Shulin Tian
Author directory2026
Demo-ICL: In-Context Learning for Procedural Video Knowledge Acquisition
Yuhao Dong | Shulin Tian | Shuai Liu | Shuangrui Ding | Yuhang Zang | Xiaoyi Dong | Yuhang Cao | Jiaqi Wang | Ziwei Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Yuhao Dong | Shulin Tian | Shuai Liu | Shuangrui Ding | Yuhang Zang | Xiaoyi Dong | Yuhang Cao | Jiaqi Wang | Ziwei Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Despite the growing video understanding capabilities of recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), existing video benchmarks primarily assess understanding based on models’ static, internal knowledge, rather than their ability to learn and adapt from dynamic, novel contexts from few examples. To bridge this gap, we present Demo-driven Video In-Context Learning, a novel task focused on learning from in-context demonstrations to answer questions about the target videos. Alongside this, we propose Demo-ICL-Bench, a challenging benchmark designed to evaluate demo-driven video in-context learning capabilities. Demo-ICL-Bench is constructed from 1200 instructional YouTube videos with associated questions, from which two types of demonstrations are derived: (i) summarizing video subtitles for text demonstration; and (ii) corresponding instructional videos as video demonstrations. To effectively tackle this new challenge, we develop Demo-ICL, an MLLM with a two-stage training strategy: video supervised fine-tuning and information-assisted direct preference optimization, jointly enhancing the model’s ability to learn from in-context examples. Extensive experiments with state-of-the-art MLLMs confirm the difficulty of Demo-ICL-Bench, demonstrate the effectiveness of Demo-ICL, and thus reveal future research directions for video in-context learning.
EgoTools: Towards Tool-Centric Reasoning in Real-World Egocentric Videos
Shulin Tian | Junsu Kim | Shuai Liu | Hao Li | Yujiao Shen | Sihan Li | Zhe Yang | Yeongon Kim | Runmao Yao | Yuhao Dong | Fangzhou Hong | Antonino Furnari | Jingkang Yang | Hongyuan Zhu | Ziwei Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Shulin Tian | Junsu Kim | Shuai Liu | Hao Li | Yujiao Shen | Sihan Li | Zhe Yang | Yeongon Kim | Runmao Yao | Yuhao Dong | Fangzhou Hong | Antonino Furnari | Jingkang Yang | Hongyuan Zhu | Ziwei Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Real-world embodied tasks require agents to act under physical constraints while tracking evolving object and task states. Because tools mediate many everyday and professional activities, understanding these tasks requires reasoning about affordances, hand–tool–object geometry, procedural progress, and causal effects. Tool-centric embodied reasoning therefore calls for real-world egocentric training data and diagnostic benchmarks that connect these abilities. We introduce EgoTools, the first comprehensive suite for egocentric tool-use understanding. It combines EgoTools-Data, approximately 100 hours of tool-centric egocentric recordings with synchronized audio, dense captions, reasoning-heavy narrations, and supplementary 3D information, with EgoTools-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark of 1,000 QA pairs across four tracks spanning perception, geometry, procedure, and causal reasoning. EgoTools-Bench reveals a substantial gap between current models and human experts. Under strict source-video separation, supervised fine-tuning of Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct on instruction data derived from EgoTools-Data improves accuracy from 50.0% to 60.9% on the full 1,000-question benchmark. These results establish EgoTools as a unified training and diagnostic evaluation resource for real-world egocentric tool-use understanding.
V-Rubrics: Visual Faithfulness via Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learning
Shulin Tian | Minglun Li | Yuhao Dong | Hao Ding | Jiarui Yao | Haiwen Diao | Jingkang Yang | Hongyuan Zhu | Ziwei Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Shulin Tian | Minglun Li | Yuhao Dong | Hao Ding | Jiarui Yao | Haiwen Diao | Jingkang Yang | Hongyuan Zhu | Ziwei Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Vision-language models can produce fluent answers that are insufficiently grounded in the visual evidence: a single unsupported object, chart value, or intermediate inference can undermine an otherwise plausible response. We argue that this is a credit-assignment failure in multimodal post-training. Scalar outcome rewards indicate whether an answer is acceptable, but do not identify which visual facts are grounded, which reasoning steps are valid, or which instruction constraints are missed. We introduce Visual Rubrics-Based Reinforcement Learning, which decomposes reference responses into atomic propositions and scores generated answers along Visual Faithfulness (VF), Reasoning Consistency (RC), and Instruction Following (IF). The resulting rubric items provide structured partial credit and localize rubric credit when supporting evidence spans are available. We first obtain an SFT checkpoint by fine-tuning Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct on the public OpenMMReasoner-SFT-874K corpus, adapting OpenMMReasoner’s cold-start data recipe. We construct V-Rubrics 50K, a 50,248-example training set from 17 visually grounded sources, by applying rule-based filters before deriving example difficulty from rejection-sampling scores and then annotating every example with Gemini-3-Pro under the same structured prompt and protocol. We train our model based on the same SFT checkpoint using component-wise, prefix-localized rubric credit. Experiments show that our rubricbased GRPO improves over both the shared SFT baseline and answer-only GRPO, with the largest gains on knowledge-oriented and visually grounded reasoning benchmarks. The results show rubrics as a useful reward abstraction for visual post-training.
Uni-MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Unified Benchmark
Kai Zou | Ziqi Huang | Yuhao Dong | Shulin Tian | Dian Zheng | Hongbo Liu | Jingwen He | Bin Liu | Yu Qiao | Ziwei Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Kai Zou | Ziqi Huang | Yuhao Dong | Shulin Tian | Dian Zheng | Hongbo Liu | Jingwen He | Bin Liu | Yu Qiao | Ziwei Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Unified multimodal models aim to jointly enable visual understanding and generation, yet current benchmarks rarely examine their true integration. Existing evaluations either treat the two abilities in isolation or overlook tasks that inherently couple them. To address this gap, we present Uni-MMMU, a comprehensive and discipline-aware benchmark that systematically unfolds the bidirectional synergy between generation and understanding across eight reasoning-centric domains, including science, coding, mathematics, and puzzles. Each task is bidirectionally coupled, demanding models to (i) leverage conceptual understanding to guide precise visual synthesis, or (ii) utilize generation as a cognitive scaffold for analytical reasoning. Uni-MMMU incorporates verifiable intermediate reasoning steps, unique ground truths, and a reproducible scoring protocol for both textual and visual outputs. Through extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art unified, generation-only, and understanding-only models, we reveal substantial performance disparities and cross-modal dependencies, offering new insights into when and how these abilities reinforce one another, and establishing a reliable foundation for advancing unified models.
2025
MMInA: Benchmarking Multihop Multimodal Internet Agents
Shulin Tian | Ziniu Zhang | Liangyu Chen | Ziwei Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Shulin Tian | Ziniu Zhang | Liangyu Chen | Ziwei Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Autonomous embodied agents live on an Internet of multimedia websites. Can they hop around multimodal websites to complete complex user tasks? Existing benchmarks fail to assess them in a realistic, evolving environment for their embodiment across websites. To answer this question, we present MMInA, a multihop and multimodal benchmark to evaluate the embodied agents for compositional Internet tasks, with several appealing properties: 1) Evolving real-world multimodal websites. Our benchmark uniquely operates on evolving real-world websites, ensuring a high degree of realism and applicability to natural user tasks. Our data includes 1,050 human-written tasks covering various domains such as shopping and travel, with each task requiring the agent to extract multimodal information from web pages as observations autonomously. 2) Multihop web browsing. Our dataset features naturally compositional tasks that require information from or actions on multiple websites to solve, to assess long-range reasoning capabilities on web tasks. 3) Holistic evaluation. We propose a novel protocol for evaluating an agent’s progress in completing multihop tasks. We experiment with both standalone (multimodal) language models and heuristic-based web agents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that while long-chain multihop web tasks are easy for humans, they remain challenging for state-of-the-art web agents. We identify that agents are more likely to fail on the early hops when solving tasks of more hops, which results in lower task success rates. To address this issue, we propose a simple memory augmentation approach replaying past action trajectories to reflect. Our method significantly improves the performance of both the single-hop and multihop web browsing abilities.
Evaluation Agent: Efficient and Promptable Evaluation Framework for Visual Generative Models
Fan Zhang | Shulin Tian | Ziqi Huang | Yu Qiao | Ziwei Liu
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Fan Zhang | Shulin Tian | Ziqi Huang | Yu Qiao | Ziwei Liu
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Recent advancements in visual generative models have enabled high-quality image and video generation, opening diverse applications. However, evaluating these models often demands sampling hundreds or thousands of images or videos, making the process computationally expensive, especially for diffusion-based models with inherently slow sampling. Moreover, existing evaluation methods rely on rigid pipelines that overlook specific user needs and provide numerical results without clear explanations. In contrast, humans can quickly form impressions of a model’s capabilities by observing only a few samples. To mimic this, we propose the Evaluation Agent framework, which employs human-like strategies for efficient, dynamic, multi-round evaluations using only a few samples per round, while offering detailed, user-tailored analyses. It offers four key advantages: 1) efficiency, 2) promptable evaluation tailored to diverse user needs, 3) explainability beyond single numerical scores, and 4) scalability across various models and tools. Experiments show that Evaluation Agent reduces evaluation time to 10% of traditional methods while delivering comparable results. The Evaluation Agent framework is fully open-sourced to advance research in visual generative models and their efficient evaluation.
Search
Fix author
Co-authors
- Ziwei Liu 6
- Yuhao Dong 4
- Ziqi Huang 2
- Shuai Liu 2
- Yu Qiao 2
- Jingkang Yang 2
- Hongyuan Zhu 2
- Yuhang Cao 1
- Liang-Yu Chen 1
- Haiwen Diao 1
- Hao Ding 1
- Shuangrui Ding 1
- Xiaoyi Dong 1
- Antonino Furnari 1
- Jingwen He 1
- Fangzhou Hong 1
- Junsu Kim 1
- Yeongon Kim 1
- Hao Li 1
- Minglun Li 1
- Sihan Li 1
- Bin Liu 1
- Hongbo Liu 1
- Yujiao Shen 1
- Jiaqi Wang 1
- Zhe Yang 1
- Jiarui Yao 1
- Runmao Yao 1
- Yuhang Zang 1
- Fan Zhang 1
- Ziniu Zhang 1
- Dian Zheng 1
- Kai Zou 1