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Xiaojian Ma

42 accepted papers

2026

DeepHA: Scaling Action Chains Elicits Deep Hierarchical Agents

ICML 2026poster

Prevailing autonomous agents are often constrained by a single, predefined action space, which limits their generalization capabilities across diverse tasks and can introduce compounding errors through decoupled policy execution. To address these limitations, we introduce the Deep Hierarchical Agent…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

FlowDreamer: A RGB-D World Model With Flow-Based Motion Representations for Robot Manipulation

RA-L 2026

This paper investigates training better visual world models for robot manipulation, i.e., models that can predict future visual observations by conditioning on past frames and robot actions. Specifically, we consider world models that operate on RGB-D frames (RGB-D world models). As opposed to canon

Cited by 12SourcecodeScholar
2026

FlowDreamer: A RGB-D World Model with Flow-Based Motion Representations for Robot Manipulation

ICRA 2026poster

This paper investigates training better visual world models for robot manipulation, i.e., models that can predict future visual observations by conditioning on past frames and robot actions. Specifically, we consider world models that operate on RGB-D frames (RGB-D world models). As opposed to canon…

2026

MILR: Improving Multimodal Image Generation via Test-Time Latent Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

Reasoning-augmented machine learning systems have shown improved performance in various domains, including image generation. However, existing reasoning-based methods for image generation either restrict reasoning to a single modality (image or text) or rely on high-quality reasoning data for fine-t…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

TongUI: Internet-Scale Trajectories from Multimodal Web Tutorials for Generalized GUI Agents

AAAI 2026technical

Building Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents is a promising research direction, which simulates human interaction with computers or mobile phones to perform diverse GUI tasks. However, a major challenge in developing generalized GUI agents is the lack of sufficient trajectory data across various o

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

``Noisier'’ Noise Contrastive Estimation is (Almost) Maximum Likelihood

ICLR 2026poster

Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) has fueled major breakthroughs in representation learning and generative modeling. Yet a long-standing challenge remains: accurately estimating ratios between distributions that differ substantially, which significantly limits the applicability of NCE on modern hig…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Embodied VideoAgent: Persistent Memory from Egocentric Videos and Embodied Sensors Enables Dynamic Scene Understanding

ICCV 2025poster

This paper investigates the problem of understanding dynamic 3D scenes from egocentric observations, a key challenge in robotics and embodied AI. Unlike prior studies that explored this as long-form video understanding and utilized egocentric video only, we instead propose an LLM-based agent, Embodi…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Falcon: Fast Visuomotor Policies via Partial Denoising

ICML 2025poster

Diffusion policies are widely adopted in complex visuomotor tasks for their ability to capture multimodal action distributions. However, the multiple sampling steps required for action generation significantly harm real-time inference efficiency, which limits their applicability in real-time decisio…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

From Objects to Anywhere: A Holistic Benchmark for Multi-level Visual Grounding in 3D Scenes

NeurIPS 2025poster

3D visual grounding has made notable progress in localizing objects within complex 3D scenes. However, grounding referring expressions beyond objects in 3D scenes remains unexplored. In this paper, we introduce Anywhere3D-Bench, a holistic 3D visual grounding benchmark consisting of 2,886 referring…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

GROOT-2: Weakly Supervised Multimodal Instruction Following Agents

ICLR 2025poster

Developing agents that can follow multimodal instructions remains a fundamental challenge in robotics and AI. Although large-scale pre-training on unlabeled datasets has enabled agents to learn diverse behaviors, these agents often struggle with following instructions. While augmenting the dataset w…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

Iterative Tool Usage Exploration for Multimodal Agents via Step-wise Preference Tuning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Multimodal agents, which integrate a controller (e.g., a vision language model) with external tools, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tackling complex multimodal tasks. Existing approaches for training these agents, both supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, depend on extens…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

JARVIS-VLA: Post-Training Large-Scale Vision Language Models to Play Visual Games with Keyboards and Mouse

ACL 2025finding

Recently, action-based decision-making in open-world environments has gained significant attention. Visual Language Action (VLA) models, pretrained on large-scale web datasets, have shown promise in decision-making tasks. However, previous work has primarily focused on action post-training, often ne…

2025

Move to Understand a 3D Scene: Bridging Visual Grounding and Exploration for Efficient and Versatile Embodied Navigation

ICCV 2025poster

Embodied scene understanding requires not only comprehending visual-spatial information that has been observed but also determining where to explore next in the 3D physical world. Existing 3D Vision-Language (3D-VL) models primarily focus on grounding objects in static observations from 3D reconstru…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Multi-modal Agent Tuning: Building a VLM-Driven Agent for Efficient Tool Usage

ICLR 2025spotlight

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) prompts the development of multi-modal agents, which are used as a controller to call external tools, providing a feasible way to solve practical tasks. In this paper, we propose a multi-modal agent tuning method that automatically generates multi-moda…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2025

NEP: Autoregressive Image Editing via Next Editing Token Prediction

NeurIPS 2025poster

Text-guided image editing involves modifying a source image based on a language instruction and, typically, requires changes to only small local regions. However, existing approaches generate the entire target image rather than selectively regenerate only the intended editing areas. This results in…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

ROCKET-1: Mastering Open-World Interaction with Visual-Temporal Context Prompting

CVPR 2025poster

Vision-language models (VLMs) have excelled in multimodal tasks, but adapting them to embodied decision-making in open-world environments presents challenges. One critical issue is bridging the gap between discrete entities in low-level observations and the abstract concepts required for effective p…

2024

An Embodied Generalist Agent in 3D World

ICML 2024poster

Leveraging massive knowledge from large language models (LLMs), recent machine learning models show notable successes in general-purpose task solving in diverse domains such as computer vision and robotics. However, several significant challenges remain: (i) most of these models rely on 2D images ye…

2024

Bongard-OpenWorld: Few-Shot Reasoning for Free-form Visual Concepts in the Real World

ICLR 2024poster

We introduce Bongard-OpenWorld, a new benchmark for evaluating real-world few-shot reasoning for machine vision. It originates from the classical Bongard Problems (BPs): Given two sets of images (positive and negative), the model needs to identify the set that query images belong to by inducing the…

2024

CLOVA: A Closed-LOop Visual Assistant with Tool Usage and Update

CVPR 2024poster

Utilizing large language models (LLMs) to compose off-the-shelf visual tools represents a promising avenue of research for developing robust visual assistants capable of addressing diverse visual tasks. However these methods often overlook the potential for continual learning typically by freezing t…

Cited by 29SourcePDFScholar
2024

GROOT: Learning to Follow Instructions by Watching Gameplay Videos

ICLR 2024spotlight

We study the problem of building a controller that can follow open-ended instructions in open-world environments. We propose to follow reference videos as instructions, which offer expressive goal specifications while eliminating the need for expensive text-gameplay annotations. A new learning frame…

Cited by 37SourcePDFScholar
2024

MMICL: Empowering Vision-language Model with Multi-Modal In-Context Learning

ICLR 2024poster

Since the resurgence of deep learning, vision-language models (VLMs) enhanced by large language models (LLMs) have grown exponentially in popularity. However, while LLMs can utilize extensive background knowledge and task information with in-context learning, most VLMs still struggle with understan…

2024

MindAgent: Emergent Gaming Interaction

NAACL 2024findings

Large Foundation Models (LFMs) can perform complex scheduling in a multi-agent system and can coordinate agents to complete sophisticated tasks that require extensive collaboration.However, despite the introduction of numerous gaming frameworks, the community lacks adequate benchmarks that support t…

Cited by 100SourcePDFScholar
2024

Multi-modal Situated Reasoning in 3D Scenes

NeurIPS 2024poster

Situation awareness is essential for understanding and reasoning about 3D scenes in embodied AI agents. However, existing datasets and benchmarks for situated understanding suffer from severe limitations in data modality, scope, diversity, and scale. To address these limitations, we propose Multi…

2024

OmniJARVIS: Unified Vision-Language-Action Tokenization Enables Open-World Instruction Following Agents

NeurIPS 2024poster

This paper presents OmniJARVIS, a novel Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model for open-world instruction-following agents in Minecraft. Compared to prior works that either emit textual goals to separate controllers or produce the control command directly, OmniJARVIS seeks a different path to ensure bot…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

UltraEdit: Instruction-based Fine-Grained Image Editing at Scale

NeurIPS 2024poster

This paper presents UltraEdit, a large-scale (~ 4M editing samples), automatically generated dataset for instruction-based image editing. Our key idea is to address the drawbacks in existing image editing datasets like InstructPix2Pix and MagicBrush, and provide a *systematic* approach to producing…

2024

Unifying 3D Vision-Language Understanding via Promptable Queries

ECCV 2024poster

"A unified model for 3D vision-language (3D-VL) understanding is expected to take various scene representations and perform a wide range of tasks in a 3D scene. However, a considerable gap exists between existing methods and such a unified model, due to the independent application of representation…

Cited by 23SourcePDFScholar
2023

3D-VisTA: Pre-trained Transformer for 3D Vision and Text Alignment

ICCV 2023poster

3D vision-language grounding (3D-VL) is an emerging field that aims to connect the 3D physical world with natural language, which is crucial for achieving embodied intelligence. Current 3D-VL models rely heavily on sophisticated modules, auxiliary losses, and optimization tricks, which calls for a s…

Cited by 129PDFScholar
2023

Describe, Explain, Plan and Select: Interactive Planning with LLMs Enables Open-World Multi-Task Agents

NeurIPS 2023poster

In this paper, we study the problem of planning in Minecraft, a popular, democratized yet challenging open-ended environment for developing multi-task embodied agents. We've found two primary challenges of empowering such agents with planning: 1) planning in an open-ended world like Minecraft requir…

2023

Learning Energy-Based Prior Model with Diffusion-Amortized MCMC

NeurIPS 2023poster

Latent space EBMs, also known as energy-based priors, have drawn growing interests in the field of generative modeling due to its flexibility in the formulation and strong modeling power of the latent space. However, the common practice of learning latent space EBMs with non-convergent short-run MCM…

2023

Open-World Multi-Task Control Through Goal-Aware Representation Learning and Adaptive Horizon Prediction

CVPR 2023poster

We study the problem of learning goal-conditioned policies in Minecraft, a popular, widely accessible yet challenging open-ended environment for developing human-level multi-task agents. We first identify two main challenges of learning such policies: 1) the indistinguishability of tasks from the st…

2023

SQA3D: Situated Question Answering in 3D Scenes

ICLR 2023poster

We propose a new task to benchmark scene understanding of embodied agents: Situated Question Answering in 3D Scenes (SQA3D). Given a scene context (e.g., 3D scan), SQA3D requires the tested agent to first understand its situation (position, orientation, etc.) in the 3D scene as described by text, th…

2022

Bongard-HOI: Benchmarking Few-Shot Visual Reasoning for Human-Object Interactions

CVPR 2022oral

A significant gap remains between today's visual pattern recognition models and human-level visual cognition especially when it comes to few-shot learning and compositional reasoning of novel concepts. We introduce Bongard-HOI, a new visual reasoning benchmark that focuses on compositional learning…

Cited by 41PDFcodeScholar
2022

Latent Diffusion Energy-Based Model for Interpretable Text Modelling

ICML 2022spotlight

Latent space Energy-Based Models (EBMs), also known as energy-based priors, have drawn growing interests in generative modeling. Fueled by its flexibility in the formulation and strong modeling power of the latent space, recent works built upon it have made interesting attempts aiming at the interpr…

2022

RelViT: Concept-guided Vision Transformer for Visual Relational Reasoning

ICLR 2022poster

Reasoning about visual relationships is central to how humans interpret the visual world. This task remains challenging for current deep learning algorithms since it requires addressing three key technical problems jointly: 1) identifying object entities and their properties, 2) inferring semantic r…

2021

Adversarial Option-Aware Hierarchical Imitation Learning

ICML 2021spotlight

It has been a challenge to learning skills for an agent from long-horizon unannotated demonstrations. Existing approaches like Hierarchical Imitation Learning(HIL) are prone to compounding errors or suboptimal solutions. In this paper, we propose Option-GAIL, a novel method to learn skills at long h…

2021

Unsupervised Foreground Extraction via Deep Region Competition

NeurIPS 2021poster

We present Deep Region Competition (DRC), an algorithm designed to extract foreground objects from images in a fully unsupervised manner. Foreground extraction can be viewed as a special case of generic image segmentation that focuses on identifying and disentangling objects from the background. In…

Cited by 41SourcePDFScholar
2020

A Mobile Robot Hand-Arm Teleoperation System by Vision and IMU

IROS 2020poster

In this paper, we present a multimodal mobile teleoperation system that consists of a novel vision-based hand pose regression network (Transteleop) and an IMU (inertial measurement units)-based arm tracking method. Transteleop observes the human hand through a low-cost depth camera and generates not…

Cited by 75SourceScholar
2020

Robust Robotic Pouring using Audition and Haptics

IROS 2020poster

Robust and accurate estimation of liquid height lies as an essential part of pouring tasks for service robots. However, vision-based methods often fail in occluded conditions while audio-based methods cannot work well in a noisy environment. We instead propose a multimodal pouring network (MP-Net) t…

Cited by 24SourcecodeScholar
2019

Imitation Learning from Observations by Minimizing Inverse Dynamics Disagreement

NeurIPS 2019spotlight

This paper studies Learning from Observations (LfO) for imitation learning with access to state-only demonstrations. In contrast to Learning from Demonstration (LfD) that involves both action and state supervisions, LfO is more practical in leveraging previously inapplicable resources (e.g., videos)…

Cited by 90SourcePDFScholar
2019

Making Sense of Audio Vibration for Liquid Height Estimation in Robotic Pouring

IROS 2019poster

In this paper, we focus on the challenging perception problem in robotic pouring. Most of the existing approaches either leverage visual or haptic information. However, these techniques may suffer from poor generalization performances on opaque containers or concerning measuring precision. To tackle…

Cited by 43SourceScholar
2019

PointNetGPD: Detecting Grasp Configurations from Point Sets

ICRA 2019poster

In this paper, we propose an end-to-end grasp evaluation model to address the challenging problem of localizing robot grasp configurations directly from the point cloud. Compared to recent grasp evaluation metrics that are based on handcrafted depth features and a convolutional neural network (CNN),…

Cited by 444SourcecodeScholar
2019

Vision-based Teleoperation of Shadow Dexterous Hand using End-to-End Deep Neural Network

ICRA 2019poster

In this paper, we present TeachNet, a novel neural network architecture for intuitive and markerless vision-based teleoperation of dexterous robotic hands. Robot joint angles are directly generated from depth images of the human hand that produce visually similar robot hand poses in an end-to-end fa…

Cited by 120SourceScholar