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20212025
most citedBridging Model-Based Optimization and Generative Modeling via Conservative Fine-Tuning of Diffusion Models

4 citations · 16 across the 13 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

14 papers

cs.LG2025

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

Xingyu Su, Xiner Li, Masatoshi Uehara +7

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,…

cs.LG2025

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

Masatoshi Uehara, Xingyu Su, Yulai Zhao +5

To fully leverage the capabilities of diffusion models, we are often interested in optimizing downstream reward functions during inference. While numerous algorithms for reward-gui…

cs.AI2025

Inference-Time Alignment in Diffusion Models with Reward-Guided Generation: Tutorial and Review

Masatoshi Uehara, Yulai Zhao, Chenyu Wang +4

This tutorial provides an in-depth guide on inference-time guidance and alignment methods for optimizing downstream reward functions in diffusion models. While diffusion models are…

cs.LG2024

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

Xiner Li, Yulai Zhao, Chenyu Wang +8

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…

cs.LG2024★ 4 cited

Understanding Reinforcement Learning-Based Fine-Tuning of Diffusion Models: A Tutorial and Review

Masatoshi Uehara, Yulai Zhao, Tommaso Biancalani +1

This tutorial provides a comprehensive survey of methods for fine-tuning diffusion models to optimize downstream reward functions. While diffusion models are widely known to provid…

cs.LG2024★ 1 cited

Adding Conditional Control to Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learning

Yulai Zhao, Masatoshi Uehara, Gabriele Scalia +4

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 data…

cs.LG2024★ 4 cited

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

Masatoshi Uehara, Yulai Zhao, Ehsan Hajiramezanali +5

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…

cs.LG2024★ 1 cited

Fine-Tuning of Continuous-Time Diffusion Models as Entropy-Regularized Control

Masatoshi Uehara, Yulai Zhao, Kevin Black +6

Diffusion models excel at capturing complex data distributions, such as those of natural images and proteins. While diffusion models are trained to represent the distribution in th…

cs.LG2024★ 1 cited

Feedback Efficient Online Fine-Tuning of Diffusion Models

Masatoshi Uehara, Yulai Zhao, Kevin Black +6

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 d…

cs.LG2023

Provably Efficient CVaR RL in Low-rank MDPs

Yulai Zhao, Wenhao Zhan, Xiaoyan Hu +4

We study risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL), where we aim to maximize the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) with a fixed risk tolerance . Prior theoretical work studying…

cs.LG2023★ 2 cited

Local Optimization Achieves Global Optimality in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Yulai Zhao, Zhuoran Yang, Zhaoran Wang +1

Policy optimization methods with function approximation are widely used in multi-agent reinforcement learning. However, it remains elusive how to design such algorithms with statis…

cs.LG2022★ 1 cited

Optimizing the Performative Risk under Weak Convexity Assumptions

Yulai Zhao

In performative prediction, a predictive model impacts the distribution that generates future data, a phenomenon that is being ignored in classical supervised learning. In this clo…

cs.LG2022

Blessing of Class Diversity in Pre-training

Yulai Zhao, Jianshu Chen, Simon S. Du

This paper presents a new statistical analysis aiming to explain the recent superior achievements of the pre-training techniques in natural language processing (NLP). We prove that…

cs.LG2021★ 2 cited

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

Yulai Zhao, Yuandong Tian, Jason D. Lee +1

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 obt…