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Yitao Liang

40 accepted papers

2026

Can Language Models Discover Scaling Laws?

ICLR 2026poster

Discovering scaling laws for predicting model performance at scale is a fundamental and open-ended challenge, mostly reliant on slow, case specific human experimentation. To investigate the potential for LLMs to automate this process, we collect over 5,000 experiments from existing literature and cu…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
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

DexGraspVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Framework Towards General Dexterous Grasping

AAAI 2026technical

Dexterous grasping remains a fundamental yet challenging problem in robotics. A general-purpose robot must be capable of grasping diverse objects in arbitrary scenarios. However, existing research typically relies on restrictive assumptions, such as single-object settings or limited environments, sh

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Inference-time scaling of diffusion models through classical search

ICLR 2026poster

Classical search algorithms have long underpinned modern artificial intelligence. In this work, we tackle the challenge of inference-time control in diffusion models—adapting generated outputs to meet diverse test-time objectives—using principles from classical search. We propose a general framework…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

OpenHA: A Series of Open-Source Hierarchical Agentic Models in Minecraft

ICML 2026poster

A critical challenge in developing capable AI agents is defining their "action space''—the set of possible actions they can take. These spaces can range widely, from generating code and using language skills to operating on latent representations or raw joystick controls. Through a large-scale study…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Preference Goal Tuning: Post-Training as Latent Control for Frozen Policies

ICML 2026poster

Goal-conditioned policies enable decision-making models to execute diverse behaviors based on specified goals, yet their downstream performance is often highly sensitive to the choice of instructions or prompts. To bypass the limitations of discrete text prompts, we formulate post-training adaptatio…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Steering Visuomotor Policy in Open Worlds via Cross-View Goal Alignment

AAAI 2026technical

We aim to develop a goal specification method that is semantically clear, spatially sensitive, domain-agnostic, and intuitive for human users to guide agent interactions in 3D environments. Specifically, we propose a novel cross-view goal alignment framework that allows users to specify target objec

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Training One Model to Master Cross-Level Agentic Actions via Reinforcement Learning

CVPR 2026

The paradigm of agentic AI is shifting from engineered complex workflows to post-training native models. However, existing agents are typically confined to static, predefined action spaces--such as exclusively using APIs, GUI events, or robotic commands. This rigidity limits their adaptability in dy

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

UniCode: Augmenting Evaluation for Code Reasoning

ICML 2026poster

Current coding benchmarks often inflate Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities due to static paradigms and data contamination, enabling models to exploit statistical shortcuts rather than genuine reasoning. To address this, we introduce \textbf{UniCode}, a generative evaluation framework that syste…

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

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

Low-Dimension-to-High-Dimension Generalization and Its Implications for Length Generalization

ICML 2025poster

Low-Dimension-to-High-Dimension (LDHD) generalization, a subset of Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization, involves training on a low-dimensional subspace and testing in a high-dimensional space. Assuming instances are generated from latent variables reflecting problem scale, LDHD generalization c…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

MCU: An Evaluation Framework for Open-Ended Game Agents

ICML 2025spotlight

Developing AI agents capable of interacting with open-world environments to solve diverse tasks is a compelling challenge. However, evaluating such open-ended agents remains difficult, with current benchmarks facing scalability limitations. To address this, we introduce \textit{Minecraft Universe} (…

2025

Open-World Skill Discovery from Unsegmented Demonstration Videos

ICCV 2025poster

Learning skills in open-world environments is essential for developing agents capable of handling a variety of tasks by combining basic skills. Online demonstration videos are typically long but unsegmented, making them difficult to segment and label with skill identifiers. Unlike existing methods t…

2025

Plug-and-Play Context Feature Reuse for Efficient Masked Generation

NeurIPS 2025poster

Masked generative models (MGMs) have emerged as a powerful framework for image synthesis, combining parallel decoding with strong bidirectional context modeling. However, generating high-quality samples typically requires many iterative decoding steps, resulting in high inference costs. A straightfo…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

QCircuitBench: A Large-Scale Dataset for Benchmarking Quantum Algorithm Design

NeurIPS 2025poster

Quantum computing is an emerging field recognized for the significant speedup it offers over classical computing through quantum algorithms. However, designing and implementing quantum algorithms pose challenges due to the complex nature of quantum mechanics and the necessity for precise control ove…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Quantification of Large Language Model Distillation

ACL 2025long

Model distillation is a fundamental technique in building large language models (LLMs), transferring knowledge from a teacher model to a student model. However, distillation can lead to model homogenization, reducing diversity among models and impairing their ability to robustly handle complex or no…

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…

2025

TFG-Flow: Training-free Guidance in Multimodal Generative Flow

ICLR 2025poster

Given an unconditional generative model and a predictor for a target property (e.g., a classifier), the goal of training-free guidance is to generate samples with desirable target properties without additional training. As a highly efficient technique for steering generative models toward flexible o…

2025

Tractable Transformers for Flexible Conditional Generation

ICML 2025poster

Non-autoregressive (NAR) generative models are valuable because they can handle diverse conditional generation tasks in a more principled way than their autoregressive (AR) counterparts, which are constrained by sequential dependency requirements. Recent advancements in NAR models, such as diffusion…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
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

Mars: Situated Inductive Reasoning in an Open-World Environment

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on massive corpora have shown remarkable success in knowledge-intensive tasks. Yet, most of them rely on pre-stored knowledge. Inducing new general knowledge from a specific environment and performing reasoning with the acquired knowledge—situated inductive reaso…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Neural-Symbolic Recursive Machine for Systematic Generalization

ICLR 2024poster

Current learning models often struggle with human-like systematic generalization, particularly in learning compositional rules from limited data and extrapolating them to novel combinations. We introduce the Neural-Symbolic Recursive Ma- chine ( NSR), whose core is a Grounded Symbol System ( GSS), a…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
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

ProAgent: Building Proactive Cooperative Agents with Large Language Models

AAAI 2024technical

Building agents with adaptive behavior in cooperative tasks stands as a paramount goal in the realm of multi-agent systems. Current approaches to developing cooperative agents rely primarily on learning-based methods, whose policy generalization depends heavily on the diversity of teammates they int…

2024

RulE: Knowledge Graph Reasoning with Rule Embedding

ACL 2024findings

Knowledge graph reasoning is an important problem for knowledge graphs. In this paper, we propose a novel and principled framework called RulE (stands for Rule Embedding) to effectively leverage logical rules to enhance KG reasoning. Unlike knowledge graph embedding methods, RulE learns rule embeddi…

2024

Selecting Large Language Model to Fine-tune via Rectified Scaling Law

ICML 2024poster

The ever-growing ecosystem of LLMs has posed a challenge in selecting the most appropriate pre-trained model to fine-tune amidst a sea of options. Given constrained resources, fine-tuning all models and making selections afterward is unrealistic. In this work, we formulate this resource-constrained…

2024

TFG: Unified Training-Free Guidance for Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

Given an unconditional diffusion model and a predictor for a target property of interest (e.g., a classifier), the goal of training-free guidance is to generate samples with desirable target properties without additional training. Existing methods, though effective in various individual applications…

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

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

Out-of-Distribution Generalization by Neural-Symbolic Joint Training

AAAI 2023technical

This paper develops a novel methodology to simultaneously learn a neural network and extract generalized logic rules. Different from prior neural-symbolic methods that require background knowledge and candidate logical rules to be provided, we aim to induce task semantics with minimal priors. This i…

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…

2023

Understanding the Distillation Process from Deep Generative Models to Tractable Probabilistic Circuits

ICML 2023poster

Probabilistic Circuits (PCs) are a general and unified computational framework for tractable probabilistic models that support efficient computation of various inference tasks (e.g., computing marginal probabilities). Towards enabling such reasoning capabilities in complex real-world tasks, Liu et a…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2022

Efficient Meta Reinforcement Learning for Preference-based Fast Adaptation

NeurIPS 2022accept

Learning new task-specific skills from a few trials is a fundamental challenge for artificial intelligence. Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) tackles this problem by learning transferable policies that support few-shot adaptation to unseen tasks. Despite recent advances in meta-RL, most existing…

2020

SAM: Squeeze-and-Mimic Networks for Conditional Visual Driving Policy Learning

CoRL 2020

We describe a policy learning approach to map visual inputs to driving controls conditioned on turning command that leverages side tasks on semantics and object affordances via a learned representation trained for driving. To learn this representation, we train a squeeze network to drive using annot

2019

On Tractable Computation of Expected Predictions

NeurIPS 2019poster

Computing expected predictions of discriminative models is a fundamental task in machine learning that appears in many interesting applications such as fairness, handling missing values, and data analysis. Unfortunately, computing expectations of a discriminative model with respect to a probability…

2018

A Semantic Loss Function for Deep Learning with Symbolic Knowledge

ICML 2018oral

This paper develops a novel methodology for using symbolic knowledge in deep learning. From first principles, we derive a semantic loss function that bridges between neural output vectors and logical constraints. This loss function captures how close the neural network is to satisfying the constrain…

2018

Inference Aided Reinforcement Learning for Incentive Mechanism Design in Crowdsourcing

NeurIPS 2018poster

Incentive mechanisms for crowdsourcing are designed to incentivize financially self-interested workers to generate and report high-quality labels. Existing mechanisms are often developed as one-shot static solutions, assuming a certain level of knowledge about worker models (expertise levels, costs…

Cited by 31SourcePDFScholar