Learning effective multi-modal 3D representations of objects is essential for numerous applications, such as augmented reality and robotics. Existing methods often rely on task-specific embeddings that are tailored either for semantic understanding or geometric reconstruction. As a result, these embeddings typically cannot be decoded into explicit geometry and simultaneously reused across tasks. In this paper, we propose Object-X, a versatile multi-modal object representation framework capable of encoding rich object embeddings (e.g., images, point cloud, text) and decoding them back into detailed geometric and visual reconstructions. Object-X operates by geometrically grounding the captured modalities in a 3D voxel grid and learning an unstructured embedding fusing the information from the voxels with the object attributes. The learned embedding enables 3D Gaussian Splatting-based object reconstruction, while also supporting a range of downstream tasks, including scene alignment, single-image 3D object reconstruction, and localization. Evaluations on two challenging real-world datasets demonstrate that Object-X produces high-fidelity novel-view synthesis comparable to standard 3D Gaussian Splatting, while significantly improving geometric accuracy. Moreover, Object-X achieves competitive performance with specialized methods in scene alignment and localization. Critically, our object-centric descriptors require 3-4 orders of magnitude less storage compared to traditional image-or point cloud-based approaches, establishing Object-X as a scalable and highly practical solution for multi-modal 3D scene representation.

Human social interactions depend on the ability to infer others' unspoken intentions, emotions, and beliefs--a cognitive skill grounded in the psychological concept of Theory of Mind (ToM). While large language models (LLMs) excel in semantic understanding tasks, they struggle with the ambiguity and contextual nuance inherent in human communication.

Online structured prediction is a task of sequentially predicting outputs with complex structures based on inputs and past observations, encompassing online classification. Recent studies showed that in the full-information setting, we can achieve finite bounds on the *surrogate regret*, *i.e.,* the extra target loss relative to the best possible surrogate loss. In practice, however, full-information feedback is often unrealistic as it requires immediate access to the whole structure of complex outputs. Motivated by this, we propose algorithms that work with less demanding feedback, *bandit* and *delayed* feedback. For bandit feedback, by using a standard inverse-weighted gradient estimator, we achieve a surrogate regret bound of $O(\sqrt{KT})$ for the time horizon $T$ and the size of the output set $K$. However, $K$ can be extremely large when outputs are highly complex, resulting in an undesirable bound.

We address the challenge of training diffusion models to sample from unnormalized energy distributions in the absence of data, the so-called diffusion samplers. Although these approaches have shown promise, they struggle to scale in more demanding scenarios where energy evaluations are expensive and the sampling space is high-dimensional. To address this limitation, we propose a scalable and sample-efficient framework that properly harmonizes the powerful classical sampling method and the diffusion sampler. Specifically, we utilize Monte Carlo Markov chain (MCMC) samplers with a novelty-based auxiliary energy as a Searcher to collect off-policy samples, using an auxiliary energy function to compensate for exploring modes the diffusion sampler rarely visits. These off-policy samples are then combined with on-policy data to train the diffusion sampler, thereby expanding its coverage of the energy landscape. Furthermore, we identify primacy bias, i.e., the preference of samplers for early experience during training, as the main cause of mode collapse during training, and introduce a periodic re-initialization trick to resolve this issue. Our method significantly improves sample efficiency on standard benchmarks for diffusion samplers and also excels at higher-dimensional problems and real-world molecular conformer generation.

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from extrapolation errors induced by out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. To address this, offline RL algorithms typically impose constraints on action selection, which can be systematically categorized into density, support, and sample constraints. However, we show that each category has inherent limitations: density and sample constraints tend to be overly conservative in many scenarios, while the support constraint, though least restrictive, faces challenges in accurately modeling the behavior policy. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new neighborhood constraint that restricts action selection in the Bellman target to the union of neighborhoods of dataset actions. Theoretically, the constraint not only bounds extrapolation errors and distribution shift under certain conditions, but also approximates the support constraint without requiring behavior policy modeling. Moreover, it retains substantial flexibility and enables pointwise conservatism by adapting the neighborhood radius for each data point. In practice, we employ data quality as the adaptation criterion and design an adaptive neighborhood constraint. Building on an efficient bilevel optimization framework, we develop a simple yet effective algorithm, Adaptive Neighborhood-constrained Q learning (ANQ), to perform Q learning with target actions satisfying this constraint. Empirically, ANQ achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard offline RL benchmarks and exhibits strong robustness in scenarios with noisy or limited data.

After pre-training, large language models are aligned with human preferences based on pairwise comparisons. State-of-the-art alignment methods (such as PPO-based RLHF and DPO) are built on the assumption of aligning with a single preference model, despite being deployed in settings where users have diverse preferences. As a result, it is not even clear that these alignment methods produce models that satisfy users \emph{on average} --- a minimal requirement for pluralistic alignment. Drawing on social choice theory and modeling users' comparisons through individual Bradley-Terry (BT) models, we introduce an alignment method's \emph{distortion}: the worst-case ratio between the optimal achievable average utility, and the average utility of the learned policy. The notion of distortion helps draw sharp distinctions between alignment methods: \emph{Nash Learning from Human Feedback} achieves the minimax optimal distortion of $(\frac{1}{2} + o(1)) \cdot \beta$ (for the BT temperature $\beta$), robustly across utility distributions, distributions of comparison pairs, and permissible KL divergences from the reference policy. RLHF and DPO, by contrast, suffer $\geq (1 - o(1)) \cdot \beta$ distortion already without a KL constraint, and $e^{\Omega(\beta)}$ or even unbounded distortion in the full setting, depending on how comparison pairs are sampled.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit impressive performance, yet the integration of powerful vision encoders has significantly broadened their attack surface, rendering them increasingly susceptible to jailbreak attacks.

Planning under opponent uncertainty is a fundamental challenge in multi-agent environments, where an agent must act while inferring the hidden policies of its opponents. Existing type-based methods rely on manually defined behavior classes and struggle to scale, while model-free approaches are sample-inefficient and lack a principled way to incorporate uncertainty into planning. We propose Quantized Opponent Models (QOM), which learn a compact catalog of opponent types via a quantized autoencoder and maintain a Bayesian belief over these types online. This posterior supports both a belief-weighted meta-policy and a Monte-Carlo planning algorithm that directly integrates uncertainty, enabling real-time belief updates and focused exploration. Experiments show that QOM achieves superior performance with lower search cost, offering a tractable and effective solution for belief-aware planning.

Typically, a modern reinforcement learning (RL) agent solves a task by updating its neural network parameters to adapt its policy to the task. Recently, it has been observed that some RL agents can solve a wide range of new out-of-distribution tasks without parameter updates after pretraining on some task distribution. When evaluated in a new task, instead of making parameter updates, the pretrained agent conditions its policy on additional input called the context, e.g., the agent's interaction history in the new task. The agent's performance increases as the information in the context increases, with the agent's parameters fixed. This phenomenon is typically called in-context RL (ICRL). The pretrained parameters of the agent network enable the remarkable ICRL phenomenon.

Visual personalization is essential in user-facing AI systems such as smart homes and healthcare, where aligning model behavior with user-centric concepts is critical. However, recent large Vision-Language Models (VLMs), despite their broad applicability, remain underexplored in their ability to adapt to individual users. In this paper, we introduce MMPB, the first extensive benchmark for evaluating VLMs on personalization. MMPB comprises 10k image-query pairs and includes 111 personalizable concepts across four categories: humans, animals, objects, and characters, with the human category enriched with preference-grounded queries.