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Yongxin Chen

47 accepted papers

2026

Clarify Before You Draw: Proactive Agents for Robust Text-to-CAD Generation

ICML 2026poster

Large language models have recently enabled text-to-CAD systems that synthesize parametric CAD programs (e.g., CadQuery) from natural-language prompts. In practice, however, geometric descriptions can be under-specified or internally inconsistent: critical dimensions may be missing and constraints m…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Complexity Analysis of Normalizing Constant Estimation: from Jarzynski Equality to Annealed Importance Sampling and beyond

ICLR 2026poster

Given an unnormalized probability density $\pi\propto\mathrm{e}^{-V}$, estimating its normalizing constant $Z=\int_{\mathbb{R}^d}\mathrm{e}^{-V(x)}\mathrm{d}x$ or free energy $F=-\log Z$ is a crucial problem in Bayesian statistics, statistical mechanics, and machine learning. It is challenging espec…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Compositional Diffusion with Guided search for Long-Horizon Planning

ICLR 2026oral

Generative models have emerged as powerful tools for planning, with compositional approaches offering particular promise for modeling long-horizon task distributions by composing together local, modular generative models. This compositional paradigm spans diverse domains, from multi-step manipulatio…

Cited by 8SourcecodeScholar
2026

Compositional Visual Planning via Inference-Time Diffusion Scaling

ICLR 2026poster

Diffusion models excel at short-horizon robot planning, yet scaling them to long-horizon tasks remains challenging due to computational constraints and limited training data. Existing compositional approaches stitch together short segments by separately denoising each component and averaging overla…

Cited by 2SourcecodeScholar
2026

Discrete Adjoint Schrödinger Bridge Sampler

ICML 2026poster

Learning discrete neural samplers is challenging due to the lack of gradients and combinatorial complexity. While stochastic optimal control (SOC) and Schrödinger bridge (SB) provide principled solutions, efficient SOC solvers like adjoint matching (AM), which excel in continuous domains, remain une…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Enhancing Reasoning for Diffusion LLMs via Distribution Matching Policy Optimization

ICML 2026spotlight

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are promising alternatives to autoregressive large language models (AR-LLMs), as they potentially allow higher inference throughput. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a crucial component for dLLMs to achieve comparable performance with AR-LLMs on important tasks,…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Lavida-R1: Advancing Reasoning for Unified Multimodal Diffusion Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Diffusion language models (dLLMs) recently emerged as a promising alternative to auto-regressive LLMs. The latest works further extended it to multimodal understanding and generation tasks. In this work, we propose LaViDa-R1, a multimodal, general-purpose reasoning dLLM. Unlike existing works that b…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

MetaDNS: Enhancing Exploration in Discrete Neural Samplers via Metadynamics

ICML 2026poster

Sampling from discrete distributions with multiple modes and energy barriers is fundamental to machine learning and computational physics. Recent discrete neural samplers like MDNS suffer from mode collapse and fail to sample high-energy barrier regions between modes, which is critical for free ener…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Rethinking the Design Space of Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Models: On the Importance of Likelihood Estimation Beyond Loss Design

ICML 2026poster

Reinforcement learning has been widely applied to diffusion and flow models for visual tasks such as text-to-image generation. However, these tasks remain challenging because diffusion models have intractable likelihoods, which creates a barrier for directly applying popular policy-gradient type met…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

S-D-RSM: Stochastic Distributed Regularized Splitting Method for Large-Scale Convex Optimization Problems

AAAI 2026technical

This paper investigates problems of large-scale distributed composite convex optimization, with motivations from a broad range of applications, including multi-agent systems, federated learning, smart grids, wireless sensor networks, compressed sensing, and so on. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD)

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Adjoint Schrödinger Bridge Sampler

NeurIPS 2025oral

Computational methods for learning to sample from the Boltzmann distribution—where the target distribution is known only up to an unnormalized energy function—have advanced significantly recently. Due to the lack of explicit target samples, however, prior diffusion-based methods, known as _diffusion…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Articulated Kinematics Distillation from Video Diffusion Models

CVPR 2025poster

We present Articulated Kinematics Distillation (AKD), a framework for generating high-fidelity character animations by merging the strengths of skeleton-based animation and modern generative models. AKD uses a skeleton-based representation for rigged 3D assets, drastically reducing the Degrees of Fr…

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

Fast Solvers for Discrete Diffusion Models: Theory and Applications of High-Order Algorithms

NeurIPS 2025poster

Discrete diffusion models have emerged as a powerful generative modeling framework for discrete data with successful applications spanning from text generation to image synthesis. However, their deployment faces challenges due to the high dimensionality of the state space, necessitating the developm…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Joint Model-based Model-free Diffusion for Planning with Constraints

CoRL 2025poster

Model-free diffusion planners have shown great promise for robot motion planning, but practical robotic systems often require combining them with model-based optimization modules to enforce constraints, such as safety. Na\"ively integrating these modules presents compatibility challenges when diffus…

Cited by 9SourceScholar
2025

MDNS: Masked Diffusion Neural Sampler via Stochastic Optimal Control

NeurIPS 2025poster

We study the problem of learning a neural sampler to generate samples from discrete state spaces where the target probability mass function $\pi\propto\mathrm{e}^{-U}$ is known up to a normalizing constant, which is an important task in fields such as statistical physics, machine learning, combinato…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
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

Diffusion Policy Attacker: Crafting Adversarial Attacks for Diffusion-based Policies

NeurIPS 2024poster

Diffusion models have emerged as a promising approach for behavior cloning (BC), leveraging their exceptional ability to model multi-modal distributions. Diffusion policies (DP) have elevated BC performance to new heights, demonstrating robust efficacy across diverse tasks, coupled with their inhere…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2024

Generative Factor Chaining: Coordinated Manipulation with Diffusion-based Factor Graph

CoRL 2024poster

Learning to plan for multi-step, multi-manipulator tasks is notoriously difficult because of the large search space and the complex constraint satisfaction problems. We present Generative Factor Chaining (GFC), a composable generative model for planning. GFC represents a planning problem as a spatia…

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2024

QueST: Self-Supervised Skill Abstractions for Learning Continuous Control

NeurIPS 2024poster

Generalization capabilities, or rather a lack thereof, is one of the most important unsolved problems in the field of robot learning, and while several large scale efforts have set out to tackle this problem, unsolved it remains. In this paper, we hypothesize that learning temporal action abstractio…

2024

RefDrop: Controllable Consistency in Image or Video Generation via Reference Feature Guidance

NeurIPS 2024poster

There is a rapidly growing interest in controlling consistency across multiple generated images using diffusion models. Among various methods, recent works have found that simply manipulating attention modules by concatenating features from multiple reference images provides an efficient approach to…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

Toward effective protection against diffusion-based mimicry through score distillation

ICLR 2024poster

While generative diffusion models excel in producing high-quality images, they can also be misused to mimic authorized images, posing a significant threat to AI systems. Efforts have been made to add calibrated perturbations to protect images from diffusion-based mimicry pipelines. However, most of…

2023

Data-driven optimal control under safety constraints using sparse Koopman approximation

ICRA 2023poster

In this work we approach the dual optimal reach-safe control problem using sparse approximations of Koopman operator. Matrix approximation of Koopman operator needs to solve a least-squares (LS) problem in the lifted function space, which is computationally intractable for fine discretizations and h…

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2023

DiffCollage: Parallel Generation of Large Content With Diffusion Models

CVPR 2023poster

We present DiffCollage, a compositional diffusion model that can generate large content by leveraging diffusion models trained on generating pieces of the large content. Our approach is based on a factor graph representation where each factor node represents a portion of the content and a variable n…

Cited by 76SourcePDFScholar
2023

Diffusion-Based Adversarial Sample Generation for Improved Stealthiness and Controllability

NeurIPS 2023poster

Neural networks are known to be susceptible to adversarial samples: small variations of natural examples crafted to deliberately mislead the models. While they can be easily generated using gradient-based techniques in digital and physical scenarios, they often differ greatly from the actual data di…

2023

Generative Skill Chaining: Long-Horizon Skill Planning with Diffusion Models

CoRL 2023poster

Long-horizon tasks, usually characterized by complex subtask dependencies, present a significant challenge in manipulation planning. Skill chaining is a practical approach to solving unseen tasks by combining learned skill priors. However, such methods are myopic if sequenced greedily and face scala…

Cited by 79SourcecodeScholar
2023

Loss-Guided Diffusion Models for Plug-and-Play Controllable Generation

ICML 2023poster

We consider guiding denoising diffusion models with general differentiable loss functions in a plug-and-play fashion, enabling controllable generation without additional training. This paradigm, termed Loss-Guided Diffusion (LGD), can easily be integrated into all diffusion models and leverage vario…

Cited by 89SourcePDFScholar
2022

On the complexity of the optimal transport problem with graph-structured cost

AISTATS 2022poster

Multi-marginal optimal transport (MOT) is a generalization of optimal transport to multiple marginals. Optimal transport has evolved into an important tool in many machine learning applications, and its multi-marginal extension opens up for addressing new challenges in the field of machine learning.…

2022

Variational Wasserstein gradient flow

ICML 2022spotlight

Wasserstein gradient flow has emerged as a promising approach to solve optimization problems over the space of probability distributions. A recent trend is to use the well-known JKO scheme in combination with input convex neural networks to numerically implement the proximal step. The most challengi…

2021

Scalable Computations of Wasserstein Barycenter via Input Convex Neural Networks

ICML 2021oral

Wasserstein Barycenter is a principled approach to represent the weighted mean of a given set of probability distributions, utilizing the geometry induced by optimal transport. In this work, we present a novel scalable algorithm to approximate the Wasserstein Barycenters aiming at high-dimensional a…

2020

Actor-Critic Provably Finds Nash Equilibria of Linear-Quadratic Mean-Field Games

ICLR 2020poster

We study discrete-time mean-field Markov games with infinite numbers of agents where each agent aims to minimize its ergodic cost. We consider the setting where the agents have identical linear state transitions and quadratic cost func- tions, while the aggregated effect of the agents is captured by…

Cited by 74SourceScholar
2020

Can Temporal-Difference and Q-Learning Learn Representation? A Mean-Field Theory

NeurIPS 2020oral

Temporal-difference and Q-learning play a key role in deep reinforcement learning, where they are empowered by expressive nonlinear function approximators such as neural networks. At the core of their empirical successes is the learned feature representation, which embeds rich observations, e.g., ima…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2019

Provably Global Convergence of Actor-Critic: A Case for Linear Quadratic Regulator with Ergodic Cost

NeurIPS 2019poster

Despite the empirical success of the actor-critic algorithm, its theoretical understanding lags behind. In a broader context, actor-critic can be viewed as an online alternating update algorithm for bilevel optimization, whose convergence is known to be fragile. To understand the instability of acto…

Cited by 171SourcePDFScholar