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Kaiwen Zheng

21 accepted papers

2026

DiffusionNFT: Online Diffusion Reinforcement with Forward Process

ICLR 2026oral

Online reinforcement learning (RL) has been central to post-training language models, but its extension to diffusion models remains challenging due to intractable likelihoods. Recent works discretize the reverse sampling process to enable GRPO-style training, yet they inherit fundamental drawbacks,…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

GuidedBridge: Training-freely Improving Bridge Models with Prior Guidance

ICML 2026poster

Guidance methods, e.g., classifier-free guidance (CFG) and auto-guidance (AG), have distinctively improved noise-to-data diffusion generation results. Recently, bridge models have been proposed, which present a data-to-data sampling process to exploit instructive information from clean prior represe…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

LLMPopcorn: Exploring LLMs as Assistants for Popular Micro-video Generation

ICASSP 2026poster

In an era where micro-videos dominate platforms like TikTok and YouTube, AI-generated content is nearing cinematic quality. The next frontier is using large language models (LLMs) to autonomously create viral micro-videos, a largely untapped potential that could shape the future of AI-driven content…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Large Scale Diffusion Distillation via Score-Regularized Continuous-Time Consistency

ICLR 2026poster

Although continuous-time consistency models (e.g., sCM, MeanFlow) are theoretically principled and empirically powerful for fast academic-scale diffusion, its applicability to large-scale text-to-image and video tasks remains unclear due to infrastructure challenges in Jacobian-vector product (JVP)…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

NFT: Bridging Supervised Learning and Reinforcement Learning in Math Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has played a central role in the recent surge of LLMs' math abilities by enabling verification-driven training through binary verifier signals. In contrast, Supervised Learning (SL) is rarely considered for such verification-driven training, largely due to its heavy relia…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

SLA: Beyond Sparsity in Diffusion Transformers via Fine-Tunable Sparse–Linear Attention

ICLR 2026poster

In Diffusion Transformer (DiT) models, particularly for video generation, attention latency is a major bottleneck due to the long sequence length and the quadratic complexity. Interestingly, we find that attention weights can be decoupled into two matrices: a small fraction of large weights with hig…

Cited by 44SourcecodeScholar
2025

Direct Discriminative Optimization: Your Likelihood-Based Visual Generative Model is Secretly a GAN Discriminator

ICML 2025spotlight

While likelihood-based generative models, particularly diffusion and autoregressive models, have achieved remarkable fidelity in visual generation, the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) objective, which minimizes the forward KL divergence, inherently suffers from a mode-covering tendency that limi…

2025

Double-Filter: Efficient Fine-tuning of Pre-trained Vision-Language Models via Patch&Layer Filtering

ICML 2025poster

In this paper, we present a novel approach, termed Double-Filter,to “slim down” the fine-tuning process of vision-language pre-trained (VLP) models via filtering redundancies in feature inputs and architectural components. We enhance the fine-tuning process using two approaches. First, we develop a…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Elucidating the Preconditioning in Consistency Distillation

ICLR 2025poster

Consistency distillation is a prevalent way for accelerating diffusion models adopted in consistency (trajectory) models, in which a student model is trained to traverse backward on the probability flow (PF) ordinary differential equation (ODE) trajectory determined by the teacher model. Preconditio…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

Masked Diffusion Models are Secretly Time-Agnostic Masked Models and Exploit Inaccurate Categorical Sampling

ICLR 2025poster

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a popular research topic for generative modeling of discrete data, thanks to their superior performance over other discrete diffusion models, and are rivaling the auto-regressive models (ARMs) for language modeling tasks. The recent effort in simplifyin…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2024

Aligning Diffusion Behaviors with Q-functions for Efficient Continuous Control

NeurIPS 2024poster

Drawing upon recent advances in language model alignment, we formulate offline Reinforcement Learning as a two-stage optimization problem: First pretraining expressive generative policies on reward-free behavior datasets, then finetuning these policies to align with task-specific annotations like Q-…

2024

Identifying and Solving Conditional Image Leakage in Image-to-Video Diffusion Model

NeurIPS 2024poster

Diffusion models have obtained substantial progress in image-to-video generation. However, in this paper, we find that these models tend to generate videos with less motion than expected. We attribute this to the issue called conditional image leakage, where the image-to-video diffusion models (I2V-…

2024

InstructPix2NeRF: Instructed 3D Portrait Editing from a Single Image

ICLR 2024poster

With the success of Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) in 3D-aware portrait editing, a variety of works have achieved promising results regarding both quality and 3D consistency. However, these methods heavily rely on per-prompt optimization when handling natural language as editing instructions. Due to t…

2023

DPM-Solver-v3: Improved Diffusion ODE Solver with Empirical Model Statistics

NeurIPS 2023poster

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have exhibited excellent performance for high-fidelity image generation while suffering from inefficient sampling. Recent works accelerate the sampling procedure by proposing fast ODE solvers that leverage the specific ODE form of DPMs. However, they highly rely…

2023

Improved Techniques for Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Diffusion ODEs

ICML 2023poster

Diffusion models have exhibited excellent performance in various domains. The probability flow ordinary differential equation (ODE) of diffusion models (i.e., diffusion ODEs) is a particular case of continuous normalizing flows (CNFs), which enables deterministic inference and exact likelihood evalu…

2023

Learning Sample Relationship for Exposure Correction

CVPR 2023poster

Exposure correction task aims to correct the underexposure and its adverse overexposure images to the normal exposure in a single network. As well recognized, the optimization flow is opposite. Despite the great advancement, existing exposure correction methods are usually trained with a mini-batch…

Cited by 49SourcePDFScholar
2023

PREIM3D: 3D Consistent Precise Image Attribute Editing From a Single Image

CVPR 2023poster

We study the 3D-aware image attribute editing problem in this paper, which has wide applications in practice. Recent methods solved the problem by training a shared encoder to map images into a 3D generator's latent space or by per-image latent code optimization and then edited images in the latent…

2022

Maximum Likelihood Training for Score-based Diffusion ODEs by High Order Denoising Score Matching

ICML 2022spotlight

Score-based generative models have excellent performance in terms of generation quality and likelihood. They model the data distribution by matching a parameterized score network with first-order data score functions. The score network can be used to define an ODE (“score-based diffusion ODE”) for e…