← Search

Jiacheng Sun

32 accepted papers

2026

Any-Order GPT as Masked Diffusion Model: Decoupling Formulation and Architecture

ICML 2026oral

Efficiently scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitates exploring alternatives to dominant autoregressive (AR) methods, with Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) emerging as candidates. However, comparing AR (typically decoder-only) and MDM (often encoder-only) paradigms is confounded by differing a…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Beyond Masks: Efficient, Flexible Diffusion Language Models via Deletion-Insertion Processes

ICLR 2026poster

While Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) relying on token masking and unmasking have shown promise in language modeling, their computational efficiency and generation flexibility remain constrained by the masking paradigm. In this paper, we propose Deletion-Insertion Diffusion language models…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Exploring More to Solve More: Boosting Diversity in Text Diffusion Models via Entropy-Based Guidance

ICML 2026poster

Although diffusion models have revolutionized continuous domains like image synthesis through high quality generations and controllable guidance mechanisms, bringing this controllability to the discrete, sequential nature of text remains an open challenge. Meanwhile, current sampling strategies and …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

HERMES: Towards Efficient and Verifiable Mathematical Reasoning in LLMs

ICML 2026poster

Informal mathematics has been central to modern large language model (LLM) reasoning, offering flexibility and efficient construction of arguments. However, purely informal reasoning is prone to logical gaps and subtle errors that are difficult to detect and correct. In contrast, formal theorem prov…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Mathesis: Towards Formal Theorem Proving from Natural Languages

ICLR 2026poster

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) show strong promise for formal reasoning. However, most LLM-based theorem provers remain constrained by the need for expert-written formal statements as inputs, limiting their applicability to real-world problems expressed in natural language. We addre…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Stabilizing Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) often exhibit severe instability during Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) training, limiting the effectiveness of reinforcement learning for improving reasoning capabilities. In dLLMs, the importance ratios used by GRPO are derived from finite-sample e…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

The Structural Origin of Attention Sink: Variance Discrepancy, Super Neurons, and Dimension Disparity

ICML 2026poster

Despite the prevalence of the attention sink phenomenon in Large Language Models (LLMs), where initial tokens disproportionately monopolize attention scores, its structural origins remain elusive. This work provides a _mechanistic explanation_ for this phenomenon, tracing its roots to the value aggr…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Variational Autoencoding Discrete Diffusion with Enhanced Dimensional Correlations Modeling

ICLR 2026poster

Discrete diffusion models have recently shown great promise for modeling complex discrete data, with masked diffusion models (MDMs) offering a compelling trade-off between quality and generation speed. MDMs denoise by progressively unmasking multiple dimensions from an all-masked input, but their pe…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

ViewMask-1-to-3: Multi-View Consistent Image Generation via Multimodal Diffusion Models

ICML 2026poster

Motivated by discrete diffusion's success in language-vision modeling, we explore its potential for multi-view generation, a task dominated by continuous approaches. We introduce \textbf{ViewMask-1-to-3}, formulating multi-view synthesis as a discrete sequence modeling problem where each viewpoint i…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Adding Additional Control to One-Step Diffusion with Joint Distribution Matching

ICCV 2025poster

While diffusion distillation has enabled one-step generation through methods like Variational Score Distillation, adapting distilled models to emerging *new controls* -- such as novel structural constraints or latest user preferences -- remains challenging. Conventional approaches typically requires…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

FUDOKI: Discrete Flow-based Unified Understanding and Generation via Kinetic-Optimal Velocities

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

The rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) has catalyzed the emergence of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that unify visual understanding and image generation within a single framework. However, most existing MLLMs rely on autoregressive (AR) architectures, which impose inherent lim…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

How Do LLMs Acquire New Knowledge? A Knowledge Circuits Perspective on Continual Pre-Training

ACL 2025finding

Despite exceptional capabilities in knowledge-intensive tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) face a critical gap in understanding how they internalize new knowledge, particularly how acquired knowledge becomes structurally embedded in their neural computations. We address this issue through the lens…

2025

How Numerical Precision Affects Arithmetical Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs

ACL 2025finding

Despite the remarkable success of transformer-based large language models (LLMs) across various domains, understanding and enhancing their mathematical capabilities remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we conduct a rigorous theoretical analysis of LLMs’ mathematical abilities, with a spec…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

ICG: Improving Cover Image Generation via MLLM-based Prompting and Personalized Preference Alignment

EMNLP 2025

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and diffusion models (DMs) have opened new possibilities for AI-generated content. Yet, personalized cover image generation remains underexplored, despite its critical role in boosting user engagement on digital platforms. We propose ICG, a

2025

Learning Few-Step Diffusion Models by Trajectory Distribution Matching

ICCV 2025poster

Accelerating diffusion model sampling is crucial for efficient AIGC deployment. While diffusion distillation methods -- based on distribution matching and trajectory matching -- reduce sampling to as few as one step, they fall short on complex tasks like text-to-image generation. Few-step generation…

2025

Masked Diffusion Models as Energy Minimization

NeurIPS 2025poster

We present a systematic theoretical framework that interprets masked diffusion models (MDMs) as solutions to energy minimization problems in discrete optimal transport. Specifically, we prove that three distinct energy formulations—kinetic, conditional kinetic, and geodesic energy—are mathematically…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

PolarNeXt: Rethink Instance Segmentation with Polar Representation

CVPR 2025poster

One of the roadblocks for instance segmentation today is heavy computational overhead and model parameters. Previous methods based on Polar Representation made the initial mark to address this challenge by formulating instance segmentation as polygon detection, but failed to align with mainstream me…

2025

ProofAug: Efficient Neural Theorem Proving via Fine-grained Proof Structure Analysis

ICML 2025poster

The synergy between deep learning models and traditional automation tools, such as built-in tactics of the proof assistant and off-the-shelf automated theorem provers, plays a crucial role in developing robust and efficient neural theorem provers~(NTPs). However, for proof synthesis with LLMs, previ…

2025

Towards Transformer-Based Aligned Generation with Self-Coherence Guidance

CVPR 2025poster

We introduce a novel, training-free approach for enhancing alignment in Transformer-based Text-Guided Diffusion Models (TGDMs). Existing TGDMs often struggle to generate semantically aligned images, particularly when dealing with complex text prompts or multi-concept attribute binding challenges. Pr…

2025

Understanding the Language Model to Solve the Symbolic Multi-Step Reasoning Problem from the Perspective of Buffer Mechanism

EMNLP 2025

Large language models have consistently struggled with complex reasoning tasks, such as mathematical problem-solving. Investigating the internal reasoning mechanisms of these models can help us design better model architectures and training strategies, ultimately enhancing their reasoning capability

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Your Absorbing Discrete Diffusion Secretly Models the Conditional Distributions of Clean Data

ICLR 2025poster

Discrete diffusion models with absorbing processes have shown promise in language modeling. The key quantities to be estimated are the ratios between the marginal probabilities of two transitive states at all timesteps, called the concrete score. In this paper, we reveal that the concrete score in a…

2024

Elucidating the design space of classifier-guided diffusion generation

ICLR 2024poster

Guidance in conditional diffusion generation is of great importance for sample quality and controllability. However, existing guidance schemes are to be desired. On one hand, mainstream methods such as classifier guidance and classifier-free guidance both require extra training with labeled data,…

2023

Breaking Correlation Shift via Conditional Invariant Regularizer

ICLR 2023poster

Recently, generalization on out-of-distribution (OOD) data with correlation shift has attracted great attentions. The correlation shift is caused by the spurious attributes that correlate to the class label, as the correlation between them may vary in training and test data. For such a problem, we s…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2023

Complexity Matters: Rethinking the Latent Space for Generative Modeling

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

In generative modeling, numerous successful approaches leverage a low-dimensional latent space, e.g., Stable Diffusion models the latent space induced by an encoder and generates images through a paired decoder. Although the selection of the latent space is empirically pivotal, determining the optim…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2023

Diff-Instruct: A Universal Approach for Transferring Knowledge From Pre-trained Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2023poster

Due to the ease of training, ability to scale, and high sample quality, diffusion models (DMs) have become the preferred option for generative modeling, with numerous pre-trained models available for a wide variety of datasets. Containing intricate information about data distributions, pre-trained D…

2023

Diffusion Models and Semi-Supervised Learners Benefit Mutually with Few Labels

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

In an effort to further advance semi-supervised generative and classification tasks, we propose a simple yet effective training strategy called *dual pseudo training* (DPT), built upon strong semi-supervised learners and diffusion models. DPT operates in three stages: training a classifier on partia…

2023

SA-Solver: Stochastic Adams Solver for Fast Sampling of Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2023poster

Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs) have achieved considerable success in generation tasks. As sampling from DPMs is equivalent to solving diffusion SDE or ODE which is time-consuming, numerous fast sampling methods built upon improved differential equation solvers are proposed. The majority of su…

2022

Estimating the Optimal Covariance with Imperfect Mean in Diffusion Probabilistic Models

ICML 2022spotlight

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) are a class of powerful deep generative models (DGMs). Despite their success, the iterative generation process over the full timesteps is much less efficient than other DGMs such as GANs. Thus, the generation performance on a subset of timesteps is crucial, whic…

2022

Nonlinear ICA Using Volume-Preserving Transformations

ICLR 2022poster

Nonlinear ICA is a fundamental problem in machine learning, aiming to identify the underlying independent components (sources) from data which is assumed to be a nonlinear function (mixing function) of these sources. Recent works prove that if the sources have some particular structures (e.g. tempor…

Cited by 23SourcePDFScholar
2021

Improved OOD Generalization via Adversarial Training and Pretraing

ICML 2021spotlight

Recently, learning a model that generalizes well on out-of-distribution (OOD) data has attracted great attention in the machine learning community. In this paper, after defining OOD generalization by Wasserstein distance, we theoretically justify that a model robust to input perturbation also genera…

Cited by 86SourcePDFScholar
2021

Towards Understanding the Generative Capability of Adversarially Robust Classifiers

ICCV 2021poster

Recently, some works found an interesting phenomenon that adversarially robust classifiers can generate good images comparable to generative models. We investigate this phenomenon from an energy perspective and provide a novel explanation. We reformulate adversarial example generation, adversarial t…

Cited by 24PDFcodeScholar