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Yichao Liang

8 accepted papers

2026

Benchmarking World-Model Learning with Environment-Level Queries

ICML 2026poster

World models are central to building AI agents capable of flexible reasoning and planning. Yet current evaluations (i) test only properties measurable from observed interactions within an environment, such as next-frame prediction or task return, and (ii) do not test whether a learned model supports…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

ExoPredicator: Learning Abstract Models of Dynamic Worlds for Robot Planning

ICLR 2026poster

Long‑horizon embodied planning is challenging because the world does not only change through an agent’s actions: exogenous processes (e.g., water heating, dominoes cascading) unfold concurrently with the agent's actions. We propose a framework for abstract world models that jointly learns (i) symbol…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

From Pixels to Predicates: Learning Symbolic World Models via Pretrained VLMs

RA-L 2026

Our aim is to learn to solve long-horizon decision-making problems in complex robotics domains given low-level skills and a handful of demonstrations containing sequences of images. To this end, we focus on learning abstract symbolic world models that facilitate zero-shot generalization to novel goa

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

KinDER: A Physical Reasoning Benchmark for Robot Learning and Planning

RSS 2026poster

Robotic systems that interact with the physical world must reason about kinematic and dynamic constraints imposed by their own embodiment, their environment, and the task at hand. We introduce KinDER, a benchmark for Kinematic and Dynamic Embodied Reasoning that targets physical reasoning challenges…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

PoE-World: Compositional World Modeling with Products of Programmatic Experts

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Learning how the world works is central to building AI agents that can adapt to complex environments. Traditional world models based on deep-learning demand vast amounts of training data, and do not flexibly update their knowledge from sparse observations. Recent advances in program synthesis usin…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

VisualPredicator: Learning Abstract World Models with Neuro-Symbolic Predicates for Robot Planning

ICLR 2025spotlight

Broadly intelligent agents should form task-specific abstractions that selectively expose the essential elements of a task, while abstracting away the complexity of the raw sensorimotor space. In this work, we present Neuro-Symbolic Predicates, a first-order abstraction language that combines the st…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2022

Drawing out of Distribution with Neuro-Symbolic Generative Models

NeurIPS 2022accept

Learning general-purpose representations from perceptual inputs is a hallmark of human intelligence. For example, people can write out numbers or characters, or even draw doodles, by characterizing these tasks as different instantiations of the same generic underlying process---compositional arrange…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar