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Alexander Tong

31 accepted papers

2026

Efficient Regression-based Training of Normalizing Flows for Boltzmann Generators

ICLR 2026poster

Simulation-free training frameworks have been at the forefront of the generative modelling revolution in continuous spaces, leading to large-scale diffusion and flow matching models. However, such modern generative models suffer from expensive inference, inhibiting their use in numerous scientific a…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

FALCON: Few-step Accurate Likelihoods for Continuous Flows

ICLR 2026oral

Scalable sampling of molecular states in thermodynamic equilibrium is a long-standing challenge in statistical physics. Boltzmann Generators tackle this problem by pairing a generative model, capable of exact likelihood computation, with importance sampling to obtain consistent samples under the tar…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

MacroGuide: Topological Guidance for Macrocycle Generation

ICML 2026poster

Macrocycles are ring-shaped molecules that offer a promising alternative to small-molecule drugs due to their enhanced selectivity and binding affinity against difficult targets. Despite their chemical value, they remain underexplored in generative modeling, likely owing to their scarcity in public …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

OXtal: An All-Atom Diffusion Model for Organic Crystal Structure Prediction

ICLR 2026poster

Accurately predicting experimentally-realizable $3\textrm{D}$ molecular crystal structures from their $2\textrm{D}$ chemical graphs is a long-standing open challenge in computational chemistry called $\textit{crystal structure prediction}$ (CSP). Efficiently solving this problem has implications ran…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Planner Aware Path Learning in Diffusion Language Models Training

ICLR 2026oral

Diffusion language models have emerged as a powerful alternative to autoregressive models, enabling fast inference through more flexible and parallel generation paths. This flexibility of sampling is unlocked by new engineered sampling strategies, or *planners*, that select more favorable generation…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Amortized Sampling with Transferable Normalizing Flows

NeurIPS 2025poster

Efficient equilibrium sampling of molecular conformations remains a core challenge in computational chemistry and statistical inference. Classical approaches such as molecular dynamics or Markov chain Monte Carlo inherently lack amortization; the computational cost of sampling must be paid in-full f…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Curly Flow Matching for Learning Non-gradient Field Dynamics

NeurIPS 2025poster

Modeling the transport dynamics of natural processes from population-level observations is a ubiquitous problem in the natural sciences. Such models rely on key assumptions about the underlying process in order to enable faithful learning of governing dynamics that mimic the actual system behavior.…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Feynman-Kac Correctors in Diffusion: Annealing, Guidance, and Product of Experts

ICML 2025spotlight

While score-based generative models are the model of choice across diverse domains, there are limited tools available for controlling inference-time behavior in a principled manner, e.g. for composing multiple pretrained models. Existing classifier-free guidance methods use a simple heuristic to mix…

2025

ImageFlowNet: Forecasting Multiscale Image-Level Trajectories of Disease Progression with Irregularly-Sampled Longitudinal Medical Images

ICASSP 2025accepted

Advances in medical imaging technologies have enabled the collection of longitudinal images, which involve repeated scanning of the same patients over time, to monitor disease progression. However, predictive modeling of such data remains challenging due to high dimensionality, irregular sampling, a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Meta Flow Matching: Integrating Vector Fields on the Wasserstein Manifold

ICLR 2025poster

Numerous biological and physical processes can be modeled as systems of interacting entities evolving continuously over time, e.g. the dynamics of communicating cells or physical particles. Learning the dynamics of such systems is essential for predicting the temporal evolution of populations across…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2025

Multi-Modal and Multi-Attribute Generation of Single Cells with CFGen

ICLR 2025poster

Generative modeling of single-cell RNA-seq data is crucial for tasks like trajectory inference, batch effect removal, and simulation of realistic cellular data. However, recent deep generative models simulating synthetic single cells from noise operate on pre-processed continuous gene expression app…

2025

Progressive Inference-Time Annealing of Diffusion Models for Sampling from Boltzmann Densities

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Sampling efficiently from a target unnormalized probability density remains a core challenge, with relevance across countless high-impact scientific applications. A promising approach towards this challenge is the design of amortized samplers that borrow key ideas, such as probability path design, f…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Scalable Equilibrium Sampling with Sequential Boltzmann Generators

ICML 2025poster

Scalable sampling of molecular states in thermodynamic equilibrium is a long-standing challenge in statistical physics. Boltzmann generators tackle this problem by pairing normalizing flows with importance sampling to obtain uncorrelated samples under the target distribution. In this paper, we exten…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

Steering Masked Discrete Diffusion Models via Discrete Denoising Posterior Prediction

ICLR 2025poster

Generative modeling of discrete data underlies important applications spanning text-based agents like ChatGPT to the design of the very building blocks of life in protein sequences. However, application domains need to exert control over the generated data by steering the generative process—typicall…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2025

The Superposition of Diffusion Models Using the Itô Density Estimator

ICLR 2025spotlight

The Cambrian explosion of easily accessible pre-trained diffusion models suggests a demand for methods that combine multiple different pre-trained diffusion models without incurring the significant computational burden of re-training a larger combined model. In this paper, we cast the problem of com…

2024

A Computational Framework for Solving Wasserstein Lagrangian Flows

ICML 2024poster

The dynamical formulation of the optimal transport can be extended through various choices of the underlying geometry (*kinetic energy*), and the regularization of density paths (*potential energy*). These combinations yield different variational problems (*Lagrangians*), encompassing many variation…

2024

Iterated Denoising Energy Matching for Sampling from Boltzmann Densities

ICML 2024poster

Efficiently generating statistically independent samples from an unnormalized probability distribution, such as equilibrium samples of many-body systems, is a foundational problem in science. In this paper, we propose Iterated Denoising Energy Matching (iDEM), an iterative algorithm that uses a nove…

2024

Metric Flow Matching for Smooth Interpolations on the Data Manifold

NeurIPS 2024poster

Matching objectives underpin the success of modern generative models and rely on constructing conditional paths that transform a source distribution into a target distribution. Despite being a fundamental building block, conditional paths have been designed principally under the assumption of $\text…

2024

SE(3)-Stochastic Flow Matching for Protein Backbone Generation

ICLR 2024spotlight

The computational design of novel protein structures has the potential to impact numerous scientific disciplines greatly. Toward this goal, we introduce \foldflow, a series of novel generative models of increasing modeling power based on the flow-matching paradigm over $3\mathrm{D}$ rigid motions---…

2024

Sequence-Augmented SE(3)-Flow Matching For Conditional Protein Generation

NeurIPS 2024poster

Proteins are essential for almost all biological processes and derive their diverse functions from complex $3 \rm D$ structures, which are in turn determined by their amino acid sequences. In this paper, we exploit the rich biological inductive bias of amino acid sequences and introduce FoldFlow++,…

Cited by 31SourcePDFScholar
2024

Trajectory Flow Matching with Applications to Clinical Time Series Modelling

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

Modeling stochastic and irregularly sampled time series is a challenging problem found in a wide range of applications, especially in medicine. Neural stochastic differential equations (Neural SDEs) are an attractive modeling technique for this problem, which parameterize the drift and diffusion ter…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2023

A Heat Diffusion Perspective on Geodesic Preserving Dimensionality Reduction

NeurIPS 2023poster

Diffusion-based manifold learning methods have proven useful in representation learning and dimensionality reduction of modern high dimensional, high throughput, noisy datasets. Such datasets are especially present in fields like biology and physics. While it is thought that these methods preserve u…

2023

DynGFN: Towards Bayesian Inference of Gene Regulatory Networks with GFlowNets

NeurIPS 2023poster

One of the grand challenges of cell biology is inferring the gene regulatory network (GRN) which describes interactions between genes and their products that control gene expression and cellular function. We can treat this as a causal discovery problem but with two non-standard challenges: (1) regul…

2023

Neural FIM for learning Fisher information metrics from point cloud data

ICML 2023poster

Although data diffusion embeddings are ubiquitous in unsupervised learning and have proven to be a viable technique for uncovering the underlying intrinsic geometry of data, diffusion embeddings are inherently limited due to their discrete nature. To this end, we propose neural FIM, a method for com…

2022

Embedding Signals on Graphs with Unbalanced Diffusion Earth Mover's Distance

ICASSP 2022accepted

In modern relational machine learning it is common to encounter large graphs that arise via interactions or similarities between observations in many domains. Further, in many cases the target entities for analysis are actually signals on such graphs. We propose to compare and organize such datasets…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Manifold Interpolating Optimal-Transport Flows for Trajectory Inference

NeurIPS 2022accept

We present a method called Manifold Interpolating Optimal-Transport Flow (MIOFlow) that learns stochastic, continuous population dynamics from static snapshot samples taken at sporadic timepoints. MIOFlow combines dynamic models, manifold learning, and optimal transport by training neural ordinary…

Cited by 62SourcePDFScholar
2021

A sandbox for prediction and integration of DNA, RNA, and proteins in single cells

NeurIPS 2021poster

The last decade has witnessed a technological arms race to encode the molecular states of cells into DNA libraries, turning DNA sequencers into scalable single-cell microscopes. Single-cell measurement of chromatin accessibility (DNA), gene expression (RNA), and proteins has revealed rich cellular d…

Cited by 126SourceScholar
2020

TrajectoryNet: A Dynamic Optimal Transport Network for Modeling Cellular Dynamics

ICML 2020poster

It is increasingly common to encounter data in the form of cross-sectional population measurements over time, particularly in biomedical settings. Recent attempts to model individual trajectories from this data use optimal transport to create pairwise matchings between time points. However, these me…