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lin yang

115 accepted papers

2026

A²Flow: Automating Agentic Workflow Generation via Self-Adaptive Abstraction Operators

AAAI 2026technical

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong potential in automating the design of agentic workflows. However, existing methods still rely heavily on manually predefined operators, limiting generalization and scalability. To address this issue, we propose A²Flow, a fully automated framework for ag

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Boosting Multi-Domain Reasoning of LLMs via Curvature-Guided Policy Optimization

ICLR 2026poster

Multi-domain reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) involves highly intricate reward surfaces, posing significant challenges in finding parameters that excel across all domains. Recent empirical studies have further highlighted conflicts among domains, where gains in one capabi…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

CodeDance: A Dynamic Tool-integrated MLLM for Executable Visual Reasoning

CVPR 2026

Recent releases such as o3 highlight human-like "thinking with images" reasoning that combines tool use with stepwise verification, yet most open-source approaches still rely on text-only chains, rigid visual schemas, or single-step pipelines, limiting flexibility, interpretability, and transferabil

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Factored Causal Representation Learning for Robust Reward Modeling in RLHF

ICML 2026poster

A reliable reward model is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). However, standard reward models are susceptible to spurious features that are not causally related to human labels. This can lead to *rewar…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Following the Navigation: Enhancing Small Language Models Contextual Reasoning with LLM Guidance

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs), such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, excel in contextual reasoning by leveraging extensive world knowledge and deep contextual understanding. However, their high computational costs limit deployment in resource-constrained settings. Conversely, small language models (SLMs…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Latent-Guided Reasoning: Empowering Small LLMs with Large-Model Thinking

ICLR 2026poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks, but their high computational costs limit their widespread practical application. We argue that this inefficiency arises from the tight coupling of high-level cognitive planning (devising the solution s…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

MIRA: Evaluating Multimodal AI on Complex Clinical Reasoning in Interventional Radiology

AAAI 2026technical

We present MIRA (Multimodal Interventional RAdiology evaluation), a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating large multimodal models in expert-level interventional radiology tasks requiring specialized domain knowledge and advanced visual reasoning capabilities. Unlike existing medical benchmarks that

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Spatio-Temporal Difference Guided Motion Deblurring with the Complementary Vision Sensor

CVPR 2026

Motion blur arises when rapid scene changes occur during the exposure period, collapsing rich intra-exposure motion into a single RGB frame. Without explicit structural or temporal cues, RGB-only deblurring is highly ill-posed and often fails under extreme motion. Inspired by the human visual system

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Towards Effective and Efficient Context-aware Nucleus Detection in Histopathology Whole Slide Images

AAAI 2026technical

Nucleus detection in histopathology whole slide images (WSIs) is crucial for a broad spectrum of clinical applications. The gigapixel size of WSIs necessitates the use of sliding window methodology for nucleus detection. However, mainstream methods process each sliding window independently, which ov

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

A Planning Framework for Stable Robust Multi-Contact Manipulation

IROS 2025

While modeling multi-contact manipulation as a quasi-static mechanical process transitioning between different contact equilibria, we propose formulating it as a planning and optimization problem, explicitly evaluating (i) contact stability and (ii) robustness to sensor noise. Specifically, we condu

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2025

A Robust Distributed Recurrent Neural Network for Multi-Agent Consensus Control

ICASSP 2025accepted

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are widely used in control system due to their dynamic capabilities. However, the control accuracy of RNN-based systems can be compromised by noise interference, and there has been little research on RNN-based control in disturbed multi-agent systems. To address this…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Boosting Multi-Domain Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models through Evolving Interactions between Samples

ICML 2025poster

The multi-domain fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) confronts a notorious trade-off among abilities across domains. Existing studies attribute this trade-off to the conflicts between samples rooted in inherent semantics. Recent approaches attempt to mitigate these conflicts through the empi…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Breaking the Frozen Subspace: Importance Sampling for Low-Rank Optimization in LLM Pretraining

NeurIPS 2025poster

Low-rank optimization has emerged as a promising approach to enabling memory-efficient training of large language models (LLMs). Existing low-rank optimization methods typically project gradients onto a low-rank subspace, reducing the memory cost of storing optimizer states. A key challenge in these…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

CPath-Omni: A Unified Multimodal Foundation Model for Patch and Whole Slide Image Analysis in Computational Pathology

CVPR 2025poster

The emergence of large multimodal models (LMMs) has brought significant advancements to pathology. Previous research has primarily focused on separately training patch-level and whole-slide image (WSI)-level models, limiting the integration of learned knowledge across patches and WSIs and resulting…

2025

CPathAgent: An Agent-based Foundation Model for Interpretable High-Resolution Pathology Image Analysis Mimicking Pathologists' Diagnostic Logic

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recent advances in computational pathology have led to the emergence of numerous foundation models. These models typically rely on general-purpose encoders with multi-instance learning for whole slide image (WSI) classification or apply multimodal approaches to generate reports directly from images.…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Combinatorial Ski Rental Problem: Robust and Learning-Augmented Algorithms

NeurIPS 2025poster

We introduce and study the Combinatorial Ski Rental (CSR) problem, which involves multiple items that can be rented or purchased, either individually or in combination. At each time step, a decision-maker must make an irrevocable buy-or-rent decision for items that have not yet been purchased, witho…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Deployment Efficient Reward-Free Exploration with Linear Function Approximation

NeurIPS 2025poster

We study deployment-efficient reward-free exploration with linear function approximation, where the goal is to explore a linear Markov Decision Process (MDP) without revealing the reward function, while minimizing the number of distinct policies implemented during learning. By ``deployment efficient…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Federated Multi-armed Bandits with Efficient Bit-Level Communications

NeurIPS 2025poster

In this work, we study the federated multi-armed bandit (FMAB) problem, where a set of distributed agents collaboratively aim to minimize cumulative regret while interacting with a shared set of arms. Unlike traditional centralized bandit models, agents in FMAB settings are connected via a communica…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Hyper: Hyperparameter Robust Efficient Exploration in Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2025poster

The exploration \& exploitation dilemma poses significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, curiosity-based exploration methods achieved great success in tackling hard-exploration problems. However, they necessitate extensive hyperparameter tuning on different environments, which…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Intrusion Detection for Intelligent Transportation Systems: A lightweight interpretable model

ICASSP 2025accepted

Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are essential in Intelligent transportation system (ITS) for detecting and identifying malicious activities. Although deep learning is commonly used in IDS, its limited interpretability hinders large-scale deployment. Additionally, the computational and storage con…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Large-scale and Fine-grained Vision-language Pre-training for Enhanced CT Image Understanding

ICLR 2025spotlight

Artificial intelligence (AI) shows great potential in assisting radiologists to improve the efficiency and accuracy of medical image interpretation and diagnosis. However, a versatile AI model requires large-scale data and comprehensive annotations, which are often impractical in medical settings. R…

2025

LogicTree: Improving Complex Reasoning of LLMs via Instantiated Multi-step Synthetic Logical Data

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Despite their remarkable performance on various tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) still struggle with logical reasoning, particularly in complex and multi-step reasoning processes. Among various efforts to enhance LLMs' reasoning capabilities, synthesizing large-scale, high-quality logical reason…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Misspecified $Q$-Learning with Sparse Linear Function Approximation: Tight Bounds on Approximation Error

ICLR 2025poster

The recent work by Dong and Yang (2023) showed for misspecified sparse linear bandits, one can obtain an $O(\epsilon)$-optimal policy using a polynomial number of samples when the sparsity is a constant, where $\epsilon$ is the misspecification error. This result is in sharp contrast to misspecified…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Near-Optimal Regret Bounds for Federated Multi-armed Bandits with Fully Distributed Communication

UAI 2025

In this paper, we focus on the research of federated multi-armed bandit (FMAB) problems where agents can only communicate with their neighbors. All agents aim to solve a common multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem to minimize individual regrets, while group regret can also be minimized. In a federated b

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

PathGen-1.6M: 1.6 Million Pathology Image-text Pairs Generation through Multi-agent Collaboration

ICLR 2025oral

Vision Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have attracted substantial attention in pathology, serving as backbones for applications such as zero-shot image classification and Whole Slide Image (WSI) analysis. Additionally, they can function as vision encoders when combined with large language models (L…

2025

PathVQ: Reforming Computational Pathology Foundation Model for Whole Slide Image Analysis via Vector Quantization

NeurIPS 2025poster

Pathology whole slide image (WSI) analysis is vital for disease diagnosis and understanding. While foundation models (FMs) have driven recent advances, their scalability in pathology remains a key challenge. In particular, vision-language (VL) pathology FMs align visual features with language annota…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Planning for Quasi-Static Manipulation Tasks via an Intrinsic Haptic Metric: A Book Insertion Case Study

RA-L 2025

Contact-rich manipulation often requires strategic interactions with objects, such as pushing to accomplish specific tasks. We propose a novel scenario where a robot inserts a book into a crowded shelf by pushing aside neighboring books to create space before slotting the new book into place. Classi

Cited by 8SourceScholar
2025

Regret-Optimal List Replicable Bandit Learning: Matching Upper and Lower Bounds

ICLR 2025poster

This paper investigates *list replicability* [Dixon et al., 2023] in the context of multi-armed (also linear) bandits (MAB). We define an algorithm $A$ for MAB to be $(\ell,\delta)$-list replicable if with probability at least $1-\delta$, $A$ has at most $\ell$ traces in independent executions even…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

SD-VLM: Spatial Measuring and Understanding with Depth-Encoded Vision-Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

While vision language models (VLMs) excel in 2D semantic visual understanding, their ability to quantitatively reason about 3D spatial relationships remains underexplored due to the deficiency of spatial representation ability of 2D images. In this paper, we analyze the problem hindering VLMs’ spat…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Stable Test-Time Training for Semantic Segmentation with Output Contrastive Loss

ICASSP 2025accepted

Deep learning-based models have achieved impressive performance on public segmentation benchmarks, yet generalizing to unseen environments remains challenging. Test-time training (TTT) addresses this by adapting source-pretrained models during evaluation. While existing TTT methods have shown promis…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Trajectory Graph Learning: Aligning with Long Trajectories in Reinforcement Learning Without Reward Design

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Reinforcement learning (RL) often relies on manually designed reward functions, which are difficult to specify and can lead to issues such as reward hacking and suboptimal behavior. Alternatives like inverse RL and preference-based RL attempt to infer surrogate rewards from demonstrations or prefere…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

VETA-DiT: Variance-Equalized and Temporally Adaptive Quantization for Efficient 4-bit Diffusion Transformers

NeurIPS 2025poster

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have recently demonstrated remarkable performance in visual generation tasks, surpassing traditional U-Net-based diffusion models by significantly improving image and video generation quality and scalability. However, the large model size and iterative denoising process…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2024

Confident Natural Policy Gradient for Local Planning in $q_\pi$-realizable Constrained MDPs

NeurIPS 2024poster

The constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) framework emerges as an important reinforcement learning approach for imposing safety or other critical objectives while maximizing cumulative reward. However, the current understanding of how to learn efficiently in a CMDP environment with a potentiall…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

DPA-P2PNet: Deformable Proposal-Aware P2PNet for Accurate Point-Based Cell Detection

AAAI 2024technical

Point-based cell detection (PCD), which pursues high-performance cell sensing under low-cost data annotation, has garnered increased attention in computational pathology community. Unlike mainstream PCD methods that rely on intermediate density map representations, the Point-to-Point network (P2PNet…

2024

HLS-FGVC: Hierarchical Label Semantics Enhanced Fine-Grained Visual Classification

ICASSP 2024accepted

Fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) intends to confirm the sub-classes of a specific object category, e.g., identifying the species of dogs or birds. It is a challenging problem with the inter-class similarity among these sub-categories and intra-class variance in every fine-grained class. Mos…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Hierarchical Human Motion Intention Prediction for Increasing Efficacy of Human-Robot Collaboration

RA-L 2024

When humans and robots work together to accomplish tasks with dynamic uncertainty, the robots should perceive human motion intentions so as to cooperate with humans and increase efficacy. In this study, we propose a hierarchical motion intention prediction model for human-robot collaboration, in whi

Cited by 8SourceScholar
2024

Horizon-Free and Instance-Dependent Regret Bounds for Reinforcement Learning with General Function Approximation

AISTATS 2024poster

To tackle long planning horizon problems in reinforcement learning with general function approximation, we propose the first algorithm, termed as UCRL-WVTR, that achieves both \emph{horizon-free} and \emph{instance-dependent}, since it eliminates the polynomial dependency on the planning horizon. Th…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

LLMEmbed: Rethinking Lightweight LLM’s Genuine Function in Text Classification

ACL 2024long

With the booming of Large Language Models (LLMs), prompt-learning has become a promising method mainly researched in various research areas. Recently, many attempts based on prompt-learning have been made to improve the performance of text classification. However, most of these methods are based on…

2024

Multi-Agent Bandit Learning through Heterogeneous Action Erasure Channels

AISTATS 2024poster

Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) systems are witnessing an upswing in applications within multi-agent distributed environments, leading to the advancement of collaborative MAB algorithms. In such settings, communication between agents executing actions and the primary learner making decisions can hinder the…

2024

PathAsst: A Generative Foundation AI Assistant towards Artificial General Intelligence of Pathology

AAAI 2024technical

As advances in large language models (LLMs) and multimodal techniques continue to mature, the development of general-purpose multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has surged, offering significant applications in interpreting natural images. However, the field of pathology has largely remained unt…

2024

Rethinking Transformer for Long Contextual Histopathology Whole Slide Image Analysis

NeurIPS 2024poster

Histopathology Whole Slide Image (WSI) analysis serves as the gold standard for clinical cancer diagnosis in the daily routines of doctors. To develop computer-aided diagnosis model for histopathology WSIs, previous methods typically employ Multi-Instance Learning to enable slide-level prediction gi…

2024

Robotic valve turning: axial misalignment estimation from reaction torques

IROS 2024poster

In this work, we present a simplified quasi-static model of a two-point contact gripper turning a circular valve to predict the reaction torques produced at the base of the valve as a function of the axis misalignment. Specifically, we learned that geometric features such as (i) the misalignment vec…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Uniform Last-Iterate Guarantee for Bandits and Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Existing metrics for reinforcement learning (RL) such as regret, PAC bounds, or uniform-PAC (Dann et al., 2017), typically evaluate the cumulative performance, while allowing the play of an arbitrarily bad policy at any finite time t. Such a behavior can be highly detrimental in high-stakes applicat…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2023

Achieving Near-Optimal Individual Regret & Low Communications in Multi-Agent Bandits

ICLR 2023poster

Cooperative multi-agent multi-armed bandits (CM2AB) study how distributed agents cooperatively play the same multi-armed bandit game. Most existing CM2AB works focused on maximizing the group performance of all agents---the accumulation of all agents' individual performance (i.e., individual reward)…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2023

Assessing the Robustness of Deep Learning-Assisted Pathological Image Analysis Under Practical Variables of Imaging System

ICASSP 2023accepted

With the advancement of deep learning, computer-assisted clinical diagnosis, such as liquid-based cervical cytology, has attracted more attention. However, the fragile robustness of deep learning models has a non-negligible impact on their classification accuracy and reliability. To be more specific…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Distributed Contextual Linear Bandits with Minimax Optimal Communication Cost

ICML 2023poster

We study distributed contextual linear bandits with stochastic contexts, where $N$ agents/learners act cooperatively to solve a linear bandit-optimization problem with $d$-dimensional features over the course of $T$ rounds. For this problem, we derive the first ever information-theoretic lower bound…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2023

Efficient Batched Algorithm for Contextual Linear Bandits with Large Action Space via Soft Elimination

NeurIPS 2023poster

In this paper, we provide the first efficient batched algorithm for contextual linear bandits with large action spaces. Unlike existing batched algorithms that rely on action elimination, which are not implementable for large action sets, our algorithm only uses a linear optimization oracle over the…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2023

Efficient Robust Bayesian Optimization for Arbitrary Uncertain inputs

NeurIPS 2023poster

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a sample-efficient optimization algorithm widely employed across various applications. In some challenging BO tasks, input uncertainty arises due to the inevitable randomness in the optimization process, such as machining errors, execution noise, or contextual variabili…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2023

Exploration for Free: How Does Reward Heterogeneity Improve Regret in Cooperative Multi-agent Bandits?

UAI 2023poster

This paper studies a cooperative multi-agent bandit scenario in which the rewards observed by agents are heterogeneous—one agent’s meat can be another agent’s poison. Specifically, the total reward observed by each agent is the sum of two values: an arm-specific reward, capturing the intrinsic value…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2023

Horizon-free Learning for Markov Decision Processes and Games: Stochastically Bounded Rewards and Improved Bounds

ICML 2023poster

Horizon dependence is an important difference between reinforcement learning and other machine learning paradigms. Yet, existing results tackling the (exact) horizon dependence either assume that the reward is bounded per step, introducing unfair comparison, or assume strict total boundedness that r…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2023

Low-Switching Policy Gradient with Exploration via Online Sensitivity Sampling

ICML 2023poster

Policy optimization methods are powerful algorithms in Reinforcement Learning (RL) for their flexibility to deal with policy parameterization and ability to handle model misspecification. However, these methods usually suffer from slow convergence rates and poor sample complexity. Hence it is import…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2023

MetaVL: Transferring In-Context Learning Ability From Language Models to Vision-Language Models

ACL 2023short

Large-scale language models have shown the ability to adapt to a new task via conditioning on a few demonstrations (i.e., in-context learning). However, in the vision-language domain, most large-scale pre-trained vision-language (VL) models do not possess the ability to conduct in-context learning.…

2023

On-Demand Communication for Asynchronous Multi-Agent Bandits

AISTATS 2023poster

This paper studies a cooperative multi-agent multi-armed stochastic bandit problem where agents operate asynchronously – agent pull times and rates are unknown, irregular, and heterogeneous – and face the same instance of a K-armed bandit problem. Agents can share reward information to speed up the…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2023

Provably Efficient Lifelong Reinforcement Learning with Linear Representation

ICLR 2023poster

We theoretically study lifelong reinforcement learning (RL) with linear representation in a regret minimization setting. The goal of the agent is to learn a multi-task policy based on a linear representation while solving a sequence of tasks that may be adaptively chosen based on the agent's past be…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2023

Tackling Heavy-Tailed Rewards in Reinforcement Learning with Function Approximation: Minimax Optimal and Instance-Dependent Regret Bounds

NeurIPS 2023poster

While numerous works have focused on devising efficient algorithms for reinforcement learning (RL) with uniformly bounded rewards, it remains an open question whether sample or time-efficient algorithms for RL with large state-action space exist when the rewards are \emph{heavy-tailed}, i.e., with o…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2023

Task-Specific Fine-Tuning via Variational Information Bottleneck for Weakly-Supervised Pathology Whole Slide Image Classification

CVPR 2023poster

While Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) has shown promising results in digital Pathology Whole Slide Image (WSI) analysis, such a paradigm still faces performance and generalization problems due to high computational costs and limited supervision of Gigapixel WSIs. To deal with the computation proble…

2022

Cross-Patch Dense Contrastive Learning for Semi-Supervised Segmentation of Cellular Nuclei in Histopathologic Images

CVPR 2022poster

We study the semi-supervised learning problem, using a few labeled data and a large amount of unlabeled data to train the network, by developing a cross-patch dense contrastive learning framework, to segment cellular nuclei in histopathologic images. This task is motivated by the expensive burden on…

Cited by 90PDFcodeScholar
2022

Explainable Survival Analysis with Convolution-Involved Vision Transformer

AAAI 2022technical

Image-based survival prediction models can facilitate doctors in diagnosing and treating cancer patients. With the advance of digital pathology technologies, the big whole slide images (WSIs) provide increasing resolution and more details for diagnosis. However, the gigabyte-size WSIs would make mos…

2022

Gap-Dependent Unsupervised Exploration for Reinforcement Learning

AISTATS 2022poster

For the problem of task-agnostic reinforcement learning (RL), an agent first collects samples from an unknown environment without the supervision of reward signals, then is revealed with a reward and is asked to compute a corresponding near-optimal policy. Existing approaches mainly concern the wors…

2022

Learning from Distributed Users in Contextual Linear Bandits Without Sharing the Context

NeurIPS 2022accept

Contextual linear bandits is a rich and theoretically important model that has many practical applications. Recently, this setup gained a lot of interest in applications over wireless where communication constraints can be a performance bottleneck, especially when the contexts come from a large $d$-…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2022

Near-Optimal Reward-Free Exploration for Linear Mixture MDPs with Plug-in Solver

ICLR 2022spotlight

Although model-based reinforcement learning (RL) approaches are considered more sample efficient, existing algorithms are usually relying on sophisticated planning algorithm to couple tightly with the model-learning procedure. Hence the learned models may lack the ability of being re-used with more…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2022

Towards Lightweight Applications: Asymmetric Enroll-Verify Structure for Speaker Verification

ICASSP 2022accepted

With the development of deep learning, automatic speaker verification has made considerable progress over the past few years. However, to design a lightweight and robust system with limited computational resources is still a challenging problem. Traditionally, a speaker verification system is symmet…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2021

Accommodating Picky Customers: Regret Bound and Exploration Complexity for Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2021poster

In this paper we consider multi-objective reinforcement learning where the objectives are balanced using preferences. In practice, the preferences are often given in an adversarial manner, e.g., customers can be picky in many applications. We formalize this problem as an episodic learning problem on…

2021

Breaking the Moments Condition Barrier: No-Regret Algorithm for Bandits with Super Heavy-Tailed Payoffs

NeurIPS 2021poster

Despite a large amount of effort in dealing with heavy-tailed error in machine learning, little is known when moments of the error can become non-existential: the random noise $\eta$ satisfies Pr$\left[|\eta| > |y|\right] \le 1/|y|^{\alpha}$ for some $\alpha > 0$. We make the first attempt to active…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2021

Cooperative Stochastic Bandits with Asynchronous Agents and Constrained Feedback

NeurIPS 2021poster

This paper studies a cooperative multi-armed bandit problem with $M$ agents cooperating together to solve the same instance of a $K$-armed stochastic bandit problem with the goal of maximizing the cumulative reward of agents. The agents are heterogeneous in (i) their limited access to a local subset…

Cited by 32SourcePDFScholar
2021

On the Value of Interaction and Function Approximation in Imitation Learning

NeurIPS 2021poster

We study the statistical guarantees for the Imitation Learning (IL) problem in episodic MDPs. Rajaraman et al. (2020) show an information theoretic lower bound that in the worst case, a learner which can even actively query the expert policy suffers from a suboptimality growing quadratically in the…

Cited by 26SourcePDFScholar
2021

Provably Correct Optimization and Exploration with Non-linear Policies

ICML 2021spotlight

Policy optimization methods remain a powerful workhorse in empirical Reinforcement Learning (RL), with a focus on neural policies that can easily reason over complex and continuous state and/or action spaces. Theoretical understanding of strategic exploration in policy-based methods with non-linear…

2021

Randomized Exploration in Reinforcement Learning with General Value Function Approximation

ICML 2021spotlight

We propose a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm inspired by the popular randomized least squares value iteration (RLSVI) algorithm as well as the optimism principle. Unlike existing upper-confidence-bound (UCB) based approaches, which are often computationally intractable, our algorithm dri…

Cited by 50SourcePDFScholar
2021

Wrist Angle Estimation With a Musculoskeletal Model Driven by Electrical Impedance Tomography Signals

RA-L 2021

Wrist kinematics estimation with muscle signals is a key issue in the field of wearable robots. In this study, we proposed a musculoskeletal-based-method driven by the Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) signals for continuously estimating wrist flexion/extension angles. The EIT-based interface ca

Cited by 14SourceScholar
2020

Adversarial Bandits with Corruptions: Regret Lower Bound and No-regret Algorithm

NeurIPS 2020accepted

This paper studies adversarial bandits with corruptions. In the basic adversarial bandit setting, the reward of arms is predetermined by an adversary who is oblivious to the learner’s policy. In this paper, we consider an extended setting in which an attacker sits in-between the environment and the…

Cited by 42SourcePDFScholar
2020

Model-Based Multi-Agent RL in Zero-Sum Markov Games with Near-Optimal Sample Complexity

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL), which finds an optimal policy using an empirical model, has long been recognized as one of the cornerstones of RL. It is especially suitable for multi-agent RL (MARL), as it naturally decouples the learning and the planning phases, and avoids the non-stationa…

Cited by 169SourcePDFScholar
2020

Model-Based Reinforcement Learning with Value-Targeted Regression

ICML 2020poster

This paper studies model-based reinforcement learning (RL) for regret minimization. We focus on finite-horizon episodic RL where the transition model $P$ belongs to a known family of models $\mathcal{P}$, a special case of which is when models in $\mathcal{P}$ take the form of linear mixtures: $P_{\…

Cited by 358SourcePDFScholar
2020

Obtaining Adjustable Regularization for Free via Iterate Averaging

ICML 2020poster

Regularization for optimization is a crucial technique to avoid overfitting in machine learning. In order to obtain the best performance, we usually train a model by tuning the regularization parameters. It becomes costly, however, when a single round of training takes significant amount of time. Ve…

2020

On Reward-Free Reinforcement Learning with Linear Function Approximation

NeurIPS 2020poster

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework which is suitable for both the batch RL setting and the setting where there are many reward functions of interest. During the exploration phase, an agent collects samples without using a pre-specified reward function. After the exploration phase…

Cited by 135SourcePDFScholar
2020

Planning with General Objective Functions: Going Beyond Total Rewards

NeurIPS 2020poster

Standard sequential decision-making paradigms aim to maximize the cumulative reward when interacting with the unknown environment., i.e., maximize $\sum_{h = 1}^H r_h$ where $H$ is the planning horizon. However, this paradigm fails to model important practical applications, e.g., safe control that a…

Cited by 24SourcePDFScholar
2020

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning with Finite-Time Guarantees

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) replaces reward values in traditional reinforcement learning by preferences to better elicit human opinion on the target objective, especially when numerical reward values are hard to design or interpret. Despite promising results in applications, the…

Cited by 79SourcePDFScholar
2020

Provably Efficient Exploration for Reinforcement Learning Using Unsupervised Learning

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

Motivated by the prevailing paradigm of using unsupervised learning for efficient exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) problems [tang2017exploration,bellemare2016unifying], we investigate when this paradigm is provably efficient. We study episodic Markov decision processes with rich observatio…

2020

Reinforcement Learning with General Value Function Approximation: Provably Efficient Approach via Bounded Eluder Dimension

NeurIPS 2020poster

Value function approximation has demonstrated phenomenal empirical success in reinforcement learning (RL). Nevertheless, despite a handful of recent progress on developing theory for RL with linear function approximation, the understanding of \emph{general} function approximation schemes largely rem…

Cited by 192SourcePDFScholar
2020

Sketching Transformed Matrices with Applications to Natural Language Processing

AISTATS 2020poster

Suppose we are given a large matrix $A=(a_{i,j})$ that cannot be stored in memory but is in a disk or is presented in a data stream. However, we need to compute a matrix decomposition of the entry-wisely transformed matrix, $f(A):=(f(a_{i,j}))$ for some function $f$. Is it possible to do it in a spa…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2020

Solving Discounted Stochastic Two-Player Games with Near-Optimal Time and Sample Complexity

AISTATS 2020poster

In this paper we settle the sampling complexity of solving discounted two-player turn-based zero-sum stochastic games up to polylogarithmic factors. Given a stochastic game with discount factor $\gamma\in(0,1)$ we provide an algorithm that computes an $\epsilon$-optimal strategy with high-probabili…

Cited by 88SourcePDFScholar
2020

Toward the Fundamental Limits of Imitation Learning

NeurIPS 2020poster

Imitation learning (IL) aims to mimic the behavior of an expert policy in a sequential decision-making problem given only demonstrations. In this paper, we focus on understanding the minimax statistical limits of IL in episodic Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We first consider the setting where th…

Cited by 103SourcePDFScholar
2019

Efficient Symmetric Norm Regression via Linear Sketching

NeurIPS 2019poster

We provide efficient algorithms for overconstrained linear regression problems with size $n \times d$ when the loss function is a symmetric norm (a norm invariant under sign-flips and coordinate-permutations). An important class of symmetric norms are Orlicz norms, where for a function $G$ and a ve…

Cited by 29SourcePDFScholar
2019

On Constrained Nonconvex Stochastic Optimization: A Case Study for Generalized Eigenvalue Decomposition

AISTATS 2019poster

We study constrained nonconvex optimization problems in machine learning and signal processing. It is well-known that these problems can be rewritten to a min-max problem in a Lagrangian form. However, due to the lack of convexity, their landscape is not well understood and how to find the stable eq…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2019

Online Factorization and Partition of Complex Networks by Random Walk

UAI 2019poster

Finding the reduced-dimensional structure is critical to understanding complex networks. Existing approaches such as spectral clustering are applicable only when the full network is explicitly observed. In this paper, we focus on the online factorization and partition of implicit large lumpable netw…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2019

Reducing Uncertainty in Undersampled MRI Reconstruction With Active Acquisition

CVPR 2019poster

The goal of MRI reconstruction is to restore a high fidelity image from partially observed measurements. This partial view naturally induces reconstruction uncertainty that can only be reduced by acquiring additional measurements. In this paper, we present a novel method for MRI reconstruction that,…

Cited by 147PDFScholar
2018

Dimensionality Reduction for Stationary Time Series via Stochastic Nonconvex Optimization

NeurIPS 2018poster

Stochastic optimization naturally arises in machine learning. Efficient algorithms with provable guarantees, however, are still largely missing, when the objective function is nonconvex and the data points are dependent. This paper studies this fundamental challenge through a streaming PCA problem f…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2018

Matrix Norms in Data Streams: Faster, Multi-Pass and Row-Order

ICML 2018oral

A central problem in mining massive data streams is characterizing which functions of an underlying frequency vector can be approximated efficiently. Given the prevalence of large scale linear algebra problems in machine learning, recently there has been considerable effort in extending this data st…

Cited by 23SourcePDFScholar
2018

Near-Optimal Time and Sample Complexities for Solving Markov Decision Processes with a Generative Model

NeurIPS 2018poster

In this paper we consider the problem of computing an $\epsilon$-optimal policy of a discounted Markov Decision Process (DMDP) provided we can only access its transition function through a generative sampling model that given any state-action pair samples from the transition function in $O(1)$ time.…

Cited by 269SourcePDFScholar
2018

Photographic Text-to-Image Synthesis With a Hierarchically-Nested Adversarial Network

CVPR 2018poster

This paper presents a novel method to deal with the challenging task of generating photographic images conditioned on semantic image descriptions. Our method introduces accompanying hierarchical-nested adversarial objectives inside the network hierarchies, which regularize mid-level representations…

2018

Quantization of Fully Convolutional Networks for Accurate Biomedical Image Segmentation

CVPR 2018poster

With pervasive applications of medical imaging in healthcare, biomedical image segmentation plays a central role in quantitative analysis, clinical diagnosis, and medical intervention. Since manual annotation suffers limited reproducibility, arduous efforts, and excessive time, automatic segmentatio…

Cited by 122SourcePDFScholar
2018

Translating and Segmenting Multimodal Medical Volumes With Cycle- and Shape-Consistency Generative Adversarial Network

CVPR 2018poster

Synthesized medical images have several important applications, e.g., as an intermedium in cross-modality image registration and as supplementary training samples to boost the generalization capability of a classifier. Especially, synthesized CT data can provide X-ray attenuation map for radiation t…

Cited by 543SourcePDFScholar
2017

MDNet: A Semantically and Visually Interpretable Medical Image Diagnosis Network

CVPR 2017oral

The inability to interpret the model prediction in semantically and visually meaningful ways is a well-known shortcoming of most existing computer-aided diagnosis methods. In this paper, we propose MDNet to establish a direct multimodal mapping between medical images and diagnostic reports that can…

Cited by 448PDFScholar
2017

On Quadratic Convergence of DC Proximal Newton Algorithm in Nonconvex Sparse Learning

NeurIPS 2017poster

We propose a DC proximal Newton algorithm for solving nonconvex regularized sparse learning problems in high dimensions. Our proposed algorithm integrates the proximal newton algorithm with multi-stage convex relaxation based on the difference of convex (DC) programming, and enjoys both strong comp…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2016

Combining Fully Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks for 3D Biomedical Image Segmentation

NeurIPS 2016poster

Segmentation of 3D images is a fundamental problem in biomedical image analysis. Deep learning (DL) approaches have achieved the state-of-the-art segmentation performance. To exploit the 3D contexts using neural networks, known DL segmentation methods, including 3D convolution, 2D convolution on the…

Cited by 444SourcePDFScholar
2016

SemiContour: A Semi-Supervised Learning Approach for Contour Detection

CVPR 2016poster

Supervised contour detection methods usually require many labeled training images to obtain satisfactory performance. However, a large set of annotated data might be unavailable or extremely labor intensive. In this paper, we investigate the usage of semi-supervised learning (SSL) to obtain competit…

Cited by 62PDFScholar
2015

Fine-Grained Histopathological Image Analysis via Robust Segmentation and Large-Scale Retrieval

CVPR 2015poster

Computer-aided diagnosis of medical images requires thorough analysis of image details. For example, examining all cells enables fine-grained categorization of histopathological images. Traditional computational methods may have efficiency issues when performing such detailed analysis. In this paper…

Cited by 72SourcePDFScholar