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Shuangfei Zhai

31 accepted papers

2026

STARFlow-V: End-to-End Video Generative Modeling with Autoregressive Normalizing Flows

CVPR 2026

Normalizing flows (NFs) are end-to-end likelihood-based generative models for continuous data, and have recently regained attention with encouraging progress on image generation. Yet in the video generation domain, where spatiotemporal complexity and computational cost are substantially higher, stat

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Composition and Control with Distilled Energy Diffusion Models and Sequential Monte Carlo

AISTATS 2025poster

Diffusion models may be formulated as a time-indexed sequence of energy-based models, where the score corresponds to the negative gradient of an energy function. As opposed to learning the score directly, an energy parameterization is attractive as the energy itself can be used to control generation…

Cited by 25SourceScholar
2025

Denoising Autoregressive Transformers for Scalable Text-to-Image Generation

ICLR 2025poster

Diffusion models have become the dominant approach for visual generation. They are trained by denoising a Markovian process which gradually adds noise to the input. We argue that the Markovian property limits the model’s ability to fully utilize the generation trajectory, leading to inefficiencies d…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Flexible Language Modeling in Continuous Space with Transformer-based Autoregressive Flows

NeurIPS 2025poster

Autoregressive models have driven remarkable progress in language modeling. Their foundational reliance on discrete tokens, unidirectional context, and single-pass decoding, while central to their success, also inspires the exploration of a design space that could offer new axes of modeling flexibil…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Normalizing Flows are Capable Generative Models

ICML 2025oral

Normalizing Flows (NFs) are likelihood-based models for continuous inputs. They have demonstrated promising results on both density estimation and generative modeling tasks, but have received relatively little attention in recent years. In this work, we demonstrate that NFs are more powerful than pr…

2025

STARFlow: Scaling Latent Normalizing Flows for High-resolution Image Synthesis

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

We present STARFlow, a scalable generative model based on normalizing flows that achieves strong performance on high-resolution image synthesis. STARFlow's main building block is Transformer Autoregressive Flow (TARFlow), which combines normalizing flows with Autoregressive Transformer architecture…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

TADA: Improved Diffusion Sampling with Training-free Augmented DynAmics

NeurIPS 2025poster

Diffusion models have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in generating high-fidelity images but typically suffer from inefficient sampling. Many solver designs and noise scheduling strategies have been proposed to dramatically improve sampling speeds. In this paper, we introduce a new sampling m…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Target Concrete Score Matching: A Holistic Framework for Discrete Diffusion

ICML 2025poster

Discrete diffusion is a promising framework for modeling and generating discrete data. In this work, we present Target Concrete Score Matching (TCSM), a novel and versatile objective for training and fine-tuning discrete diffusion models. TCSM provides a general framework with broad applicability. I…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

World-consistent Video Diffusion with Explicit 3D Modeling

CVPR 2025highlight

Recent advancements in diffusion models have set new benchmarks in image and video generation, enabling realistic visual synthesis across single- and multi-frame contexts. However, these models still struggle with efficiently and explicitly generating 3D-consistent content. To address this, we propo…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2024

Data-free Distillation of Diffusion Models with Bootstrapping

ICML 2024poster

Diffusion models have demonstrated great potential for generating diverse images. However, their performance often suffers from slow generation due to iterative denoising. Knowledge distillation has been recently proposed as a remedy which can reduce the number of inference steps to one or a few, wi…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Generative Modeling with Phase Stochastic Bridge

ICLR 2024oral

Diffusion models (DMs) represent state-of-the-art generative models for continuous inputs. DMs work by constructing a Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE) in the input space (ie, position space), and using a neural network to reverse it. In this work, we introduce a novel generative modeling frame…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2024

Kaleido Diffusion: Improving Conditional Diffusion Models with Autoregressive Latent Modeling

NeurIPS 2024poster

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful tool for generating high-quality images from textual descriptions. Despite their successes, these models often exhibit limited diversity in the sampled images, particularly when sampling with a high classifier-free guidance weight. To address this issue, w…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2024

Scalable Pre-training of Large Autoregressive Image Models

ICML 2024poster

This paper introduces AIM, a collection of vision models pre-trained with an autoregressive objective. These models are inspired by their textual counterparts, i.e., Large Language Models (LLMs), and exhibit similar scaling properties. Specifically, we highlight two key findings: (1) the performance…

2023

AutoFocusFormer: Image Segmentation off the Grid

CVPR 2023poster

Real world images often have highly imbalanced content density. Some areas are very uniform, e.g., large patches of blue sky, while other areas are scattered with many small objects. Yet, the commonly used successive grid downsampling strategy in convolutional deep networks treats all areas equally.…

2023

PLANNER: Generating Diversified Paragraph via Latent Language Diffusion Model

NeurIPS 2023poster

Autoregressive models for text sometimes generate repetitive and low-quality output because errors accumulate during the steps of generation. This issue is often attributed to exposure bias -- the difference between how a model is trained, and how it is used during inference. Denoising diffusion mod…

2023

Stabilizing Transformer Training by Preventing Attention Entropy Collapse

ICML 2023poster

Training stability is of great importance to Transformers. In this work, we investigate the training dynamics of Transformers by examining the evolution of the attention layers. In particular, we track the attention entropy for each attention head during the course of training, which is a proxy for…

2023

f-DM: A Multi-stage Diffusion Model via Progressive Signal Transformation

ICLR 2023poster

Diffusion models (DMs) have recently emerged as SoTA tools for generative modeling in various domains. Standard DMs can be viewed as an instantiation of hierarchical variational autoencoders (VAEs) where the latent variables are inferred from input-centered Gaussian distributions with fixed scales a…

Cited by 28SourcePDFScholar
2022

GAUDI: A Neural Architect for Immersive 3D Scene Generation

NeurIPS 2022accept

We introduce GAUDI, a generative model capable of capturing the distribution of complex and realistic 3D scenes that can be rendered immersively from a moving camera. We tackle this challenging problem with a scalable yet powerful approach, where we first optimize a latent representation that disent…

2022

Learning Representation from Neural Fisher Kernel with Low-rank Approximation

ICLR 2022poster

In this paper, we study the representation of neural networks from the view of kernels. We first define the Neural Fisher Kernel (NFK), which is the Fisher Kernel applied to neural networks. We show that NFK can be computed for both supervised and unsupervised learning models, which can serve as a u…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2022

Position Prediction as an Effective Pretraining Strategy

ICML 2022spotlight

Transformers \cite{transformer} have gained increasing popularity in a wide range of applications, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision and Speech Recognition, because of their powerful representational capacity. However, harnessing this representational capacity effectively…

2021

Uncertainty Weighted Actor-Critic for Offline Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2021spotlight

Offline Reinforcement Learning promises to learn effective policies from previously-collected, static datasets without the need for exploration. However, existing Q-learning and actor-critic based off-policy RL algorithms fail when bootstrapping from out-of-distribution (OOD) actions or states. We h…

2019

Addressing the Loss-Metric Mismatch with Adaptive Loss Alignment

ICML 2019oral

In most machine learning training paradigms a fixed, often handcrafted, loss function is assumed to be a good proxy for an underlying evaluation metric. In this work we assess this assumption by meta-learning an adaptive loss function to directly optimize the evaluation metric. We propose a sample e…

Cited by 99SourcePDFScholar
2019

Adversarial Fisher Vectors for Unsupervised Representation Learning

NeurIPS 2019spotlight

We examine Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) through the lens of deep Energy Based Models (EBMs), with the goal of exploiting the density model that follows from this formulation. In contrast to a traditional view where the discriminator learns a constant function when reaching convergence, her…

2017

Fully-Adaptive Feature Sharing in Multi-Task Networks With Applications in Person Attribute Classification

CVPR 2017spotlight

Multi-task learning aims to improve generalization performance of multiple prediction tasks by appropriately sharing relevant information across them. In the context of deep neural networks, this idea is often realized by hand-designed network architectures with layers that are shared across tasks a…

Cited by 509PDFcodeScholar
2017

S3Pool: Pooling With Stochastic Spatial Sampling

CVPR 2017poster

Feature pooling layers (e.g., max pooling) in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) serve the dual purpose of providing increasingly abstract representations as well as yielding computational savings in subsequent convolutional layers. We view the pooling operation in CNNs as a two step procedure: fi…

Cited by 106PDFcodeScholar