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Ziqiao Ma

23 accepted papers

2026

ROVER: Benchmarking Reciprocal Cross-Modal Reasoning for Omnimodal Generation

ICLR 2026poster

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) have shown remarkable advances in jointly understanding and generating text and images. However, prevailing evaluations treat these abilities in isolation, such that tasks with multimodal inputs and outputs are scored primarily through unimodal reasoning: textual ben…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Tracing the Emergence of Symbol Grounding in Multimodal Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Symbol grounding (Harnad, 1990) describes how symbols such as words acquire their meanings by connecting to real-world sensorimotor experiences. Recent work has shown preliminary evidence that grounding may emerge in (vision-)language models trained at scale without using explicit grounding objectiv…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Vision Language Models Cannot Reason About Physical Transformation

ICML 2026poster

Understanding physical transformations is fundamental for reasoning in dynamic environments. While Vision Language Models (VLMs) show promise in embodied applications, whether they genuinely understand physical transformations remains unclear. We introduce ***ConservationBench*** evaluating ***conse…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

4D-LRM: Large Space-Time Reconstruction Model From and To Any View at Any Time

NeurIPS 2025poster

Can we scale 4D pretraining to learn general space-time representations that reconstruct an object from a few views at some times to any view at any time? We provide an affirmative answer with 4D-LRM, the first large-scale 4D reconstruction model that takes input from unconstrained views and timesta…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

AimBot: A Simple Auxiliary Visual Cue to Enhance Spatial Awareness of Visuomotor Policies

CoRL 2025poster

In this paper, we propose AimBot, a lightweight visual augmentation technique that provides explicit spatial cues to improve visuomotor policy learning in robotic manipulation. AimBot overlays shooting lines and scope reticles onto multi-view RGB images, offering auxiliary visual guidance that encod…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Babysit A Language Model From Scratch: Interactive Language Learning by Trials and Demonstrations

NAACL 2025long

Humans are efficient language learners and inherently social creatures. Our language development is largely shaped by our social interactions, for example, the demonstration and feedback from caregivers. Contrary to human language learning, recent advancements in large language models have primarily…

2025

Do Vision-Language Models Have Internal World Models? Towards an Atomic Evaluation

ACL 2025finding

Internal world models (WMs) enable agents to understand the world’s state and predict transitions, serving as the basis for advanced deliberative reasoning.Recent large Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as GPT-4o and Gemini, exhibit potential as general-purpose WMs. While the latest studies have e…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Do Vision-Language Models Represent Space and How? Evaluating Spatial Frame of Reference under Ambiguities

ICLR 2025oral

Spatial expressions in situated communication can be ambiguous, as their meanings vary depending on the frames of reference (FoR) adopted by speakers and listeners. While spatial language understanding and reasoning by vision-language models (VLMs) have gained increasing attention, potential ambigui…

2025

SimWorld: An Open-ended Simulator for Agents in Physical and Social Worlds

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

While LLM/VLM-powered AI agents have advanced rapidly in math, coding, and computer use, their applications in complex physical and social environments remain challenging. Building agents that can survive and thrive in the real world (e.g., by autonomously earning income) requires massive-scale inte…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Synthesizing Photorealistic and Dynamic Urban Environments for Multimodal Robot Navigation and Collaboration

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recent advances in foundation models have shown promising results in developing generalist robotics that can perform diverse tasks in open-ended scenarios given multimodal inputs. However, current work has been mainly focused on indoor, household scenarios. In this work, we present SimWorld-Robotics…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Training Turn-by-Turn Verifiers for Dialogue Tutoring Agents: The Curious Case of LLMs as Your Coding Tutors

ACL 2025finding

Intelligent tutoring agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly explored to deliver personalized knowledge in areas such as language learning and science education. However, their capabilities in guiding users to solve complex real-world tasks remain underexplored. To addr…

2024

DriVLMe: Enhancing LLM-based Autonomous Driving Agents with Embodied and Social Experiences

IROS 2024poster

Recent advancements in foundation models (FMs) have unlocked new prospects in autonomous driving, yet the experimental settings of these studies are preliminary, oversimplified, and fail to capture the complexity of real-world driving scenarios in human environments. It remains under-explored whethe…

Cited by 20SourcecodeScholar
2024

GROUNDHOG: Grounding Large Language Models to Holistic Segmentation

CVPR 2024poster

Most multimodal large language models (MLLMs) learn language-to-object grounding through causal language modeling where grounded objects are captured by bounding boxes as sequences of location tokens. This paradigm lacks pixel-level representations that are important for fine-grained visual understa…

Cited by 47SourcePDFScholar
2024

Inversion-Free Image Editing with Language-Guided Diffusion Models

CVPR 2024poster

Despite recent advances in inversion-based editing text-guided image manipulation remains challenging for diffusion models. The primary bottlenecks include 1) the time-consuming nature of the inversion process; 2) the struggle to balance consistency with accuracy; 3) the lack of compatibility with e…

2024

Multi-Object Hallucination in Vision Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large vision language models (LVLMs) often suffer from object hallucination, producing objects not present in the given images. While current benchmarks for object hallucination primarily concentrate on the presence of a single object class rather than individual entities, this work systematically…

2023

CycleNet: Rethinking Cycle Consistency in Text-Guided Diffusion for Image Manipulation

NeurIPS 2023poster

Diffusion models (DMs) have enabled breakthroughs in image synthesis tasks but lack an intuitive interface for consistent image-to-image (I2I) translation. Various methods have been explored to address this issue, including mask-based methods, attention-based methods, and image-conditioning. However…

2023

NLP Reproducibility For All: Understanding Experiences of Beginners

ACL 2023long

As natural language processing (NLP) has recently seen an unprecedented level of excitement, and more people are eager to enter the field, it is unclear whether current research reproducibility efforts are sufficient for this group of beginners to apply the latest developments. To understand their n…

2023

Towards A Holistic Landscape of Situated Theory of Mind in Large Language Models

EMNLP 2023long findings

Large Language Models (LLMs) have generated considerable interest and debate regarding their potential emergence of Theory of Mind (ToM). Several recent inquiries reveal a lack of robust ToM in these models and pose a pressing demand to develop new benchmarks, as current ones primarily focus on diff…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Towards Collaborative Plan Acquisition through Theory of Mind Modeling in Situated Dialogue

IJCAI 2023poster

Collaborative tasks often begin with partial task knowledge and incomplete plans from each partner. To complete these tasks, partners need to engage in situated communication with their partners and coordinate their partial plans towards a complete plan to achieve a joint task goal. While such c…

2023

World-to-Words: Grounded Open Vocabulary Acquisition through Fast Mapping in Vision-Language Models

ACL 2023long

The ability to connect language units to their referents in the physical world, referred to as grounding, is crucial to learning and understanding grounded meanings of words. While humans demonstrate fast mapping in new word learning, it remains unclear whether modern vision-language models can trul…

2022

DANLI: Deliberative Agent for Following Natural Language Instructions

EMNLP 2022main

Recent years have seen an increasing amount of work on embodied AI agents that can perform tasks by following human language instructions. However, most of these agents are reactive, meaning that they simply learn and imitate behaviors encountered in the training data. These reactive agents are insu…

2022

DOROTHIE: Spoken Dialogue for Handling Unexpected Situations in Interactive Autonomous Driving Agents

EMNLP 2022finding

In the real world, autonomous driving agents navigate in highly dynamic environments full of unexpected situations where pre-trained models are unreliable. In these situations, what is immediately available to vehicles is often only human operators. Empowering autonomous driving agents with the abil…