← Search

Mengchen Zhao

12 accepted papers

2026

PADiff: Predictive and Adaptive Diffusion Policies for Ad Hoc Teamwork

AAAI 2026technical

Ad hoc teamwork (AHT) requires agents to collaborate with previously unseen teammates, which is crucial for many real-world applications. The core challenge of AHT is to develop an ego agent that can predict and adapt to unknown teammates on the fly. Conventional RL-based approaches optimize a singl

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

POLIA: Policy Optimization with Visual-Object-Level Intrinsic Advantage for Multimodal Reasoning

ICML 2026poster

Recent advances in group-based reinforcement learning (RL) greatly improve LLMs' ability in text reasoning. Yet, these methods lack sufficient modeling of multimodal information, leading to significant reasoning hallucination. In this work, we propose POLIA, a novel group-based RL method with visual…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Strat-Reasoner: Reinforcing Strategic Reasoning of LLMs in Multi-Agent Games

ICML 2026poster

While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in certain reasoning tasks, they struggle in multi-agent games where the final outcome depends on the joint strategies of all agents. In multi-agent games, the non-stationarity of other agents brings significant challenges on the evaluation of the reasoning p…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Ad Hoc Teamwork via Offline Goal-Based Decision Transformers

ICML 2025poster

The ability of agents to collaborate with previously unknown teammates on the fly, known as ad hoc teamwork (AHT), is crucial in many real-world applications. Existing approaches to AHT require online interactions with the environment and some carefully designed teammates. However, these prerequisit…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

MTRec: Learning to Align with User Preferences via Mental Reward Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recommendation models are predominantly trained using implicit user feedback, since explicit feedback is often costly to obtain. However, implicit feedback, such as clicks, does not always reflect users' real preferences. For example, a user might click on a news article because of its attractive he…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

RTADev: Intention Aligned Multi-Agent Framework for Software Development

ACL 2025finding

LLM-based Multi-agent frameworks have shown a great potential in solving real-world software development tasks, where the agents of different roles can communicate much more efficiently than humans. Despite their efficiency, LLM-based agents can hardly fully understand each other, which frequently c…

2024

Improving Unsupervised Hierarchical Representation with Reinforcement Learning

CVPR 2024poster

Learning representations to capture the very fundamental understanding of the world is a key challenge in machine learning. The hierarchical structure of explanatory factors hidden in data is such a general representation and could be potentially achieved with a hierarchical VAE. However training a…

2024

PoRank: A Practical Framework for Learning to Rank Policies

IJCAI 2024poster

In many real-world scenarios, we need to select from a set of candidate policies before online deployment. Although existing Off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods can be used to estimate the online performance, they suffer from high variance. Fortunately, we care only about the ranking of the candidat…

2023

Co-Speech Gesture Synthesis by Reinforcement Learning With Contrastive Pre-Trained Rewards

CVPR 2023poster

There is a growing demand of automatically synthesizing co-speech gestures for virtual characters. However, it remains a challenge due to the complex relationship between input speeches and target gestures. Most existing works focus on predicting the next gesture that fits the data best, however, su…

2023

Offline RL with Discrete Proxy Representations for Generalizability in POMDPs

NeurIPS 2023poster

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated promising results in various applications by learning policies from previously collected datasets, reducing the need for online exploration and interactions. However, real-world scenarios usually involve partial observability, which brings crucial…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2022

Learning Pseudometric-based Action Representations for Offline Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2022spotlight

Offline reinforcement learning is a promising approach for practical applications since it does not require interactions with real-world environments. However, existing offline RL methods only work well in environments with continuous or small discrete action spaces. In environments with large and d…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar