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Yanchao Sun

27 accepted papers

2026

Hilbert: Recursively Building Formal Proofs with Informal Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive mathematical reasoning abilities, but their solutions frequently contain errors that cannot be automatically verified. Formal theorem proving systems such as Lean 4 offer automated verification with complete accuracy, motivating recent efforts to b…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
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

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

Safety Guaranteed Robust Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Hierarchical Control for Connected and Automated Vehicles

ICRA 2025

We address the problem of coordination and control of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) in the presence of imperfect observations in mixed traffic environment. A commonly used approach is learning-based decision-making, such as reinforcement learning (RL). However, most existing safe RL method

Cited by 5SourceScholar
2025

Statistical Guarantees for Lifelong Reinforcement Learning using PAC-Bayes Theory

AISTATS 2025poster

Lifelong reinforcement learning (RL) has been developed as a paradigm for extending single-task RL to more realistic, dynamic settings. In lifelong RL, the "life" of an RL agent is modeled as a stream of tasks drawn from a task distribution. We propose EPIC (Empirical PAC-Bayes that Improves Continu…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
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…

2024

Adapting Static Fairness to Sequential Decision-Making: Bias Mitigation Strategies towards Equal Long-term Benefit Rate

ICML 2024poster

Decisions made by machine learning models can have lasting impacts, making long-term fairness a critical consideration. It has been observed that ignoring the long-term effect and directly applying fairness criterion in static settings can actually worsen bias over time. To address biases in sequent…

2024

Beyond Worst-case Attacks: Robust RL with Adaptive Defense via Non-dominated Policies

ICLR 2024spotlight

In light of the burgeoning success of reinforcement learning (RL) in diverse real-world applications, considerable focus has been directed towards ensuring RL policies are robust to adversarial attacks during test time. Current approaches largely revolve around solving a minimax problem to prepare f…

2024

COPlanner: Plan to Roll Out Conservatively but to Explore Optimistically for Model-Based RL

ICLR 2024poster

Dyna-style model-based reinforcement learning contains two phases: model rollouts to generate sample for policy learning and real environment exploration using current policy for dynamics model learning. However, due to the complex real-world environment, it is inevitable to learn an imperfect dynam…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2024

Game-Theoretic Robust Reinforcement Learning Handles Temporally-Coupled Perturbations

ICLR 2024poster

Deploying reinforcement learning (RL) systems requires robustness to uncertainty and model misspecification, yet prior robust RL methods typically only study noise introduced independently across time. However, practical sources of uncertainty are usually coupled across time. We formally introduce t…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2024

Rethinking Adversarial Policies: A Generalized Attack Formulation and Provable Defense in RL

ICLR 2024poster

Most existing works focus on direct perturbations to the victim's state/action or the underlying transition dynamics to demonstrate the vulnerability of reinforcement learning agents to adversarial attacks. However, such direct manipulations may not be always realizable. In this paper, we consider…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

Shadowcast: Stealthy Data Poisoning Attacks Against Vision-Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel in generating textual responses from visual inputs, but their versatility raises security concerns. This study takes the first step in exposing VLMs’ susceptibility to data poisoning attacks that can manipulate responses to innocuous, everyday prompts. We introduc…

2023

$\texttt{TACO}$: Temporal Latent Action-Driven Contrastive Loss for Visual Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

Despite recent progress in reinforcement learning (RL) from raw pixel data, sample inefficiency continues to present a substantial obstacle. Prior works have attempted to address this challenge by creating self-supervised auxiliary tasks, aiming to enrich the agent's learned representations with co…

2023

Certifiably Robust Policy Learning against Adversarial Multi-Agent Communication

ICLR 2023poster

Communication is important in many multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) problems for agents to share information and make good decisions. However, when deploying trained communicative agents in a real-world application where noise and potential attackers exist, the safety of communication-based…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2023

Exploring and Exploiting Decision Boundary Dynamics for Adversarial Robustness

ICLR 2023poster

The robustness of a deep classifier can be characterized by its margins: the decision boundary's distances to natural data points. However, it is unclear whether existing robust training methods effectively increase the margin for each vulnerable point during training. To understand this, we propose…

2023

Is Imitation All You Need? Generalized Decision-Making with Dual-Phase Training

ICCV 2023poster

We introduce DualMind, a generalist agent designed to tackle various decision-making tasks that addresses challenges posed by current methods, such as overfitting behaviors and dependence on task-specific fine-tuning. DualMind uses a novel "Dual-phase" training strategy that emulates how humans lear…

Cited by 17PDFcodeScholar
2023

Learning Generalizable Agents via Saliency-guided Features Decorrelation

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

In visual-based Reinforcement Learning (RL), agents often struggle to generalize well to environmental variations in the state space that were not observed during training. The variations can arise in both task-irrelevant features, such as background noise, and task-relevant features, such as robot…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2023

SMART: Self-supervised Multi-task pretrAining with contRol Transformers

ICLR 2023top-25%

Self-supervised pretraining has been extensively studied in language and vision domains, where a unified model can be easily adapted to various downstream tasks by pretraining representations without explicit labels. When it comes to sequential decision-making tasks, however, it is difficult to prop…

2022

Adversarial Auto-Augment with Label Preservation: A Representation Learning Principle Guided Approach

NeurIPS 2022accept

Data augmentation is a critical contributing factor to the success of deep learning but heavily relies on prior domain knowledge which is not always available. Recent works on automatic data augmentation learn a policy to form a sequence of augmentation operations, which are still pre-defined and re…

2022

Distributional Reward Estimation for Effective Multi-agent Deep Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2022accept

Multi-agent reinforcement learning has drawn increasing attention in practice, e.g., robotics and automatic driving, as it can explore optimal policies using samples generated by interacting with the environment. However, high reward uncertainty still remains a problem when we want to train a satisf…

2022

Efficient Adversarial Training without Attacking: Worst-Case-Aware Robust Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2022accept

Recent studies reveal that a well-trained deep reinforcement learning (RL) policy can be particularly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations on input observations. Therefore, it is crucial to train RL agents that are robust against any attacks with a bounded budget. Existing robust training methods…

2022

Transfer RL across Observation Feature Spaces via Model-Based Regularization

ICLR 2022poster

In many reinforcement learning (RL) applications, the observation space is specified by human developers and restricted by physical realizations, and may thus be subject to dramatic changes over time (e.g. increased number of observable features). However, when the observation space changes, the pre…

Cited by 23SourcePDFScholar
2022

Who Is the Strongest Enemy? Towards Optimal and Efficient Evasion Attacks in Deep RL

ICLR 2022poster

Evaluating the worst-case performance of a reinforcement learning (RL) agent under the strongest/optimal adversarial perturbations on state observations (within some constraints) is crucial for understanding the robustness of RL agents. However, finding the optimal adversary is challenging, in terms…

2021

TempLe: Learning Template of Transitions for Sample Efficient Multi-task RL

AAAI 2021technical

Transferring knowledge among various environments is important for efficiently learning multiple tasks online. Most existing methods directly use the previously learned models or previously learned optimal policies to learn new tasks. However, these methods may be inefficient when the underlying mod…

2020

Understanding Generalization in Deep Learning via Tensor Methods

AISTATS 2020poster

Deep neural networks generalize well on unseen data though the number of parameters often far exceeds the number of training examples. Recently proposed complexity measures have provided insights to understanding the generalizability in neural networks from perspectives of PAC-Bayes, robustness, ove…