← Search

Yuexiang Zhai

13 accepted papers

2026

Seeing from Another Perspective: Evaluating Multi-View Understanding in MLLMs

AAAI 2026technical

Multi-view understanding, the ability to reconcile visual information across diverse viewpoints for effective navigation, manipulation, and 3D scene comprehension, is a fundamental challenge in Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to be used as embodied agents. While recent MLLMs have shown im

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

LMRL Gym: Benchmarks for Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning with Language Models

ICML 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) provide excellent text-generation capabilities, but standard prompting and generation methods generally do not lead to intentional or goal-directed agents and might necessitate considerable prompt tuning. Even the best current LLMs rarely ask clarifying questions, engage…

2025

SFT Memorizes, RL Generalizes: A Comparative Study of Foundation Model Post-training

ICML 2025poster

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) are widely used post-training techniques for foundation models. However, their roles in enhancing model generalization capabilities remain unclear. This paper studies the difference between SFT and RL on generalization and memorization, fo…

Cited by 72SourcePDFScholar
2024

Eyes Wide Shut? Exploring the Visual Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs

CVPR 2024poster

Is vision good enough for language? Recent advancements in multimodal models primarily stem from the powerful reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However the visual component typically depends only on the instance-level contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP). Our research re…

2024

Fine-Tuning Large Vision-Language Models as Decision-Making Agents via Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large vision-language models (VLMs) fine-tuned on specialized visual instruction-following data have exhibited impressive language reasoning capabilities across various scenarios. However, this fine-tuning paradigm may not be able to efficiently learn optimal decision-making agents in multi-step goa…

Cited by 68SourcePDFScholar
2024

RLIF: Interactive Imitation Learning as Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2024poster

Although reinforcement learning methods offer a powerful framework for auto- matic skill acquisition, for practical learning-based control problems in domains such as robotics, imitation learning often provides a more convenient and accessible alternative. In particular, an interactive imitation lea…

2023

Cal-QL: Calibrated Offline RL Pre-Training for Efficient Online Fine-Tuning

NeurIPS 2023poster

A compelling use case of offline reinforcement learning (RL) is to obtain a policy initialization from existing datasets followed by fast online fine-tuning with limited interaction. However, existing offline RL methods tend to behave poorly during fine-tuning. In this paper, we devise an approach f…

2023

Understanding the Complexity Gains of Single-Task RL with a Curriculum

ICML 2023poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems can be challenging without well-shaped rewards. Prior work on provably efficient RL methods generally proposes to address this issue with dedicated exploration strategies. However, another way to tackle this challenge is to reformulate it as a multi-task RL probl…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2022

Unpacking Reward Shaping: Understanding the Benefits of Reward Engineering on Sample Complexity

NeurIPS 2022accept

The success of reinforcement learning in a variety of challenging sequential decision-making problems has been much discussed, but often ignored in this discussion is the consideration of how the choice of reward function affects the behavior of these algorithms. Most practical RL algorithms require…

Cited by 83SourcePDFScholar
2021

Convolutional Normalization: Improving Deep Convolutional Network Robustness and Training

NeurIPS 2021poster

Normalization techniques have become a basic component in modern convolutional neural networks (ConvNets). In particular, many recent works demonstrate that promoting the orthogonality of the weights helps train deep models and improve robustness. For ConvNets, most existing methods are based on pen…

2020

Geometric Analysis of Nonconvex Optimization Landscapes for Overcomplete Learning

ICLR 2020talk

Learning overcomplete representations finds many applications in machine learning and data analytics. In the past decade, despite the empirical success of heuristic methods, theoretical understandings and explanations of these algorithms are still far from satisfactory. In this work, we provide new…

Cited by 33SourceScholar
2020

Understanding l4-based Dictionary Learning: Interpretation, Stability, and Robustness

ICLR 2020poster

Recently, the $\ell^4$-norm maximization has been proposed to solve the sparse dictionary learning (SDL) problem. The simple MSP (matching, stretching, and projection) algorithm proposed by \cite{zhai2019a} has proved surprisingly efficient and effective. This paper aims to better understand this a…

Cited by 25SourcecodeScholar
2019

Learning to Reconstruct 3D Manhattan Wireframes From a Single Image

ICCV 2019oral

From a single view of an urban environment, we propose a method to effectively exploit the global structural regularities for obtaining a compact, accurate, and intuitive 3D wireframe representation. Our method trains a single convolutional neural network to simultaneously detect salient junctions a…

Cited by 83PDFcodeScholar