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Yusu Wang

31 accepted papers

2026

Two Calm Ends and the Wild Middle: A Geometric Picture of Memorization in Diffusion Models

ICML 2026poster

Diffusion models generate high-quality samples but can also memorize training data, raising serious privacy concerns. Understanding the mechanisms governing when memorization versus generalization occurs remains an active area of research. In particular, it is unclear where along the noise schedule …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Which Algorithms Can Graph Neural Networks Learn?

ICML 2026oral

In recent years, there has been growing interest in understanding neural architectures' ability to learn to execute discrete algorithms, a line of work often referred to as neural algorithmic reasoning. The goal is to integrate algorithmic reasoning capabilities into larger neural pipelines. Many su…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

De-coupled NeuroGF for Shortest Path Distance Approximations on Large Terrain Graphs

ICML 2025poster

The ability to acquire high-resolution, large-scale geospatial data at an unprecedented using LiDAR and other related technologies has intensified the need for scalable algorithms for terrain analysis, including *shortest-path-distance* (SPD) queries on large-scale terrain digital elevation models (…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

Differentiable extensions with rounding guarantees for combinatorial optimization over permutations

NeurIPS 2025poster

Continuously extending combinatorial optimization objectives is a powerful technique commonly applied to the optimization of set functions. However, few such methods exist for extending functions on permutations, despite the fact that many combinatorial optimization problems, such as the quadratic a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Effective Neural Approximations for Geometric Optimization Problems

NeurIPS 2025poster

Neural networks offer a promising data-driven approach to tackle computationally challenging optimization problems. In this work, we introduce neural approximation frameworks for a family of geometric "extent measure" problems, including shape-fitting descriptors (e.g. minimum enclosing ball or ann…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Elucidating Flow Matching ODE Dynamics via Data Geometry and Denoisers

ICML 2025poster

Flow matching (FM) models extend ODE sampler based diffusion models into a general framework, significantly reducing sampling steps through learned vector fields. However, the theoretical understanding of FM models, particularly how their sample trajectories interact with underlying data geometry, r…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Seeds of Structure: Patch PCA Reveals Universal Compositional Cues in Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Diffusion models transform random noise into images of remarkable fidelity, yet the structure of this noise-to-image map remains largely unexplored. We investigate this relationship using patch-wise Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and empirically demonstrate that low-frequency components of the i…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Comparing Graph Transformers via Positional Encodings

ICML 2024poster

The distinguishing power of graph transformers is tied to the choice of *positional encoding*: features used to augment the base transformer with information about the graph. There are two primary types of positional encoding: *absolute positional encodings (APEs)* and *relative positional encodings…

2024

DE-HNN: An effective neural model for Circuit Netlist representation

AISTATS 2024poster

The run-time for optimization tools used in chip design has grown with the complexity of designs to the point where it can take several days to go through one design cycle which has become a bottleneck. Designers want fast tools that can quickly give feedback on a design. Using the input and output…

2024

NN-Steiner: A Mixed Neural-Algorithmic Approach for the Rectilinear Steiner Minimum Tree Problem

AAAI 2024technical

Recent years have witnessed rapid advances in the use of neural networks to solve combinatorial optimization problems. Nevertheless, designing the "right" neural model that can effectively handle a given optimization problem can be challenging, and often there is no theoretical understanding or just…

2024

On the Theoretical Expressive Power and the Design Space of Higher-Order Graph Transformers

AISTATS 2024poster

Graph transformers have recently received significant attention in graph learning, partly due to their ability to capture more global interaction via self-attention. Nevertheless, while higher-order graph neural networks have been reasonably well studied, the exploration of extending graph transform…

2024

Position: Topological Deep Learning is the New Frontier for Relational Learning

ICML 2024poster

Topological deep learning (TDL) is a rapidly evolving field that uses topological features to understand and design deep learning models. This paper posits that TDL is the new frontier for relational learning. TDL may complement graph representation learning and geometric deep learning by incorporat…

Cited by 40SourcePDFScholar
2023

Neural approximation of Wasserstein distance via a universal architecture for symmetric and factorwise group invariant functions

NeurIPS 2023poster

Learning distance functions between complex objects, such as the Wasserstein distance to compare point sets, is a common goal in machine learning applications. However, functions on such complex objects (e.g., point sets and graphs) are often required to be invariant to a wide variety of group actio…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2023

The Numerical Stability of Hyperbolic Representation Learning

ICML 2023poster

The hyperbolic space is widely used for representing hierarchical datasets due to its ability to embed trees with small distortion. However, this property comes at a price of numerical instability such that training hyperbolic learning models will sometimes lead to catastrophic NaN problems, encount…

2023

Understanding Oversquashing in GNNs through the Lens of Effective Resistance

ICML 2023poster

Message passing graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular learning architectures for graph-structured data. However, one problem GNNs experience is oversquashing, where a GNN has difficulty sending information between distant nodes. Understanding and mitigating oversquashing has recently received s…

2022

Generative Coarse-Graining of Molecular Conformations

ICML 2022spotlight

Coarse-graining (CG) of molecular simulations simplifies the particle representation by grouping selected atoms into pseudo-beads and therefore drastically accelerates simulation. However, such CG procedure induces information losses, which makes accurate backmapping, i.e., restoring fine-grained (F…

2022

Neural Approximation of Graph Topological Features

NeurIPS 2022accept

Topological features based on persistent homology capture high-order structural information so as to augment graph neural network methods. However, computing extended persistent homology summaries remains slow for large and dense graphs and can be a serious bottleneck for the learning pipeline. Insp…

2022

Weisfeiler-Lehman Meets Gromov-Wasserstein

ICML 2022spotlight

The Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) test is a classical procedure for graph isomorphism testing. The WL test has also been widely used both for designing graph kernels and for analyzing graph neural networks. In this paper, we propose the Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) distance, a notion of distance between labeled…

2021

NN-Baker: A Neural-network Infused Algorithmic Framework for Optimization Problems on Geometric Intersection Graphs

NeurIPS 2021poster

Recent years have witnessed a surge of approaches to use neural networks to help tackle combinatorial optimization problems, including graph optimization problems. However, theoretical understanding of such approaches remains limited. In this paper, we consider the geometric setting, where graphs ar…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2021

Topology-Aware Segmentation Using Discrete Morse Theory

ICLR 2021spotlight

In the segmentation of fine-scale structures from natural and biomedical images, per-pixel accuracy is not the only metric of concern. Topological correctness, such as vessel connectivity and membrane closure, is crucial for downstream analysis tasks. In this paper, we propose a new approach to trai…

Cited by 112SourcePDFScholar
2019

A Topological Regularizer for Classifiers via Persistent Homology

AISTATS 2019poster

Regularization plays a crucial role in supervised learning. Most existing methods enforce a global regularization in a structure agnostic manner. In this paper, we initiate a new direction and propose to enforce the structural simplicity of the classification boundary by regularizing over its topolo…

Cited by 156SourcePDFScholar
2019

Learning metrics for persistence-based summaries and applications for graph classification

NeurIPS 2019poster

Recently a new feature representation and data analysis methodology based on a topological tool called persistent homology (and its persistence diagram summary) has gained much momentum. A series of methods have been developed to map a persistence diagram to a vector representation so as to facilita…

2017

Composing Tree Graphical Models with Persistent Homology Features for Clustering Mixed-Type Data

ICML 2017poster

Clustering data with both continuous and discrete attributes is a challenging task. Existing methods lack a principled probabilistic formulation. In this paper, we propose a clustering method based on a tree-structured graphical model to describe the generation process of mixed-type data. Our tree-s…

Cited by 25SourcePDFScholar