLM. This can be very restrictive due to demanding computation requirement…

2022

Hallucinated but Factual! Inspecting the Factuality of Hallucinations in Abstractive Summarization

ACL 2022long

State-of-the-art abstractive summarization systems often generate hallucinations; i.e., content that is not directly inferable from the source text. Despite being assumed to be incorrect, we find that much hallucinated content is actually consistent with world knowledge, which we call factual halluc…

2022

Information Gain Propagation: a New Way to Graph Active Learning with Soft Labels

ICLR 2022poster

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in various tasks, but their performance highly relies on a large number of labeled nodes, which typically requires considerable human effort. GNN-based Active Learning (AL) methods are proposed to improve the labeling efficiency by selecting t…

2022

Learning with Rejection for Abstractive Text Summarization

EMNLP 2022main

State-of-the-art abstractive summarization systems frequently hallucinate content that is not supported by the source document, mainly due to noise in the training dataset.Existing methods opt to drop the noisy samples or tokens from the training set entirely, reducing the effective training set siz…

2022

LocVTP: Video-Text Pre-training for Temporal Localization

ECCV 2022poster

"Video-Text Pre-training (VTP) aims to learn transferable representations for various downstream tasks from large-scale web videos. To date, almost all existing VTP methods are limited to retrieval-based downstream tasks, e.g., video retrieval, whereas their transfer potentials on localization-based…

2022

Unsupervised Pre-Training for Temporal Action Localization Tasks

CVPR 2022poster

Unsupervised video representation learning has made remarkable achievements in recent years. However, most existing methods are designed and optimized for video classification. These pre-trained models can be sub-optimal for temporal localization tasks due to the inherent discrepancy between video-l…

Cited by 64PDFcodeScholar
2021

BatchQuant: Quantized-for-all Architecture Search with Robust Quantizer

NeurIPS 2021poster

As the applications of deep learning models on edge devices increase at an accelerating pace, fast adaptation to various scenarios with varying resource constraints has become a crucial aspect of model deployment. As a result, model optimization strategies with adaptive configuration are becoming in…

Cited by 43SourcePDFScholar
2021

CoLA: Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization With Snippet Contrastive Learning

CVPR 2021poster

Weakly-supervised temporal action localization (WS-TAL) aims to localize actions in untrimmed videos with only video-level labels. Most existing models follow the "localization by classification" procedure: locate temporal regions contributing most to the video-level classification. Generally, they…

Cited by 184PDFcodeScholar
2021

On Pursuit of Designing Multi-modal Transformer for Video Grounding

EMNLP 2021main

Video grounding aims to localize the temporal segment corresponding to a sentence query from an untrimmed video. Almost all existing video grounding methods fall into two frameworks: 1) Top-down model: It predefines a set of segment candidates and then conducts segment classification and regression.…

Cited by 91SourcePDFScholar
2021

RIM: Reliable Influence-based Active Learning on Graphs

NeurIPS 2021spotlight

Message passing is the core of most graph models such as Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and Label Propagation (LP), which usually require a large number of clean labeled data to smooth out the neighborhood over the graph. However, the labeling process can be tedious, costly, and error-prone in pr…

2021

RR-Net: Injecting Interactive Semantics in Human-Object Interaction Detection

IJCAI 2021poster

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection devotes to learn how humans interact with surrounding objects. Latest end-to-end HOI detectors are short of relation reasoning, which leads to inability to learn HOI-specific interactive semantics for predictions. In this paper, we therefore propose novel rel…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2020

Non-Local Nested Residual Attention Network for Stereo Image Super-Resolution

ICASSP 2020accepted

Nowadays CNN-based stereo image super-resolution(SR) methods have obtained remarkable performance. However, most of existing methods only superficially portrayed the low layer features without considering the uneven distribution of information, which is insufficient because stereo image warping and…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2020

Weakly Labelled Audio Tagging Via Convolutional Networks with Spatial and Channel-Wise Attention

ICASSP 2020accepted

Multiple instance learning (MIL) with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has been proposed recently for weakly labelled audio tagging. However, features from the various CNN filtering channels and spatial regions are often treated equally, which may limit its performance in event prediction. In th…

Cited by 0SourceScholar