← Search

Yulai Zhao

10 accepted papers

2026

Iterative Distillation for Reward-Guided Fine-Tuning of Diffusion Models in Biomolecular Design

ICLR 2026poster

We address the problem of fine-tuning diffusion models for reward-guided generation in biomolecular design. While diffusion models have proven highly effective in modeling complex, high-dimensional data distributions, real-world applications often demand more than high-fidelity generation, requiring…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Adding Conditional Control to Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2025poster

Diffusion models are powerful generative models that allow for precise control over the characteristics of the generated samples. While these diffusion models trained on large datasets have achieved success, there is often a need to introduce additional controls in downstream fine-tuning processes,…

2025

Derivative-Free Guidance in Continuous and Discrete Diffusion Models with Soft Value-based Decoding

NeurIPS 2025poster

Diffusion models excel at capturing the natural design spaces of images, molecules, DNA, RNA, and protein sequences. However, rather than merely generating designs that are natural, we often aim to optimize downstream reward functions while preserving the naturalness of these design spaces. Existing…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Reward-Guided Iterative Refinement in Diffusion Models at Test-Time with Applications to Protein and DNA Design

ICML 2025poster

To fully leverage the capabilities of diffusion models, we are often interested in optimizing downstream reward functions during inference. While numerous algorithms for reward-guided generation have been recently proposed due to their significance, current approaches predominantly focus on single-s…

2024

Bridging Model-Based Optimization and Generative Modeling via Conservative Fine-Tuning of Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

AI-driven design problems, such as DNA/protein sequence design, are commonly tackled from two angles: generative modeling, which efficiently captures the feasible design space (e.g., natural images or biological sequences), and model-based optimization, which utilizes reward models for extrapolation…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2024

Feedback Efficient Online Fine-Tuning of Diffusion Models

ICML 2024poster

Diffusion models excel at modeling complex data distributions, including those of images, proteins, and small molecules. However, in many cases, our goal is to model parts of the distribution that maximize certain properties: for example, we may want to generate images with high aesthetic quality, o…

Cited by 26SourcePDFScholar
2024

Provably Efficient CVaR RL in Low-rank MDPs

ICLR 2024poster

We study risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL), where we aim to maximize the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) with a fixed risk tolerance $\tau$. Prior theoretical work studying risk-sensitive RL focuses on the tabular Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) setting. To extend CVaR RL to settings w…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2023

Local Optimization Achieves Global Optimality in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2023poster

Policy optimization methods with function approximation are widely used in multi-agent reinforcement learning. However, it remains elusive how to design such algorithms with statistical guarantees. Leveraging a multi-agent performance difference lemma that characterizes the landscape of multi-agent…

2022

Provably Efficient Policy Optimization for Two-Player Zero-Sum Markov Games

AISTATS 2022poster

Policy-based methods with function approximation are widely used for solving two-player zero-sum games with large state and/or action spaces. However, it remains elusive how to obtain optimization and statistical guarantees for such algorithms. We present a new policy optimization algorithm with fun…

Cited by 74SourcePDFScholar