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Concept Learning and Abstraction

Scaling AI for lifelong learning and reasoning requires the ability to transform raw inputs into abstract concepts that can be efficiently composed to form more complex ones. Our lab has a strong focus on few-shot learning for concept acquisition. In recent research, we have enabled large-scale foundation models to incrementally learn new language and visual concepts. Our current efforts extend to recognizing functional and relational concepts, as well as exploring how learned concepts can be composed hierarchically for high-level reasoning. These advancements are key to building AI systems that generalize efficiently and adapt continuously to new tasks.

Research Works in the Area

design

Seeking the Unfamiliar but Memorable: Conceptual Creativity as Meta-Learning

CoRR · 2026-05-15

Creativity is producing stimuli that are unfamiliar at first sight but quickly learnable from a few exposures. A Creator-Appraiser meta-learning loop lets a frozen diffusion model generate novel concepts the base model would not.

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design

In-Context Clustering with Large Language Models

CoRR · 2025-10-09

In-Context Clustering (ICC) is a flexible LLM-based procedure for clustering data from diverse distributions.

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design

Context Tuning for In-Context Optimization

ICML 2026 · 2025-07-06

Context Tuning directly optimizes an LLM's memory representation for efficient adaptation without updating model weights.

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design

Discrete JEPA: Learning Discrete Token Representations without Reconstruction

CoRR · 2025-06-22

Discrete-JEPA extends the latent predictive coding JEPA framework with semantic tokenization and complementary objectives for symbolic reasoning tasks.

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design

ProCreate, Don't Reproduce! Propulsive Energy Diffusion for Creative Generation

ECCV 2024 · 2024-08-05

ProCreate is a simple and easy-to-implement method to improve sample diversity and creativity of diffusion-based image generative models and to prevent training data reproduction.

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design

CoLLEGe: Concept Embedding Generation for Large Language Models

COLM 2024 · 2024-03-22

CoLLEGe is a meta-learning framework capable of generating flexible embeddings for new concepts using a small number of example sentences or definitions.

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