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Zihao Deng

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6 papers

2 author rows

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

NL2CA: Auto-formalizing Cognitive Decision-Making from Natural Language Using an Unsupervised CriticNL2LTL Framework

Zihao Deng
Yijia Li
Renrui Zhang
Peijun Ye

Cognitive computing models offer a formal and interpretable way to characterize human's deliberation and decision-making, yet their development remains labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose NL2CA, a novel method for auto-formalizing cognitive decision-making rules from natural language descriptions of human experience. Different from most related work that exploits either pure manual or human-guided interactive modeling, our method is fully automated without any human intervention. The approach first translates text into Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) using a fine-tuned large language model (LLM), then refines the logic via an unsupervised Critic Tree, and finally transforms the output into executable production rules compatible with symbolic cognitive frameworks. Based on the resulted rules, a cognitive agent is further constructed and optimized through cognitive reinforcement learning according to the real-world behavioral data. Our method is validated in two domains: (1) NL-to-LTL translation, where our CriticNL2LTL module achieves consistent performance across both expert and large-scale benchmarks without human-in-the-loop feedbacks, and (2) cognitive driving simulation, where agents automatically constructed from human interviews have successfully learned the diverse decision patterns of about 70 trials in different critical scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that NL2CA enables scalable, interpretable, and human-aligned cognitive modeling from unstructured textual data, offering a novel paradigm to automatically design symbolic cognitive agents.

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ICRA Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Coordinated Multi-Robot Navigation with Formation Adaptation

Zihao Deng
Peng Gao 0009
Williard Joshua Jose
Christopher M. Reardon
Maggie B. Wigness
John G. Rogers
Hao Zhang 0011

Coordinated multi-robot navigation is an essential ability for a team of robots operating in diverse environments. Robot teams often need to maintain specific formations, such as wedge formations, to enhance visibility, positioning, and efficiency during fast movement. However, complex environments such as narrow corridors challenge rigid team formations, which makes effective formation control difficult in real-world environments. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel Adaptive Formation with Oscillation Reduction (AFOR) approach to improve coordinated multi-robot navigation. We develop AFOR under the theoretical framework of hierarchical learning and integrate a spring-damper model with hierarchical learning to enable both team coordination and individual robot control. At the upper level, a graph neural network facilitates formation adaptation and information sharing among the robots. At the lower level, reinforcement learning enables each robot to navigate and avoid obstacles while maintaining the formations. We conducted extensive experiments using Gazebo in the Robot Operating System (ROS), a high-fidelity Unity3D simulator with ROS, and real robot teams. Results demonstrate that AFOR enables smooth navigation with formation adaptation in complex scenarios and outperforms previous methods. More details of this work are provided on the project website: https://hcrlab.gitlab.io/project/afor.

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EAAI Journal 2024 Journal Article

Boosting efficient attention assisted cyclic adversarial auto-encoder for rotating component fault diagnosis under low label rates

Jianguo Miao
Zihao Deng
Congying Deng
Chong Chen

In practical engineering scenarios with limited labeled samples, conventional semi-supervised diagnostic methods face challenges in achieving satisfactory identification outcomes. To address the aforementioned issues, this paper introduces an incremental semi-supervised learning (ISL) approach based on boosting efficient attention (BEA) assisted cyclic adversarial auto-encoder (CAAE), referred to as BEA-CAAE. The CAAE enhances unsupervised feature representation by simultaneously constraining the distribution of encoded features and aligning elements of the reconstructed samples through a cyclic encoding strategy. The BEA improves classical attention weights' activation strength to better capture vital information, thereby boosting the feature extraction capabilities of both CAAE and the classifier. The ISL employs a stepwise pseudo-label propagation strategy to incrementally filter high-confidence samples, enhancing sample and label utilization, and improving diagnostic accuracy under low label rate conditions. Experiments conducted on multiple test rigs with simple structures as well as large-scale rotating components test rigs that mimic real-world engineering conditions have demonstrated that the proposed method exhibits a significant advantage over existing semi-supervised fault diagnosis approaches in terms of fault diagnosis accuracy and generalization capability, especially under low label rate conditions.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Factorized Contrastive Learning: Going Beyond Multi-view Redundancy

Paul Pu Liang
Zihao Deng
Martin Q. Ma
James Y. Zou
Louis-Philippe Morency
Ruslan Salakhutdinov

In a wide range of multimodal tasks, contrastive learning has become a particularly appealing approach since it can successfully learn representations from abundant unlabeled data with only pairing information (e. g. , image-caption or video-audio pairs). Underpinning these approaches is the assumption of multi-view redundancy - that shared information between modalities is necessary and sufficient for downstream tasks. However, in many real-world settings, task-relevant information is also contained in modality-unique regions: information that is only present in one modality but still relevant to the task. How can we learn self-supervised multimodal representations to capture both shared and unique information relevant to downstream tasks? This paper proposes FactorCL, a new multimodal representation learning method to go beyond multi-view redundancy. FactorCL is built from three new contributions: (1) factorizing task-relevant information into shared and unique representations, (2) capturing task-relevant information via maximizing MI lower bounds and removing task-irrelevant information via minimizing MI upper bounds, and (3) multimodal data augmentations to approximate task relevance without labels. On large-scale real-world datasets, FactorCL captures both shared and unique information and achieves state-of-the-art results on six benchmarks.

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ICLR Conference 2023 Conference Paper

MultiViz: Towards Visualizing and Understanding Multimodal Models

Paul Pu Liang
Yiwei Lyu 0001
Gunjan Chhablani
Nihal Jain
Zihao Deng
Xingbo Wang 0001
Louis-Philippe Morency
Ruslan Salakhutdinov

The promise of multimodal models for real-world applications has inspired research in visualizing and understanding their internal mechanics with the end goal of empowering stakeholders to visualize model behavior, perform model debugging, and promote trust in machine learning models. However, modern multimodal models are typically black-box neural networks, which makes it challenging to understand their internal mechanics. How can we visualize the internal modeling of multimodal interactions in these models? Our paper aims to fill this gap by proposing MultiViz, a method for analyzing the behavior of multimodal models by scaffolding the problem of interpretability into 4 stages: (1) unimodal importance: how each modality contributes towards downstream modeling and prediction, (2) cross-modal interactions: how different modalities relate with each other, (3) multimodal representations: how unimodal and cross-modal interactions are represented in decision-level features, and (4) multimodal prediction: how decision-level features are composed to make a prediction. MultiViz is designed to operate on diverse modalities, models, tasks, and research areas. Through experiments on 8 trained models across 6 real-world tasks, we show that the complementary stages in MultiViz together enable users to (1) simulate model predictions, (2) assign interpretable concepts to features, (3) perform error analysis on model misclassifications, and (4) use insights from error analysis to debug models. MultiViz is publicly available, will be regularly updated with new interpretation tools and metrics, and welcomes inputs from the community.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Quantifying & Modeling Multimodal Interactions: An Information Decomposition Framework

Paul Pu Liang
Yun Cheng
Xiang Fan
Chun Kai Ling
Suzanne Nie
Richard Chen
Zihao Deng
Nicholas Allen

The recent explosion of interest in multimodal applications has resulted in a wide selection of datasets and methods for representing and integrating information from different modalities. Despite these empirical advances, there remain fundamental research questions: How can we quantify the interactions that are necessary to solve a multimodal task? Subsequently, what are the most suitable multimodal models to capture these interactions? To answer these questions, we propose an information-theoretic approach to quantify the degree of redundancy, uniqueness, and synergy relating input modalities with an output task. We term these three measures as the PID statistics of a multimodal distribution (or PID for short), and introduce two new estimators for these PID statistics that scale to high-dimensional distributions. To validate PID estimation, we conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic datasets where the PID is known and on large-scale multimodal benchmarks where PID estimations are compared with human annotations. Finally, we demonstrate their usefulness in (1) quantifying interactions within multimodal datasets, (2) quantifying interactions captured by multimodal models, (3) principled approaches for model selection, and (4) three real-world case studies engaging with domain experts in pathology, mood prediction, and robotic perception where our framework helps to recommend strong multimodal models for each application.

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