← Search

Zhijian Zhou

13 accepted papers

2026

Constraints-Guided Diffusion Reasoner for Neuro-Symbolic Learning

AAAI 2026technical

Enabling neural networks to learn complex logical constraints and fulfill symbolic reasoning is a critical challenge. Bridging this gap often requires guiding the neural network’s output distribution to move closer to the symbolic constraints. While diffusion models have shown remarkable generative

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Count Counts: Motivating Exploration in LLM Reasoning with Count-based Intrinsic Rewards

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a compelling way to strengthen the multi step reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, prevalent RL paradigms still lean on sparse outcome-based rewards and limited exploration, which often drives LLMs toward repetitive and suboptimal reasoni…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

DisPPO: Quantile-Based Distributional Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, standard actor-critic methods, such as PPO, rely on scalar value functions that estimate only the expectation of cumulative returns. This reduction inherently disca…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Do You Want to Know if Two Distributions Are Close to Each Other?Testing the Closeness With Statistical Significance

ICML 2026poster

Are two distributions close to each other with statistical significance? Distribution closeness testing (DCT) formalizes this question by testing whether the distance between a distribution pair is at least $\epsilon$-far. Existing DCT methods mainly measure discrepancies between a distribution pair…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

LOTTERY: Learning from Reference-Only Samples in Two-Sample Testing under Size Asymmetry

ICML 2026poster

Data-adaptive two-sample testing assesses if two samples come from the same distribution, using a discrepancy learned from the data (e.g., via kernel-based feature representations). Such methods typically rely on data splitting to decouple learning from testing and control type I error. However, thi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

SIPO: Stabilized and Improved Preference Optimization for Aligning Diffusion Models

ICML 2026poster

Preference learning has garnered extensive attention as an effective technique for aligning diffusion models with human preferences in visual generation tasks. However, existing alignment approaches such as Diffusion-DPO suffer from two fundamental challenges: training instability caused by high gra…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

The Choice of Divergence: A Neglected Key to Mitigating Diversity Collapse in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward

ICLR 2026poster

A central paradox in fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) is the frequent degradation of multi-attempt performance (Pass@k) despite improvements in single-attempt accuracy (Pass@1). This is often accompanied by catastrophic forgetting, wh…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

A Unified Data Representation Learning for Non-parametric Two-sample Testing

UAI 2025

Learning effective data representations has been crucial in non-parametric two-sample testing. Common approaches will first split data into training and test sets and then learn data representations purely on the training set. However, recent theoretical studies have shown that, as long as the sampl

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Anchor-based Maximum Discrepancy for Relative Similarity Testing

NeurIPS 2025poster

The relative similarity testing aims to determine which of the distributions, $P$ or $Q$, is closer to an anchor distribution $U$. Existing kernel-based approaches often test the relative similarity with a fixed kernel in a manually specified alternative hypothesis, e.g., $Q$ is closer to $U$ than $…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

DUAL: Learning Diverse Kernels for Aggregated Two-sample and Independence Testing

NeurIPS 2025poster

To adapt kernel two-sample and independence testing to complex structured data, aggregation of multiple kernels is frequently employed to boost testing power compared to single-kernel tests. However, we observe a phenomenon that directly maximizing multiple kernel-based statistics may result in high…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

From Implicit Exploration to Structured Reasoning: Guideline and Refinement for LLMs

EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced general-purpose reasoning, showing strong performance across diverse tasks. However, existing methods often rely on implicit exploration, where the model follows stochastic and unguided reasoning paths—like walking without a map. This leads to unstable reas

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

On the Exploration of Local Significant Differences For Two-Sample Test

NeurIPS 2023poster

Recent years have witnessed increasing attentions on two-sample test with diverse real applications, while this work takes one more step on the exploration of local significant differences for two-sample test. We propose the ME$_\text{MaBiD}$, an effective test for two-sample testing, and the basic…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar