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Shengbang Tong

20 accepted papers

2026

Learning to See Before Seeing: Demystifying LLM Visual Priors from Language Pre-training

ICLR 2026oral

Large Language Models (LLMs), despite being trained on text alone, surprisingly develop rich visual priors. These priors allow latent visual capabilities to be unlocked for vision tasks with a relatively small amount of multimodal data, and to perform symbolic visual generation tasks without ever ha…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Seeing from Another Perspective: Evaluating Multi-View Understanding in MLLMs

AAAI 2026technical

Multi-view understanding, the ability to reconcile visual information across diverse viewpoints for effective navigation, manipulation, and 3D scene comprehension, is a fundamental challenge in Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to be used as embodied agents. While recent MLLMs have shown im

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Towards Spatial Supersensing in Video

ICLR 2026poster

We frame spatial supersensing in video as an overarching goal for multimodal intelligence and argue that progress requires a shift from long-context brute force to predictive sensing. Using a four-level taxonomy: semantic perception, streaming event cognition, implicit 3D spatial cognition, and pred…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Towards Unified Multimodal Pretraining

ICML 2026spotlight

Unified multimodal models aim to input and output both vision and language data within a single system. In this work, we explore the design space of Unified Multimodal Pretraining through a controlled, from-scratch study. We find that leveraging a single high-dimensional semantic encoder (e.g. SigLI…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

MMMU-Pro: A More Robust Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmark

ACL 2025long

This paper introduces MMMU-Pro, a robust version of the Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning (MMMU) benchmark. MMMU-Pro rigorously assesses multimodal models’ true understanding and reasoning capabilities through a three-step process based on MMMU: (1) filtering out questi…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

MetaMorph: Multimodal Understanding and Generation via Instruction Tuning

ICCV 2025poster

In this work, we propose Visual-Predictive Instruction Tuning (VPiT) - a simple and effective extension to visual instruction tuning that enables a pretrained LLM to quickly morph into an unified autoregressive model capable of generating both text and visual tokens. VPiT teaches an LLM to predict d…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

SFT Memorizes, RL Generalizes: A Comparative Study of Foundation Model Post-training

ICML 2025poster

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) are widely used post-training techniques for foundation models. However, their roles in enhancing model generalization capabilities remain unclear. This paper studies the difference between SFT and RL on generalization and memorization, fo…

Cited by 72SourcePDFScholar
2025

Scaling Language-Free Visual Representation Learning

ICCV 2025poster

Visual Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) currently underperforms Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) in multimodal settings such as Visual Question Answering (VQA). This multimodal gap is often attributed to the semantics introduced by language supervision, even though visual SSL and CLIP mod…

2025

Thinking vs. Doing: Improving Agent Reasoning by Scaling Test-Time Interaction

NeurIPS 2025poster

Test-time scaling in agentic tasks often relies on generating long reasoning traces ("think" more) before acting, but this does not allow agents to acquire new information from the environment or adapt behavior over time. In this work, we propose scaling test-time interaction, an untapped dimension…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Cambrian-1: A Fully Open, Vision-Centric Exploration of Multimodal LLMs

NeurIPS 2024oral

We introduce Cambrian-1, a family of multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) designed with a vision-centric approach. While stronger language models can enhance multimodal capabilities, the design choices for vision components are often insufficiently explored and disconnected from visual representation learning re…

2024

Connecting Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture with Contrastive Self-supervised Learning

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

In recent advancements in unsupervised visual representation learning, the Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) has emerged as a significant method for extracting visual features from unlabeled imagery through an innovative masking strategy. Despite its success, two primary limitations hav…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Eyes Wide Shut? Exploring the Visual Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs

CVPR 2024poster

Is vision good enough for language? Recent advancements in multimodal models primarily stem from the powerful reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However the visual component typically depends only on the instance-level contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP). Our research re…

2024

Fine-Tuning Large Vision-Language Models as Decision-Making Agents via Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large vision-language models (VLMs) fine-tuned on specialized visual instruction-following data have exhibited impressive language reasoning capabilities across various scenarios. However, this fine-tuning paradigm may not be able to efficiently learn optimal decision-making agents in multi-step goa…

Cited by 68SourcePDFScholar
2024

Image Clustering via the Principle of Rate Reduction in the Age of Pretrained Models

ICLR 2024poster

The advent of large pre-trained models has brought about a paradigm shift in both visual representation learning and natural language processing. However, clustering unlabeled images, as a fundamental and classic machine learning problem, still lacks an effective solution, particularly for large-sca…

2023

Incremental Learning of Structured Memory via Closed-Loop Transcription

ICLR 2023poster

This work proposes a minimal computational model for learning structured memories of multiple object classes in an incremental setting. Our approach is based on establishing a {\em closed-loop transcription} between the classes and a corresponding set of subspaces, known as a linear discriminative…

2023

Mass-Producing Failures of Multimodal Systems with Language Models

NeurIPS 2023poster

Deployed multimodal models can fail in ways that evaluators did not anticipate. In order to find these failures before deployment, we introduce MultiMon, a system that automatically identifies systematic failures---generalizable, natural-language descriptions that describe categories of individual f…

2023

Unsupervised Manifold Linearizing and Clustering

ICCV 2023poster

We consider the problem of simultaneously clustering and learning a linear representation of data lying close to a union of low-dimensional manifolds, a fundamental task in machine learning and computer vision. When the manifolds are assumed to be linear subspaces, this reduces to the classical prob…

Cited by 14PDFcodeScholar
2023

White-Box Transformers via Sparse Rate Reduction

NeurIPS 2023poster

In this paper, we contend that the objective of representation learning is to compress and transform the distribution of the data, say sets of tokens, towards a mixture of low-dimensional Gaussian distributions supported on incoherent subspaces. The quality of the final representation can be measur…

2022

Revisiting Sparse Convolutional Model for Visual Recognition

NeurIPS 2022accept

Despite strong empirical performance for image classification, deep neural networks are often regarded as ``black boxes'' and they are difficult to interpret. On the other hand, sparse convolutional models, which assume that a signal can be expressed by a linear combination of a few elements from a…