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Ziliang Chen

28 accepted papers

2026

$\ell_1$ Latent Distance based Continuous-time Graph Representation

ICLR 2026poster

Continuous-time graph representation (CTGR) is a widely-used methodology in machine learning, physics, bioinformatics, and social networks. The sequential survival process in a latent space with the squared $\ell_2$ distance is an important ultra-low-dimensional embedding for CTGR. However, the squa…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

A Causal Marriage between VLM and IRM from Understanding to Reasoning

CVPR 2026

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP exhibit extraordinary out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, while the theoretical foundations underlying this robustness remain largely unexplored. This work establishes a connection between CLIP and Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM), the principled paradi

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

A Unified Total Variation Framework for Membrane Potential Perturbation Dynamic

ICLR 2026poster

Membrane potential perturbation dynamic (MPPD) is an emerging approach to capture perturbation intensity and stabilize the performance of spiking neural networks (SNN). It discards the neuronal reset part to intuitively reduce fluctuations of dynamics, but this treatment may be insufficient in pertu…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Failure-Driven Workflow Refinement

ICML 2026spotlight

Workflow optimization for tool-using LLM agents is often cast as global search over candidate graphs, scored by a scalar metric. This collapses rich, multi-step failure traces into binary outcomes, obscuring recurring failure structure and making refinement inefficient. We reframe optimization as \e…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Great Minds Think Alike: Contextual Tacit Communication for Decentralized LLM-Agent Cooperation

ICML 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as planners for cooperative embodied agents, but multi-agent settings amplify inconsistency under partial observability and make explicit communication costly or even unavailable. Many existing approaches rely on online message passing; when communi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Learning to See and Act: Task-Aware Virtual View Exploration for Robotic Manipulation

CVPR 2026

Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models for multi-task robot manipulation often rely on fixed camera setups and shared visual encoders, which limit their performance under occlusions and during cross-task transfer. To address these challenges, we propose Task-aware Virtual View Exploration (TVVE)

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

SOLAR for Offline MARL: Plateau-Triggered Potential Shaping under World-Model Uncertainty

ICML 2026poster

Reward shaping can accelerate reinforcement learning, but in sparse-reward \emph{offline} multi-agent RL it is often brittle: dense intrinsic rewards may alter the underlying Markov game, while world-model guidance can amplify model bias. We find that shaping becomes reliable when it is (i) activate…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Vocabulary Scaling Law: Tuning Open-vocabulary Predictors for Their Openness

CVPR 2026

Open-vocabulary learning on CLIP provides remarkable generalization on diverse concepts, however, falters under the realistic streaming open-world evaluations for Stability against distractor classes and Extensibility to novel classes. Current fine-tuning methods often fail these tests since they ar

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Why Keep Your Doubts to Yourself? Trading Visual Uncertainties in Multi-Agent Bandit Systems

ICLR 2026poster

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) enable powerful multi-agent systems, but scaling them is economically unsustainable: coordinating heterogeneous agents under information asymmetry often spirals costs. Existing paradigms, such as Mixture-of-Agents and knowledge-based routers, rely on heuristic proxies t…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Beyond the Destination: A Novel Benchmark for Exploration-Aware Embodied Question Answering

ICCV 2025poster

Embodied Question Answering (EQA) is a challenging task in embodied intelligence that requires agents to dynamically explore 3D environments, actively gather visual information, and perform multi-step reasoning to answer questions. However, current EQA approaches suffer from critical limitations in…

2025

De-singularity Subgradient for the q-th-Powered lₚ-Norm Weber Location Problem

AAAI 2025technical

The Weber location problem is widely used in several artificial intelligence scenarios. However, the gradient of the objective does not exist at a considerable set of singular points. Recently, a de-singularity subgradient method has been proposed to fix this problem, but it can only handle the q-th…

2025

HyperCRS: Hypergraph-Aware Multi-Grained Preference Learning to Burst Filter Bubbles in Conversational Recommendation System

ACL 2025finding

The filter bubble is a notorious issue in Recommender Systems (RSs), characterized by users being confined to a limited corpus of information or content that strengthens and amplifies their pre-established preferences and beliefs. Most existing methods primarily aim to analyze filter bubbles in the…

2025

Improvements to the Generate-and-Complete Approach to Conformant Planning

IJCAI 2025

Conformant planning is a computationally challenging task that generates an action sequence to achieve goal condition with uncertain initial states and non-deterministic actions. The generate-and-complete (in short, GC) approach shows superior performance on conformant planning, which iteratively en

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Language Models as Implicit Tree Search

ICML 2025poster

Despite advancing language model (LM) alignment, direct preference optimization (DPO) falls short in LM reasoning with the free lunch from reinforcement learning (RL). As the breakthrough, this work proposes a new RL-free preference optimization method aiming to achieve DPO along with learning anoth…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

MM-OPERA: Benchmarking Open-ended Association Reasoning for Large Vision-Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have exhibited remarkable progress. However, deficiencies remain compared to human intelligence, such as hallucination and shallow pattern matching. In this work, we aim to evaluate a fundamental yet underexplored intelligence: association, a cornerstone of human…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Quadratic Coreset Selection: Certifying and Reconciling Sequence and Token Mining for Efficient Instruction Tuning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Instruction-Tuning (IT) was recently found the impressive data efficiency in post-training large language models (LLMs). While the pursuit of efficiency predominantly focuses on sequence-level curation, often overlooking the nuanced impact of critical tokens and the inherent risks of token noise and…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Reproducible Vision-Language Models Meet Concepts Out of Pre-Training

CVPR 2025poster

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models as a milestone of modern multimodal intelligence, its generalization mechanism grasped massive research interests in the community. While existing studies limited in the scope of pre-training knowledge, hardly underpinned its generalization to co…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

A De-singularity Subgradient Approach for the Extended Weber Location Problem

IJCAI 2024poster

The extended Weber location problem is a classical optimization problem that has inspired some new works in several machine learning scenarios recently. However, most existing algorithms may get stuck due to the singularity at the data points when the power of the cost function 1\<= q<2, such as the…

2024

Diagnosing and Rectifying Fake OOD Invariance: A Restructured Causal Approach

AAAI 2024technical

Invariant representation learning (IRL) encourages the prediction from invariant causal features to labels deconfounded from the environments, advancing the technical roadmap of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. Despite spotlights around, recent theoretical result verified that some causal f…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

FacetCRS: Multi-Faceted Preference Learning for Pricking Filter Bubbles in Conversational Recommender System

AAAI 2024technical

The filter bubble is a notorious issue in Recommender Systems (RSs), which describes the phenomenon whereby users are exposed to a limited and narrow range of information or content that reinforces their existing dominant preferences and beliefs. This results in a lack of exposure to diverse and var…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

HyCoRec: Hypergraph-Enhanced Multi-Preference Learning for Alleviating Matthew Effect in Conversational Recommendation

ACL 2024long

The Matthew effect is a notorious issue in Recommender Systems (RSs), i.e., the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, wherein popular items are overexposed while less popular ones are regularly ignored. Most methods examine Matthew effect in static or nearly-static recommendation scenarios. Howev…

2023

A Retrospect to Multi-prompt Learning across Vision and Language

ICCV 2023poster

The vision community is undergoing the unprecedented progress with the emergence of Vision-Language Pretraining Models (VLMs). Prompt learning plays as the holy grail of accessing VLMs since it enables their fast adaptation to downstream tasks with limited resources. Whereas existing research millin…

Cited by 7PDFcodeScholar
2023

LAW-Diffusion: Complex Scene Generation by Diffusion with Layouts

ICCV 2023poster

Thanks to the rapid development of diffusion models, unprecedented progress has been witnessed in image synthesis. Prior works mostly rely on pre-trained linguistic models, but a text is often too abstract to properly specify all the spatial properties of an image, e.g., the layout configuration of…

Cited by 14PDFScholar
2021

Graph-Evolving Meta-Learning for Low-Resource Medical Dialogue Generation

AAAI 2021technical

Human doctors with well-structured medical knowledge can diagnose a disease merely via a few conversations with patients about symptoms. In contrast, existing knowledge-grounded dialogue systems often require a large number of dialogue instances to learn as they fail to capture the correlations betw…

2019

Blending-Target Domain Adaptation by Adversarial Meta-Adaptation Networks

CVPR 2019oral

(Unsupervised) Domain Adaptation (DA) seeks for classifying target instances when solely provided with source labeled and target unlabeled examples for training. Learning domain-invariant features helps to achieve this goal, whereas it underpins unlabeled samples drawn from a single or multiple expl…

Cited by 120PDFcodeScholar
2019

Meta R-CNN: Towards General Solver for Instance-Level Low-Shot Learning

ICCV 2019poster

Resembling the rapid learning capability of human, low-shot learning empowers vision systems to understand new concepts by training with few samples. Leading approaches derived from meta-learning on images with a single visual object. Obfuscated by a complex background and multiple objects in one im…

Cited by 651PDFcodeScholar
2019

Multivariate-Information Adversarial Ensemble for Scalable Joint Distribution Matching

ICML 2019oral

A broad range of cross-$m$-domain generation researches boil down to matching a joint distribution by deep generative models (DGMs). Hitherto algorithms excel in pairwise domains while as $m$ increases, remain struggling to scale themselves to fit a joint distribution. In this paper, we propose a dom…

2018

Deep Cocktail Network: Multi-Source Unsupervised Domain Adaptation With Category Shift

CVPR 2018poster

Most existing unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods are based upon the assumption that source labeled data come from an identical underlying distribution. Whereas in practical scenario, labeled instances are typically collected from diverse sources. Moreover, those sources may not completely…