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Ziming Liu

36 accepted papers

2026

From Kepler to Newton: Inductive Biases Guide Learned World Models in Transformers

ICML 2026poster

Vafa et al. recently showed that a transformer fails to acquire an internal Newtonian world model when trained on synthetic planetary-motion data. How can we fix this problem? We find that inductive biases are key to learning the veridical world model: (1) **Spatial smoothness** is required for any …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

KANO: Kolmogorov-Arnold Neural Operator

ICLR 2026poster

We introduce Kolmogorov–Arnold Neural Operator (KANO), a dual‑domain neural operator jointly parameterized by both spectral and spatial bases with intrinsic symbolic interpretability. We theoretically demonstrate that KANO overcomes the pure-spectral bottleneck of Fourier Neural Operator (FNO): KANO…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Region-Adaptive Sampling for Diffusion Transformers

CVPR 2026

Diffusion models (DMs) have become the state-of-the-art for generative tasks across domains, but their reliance on sequential forward passes limits real-time performance. Prior acceleration methods mainly reduce sampling steps or reuse intermediate results. Leveraging the flexibility of Diffusion Tr

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

DSP: Dynamic Sequence Parallelism for Multi-Dimensional Transformers

ICML 2025poster

Scaling multi-dimensional transformers to long sequences is indispensable across various domains. However, the challenges of large memory requirements and slow speeds of such sequences necessitate sequence parallelism. All existing approaches fall under the category of embedded sequence parallelism,…

2025

Delving into Mapping Uncertainty for Mapless Trajectory Prediction

IROS 2025

Recent advances in autonomous driving are moving towards mapless approaches, where High-Definition (HD) maps are generated online directly from sensor data, reducing the need for expensive labeling and maintenance. However, the reliability of these online-generated maps remains uncertain. While inco

Cited by 4SourcecodeScholar
2025

Epsilon: Exploring Comprehensive Visual-Semantic Projection for Multi-Label Zero-Shot Learning

AAAI 2025technical

This paper investigates a challenging problem of zero-shot learning in the multi-label scenario (MLZSL), wherein the model is trained to recognize multiple unseen classes within a sample (e.g., an image) based on seen classes and auxiliary knowledge, e.g., semantic information. Existing methods usua…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2025

IMVPR: Implicit BEV-Enhanced Multi-View Aggregation for Visual Place Recognition

IROS 2025

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is essential for robotics and autonomous driving, enabling localization by matching current observations with a database of known places. While monocular VPR methods rely on visual features, they are sensitive to environmental changes, and multimodal approaches using L

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Impromptu VLA: Open Weights and Open Data for Driving Vision-Language-Action Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for autonomous driving show promise but falter in unstructured corner case scenarios, largely due to a scarcity of targeted benchmarks. To address this, we introduce Impromptu VLA. Our core contribution is the Impromptu VLA Dataset: over 80,000 meticulously curate…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

KAN: Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks

ICLR 2025oral

Inspired by the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem, we propose Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) as promising alternatives to Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs). While MLPs have fixed activation functions on nodes ("neurons''), KANs have learnable activation functions on edges ("weights''). KANs h…

2025

Reusing Attention for One-stage Lane Topology Understanding

IROS 2025

Understanding lane topology relationships accurately is critical for safe autonomous driving. However, existing two-stage methods suffer from inefficiencies due to error propagations and increased computational overheads. To address these challenges, we propose a one-stage architecture that simultan

Cited by 6SourcecodeScholar
2025

StarTrail: Concentric Ring Sequence Parallelism for Efficient Near-Infinite-Context Transformer Model Training

NeurIPS 2025poster

Training Transformer models on long sequences in a distributed setting poses significant challenges in terms of efficiency and scalability. Current methods are either constrained by the number of attention heads or excessive communication overheads. To address this problem, we propose StarTrail, a m…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Easing Concept Bleeding in Diffusion via Entity Localization and Anchoring

ICML 2024poster

Recent diffusion models have manifested extraordinary capabilities in generating high-quality, diverse, and innovative images guided by textual prompts. Nevertheless, these state-of-the-art models may encounter the challenge of concept bleeding when generating images with multiple entities or attrib…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

ParsNets: A Parsimonious Composition of Orthogonal and Low-Rank Linear Networks for Zero-Shot Learning

IJCAI 2024poster

This paper provides a novel parsimonious yet efficient design for zero-shot learning (ZSL), dubbed ParsNets, in which we are interested in learning a composition of on-device friendly linear networks, each with orthogonality and low-rankness properties, to achieve equivalent or better performance ag…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2024

ProCC: Progressive Cross-Primitive Compatibility for Open-World Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

AAAI 2024technical

Open-World Compositional Zero-shot Learning (OW-CZSL) aims to recognize novel compositions of state and object primitives in images with no priors on the compositional space, which induces a tremendously large output space containing all possible state-object compositions. Existing works either lear…

2024

The Joint Grid-Free DOA and Polarization Estimation Algorithm based on Atomic Norm Minimization

ICASSP 2024accepted

To address the issue of estimation accuracy degradation caused by off-grid in compressed sensing-based direction of arrival (DOA) estimation algorithms for polarized sensitive arrays, this paper proposes a joint estimation algorithm for two-dimensional DOA and polarization parameters based on the at…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

(ML)$^2$P-Encoder: On Exploration of Channel-Class Correlation for Multi-Label Zero-Shot Learning

CVPR 2023poster

Recent studies usually approach multi-label zero-shot learning (MLZSL) with visual-semantic mapping on spatial-class correlation, which can be computationally costly, and worse still, fails to capture fine-grained class-specific semantics. We observe that different channels may usually have differen…

2023

Anchor Sampling for Federated Learning with Partial Client Participation

ICML 2023poster

Compared with full client participation, partial client participation is a more practical scenario in federated learning, but it may amplify some challenges in federated learning, such as data heterogeneity. The lack of inactive clients' updates in partial client participation makes it more likely f…

2023

Graph Knows Unknowns: Reformulate Zero-Shot Learning as Sample-Level Graph Recognition

AAAI 2023technical

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) is an extreme case of transfer learning that aims to recognize samples (e.g., images) of unseen classes relying on a train-set covering only seen classes and a set of auxiliary knowledge (e.g., semantic descriptors). Existing methods usually resort to constructing a visual-t…

Cited by 67SourcePDFScholar
2023

PFGM++: Unlocking the Potential of Physics-Inspired Generative Models

ICML 2023poster

We introduce a new family of physics-inspired generative models termed PFGM++ that unifies diffusion models and Poisson Flow Generative Models (PFGM). These models realize generative trajectories for N dimensional data by embedding paths in N+D dimensional space while still controlling the progressi…

2023

Restart Sampling for Improving Generative Processes

NeurIPS 2023poster

Generative processes that involve solving differential equations, such as diffusion models, frequently necessitate balancing speed and quality. ODE-based samplers are fast but plateau in performance while SDE-based samplers deliver higher sample quality at the cost of increased sampling time. We at…

2023

The Clock and the Pizza: Two Stories in Mechanistic Explanation of Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2023oral

Do neural networks, trained on well-understood algorithmic tasks, reliably rediscover known algorithms? Several recent studies, on tasks ranging from group operations to in-context linear regression, have suggested that the answer is yes. Using modular addition as a prototypical problem, we show tha…

2023

Towards Test-Time Refusals via Concept Negation

NeurIPS 2023poster

Generative models produce unbounded outputs, necessitating the use of refusal techniques to confine their output space. Employing generative refusals is crucial in upholding the ethical and copyright integrity of synthesized content, particularly when working with widely adopted diffusion models. "C…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2022

Towards Understanding Grokking: An Effective Theory of Representation Learning

NeurIPS 2022accept

We aim to understand grokking, a phenomenon where models generalize long after overfitting their training set. We present both a microscopic analysis anchored by an effective theory and a macroscopic analysis of phase diagrams describing learning performance across hyperparameters. We find that gene…