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Kai Zou

21 accepted papers

2026

Context Forcing: Consistent Autoregressive Video Generation with Long Context

ICML 2026poster

Recent approaches to real-time long video generation typically employ streaming tuning strategies, attempting to train a long-context student using a short-context (memoryless) teacher. In these frameworks, the student performs long rollouts but receives supervision from a teacher limited to short 5…

Cited by 32SourceScholar
2026

EchoGen: Cycle-Consistent Learning for Unified Layout-Image Generation and Understanding

AAAI 2026technical

In this work, we present EchoGen, a unified framework for layout-to-image generation and image grounding, capable of generating images with both accurate layout and high fidelity to the text description.(e.g., spatial relationship), and grounding the image robustly at the same time. We believe that

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Hierarchical Process Reward Models are Symbolic Vision Learners

CVPR 2026

Symbolic computer vision represents diagrams through explicit logical rules and structured representations, enabling interpretable understanding in machine vision. This requires fundamentally different learning paradigms from pixel-based visual models. Symbolic visual learners parse diagrams into ge

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Math Blind: Failures in Diagram Understanding Undermine Reasoning in MLLMs

ICLR 2026poster

Diagrams represent a form of visual language that encodes abstract concepts and relationships through structured symbols and their spatial arrangements. Unlike natural images, they are inherently symbolic, and entirely artificial. They thus pose unique challenges for Multimodal Large Language Model…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

VisCoder2: Building Multi-Language Visualization Coding Agents

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) have recently enabled coding agents capable of generating, executing, and revising visualization code. However, existing models often fail in practical workflows due to limited language coverage, unreliable execution, and lack of iterative correction mechanisms. Progress…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

MoE-CAP: Benchmarking Cost, Accuracy and Performance of Sparse Mixture-of-Experts Systems

NeurIPS 2025poster

The sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture is increasingly favored for scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) efficiently, but it depends on heterogeneous compute and memory resources. These factors jointly affect system Cost, Accuracy, and Performance (CAP), making trade-offs inevitable. Existi…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

NitroFusion: High-Fidelity Single-Step Diffusion through Dynamic Adversarial Training

CVPR 2025poster

We introduce NitroFusion, a fundamentally different approach to single-step diffusion that achieves high-quality generation through a dynamic adversarial framework. While one-step methods offer dramatic speed advantages, they typically suffer from quality degradation compared to their multi-step cou…

2025

Normalized Attention Guidance: Universal Negative Guidance for Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Negative guidance -- explicitly suppressing unwanted attributes -- remains a fundamental challenge in diffusion models, particularly in few-step sampling regimes. While Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) works well in standard settings, it fails under aggressive sampling step compression due to divergen…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

PriFold: Biological Priors Improve RNA Secondary Structure Predictions

AAAI 2025technical

Predicting RNA secondary structures is crucial for understanding RNA function, designing RNA-based therapeutics, and studying molecular interactions within cells. Existing deep-learning-based methods for RNA secondary structure prediction have mainly focused on local structural properties, often ove…

2025

Primitive Vision: Improving Diagram Understanding in MLLMs

ICML 2025poster

Mathematical diagrams have a distinctive structure. Standard feature transforms designed for natural images (e.g., CLIP) fail to process them effectively, limiting their utility in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Current efforts to improve MLLMs have primarily focused on scaling mathematic…

2025

Universal Biological Sequence Reranking for Improved De Novo Peptide Sequencing

ICML 2025poster

De novo peptide sequencing is a critical task in proteomics. However, the performance of current deep learning-based methods is limited by the inherent complexity of mass spectrometry data and the heterogeneous distribution of noise signals, leading to data-specific biases. We present RankNovo, the…

2025

Unleashing the Reasoning Potential of LLMs by Critique Fine-Tuning on One Problem

EMNLP 2025

Critique Fine-Tuning (CFT) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm for unlocking the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). In this work, we introduce one-shot CFT, a highly compute-efficient approach that leverages critique data generated from a single math problem. Remarkably

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

VisCoder: Fine-Tuning LLMs for Executable Python Visualization Code Generation

EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with visualization tasks like plotting diagrams, charts, where success depends on both code correctness and visual semantics. Existing instruction-tuning datasets lack execution-grounded supervision and offer limited support for iterative code correction,

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

VisualWebInstruct: Scaling up Multimodal Instruction Data through Web Search

EMNLP 2025

Vision-Language Models have made significant progress on many perception-focused tasks. However, their progress on reasoning-focused tasks remains limited due to the lack of high-quality and diverse training data. In this work, we aim to address the scarcity of reasoning-focused multimodal datasets.

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

FTBC: Forward Temporal Bias Correction for Optimizing ANN-SNN Conversion

ECCV 2024poster

"Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a promising avenue for energy-efficient computing compared with Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), closely mirroring biological neural processes. However, this potential comes with inherent challenges in directly training SNNs through spatio-temporal backpropaga…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Virtual Scanning: Unsupervised Non-line-of-sight Imaging from Irregularly Undersampled Transients

NeurIPS 2024poster

Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging allows for seeing hidden scenes around corners through active sensing. Most previous algorithms for NLOS reconstruction require dense transients acquired through regular scans over a large relay surface, which limits their applicability in realistic scenarios with ir…

2023

Annotations Are Not All You Need: A Cross-modal Knowledge Transfer Network for Unsupervised Temporal Sentence Grounding

EMNLP 2023long findings

This paper addresses the task of temporal sentence grounding (TSG). Although many respectable works have made decent achievements in this important topic, they severely rely on massive expensive video-query paired annotations, which require a tremendous amount of human effort to collect in real-worl…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Evaluation Metrics in the Era of GPT-4: Reliably Evaluating Large Language Models on Sequence to Sequence Tasks

EMNLP 2023short main

Large Language Models (LLMs) evaluation is a patchy and inconsistent landscape, and it is becoming clear that the quality of automatic evaluation metrics is not keeping up with the pace of development of generative models. We aim to improve the understanding of current models' performance by providi…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

You Are Catching My Attention: Are Vision Transformers Bad Learners Under Backdoor Attacks?

CVPR 2023poster

Vision Transformers (ViTs), which made a splash in the field of computer vision (CV), have shaken the dominance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, in the process of industrializing ViTs, backdoor attacks have brought severe challenges to security. The success of ViTs benefits from the…

Cited by 43SourcePDFScholar
2022

M³ViT: Mixture-of-Experts Vision Transformer for Efficient Multi-task Learning with Model-Accelerator Co-design

NeurIPS 2022accept

Multi-task learning (MTL) encapsulates multiple learned tasks in a single model and often lets those tasks learn better jointly. Multi-tasking models have become successful and often essential for many sophisticated systems such as autonomous driving and indoor robots. However, when deploying MTL on…

Cited by 92SourcePDFScholar
2022

Unsupervised Temporal Video Grounding with Deep Semantic Clustering

AAAI 2022technical

Temporal video grounding (TVG) aims to localize a target segment in a video according to a given sentence query. Though respectable works have made decent achievements in this task, they severely rely on abundant video-query paired data, which is expensive to collect in real-world scenarios. In this…

Cited by 59SourcePDFScholar