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Weili Nie

32 accepted papers

2026

Exploring Synthesizable Chemical Space with Iterative Pathway Refinements

ICLR 2026oral

A well-known pitfall of molecular generative models is that they are not guaranteed to generate synthesizable molecules. Existing solutions for this problem often struggle to effectively navigate exponentially large combinatorial space of synthesizable molecules and suffer from poor coverage. To add…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Flex-Forcing: Towards a Unified Autoregressive and Bidirectional Video Diffusion Model

ICML 2026spotlight

Recent progress in large-scale generative models has substantially advanced video generation, yet existing methods remain constrained by a rigid inference paradigm. Bidirectional diffusion models excel at global coherence and visual fidelity but suffer from slow inference, while autoregressive model…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Mode Seeking meets Mean Seeking for Long Video Generation

ICML 2026poster

Scaling video generation from seconds to minutes faces a critical bottleneck: while short-video data is abundant and high-fidelity, coherent long-form data is scarce and limited to narrow domains. While multi-resolution image training works because higher resolution is largely an interpolation of th…

Cited by 7SourceScholar
2026

PixelDiT: Pixel Diffusion Transformers for Image Generation

CVPR 2026

Latent-space modeling has been the standard for Diffusion Transformers (DiTs). However, it relies on a two-stage pipeline where the pretrained autoencoder introduces lossy reconstruction, leading to error accumulation while hindering joint optimization. To address these issues, we propose PixelDiT,

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Transition Matching Distillation for Fast Video Generation

CVPR 2026

Large video diffusion and flow models have achieved remarkable success in high-quality video generation, but their use in real-time interactive applications remains limited due to their inefficient multi-step sampling process. In this work, we present Transition Matching Distillation (TMD), a novel

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

BlobGEN-Vid: Compositional Text-to-Video Generation with Blob Video Representations

CVPR 2025poster

Existing video generation models struggle to follow complex text prompts and synthesize multiple objects, raising the need for additional grounding input for improved controllability. In this work, we propose to decompose videos into visual primitives -- blob video representation, a general represen…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
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

GenMol: A Drug Discovery Generalist with Discrete Diffusion

ICML 2025poster

Drug discovery is a complex process that involves multiple stages and tasks. However, existing molecular generative models can only tackle some of these tasks. We present *Generalist Molecular generative model* (GenMol), a versatile framework that uses only a *single* discrete diffusion model to han…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2025

T-Stitch: Accelerating Sampling in Pre-Trained Diffusion Models with Trajectory Stitching

ICLR 2025poster

Sampling from diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) is often expensive for high-quality image generation and typically requires many steps with a large model. In this paper, we introduce sampling Trajectory Stitching (T-Stitch), a simple yet efficient technique to improve the sampling efficiency wit…

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

Compositional Text-to-Image Generation with Dense Blob Representations

ICML 2024poster

Existing text-to-image models struggle to follow complex text prompts, raising the need for extra grounding inputs for better controllability. In this work, we propose to decompose a scene into visual primitives - denoted as dense blob representations - that contain fine-grained details of the scene…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2024

Efficient Video Diffusion Models via Content-Frame Motion-Latent Decomposition

ICLR 2024poster

Video diffusion models have recently made great progress in generation quality, but are still limited by the high memory and computational requirements. This is because current video diffusion models often attempt to process high-dimensional videos directly. To tackle this issue, we propose content-…

Cited by 24SourcePDFScholar
2024

Molecule Generation with Fragment Retrieval Augmentation

NeurIPS 2024poster

Fragment-based drug discovery, in which molecular fragments are assembled into new molecules with desirable biochemical properties, has achieved great success. However, many fragment-based molecule generation methods show limited exploration beyond the existing fragments in the database as they only…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Warped Diffusion: Solving Video Inverse Problems with Image Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Using image models naively for solving inverse video problems often suffers from flickering, texture-sticking, and temporal inconsistency in generated videos. To tackle these problems, in this paper, we view frames as continuous functions in the 2D space, and videos as a sequence of continuous warpi…

2023

A Critical Revisit of Adversarial Robustness in 3D Point Cloud Recognition with Diffusion-Driven Purification

ICML 2023poster

3D point clouds serve as a crucial data representation in numerous real-world applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and medical imaging. While the advancements in deep learning have spurred the utilization of 3D point clouds, deep models are notoriously vulnerable to adversarial attacks…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2023

Defending against Adversarial Audio via Diffusion Model

ICLR 2023poster

Deep learning models have been widely used in commercial acoustic systems in recent years. However, adversarial audio examples can cause abnormal behaviors for those acoustic systems, while being hard for humans to perceive. Various methods, such as transformation-based defenses and adversarial trai…

2023

DensePure: Understanding Diffusion Models for Adversarial Robustness

ICLR 2023poster

Diffusion models have been recently employed to improve certified robustness through the process of denoising. However, the theoretical understanding of why diffusion models are able to improve the certified robustness is still lacking, preventing from further improvement. In this study, we close…

Cited by 43SourcePDFScholar
2023

Fast Sampling of Diffusion Models via Operator Learning

ICML 2023poster

Diffusion models have found widespread adoption in various areas. However, their sampling process is slow because it requires hundreds to thousands of network evaluations to emulate a continuous process defined by differential equations. In this work, we use neural operators, an efficient method to…

2023

I$^2$SB: Image-to-Image Schrödinger Bridge

ICML 2023poster

We propose Image-to-Image Schrödinger Bridge (I$^2$SB), a new class of conditional diffusion models that directly learn the nonlinear diffusion processes between two given distributions. These diffusion bridges are particularly useful for image restoration, as the degraded images are structurally in…

2023

Re-ViLM: Retrieval-Augmented Visual Language Model for Zero and Few-Shot Image Captioning

EMNLP 2023long findings

Augmenting pretrained language models (LMs) with a vision encoder~(e.g., Flamingo) has obtained state-of-the-art results in image-to-text generation. However, these models store all the knowledge within their parameters, thus often requiring enormous model parameters to model the abundant visual con…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Retrieval-based Controllable Molecule Generation

ICLR 2023top-25%

Generating new molecules with specified chemical and biological properties via generative models has emerged as a promising direction for drug discovery. However, existing methods require extensive training/fine-tuning with a large dataset, often unavailable in real-world generation tasks. In this w…

2022

Bongard-HOI: Benchmarking Few-Shot Visual Reasoning for Human-Object Interactions

CVPR 2022oral

A significant gap remains between today's visual pattern recognition models and human-level visual cognition especially when it comes to few-shot learning and compositional reasoning of novel concepts. We introduce Bongard-HOI, a new visual reasoning benchmark that focuses on compositional learning…

Cited by 41PDFcodeScholar
2022

Diffusion Models for Adversarial Purification

ICML 2022spotlight

Adversarial purification refers to a class of defense methods that remove adversarial perturbations using a generative model. These methods do not make assumptions on the form of attack and the classification model, and thus can defend pre-existing classifiers against unseen threats. However, their…

2022

RelViT: Concept-guided Vision Transformer for Visual Relational Reasoning

ICLR 2022poster

Reasoning about visual relationships is central to how humans interpret the visual world. This task remains challenging for current deep learning algorithms since it requires addressing three key technical problems jointly: 1) identifying object entities and their properties, 2) inferring semantic r…

2022

Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Zero-Shot Generalization in Vision-Language Models

NeurIPS 2022accept

Pre-trained vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) have shown promising zero-shot generalization in many downstream tasks with properly designed text prompts. Instead of relying on hand-engineered prompts, recent works learn prompts using the training data from downstream tasks. While effective, traini…

2021

Controllable and Compositional Generation with Latent-Space Energy-Based Models

NeurIPS 2021poster

Controllable generation is one of the key requirements for successful adoption of deep generative models in real-world applications, but it still remains as a great challenge. In particular, the compositional ability to generate novel concept combinations is out of reach for most current models. In…

2020

Bongard-LOGO: A New Benchmark for Human-Level Concept Learning and Reasoning

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

Humans have an inherent ability to learn novel concepts from only a few samples and generalize these concepts to different situations. Even though today's machine learning models excel with a plethora of training data on standard recognition tasks, a considerable gap exists between machine-level pat…

2020

Semi-Supervised StyleGAN for Disentanglement Learning

ICML 2020poster

Disentanglement learning is crucial for obtaining disentangled representations and controllable generation. Current disentanglement methods face several inherent limitations: difficulty with high-resolution images, primarily focusing on learning disentangled representations, and non-identifiability…

2018

A Theoretical Explanation for Perplexing Behaviors of Backpropagation-based Visualizations

ICML 2018oral

Backpropagation-based visualizations have been proposed to interpret convolutional neural networks (CNNs), however a theory is missing to justify their behaviors: Guided backpropagation (GBP) and deconvolutional network (DeconvNet) generate more human-interpretable but less class-sensitive visualiza…