Source author record

Jialian Li

Explore this author’s publications, collaborators and research topics. This catalog record has not been claimed by its author.

ResearcherUnclaimed source record

Catalog footprint

Research overview

5works
3topics
4close collaborators

Published work

5 publications

preprint2026arXiv

Engagement Process: Rethinking the Temporal Interface of Action and Observation

Task completion in digital and physical environments increasingly involves complex temporal interaction, where actions and observations unfold over different time scales rather than align with fixed observation--action steps. To model such interactions, we propose \emph{Engagement Process} (EP), an interaction formalism that inherits the decision-theoretic structure of POMDPs while making time explicit in the action--observation interface. EP represents actions and observations as decoupled event streams along time, rather than updates paired at fixed decision steps. This interface captures single-agent timing issues such as deliberation latency, delayed feedback, and persistent actions, while supporting richer agent-side organization, multi-rate coordination, and compositional interaction among subsystems. Across toy, LLM-agent, and learning experiments, EP exposes temporal behaviors hidden by step-based interfaces and enables policies to adapt under explicit time costs.

preprint2022arXiv

LiDARCap: Long-range Marker-less 3D Human Motion Capture with LiDAR Point Clouds

Existing motion capture datasets are largely short-range and cannot yet fit the need of long-range applications. We propose LiDARHuman26M, a new human motion capture dataset captured by LiDAR at a much longer range to overcome this limitation. Our dataset also includes the ground truth human motions acquired by the IMU system and the synchronous RGB images. We further present a strong baseline method, LiDARCap, for LiDAR point cloud human motion capture. Specifically, we first utilize PointNet++ to encode features of points and then employ the inverse kinematics solver and SMPL optimizer to regress the pose through aggregating the temporally encoded features hierarchically. Quantitative and qualitative experiments show that our method outperforms the techniques based only on RGB images. Ablation experiments demonstrate that our dataset is challenging and worthy of further research. Finally, the experiments on the KITTI Dataset and the Waymo Open Dataset show that our method can be generalized to different LiDAR sensor settings.

preprint2022arXiv

Nearly Horizon-Free Offline Reinforcement Learning

We revisit offline reinforcement learning on episodic time-homogeneous Markov Decision Processes (MDP). For tabular MDP with SS states and AA actions, or linear MDP with anchor points and feature dimension dd, given the collected KK episodes data with minimum visiting probability of (anchor) state-action pairs dmd_m, we obtain nearly horizon HH-free sample complexity bounds for offline reinforcement learning when the total reward is upper bounded by 11. Specifically: 1. For offline policy evaluation, we obtain an O~(1Kdm)\tilde{O}\left(\sqrt{\frac{1}{Kd_m}} \right) error bound for the plug-in estimator, which matches the lower bound up to logarithmic factors and does not have additional dependency on poly(H,S,A,d)\mathrm{poly}\left(H, S, A, d\right) in higher-order term. 2.For offline policy optimization, we obtain an O~(1Kdm+min⁡(S,d)Kdm)\tilde{O}\left(\sqrt{\frac{1}{Kd_m}} + \frac{\min(S, d)}{Kd_m}\right) sub-optimality gap for the empirical optimal policy, which approaches the lower bound up to logarithmic factors and a high-order term, improving upon the best known result by \cite{cui2020plug} that has additional poly(H,S,d)\mathrm{poly}\left(H, S, d\right) factors in the main term. To the best of our knowledge, these are the \emph{first} set of nearly horizon-free bounds for episodic time-homogeneous offline tabular MDP and linear MDP with anchor points. Central to our analysis is a simple yet effective recursion based method to bound a "total variance" term in the offline scenarios, which could be of individual interest.

preprint2022arXiv

Policy Learning for Robust Markov Decision Process with a Mismatched Generative Model

In high-stake scenarios like medical treatment and auto-piloting, it's risky or even infeasible to collect online experimental data to train the agent. Simulation-based training can alleviate this issue, but may suffer from its inherent mismatches from the simulator and real environment. It is therefore imperative to utilize the simulator to learn a robust policy for the real-world deployment. In this work, we consider policy learning for Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDP), where the agent tries to seek a robust policy with respect to unexpected perturbations on the environments. Specifically, we focus on the setting where the training environment can be characterized as a generative model and a constrained perturbation can be added to the model during testing. Our goal is to identify a near-optimal robust policy for the perturbed testing environment, which introduces additional technical difficulties as we need to simultaneously estimate the training environment uncertainty from samples and find the worst-case perturbation for testing. To solve this issue, we propose a generic method which formalizes the perturbation as an opponent to obtain a two-player zero-sum game, and further show that the Nash Equilibrium corresponds to the robust policy. We prove that, with a polynomial number of samples from the generative model, our algorithm can find a near-optimal robust policy with a high probability. Our method is able to deal with general perturbations under some mild assumptions and can also be extended to more complex problems like robust partial observable Markov decision process, thanks to the game-theoretical formulation.

preprint2016arXiv

Conditional Generative Moment-Matching Networks

Maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) has been successfully applied to learn deep generative models for characterizing a joint distribution of variables via kernel mean embedding. In this paper, we present conditional generative moment- matching networks (CGMMN), which learn a conditional distribution given some input variables based on a conditional maximum mean discrepancy (CMMD) criterion. The learning is performed by stochastic gradient descent with the gradient calculated by back-propagation. We evaluate CGMMN on a wide range of tasks, including predictive modeling, contextual generation, and Bayesian dark knowledge, which distills knowledge from a Bayesian model by learning a relatively small CGMMN student network. Our results demonstrate competitive performance in all the tasks.

Research graph

See the researcher in context

Open full explorer

Inspect adjacent papers, topics, institutions and collaborators without losing the researcher page.

Building this map preview

BZPEER is loading the nearby papers, people, topics and institutions for this page.