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Tianren Zhang

13 accepted papers

2026

DeFacto: Counterfactual Thinking with Images for Enforcing Evidence-Grounded and Faithful Reasoning

ICML 2026poster

Recent advances in multimodal language models (MLLMs) have made thinking with images a dominant paradigm for multimodal reasoning. However, existing methods still fail to ensure evidence–answer consistency, where correct answers must be supported by correct visual evidence. To address this issue, we…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Quantifying and Optimizing Simplicity via Polynomial Representations

ICML 2026poster

Deep networks often exhibit a preference for "simple" solutions, and such a simplicity bias is widely believed to play a key role in generalization. Yet a broadly applicable, quantitative measure of simplicity remains elusive. We introduce _polynomial representations_ as a distribution-aware, low-di…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Adaptive Fission: Post-training Encoding for Low-latency Spike Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2025poster

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) often rely on rate coding, where high-precision inference depends on long time-steps, leading to significant latency and energy cost—especially for ANN-to-SNN conversions. To address this, we propose Adaptive Fission, a post-training encoding technique that selectively…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Exploring the Hidden Reasoning Process of Large Language Models by Misleading Them

EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have been able to perform various forms of reasoning tasks ina wide range of scenarios, but are they truly engaging in task abstraction and rule-based reasoning beyond mere memorization? To answer this question, we propose a novel experimentalapproach, Misleading Fine-Tu

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

OURO: A Self-Bootstrapped Framework for Enhancing Multimodal Scene Understanding

ICCV 2025poster

Multimodal large models have made significant progress, yet fine-grained understanding of complex scenes remains a challenge. High-quality, large-scale vision-language datasets are essential for addressing this issue. However, existing methods often rely on labor-intensive manual annotations or clos…

2024

Feature Contamination: Neural Networks Learn Uncorrelated Features and Fail to Generalize

ICML 2024poster

Learning representations that generalize under distribution shifts is critical for building robust machine learning models. However, despite significant efforts in recent years, algorithmic advances in this direction have been limited. In this work, we seek to understand the fundamental difficulty o…

2024

Spatio-Temporal Approximation: A Training-Free SNN Conversion for Transformers

ICLR 2024poster

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are energy-efficient and hold great potential for large-scale inference. Since training SNNs from scratch is costly and has limited performance, converting pretrained artificial neural networks (ANNs) to SNNs is an attractive approach that retains robust performance wi…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2023

Fast Counterfactual Inference for History-Based Reinforcement Learning

AAAI 2023technical

Incorporating sequence-to-sequence models into history-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) provides a general way to extend RL to partially-observable tasks. This method compresses history spaces according to the correlations between historical observations and the rewards. However, they do not adjust…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2021

CRIL: Continual Robot Imitation Learning via Generative and Prediction Model

IROS 2021poster

Imitation learning (IL) algorithms have shown promising results for robots to learn skills from expert demonstrations. However, they need multi-task demonstrations to be provided at once for acquiring diverse skills, which is difficult in real world. In this work we study how to realize continual im…

Cited by 20SourcecodeScholar
2020

Generating Adjacency-Constrained Subgoals in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

Goal-conditioned hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) is a promising approach for scaling up reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. However, it often suffers from training inefficiency as the action space of the high-level, i.e., the goal space, is often large. Searching in a large goal space…