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Minkai Xu

35 accepted papers

2026

Diffusion Language Model Parallel Decoding via Product-of-Experts Bridge

ICML 2026poster

Diffusion language models (DLMs) offer substantial speed advantages through parallel decoding, but the lack of token dependencies limits generation quality compared to autoregressive (AR) models. Recent progress attempts to bridge the gap via importance sampling, with DLM being the proposal and AR b…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Discrete Diffusion Trajectory Alignment via Stepwise Decomposition

ICLR 2026poster

Discrete diffusion models have demonstrated great promise in modeling various sequence data, ranging from human language to biological sequences. Inspired by the success of RL in language models, there is growing interest in further improving the models by alignment with a certain reward. In this wo…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Principled RL for Diffusion LLMs Emerges from a Sequence-Level Perspective

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective for autoregressive language models, but adapting these methods to diffusion large language models (dLLMs) presents fundamental challenges. The core difficulty lies in likelihood approximation: while autoregressive models naturally provide token…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

$f$-PO: Generalizing Preference Optimization with $f$-divergence Minimization

AISTATS 2025poster

Preference optimization has made significant progress recently, with numerous methods developed to align language models with human preferences. This paper introduces $f$-divergence Preference Optimization ($f$-PO), a novel framework that generalizes and extends existing approaches. $f$-PO minimizes…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

3D Interaction Geometric Pre-training for Molecular Relational Learning

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Molecular Relational Learning (MRL) is a rapidly growing field that focuses on understanding the interaction dynamics between molecules, which is crucial for applications ranging from catalyst engineering to drug discovery. Despite recent progress, earlier MRL approaches are limited to using only t…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

CHORDS: Diffusion Sampling Accelerator with Multi-core Hierarchical ODE Solvers

ICCV 2025poster

Diffusion-based generative models have become dominant generators of high-fidelity images and videos but remain limited by their computationally expensive inference procedures. Existing acceleration techniques either require extensive model retraining or compromise significantly on sample quality. T…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Energy-Based Diffusion Language Models for Text Generation

ICLR 2025poster

Despite remarkable progress in autoregressive language models, alternative generative paradigms beyond left-to-right generation are still being actively explored. Discrete diffusion models, with the capacity for parallel generation, have recently emerged as a promising alternative. Unfortunately, th…

2025

RetroDiff: Retrosynthesis as Multi-stage Distribution Interpolation

AISTATS 2025poster

Retrosynthesis poses a key challenge in biopharmaceuticals, aiding chemists in finding appropriate reactant molecules for given product molecules. With reactants and products represented as 2D graphs, retrosynthesis constitutes a conditional graph-to-graph (G2G) generative task. Inspired by advancem…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Smooth Interpolation for Improved Discrete Graph Generative Models

ICML 2025poster

Though typically represented by the discrete node and edge attributes, the graph topological information can be sufficiently captured by the graph spectrum in a continuous space. It is believed that incorporating the continuity of graph topological information into the generative process design coul…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

SuperCorrect: Advancing Small LLM Reasoning with Thought Template Distillation and Self-Correction

ICLR 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, DeepSeek-R1, and ReasonFlux have shown significant improvements in various reasoning tasks. However, smaller LLMs still struggle with complex mathematical reasoning because they fail to effectively identify and correct reasoning errors. Recent reflection-base…

2025

TabDiff: a Mixed-type Diffusion Model for Tabular Data Generation

ICLR 2025poster

Synthesizing high-quality tabular data is an important topic in many data science tasks, ranging from dataset augmentation to privacy protection. However, developing expressive generative models for tabular data is challenging due to its inherent heterogeneous data types, complex inter-correlations,…

2024

Aligning Target-Aware Molecule Diffusion Models with Exact Energy Optimization

NeurIPS 2024poster

Generating ligand molecules for specific protein targets, known as structure-based drug design, is a fundamental problem in therapeutics development and biological discovery. Recently, target-aware generative models, especially diffusion models, have shown great promise in modeling protein-ligand in…

2024

Buffer of Thoughts: Thought-Augmented Reasoning with Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

We introduce Buffer of Thoughts (BoT), a novel and versatile thought-augmented reasoning approach for enhancing accuracy, efficiency and robustness of large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we propose meta-buffer to store a series of informative high-level thoughts, namely thought-template, dis…

2024

Cross-Modal Contextualized Diffusion Models for Text-Guided Visual Generation and Editing

ICLR 2024poster

Conditional diffusion models have exhibited superior performance in high-fidelity text-guided visual generation and editing. Nevertheless, prevailing text-guided visual diffusion models primarily focus on incorporating text-visual relationships exclusively into the reverse process, often disregardin…

2024

Equivariant Graph Neural Operator for Modeling 3D Dynamics

ICML 2024poster

Modeling the complex three-dimensional (3D) dynamics of relational systems is an important problem in the natural sciences, with applications ranging from molecular simulations to particle mechanics. Machine learning methods have achieved good success by learning graph neural networks to model spati…

2024

MADiff: Offline Multi-agent Learning with Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies from pre-existing datasets without further interactions, making it a challenging task. Q-learning algorithms struggle with extrapolation errors in offline settings, while supervised learning methods are constrained by model expressiveness. R…

2024

Mastering Text-to-Image Diffusion: Recaptioning, Planning, and Generating with Multimodal LLMs

ICML 2024poster

Diffusion models have exhibit exceptional performance in text-to-image generation and editing. However, existing methods often face challenges when handling complex text prompts that involve multiple objects with multiple attributes and relationships. In this paper, we propose a brand new training-f…

2024

RealCompo: Balancing Realism and Compositionality Improves Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable advancements in text-to-image generation. However, existing models still have many difficulties when faced with multiple-object compositional generation. In this paper, we propose ***RealCompo***, a new *training-free* and *transferred-friendly* text-to-imag…

2024

TFG: Unified Training-Free Guidance for Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

Given an unconditional diffusion model and a predictor for a target property of interest (e.g., a classifier), the goal of training-free guidance is to generate samples with desirable target properties without additional training. Existing methods, though effective in various individual applications…

2024

VQGraph: Rethinking Graph Representation Space for Bridging GNNs and MLPs

ICLR 2024poster

GNN-to-MLP distillation aims to utilize knowledge distillation (KD) to learn computationally-efficient multi-layer perceptron (student MLP) on graph data by mimicking the output representations of teacher GNN. Existing methods mainly make the MLP to mimic the GNN predictions over a few class labels.…

2023

Coarse-to-Fine: a Hierarchical Diffusion Model for Molecule Generation in 3D

ICML 2023poster

Generating desirable molecular structures in 3D is a fundamental problem for drug discovery. Despite the considerable progress we have achieved, existing methods usually generate molecules in atom resolution and ignore intrinsic local structures such as rings, which leads to poor quality in generate…

2023

Equivariant Flow Matching with Hybrid Probability Transport for 3D Molecule Generation

NeurIPS 2023poster

The generation of 3D molecules requires simultaneously deciding the categorical features (atom types) and continuous features (atom coordinates). Deep generative models, especially Diffusion Models (DMs), have demonstrated effectiveness in generating feature-rich geometries. However, existing DMs ty…

2023

FusionRetro: Molecule Representation Fusion via In-Context Learning for Retrosynthetic Planning

ICML 2023poster

Retrosynthetic planning aims to devise a complete multi-step synthetic route from starting materials to a target molecule. Current strategies use a decoupled approach of single-step retrosynthesis models and search algorithms, taking only the product as the input to predict the reactants for each pl…

2023

Geometric Latent Diffusion Models for 3D Molecule Generation

ICML 2023poster

Generative models, especially diffusion models (DMs), have achieved promising results for generating feature-rich geometries and advancing foundational science problems such as molecule design. Inspired by the recent huge success of Stable (latent) Diffusion models, we propose a novel and principled…

2023

When Do Graph Neural Networks Help with Node Classification? Investigating the Homophily Principle on Node Distinguishability

NeurIPS 2023poster

Homophily principle, i.e., nodes with the same labels are more likely to be connected, has been believed to be the main reason for the performance superiority of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) over Neural Networks on node classification tasks. Recent research suggests that, even in the absence of homo…

Cited by 88SourcePDFScholar
2022

Generative Coarse-Graining of Molecular Conformations

ICML 2022spotlight

Coarse-graining (CG) of molecular simulations simplifies the particle representation by grouping selected atoms into pseudo-beads and therefore drastically accelerates simulation. However, such CG procedure induces information losses, which makes accurate backmapping, i.e., restoring fine-grained (F…

2022

GeoDiff: A Geometric Diffusion Model for Molecular Conformation Generation

ICLR 2022oral

Predicting molecular conformations from molecular graphs is a fundamental problem in cheminformatics and drug discovery. Recently, significant progress has been achieved with machine learning approaches, especially with deep generative models. Inspired by the diffusion process in classical non-equil…

2021

An End-to-End Framework for Molecular Conformation Generation via Bilevel Programming

ICML 2021spotlight

Predicting molecular conformations (or 3D structures) from molecular graphs is a fundamental problem in many applications. Most existing approaches are usually divided into two steps by first predicting the distances between atoms and then generating a 3D structure through optimizing a distance geom…

2021

Learning Gradient Fields for Molecular Conformation Generation

ICML 2021oral

We study a fundamental problem in computational chemistry known as molecular conformation generation, trying to predict stable 3D structures from 2D molecular graphs. Existing machine learning approaches usually first predict distances between atoms and then generate a 3D structure satisfying the di…

2021

Learning Neural Generative Dynamics for Molecular Conformation Generation

ICLR 2021poster

We study how to generate molecule conformations (i.e., 3D structures) from a molecular graph. Traditional methods, such as molecular dynamics, sample conformations via computationally expensive simulations. Recently, machine learning methods have shown great potential by training on a large collecti…

Cited by 153SourcePDFScholar
2021

Predicting Molecular Conformation via Dynamic Graph Score Matching

NeurIPS 2021poster

Predicting stable 3D conformations from 2D molecular graphs has been a long-standing challenge in computational chemistry. Recently, machine learning approaches have demonstrated very promising results compared to traditional experimental and physics-based simulation methods. These approaches mainly…

Cited by 116SourcePDFScholar
2020

A Graph to Graphs Framework for Retrosynthesis Prediction

ICML 2020poster

A fundamental problem in computational chemistry is to find a set of reactants to synthesize a target molecule, a.k.a. retrosynthesis prediction. Existing state-of-the-art methods rely on matching the target molecule with a large set of reaction templates, which are very computationally expensive an…

Cited by 196SourcePDFScholar