VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Kanika Madan
dblp:222/7103
· DBLP profile ↗
8ranked-venue papers
3as first author
8since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-5854-6263ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 6 · 3 first-author · 6 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1 · 1 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1 · 1 since 2021
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Artificial intelligence
6 papers |
Reinforcement learning · 24% Generative modeling · 23% Representation and self-supervised learning · 20% |
Topics — the 13 heaviest of 15, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Machine learning › Generative modeling
generative flow networks |
2.3 | 3 | 2025 | Towards Improving Exploration through Sibling Augmented GFlowNets · ICLR 2025 Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning Generative Flow Networks · ICLR 2024 Learning GFlowNets From Partial Episodes For Improved Convergence And Stability · ICML 2023 |
Natural language and speech › Language models and text generation › decoding
best-of-n selection |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Majority of the Bests: Improving Best-of-N via Bootstrapping · NeurIPS 2025 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
exploration |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Towards Improving Exploration through Sibling Augmented GFlowNets · ICLR 2025 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning › exploration
intrinsic motivation |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Towards Improving Exploration through Sibling Augmented GFlowNets · ICLR 2025 |
Natural language and speech › Language models and text generation
self-consistency |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Majority of the Bests: Improving Best-of-N via Bootstrapping · NeurIPS 2025 |
Machine learning › Representation and self-supervised learning
pre-training |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning Generative Flow Networks · ICLR 2024 |
Machine learning › Representation and self-supervised learning › representation learning › unsupervised representation learning
self-supervised representation learning |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning Generative Flow Networks · ICLR 2024 |
Computer vision › 3D vision
object representation |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | Reusable Slotwise Mechanisms · NeurIPS 2023 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
temporal difference learning |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | Learning GFlowNets From Partial Episodes For Improved Convergence And Stability · ICML 2023 |
Machine learning › Representation and self-supervised learning › representation learning
modular representation learning |
0.5 | 1 | 2021 | Fast And Slow Learning Of Recurrent Independent Mechanisms · ICLR 2021 |
Machine learning › Deep learning architectures and training
recurrent neural network |
0.5 | 1 | 2021 | Fast And Slow Learning Of Recurrent Independent Mechanisms · ICLR 2021 |
Knowledge, reasoning and agents › Planning, search and constraint satisfaction › planning › agent planning
action planning |
0.2 | 1 | 2023 | Reusable Slotwise Mechanisms · NeurIPS 2023 |
Computer vision › Vision and language
visual question answering |
0.2 | 1 | 2023 | Reusable Slotwise Mechanisms · NeurIPS 2023 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
sibling augmented GFlowNets · 0.9reward model · 0.9decoupled dual network architecture · 0.9bootstrapping · 0.9goal-conditioned policy · 0.8amortized inference · 0.8stochastic gradient descent · 0.7slot attention · 0.7modular network · 0.7TD(lambda) · 0.7
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | A Scalable Attention-Based Approach for Image-to-3D Texture MappingabstractHigh-quality textures are critical for realistic 3D content creation, yet existing generative methods are slow, rely on UV maps, and often fail to remain faithful to a reference image. To address these challenges, we propose a transformer-based framework that predicts a 3D texture field directly from a single image and a mesh, eliminating the need for UV mapping and differentiable rendering, and enabling faster texture generation. Our method integrates a triplane representation with depth-based backprojection losses, enabling efficient training and faster inference. Once trained, it generates high-fidelity textures in a single forward pass, requiring only$\sim 0.2 s$per shape. Extensive qualitative, quantitative, and user preference evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on single-image texture reconstruction in terms of both fidelity to the input image and perceptual quality, highlighting its practicality for scalable, highquality, and controllable 3D content creation. Arianna Rampini, Kanika Madan, Bruno Roy, AmirHossein Zamani, Derek Cheung |
3DV | 2 |
| 2025 | Towards Improving Exploration through Sibling Augmented GFlowNetsabstractExploration is a key factor for the success of an active learning agent, especially when dealing with sparse extrinsic terminal rewards and long trajectories. We introduce Sibling Augmented Generative Flow Networks (SA-GFN), a novel framework designed to enhance exploration and training efficiency of Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets). SA-GFN uses a decoupled dual network architecture, comprising of a main Behavior Network and an exploratory Sibling Network, to enable a diverse exploration of the underlying distribution using intrinsic rewards. Inspired by the ideas on exploration from reinforcement learning, SA-GFN provides a general-purpose exploration and learning paradigm that integrates with multiple GFlowNet training objectives and is especially helpful for exploration over a wide range of sparse or low reward distributions and task structures. An extensive set of experiments across a diverse range of tasks, reward structures and trajectory lengths, along with a thorough set of ablations, demonstrate the superior performance of SA-GFN in terms of exploration efficacy and convergence speed as compared to the existing methods. In addition, SA-GFN's versatility and compatibility with different GFlowNet training objectives and intrinsic reward methods underscores its broad applicability in various problem domains. Kanika Madan, Alex Lamb, Emmanuel Bengio, Glen Berseth, Yoshua Bengio |
ICLR | 1 |
| 2025 | Majority of the Bests: Improving Best-of-N via BootstrappingabstractSampling multiple outputs from a Large Language Model (LLM) and selecting the most frequent (Self-consistency) or highest-scoring (Best-of-N) candidate is a popular approach to achieve higher accuracy in tasks with discrete final answers. Best-of-N (BoN) selects the output with the highest reward, and with perfect rewards, it often achieves near-perfect accuracy. With imperfect rewards from reward models, however, BoN fails to reliably find the correct answer and its performance degrades drastically. We consider the distribution of BoN’s outputs and highlight that, although the correct answer does not usually have a probability close to one under imperfect rewards, it is often the most likely outcome. This suggests that the mode of this distribution can be more reliably correct than a sample from it. Based on this idea, we propose Majority-of-the-Bests (MoB), a novel selection mechanism that estimates the output distribution of BoN via bootstrapping and selects its mode. Experimental results across five benchmarks, three different base LLMs, and two reward models demonstrate consistent improvements over BoN in 25 out of 30 setups. We also provide theoretical results for the consistency of the bootstrapping. MoB serves as a simple, yet strong alternative to BoN and self-consistency, and more broadly, motivates further research in more nuanced selection mechanisms. Amin Rakhsha, Kanika Madan, Tianyu Zhang 0003, Amir-massoud Farahmand, Amir Khasahmadi |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2024 | Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning Generative Flow NetworksabstractGenerative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are amortized samplers that learn stochastic policies to sequentially generate compositional objects from a given unnormalized reward distribution.
They can generate diverse sets of high-reward objects, which is an important consideration in scientific discovery tasks. However, as they are typically trained from a given extrinsic reward function, it remains an important open challenge about how to leverage the power of pre-training and train GFlowNets in an unsupervised fashion for efficient adaptation to downstream tasks.
Inspired by recent successes of unsupervised pre-training in various domains, we introduce a novel approach for reward-free pre-training of GFlowNets. By framing the training as a self-supervised problem, we propose an outcome-conditioned GFlowNet (OC-GFN) that learns to explore the candidate space. Specifically, OC-GFN learns to reach any targeted outcomes, akin to goal-conditioned policies in reinforcement learning.
We show that the pre-trained OC-GFN model can allow for a direct extraction of a policy capable of sampling from any new reward functions in downstream tasks.
Nonetheless, adapting OC-GFN on a downstream task-specific reward involves an intractable marginalization over possible outcomes. We propose a novel way to approximate this marginalization by learning an amortized predictor enabling efficient fine-tuning.
Extensive experimental results validate the efficacy of our approach, demonstrating the effectiveness of pre-training the OC-GFN, and its ability to swiftly adapt to downstream tasks and discover modes more efficiently.
This work may serve as a foundation for further exploration of pre-training strategies in the context of GFlowNets. Ling Pan, Moksh Jain, Kanika Madan, Yoshua Bengio |
ICLR | 3 |
| 2023 | Learning GFlowNets From Partial Episodes For Improved Convergence And StabilityabstractGenerative flow networks (GFlowNets) are a family of algorithms for training a sequential sampler of discrete objects under an unnormalized target density and have been successfully used for various probabilistic modeling tasks. Existing training objectives for GFlowNets are either local to states or transitions, or propagate a reward signal over an entire sampling trajectory. We argue that these alternatives represent opposite ends of a gradient bias-variance tradeoff and propose a way to exploit this tradeoff to mitigate its harmful effects. Inspired by the TD($\lambda$) algorithm in reinforcement learning, we introduce *subtrajectory balance* or SubTB($\lambda$), a GFlowNet training objective that can learn from partial action subsequences of varying lengths. We show that SubTB($\lambda$) accelerates sampler convergence in previously studied and new environments and enables training GFlowNets in environments with longer action sequences and sparser reward landscapes than what was possible before. We also perform a comparative analysis of stochastic gradient dynamics, shedding light on the bias-variance tradeoff in GFlowNet training and the advantages of subtrajectory balance. Kanika Madan, Jarrid Rector-Brooks, Maksym Korablyov, Emmanuel Bengio, Moksh Jain, Andrei Cristian Nica, Tom Bosc, Yoshua Bengio, Nikolay Malkin |
ICML | 1 |
| 2023 | Reusable Slotwise MechanismsabstractAgents with the ability to comprehend and reason about the dynamics of objects would be expected to exhibit improved robustness and generalization in novel scenarios. However, achieving this capability necessitates not only an effective scene representation but also an understanding of the mechanisms governing interactions among object subsets. Recent studies have made significant progress in representing scenes using object slots. In this work, we introduce Reusable Slotwise Mechanisms, or RSM, a framework that models object dynamics by leveraging communication among slots along with a modular architecture capable of dynamically selecting reusable mechanisms for predicting the future states of each object slot. Crucially, RSM leverages the Central Contextual Information (CCI), enabling selected mechanisms to access the remaining slots through a bottleneck, effectively allowing for modeling of higher order and complex interactions that might require a sparse subset of objects. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of RSM compared to state-of-the-art methods across various future prediction and related downstream tasks, including Visual Question Answering and action planning. Furthermore, we showcase RSM’s Out-of-Distribution generalization ability to handle scenes in intricate scenarios. Bailey Trang Nguyen, Amin Mansouri, Kanika Madan, Khuong Nguyen, Kartik Ahuja, Dianbo Liu, Yoshua Bengio |
NeurIPS | 3 |
| 2022 | Multi-label legal document classification: A deep learning-based approach with label-attention and domain-specific pre-training
Dezhao Song, Andrew Vold, Kanika Madan, Frank Schilder |
Inf. Syst. | 3 |
| 2021 | Fast And Slow Learning Of Recurrent Independent Mechanisms
Kanika Madan, Nan Rosemary Ke, Anirudh Goyal, Bernhard Schölkopf, Yoshua Bengio |
ICLR | 1 |