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Yuchen Zhu

22 accepted papers

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

Efficient Test-Time Scaling via Hierarchical Search and Self-Verification for Discrete Diffusion Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Inference-time compute has re-emerged as a practical way to improve LLM reasoning. Most test-time scaling (TTS) algorithms rely on autoregressive decoding, which is ill-suited to discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs) due to their parallel decoding over the entire sequence. As a result, developi…

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

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
2025

Diffuse Everything: Multimodal Diffusion Models on Arbitrary State Spaces

ICML 2025poster

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable performance in generating unimodal data across various tasks, including image, video, and text generation. On the contrary, the joint generation of multimodal data through diffusion models is still in the early stages of exploration. Existing approaches…

2025

Diffusion Generative Modeling for Spatially Resolved Gene Expression Inference from Histology Images

ICLR 2025poster

Spatial Transcriptomics (ST) allows a high-resolution measurement of RNA sequence abundance by systematically connecting cell morphology depicted in Hematoxylin and eosin (H\&E) stained histology images to spatially resolved gene expressions. ST is a time-consuming, expensive yet powerful experiment…

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

Infinite Neural Operators: Gaussian processes on functions

NeurIPS 2025poster

A variety of infinitely wide neural architectures (e.g., dense NNs, CNNs, and transformers) induce Gaussian process (GP) priors over their outputs. These relationships provide both an accurate characterization of the prior predictive distribution and enable the use of GP machinery to improve the unc…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Intervene-All-Paths: Unified Mitigation of LVLM Hallucinations across Alignment Formats

NeurIPS 2025poster

Despite their impressive performance across a wide range of tasks, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) remain prone to hallucination. In this study, we propose a comprehensive intervention framework aligned with the transformer’s causal architecture in LVLMs, integrating the effects of different in…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
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

Rethinking Query-based Transformer for Continual Image Segmentation

CVPR 2025poster

Class-incremental/Continual image segmentation (CIS) aims to train an image segmenter in stages, where the set of available categories differs at each stage. To leverage the built-in objectness of query-based transformers, which mitigates catastrophic forgetting of mask proposals, current methods of…

2025

Sim-DETR: Unlock DETR for Temporal Sentence Grounding

ICCV 2025poster

Temporal sentence grounding aims to identify exact moments in a video that correspond to a given textual query, typically addressed with detection transformer (DETR) solutions. However, we find that typical strategies designed to enhance DETR do not improve, and may even degrade, its performance in…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Trivialized Momentum Facilitates Diffusion Generative Modeling on Lie Groups

ICLR 2025poster

The generative modeling of data on manifolds is an important task, for which diffusion models in flat spaces typically need nontrivial adaptations. This article demonstrates how a technique called `trivialization' can transfer the effectiveness of diffusion models in Euclidean spaces to Lie groups.…

2025

When Can Proxies Improve the Sample Complexity of Preference Learning?

ICML 2025poster

We address the problem of reward hacking, where maximising a proxy reward does not necessarily increase the true reward. This is a key concern for Large Language Models (LLMs), as they are often fine-tuned on human preferences that may not accurately reflect a true objective. Existing work uses vari…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Structured Learning of Compositional Sequential Interventions

NeurIPS 2024poster

We consider sequential treatment regimes where each unit is exposed to combinations of interventions over time. When interventions are described by qualitative labels, such as "close schools for a month due to a pandemic" or "promote this podcast to this user during this week", it is unclear which a…

2022

Causal inference with treatment measurement error: a nonparametric instrumental variable approach

UAI 2022poster

We propose a kernel-based nonparametric estimator for the causal effect when the cause is corrupted by error. We do so by generalizing estimation in the instrumental variable setting. Despite significant work on regression with measurement error, additionally handling unobserved confounding in the c…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2021

Causal Effect Inference for Structured Treatments

NeurIPS 2021poster

We address the estimation of conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) for structured treatments (e.g., graphs, images, texts). Given a weak condition on the effect, we propose the generalized Robinson decomposition, which (i) isolates the causal estimand (reducing regularization bias), (ii) all…

Cited by 56SourcePDFScholar
2021

Proximal Causal Learning with Kernels: Two-Stage Estimation and Moment Restriction

ICML 2021spotlight

We address the problem of causal effect estima-tion in the presence of unobserved confounding,but where proxies for the latent confounder(s) areobserved. We propose two kernel-based meth-ods for nonlinear causal effect estimation in thissetting: (a) a two-stage regression approach, and(b) a maximum…

Cited by 78SourcePDFScholar