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Videos are Sample-Efficient Supervisions: Behavior Cloning from Videos via Latent Representations

Neural Information Processing Systems

Humans can efficiently extract knowledge and learn skills from the videos within only a few trials and errors. However, it poses a big challenge to replicate this learning process for autonomous agents, due to the complexity of visual input, the absence of action or reward signals, and the limitations of interaction steps. In this paper, we propose a novel, unsupervised, and sample-efficient framework to achieve imitation learning from videos (ILV), named Behavior Cloning from Videos via Latent Representations (BCV-LR). BCV-LR extracts action-related latent features from high-dimensional video inputs through self-supervised tasks, and then leverages a dynamics-based unsupervised objective to predict latent actions between consecutive frames. The pre-trained latent actions are fine-tuned and efficiently aligned to the real action space online (with collected interactions) for policy behavior cloning. The cloned policy in turn enriches the agent experience for further latent action finetuning, resulting in an iterative policy improvement that is highly sample-efficient. We conduct extensive experiments on a set of challenging visual tasks, including both discrete control and continuous control. BCV-LR enables effective (even expert-level on some tasks) policy performance with only a few interactions, surpassing state-of-the-art ILV baselines and reinforcement learning methods (provided with environmental rewards) in terms of sample efficiency across 24/28 tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this work for the first time demonstrates that videos can support extremely sample-efficient visual policy learning, without the need to access any other expert supervision.


High-order Interactions Modeling for Interpretable Multi-Agent Q-Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

The ability to model interactions among agents is crucial for effective coordination and understanding their cooperation mechanisms in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, previous efforts to model high-order interactions have been primarily hindered by the combinatorial explosion or the opaque nature of their black-box network structures. In this paper, we propose a novel value decomposition framework, called Continued Fraction Q-Learning (QCoFr), which can flexibly capture arbitrary-order agent interactions with only linear complexity O(n) in the number of agents, thus avoiding the combinatorial explosion when modeling rich cooperation. Furthermore, we introduce the variational information bottleneck to extract latent information for estimating credits. This latent information helps agents filter out noisy interactions, thereby significantly enhancing both cooperation and interpretability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that QCoFr not only consistently achieves better performance but also provides interpretability that aligns with our theoretical analysis.


Tree of Preferences for Diversified Recommendation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Diversified recommendation has attracted increasing attention from both researchers and practitioners, which can effectively address the homogeneity of recommended items. Existing approaches predominantly aim to infer the diversity of user preferences from observed user feedback. Nonetheless, due to inherent data biases, the observed data may not fully reflect user interests, where underexplored preferences can be overwhelmed or remain unmanifested. Failing to capture these preferences can lead to suboptimal diversity in recommendations. To fill this gap, this work aims to study diversified recommendation from a data-bias perspective.


EDBench: Large-Scale Electron Density Data for Molecular Modeling

Neural Information Processing Systems

Existing molecular machine learning force fields (MLFFs) generally focus on the learning of atoms, molecules, and simple quantum chemical properties (such as energy and force), but ignore the importance of electron density (ED) ρ(r) in accurately understanding molecular force fields (MFFs). ED describes the probability of finding electrons at specific locations around atoms or molecules, which uniquely determines all ground state properties (such as energy, molecular structure, etc.) of interactive multi-particle systems according to the HohenbergKohn theorem. However, the calculation of ED relies on the time-consuming first-principles density functional theory (DFT), which leads to the lack of largescale ED data and limits its application in MLFFs. In this paper, we introduce EDBench, a large-scale, high-quality dataset of ED designed to advance learningbased research at the electronic scale. Built upon the PCQM4Mv2, EDBench provides accurate ED data, covering 3.3 million molecules. To comprehensively evaluate the ability of models to understand and utilize electronic information, we design a suite of ED-centric benchmark tasks spanning prediction, retrieval, and generation. Our evaluation of several state-of-the-art methods demonstrates that learning from EDBench is not only feasible but also achieves high accuracy. Moreover, we show that learning-based methods can efficiently calculate ED with comparable precision while significantly reducing the computational cost relative to traditional DFT calculations. All data and benchmarks from EDBench will be freely available, laying a robust foundation for ED-driven drug discovery and materials science.


A.1 Qualitative Results of Bench

Neural Information Processing Systems

Figure 5: Word clouds of text prompts for the text-only generation (T2I) task (left) and the multimodal generation task (right). Figure 5 visually summarizes the prominent semantic elements in the benchmark prompts for text-only492 (T2I) and multimodal generation tasks. The differentiation of the word clouds reflects task-specific493 features of MMGen-Bench, emphasizing spatial and descriptive details in T2I tasks, while multimodal494 tasks more frequently involve social and interactive scenarios.495 Aspect Objects Relations Attributes Counting Overall Spearman ω 0.469 0.909 0.601 0.839 0.699 As depicted in Figure 6, the distribution of aspect types differs notably between the text-only497 generation (T2I) and multi-modal generation tasks. In the T2I setting, "Objects" dominate with498 38.3%, while "Attributes" and "Relations" also constitute substantial proportions (33.9% and 25.4%,499 respectively).



Results on FAVOR Bench

Neural Information Processing Systems

Prompt Template: Generating QAPairs for Camera Motion (CM) Task You are a professional question designer focusing on temporal dynamics in videos, including camera movements, motions, activities, and interactions, rather than static content. You will receive detailed annotations about the temporal details of the entire video, with duration markers in parentheses after "camera_motion" and "motion_list". Based on these annotations, design 3 multiple-choice questions around the "Camera Motion" theme to test models' fine-grained video motion understanding, particularly: Understanding camera movement direction and focus changes in the video. Additionally, follow these question design guidelines: 1. If a video's "camera_motion" has only one element, such as "camera_motion": "static", or "camera_motion": "camera shaking (0-22)", skip this video and don't generate any content.


World Models Should Prioritize the Unification of Physical and Social Dynamics

Neural Information Processing Systems

World models, which explicitly learn environmental dynamics to lay the foundation for planning, reasoning, and decision-making, are rapidly advancing in predicting both physical dynamics and aspects of social behavior, yet predominantly in separate silos. This division results in a systemic failure to model the crucial interplay between physical environments and social constructs, rendering current models fundamentally incapable of adequately addressing the true complexity of real-world systems where physical and social realities are inextricably intertwined. This position paper argues that the systematic, bidirectional unification of physical and social predictive capabilities is the next crucial frontier for world model development. We contend that comprehensive world models must holistically integrate objective physical laws with the subjective, evolving, and context-dependent nature of social dynamics. Such unification is paramount for AI to robustly navigate complex real-world challenges and achieve more generalizable intelligence.



Part-Aware Bottom-Up Group Reasoning for Fine-Grained Social Interaction Detection

Neural Information Processing Systems

Social interactions often emerge from subtle, fine-grained cues such as facial expressions, gaze, and gestures. However, existing methods for social interaction detection overlook such nuanced cues and primarily rely on holistic representations of individuals. Moreover, they directly detect social groups without explicitly modeling the underlying interactions between individuals. These drawbacks limit their ability to capture localized social signals and introduce ambiguity when group configurations should be inferred from social interactions grounded in nuanced cues. In this work, we propose a part-aware bottom-up group reasoning framework for fine-grained social interaction detection. The proposed method infers social groups and their interactions using body part features and their interpersonal relations. Our model first detects individuals and enhances their features using part-aware cues, and then infers group configuration by associating individuals via similarity-based reasoning, which considers not only spatial relations but also subtle social cues that signal interactions, leading to more accurate group inference. Experiments on the NVI dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms prior methods, achieving the new state of the art, while additional results on the Café dataset further validate its generalizability to group activity understanding.