VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Naitik Khandelwal
dblp:335/4269
· DBLP profile ↗
2ranked-venue papers
1as first author
2since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 2 · 1 first-author · 2 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
2 papers |
Vision and language · 39% Knowledge representation and reasoning · 20% Reinforcement learning · 20% |
Topics — the 6 heaviest of 6, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Knowledge, reasoning and agents › Knowledge representation and reasoning › semantic representation › grounding
grounded reasoning |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Grounded Reinforcement Learning for Visual Reasoning · NeurIPS 2025 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
multi-turn reinforcement learning |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Grounded Reinforcement Learning for Visual Reasoning · NeurIPS 2025 |
Computer vision › Vision and language
vision-language model |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Grounded Reinforcement Learning for Visual Reasoning · NeurIPS 2025 |
Computer vision › Vision and language
visual reasoning |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Grounded Reinforcement Learning for Visual Reasoning · NeurIPS 2025 |
Computer vision › Segmentation and scene understanding
scene graph generation |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Adaptive Visual Scene Understanding: Incremental Scene Graph Generation · NeurIPS 2024 |
Machine learning › Learning paradigms
continual learning |
0.2 | 1 | 2024 | Adaptive Visual Scene Understanding: Incremental Scene Graph Generation · NeurIPS 2024 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
visual grounding · 0.9reinforcement learning · 0.9chain-of-thought reasoning · 0.9scene graph decomposition and recomposition · 0.8replay via analysis by synthesis · 0.8
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Grounded Reinforcement Learning for Visual ReasoningabstractWhile reinforcement learning (RL) over chains of thought has significantly advanced language models in tasks such as mathematics and coding, visual reasoning introduces added complexity by requiring models to direct visual attention, interpret perceptual inputs, and ground abstract reasoning in spatial evidence. We introduce ViGoRL (**Vi**sually **G**r**o**unded **R**einforcement **L**earning), a vision-language model trained with RL to explicitly anchor each reasoning step to specific visual coordinates. Inspired by human visual decision-making, ViGoRL learns to produce spatially grounded reasoning traces, guiding visual attention to task-relevant regions at each step. When fine-grained exploration is required, our novel multi-turn RL framework enables the model to dynamically zoom into predicted coordinates as reasoning unfolds. Across a diverse set of visual reasoning benchmarks—including SAT-2 and BLINK for spatial reasoning, V$^\*$bench for visual search, and ScreenSpot and VisualWebArena for web-based grounding—ViGoRL consistently outperforms both supervised fine-tuning and conventional RL baselines that lack explicit grounding mechanisms. Incorporating multi-turn RL with zoomed-in visual feedback significantly improves ViGoRL’s performance on localizing small GUI elements and visual search, achieving 86.4% on V$^\*$Bench. Additionally, we find that grounding amplifies other visual behaviors such as region exploration, grounded subgoal setting, and visual verification. Finally, human evaluations show that the model’s visual references are not only spatially accurate but also helpful for understanding model reasoning steps. Our results show that visually grounded RL is a strong paradigm for imbuing models with general-purpose visual reasoning. Gabriel Sarch, Snigdha Saha, Naitik Khandelwal, Michael J. Tarr, Aviral Kumar, Katerina Fragkiadaki |
NeurIPS | 3 |
| 2024 | Adaptive Visual Scene Understanding: Incremental Scene Graph GenerationabstractScene graph generation (SGG) analyzes images to extract meaningful information about objects and their relationships. In the dynamic visual world, it is crucial for AI systems to continuously detect new objects and establish their relationships with existing ones. Recently, numerous studies have focused on continual learning within the domains of object detection and image recognition. However, a limited amount of research focuses on a more challenging continual learning problem in SGG. This increased difficulty arises from the intricate interactions and dynamic relationships among objects, and their associated contexts. Thus, in continual learning, SGG models are often required to expand, modify, retain, and reason scene graphs within the process of adaptive visual scene understanding. To systematically explore Continual Scene Graph Generation (CSEGG), we present a comprehensive benchmark comprising three learning regimes: relationship incremental, scene incremental, and relationship generalization. Moreover, we introduce a ``Replays via Analysis by Synthesis" method named RAS. This approach leverages the scene graphs, decomposes and re-composes them to represent different scenes, and replays the synthesized scenes based on these compositional scene graphs. The replayed synthesized scenes act as a means to practice and refine proficiency in SGG in known and unknown environments. Our experimental results not only highlight the challenges of directly combining existing continual learning methods with SGG backbones but also demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, enhancing CSEGG efficiency while simultaneously preserving privacy and memory usage. All data and source code will be made public. Naitik Khandelwal, Mengmi Zhang |
NeurIPS | 1 |