activity
20222026
collaborators

11 papers

cs.LG2026

Uni-LaDiR: Latent Diffusion Unifies Multimodal Reasoning

Haoqiang Kang, Yizhe Zhang, Nikki Lijing Kuang +3

Multimodal models increasingly think with different modalities such as images, 3D point clouds, and robot states, not just text. Yet each modality is still encoded into its own rep…

cs.LG2026

Reinforcement Learning without Ground-Truth Solutions can Improve LLMs

Yingyu Lin, Qiyue Gao, Nikki Lijing Kuang +6

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for training LLMs typically rely on ground-truth answers to assign rewards, limiting their applicability to tasks where the gr…

cs.CL2026

Residual Skill Optimization for Text-to-SQL Ensembles

Jiongli Zhu, Haoquan Guan, Parjanya Prajakta Prashant +8

Text-to-SQL ensembles improve over single-candidate generation by drawing multiple SQL candidates and selecting one, but their effectiveness is bounded by Pass@K, the probability t…

cs.LG2026

LaDi-RL: Latent Diffusion Reasoning Prevents Entropy Collapse in Reinforcement Learning

Haoqiang Kang, Yizhe Zhang, Nikki Lijing Kuang +2

Reinforcement learning has become a central paradigm for improving LLM reasoning, but most existing methods optimize policies over discrete token sequences. This creates a mismatch…

cs.LG2025

LaDiR: Latent Diffusion Enhances LLMs for Text Reasoning

Haoqiang Kang, Yizhe Zhang, Nikki Lijing Kuang +4

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate their reasoning ability through chain-of-thought (CoT) generation. However, LLM's autoregressive decoding may limit the ability to revisit…

stat.ML2025

Almost Linear Convergence under Minimal Score Assumptions: Quantized Transition Diffusion

Xunpeng Huang, Yingyu Lin, Nikki Lijing Kuang +4

Continuous diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable performance in data generation across various domains, yet their efficiency remains constrained by two critical limitations…

cs.DS2024

Log-concave Sampling from a Convex Body with a Barrier: a Robust and Unified Dikin Walk

Yuzhou Gu, Nikki Lijing Kuang, Yi-An Ma +2

We consider the problem of sampling from a -dimensional log-concave distribution for -Lipschitz , constrained to a convex body with an efficient…

cs.LG2024

Diffusion-BBO: Diffusion-Based Inverse Modeling for Online Black-Box Optimization

Dongxia Wu, Nikki Lijing Kuang, Ruijia Niu +2

Online black-box optimization (BBO) aims to optimize an objective function by iteratively querying a black-box oracle in a sample-efficient way. While prior studies focus on forwar…

cs.LG2023

Posterior Sampling with Delayed Feedback for Reinforcement Learning with Linear Function Approximation

Nikki Lijing Kuang, Ming Yin, Mengdi Wang +2

Recent studies in reinforcement learning (RL) have made significant progress by leveraging function approximation to alleviate the sample complexity hurdle for better performance.…

cs.LG2023

Langevin Thompson Sampling with Logarithmic Communication: Bandits and Reinforcement Learning

Amin Karbasi, Nikki Lijing Kuang, Yi-An Ma +1

Thompson sampling (TS) is widely used in sequential decision making due to its ease of use and appealing empirical performance. However, many existing analytical and empirical resu…

stat.ML2022

Statistical and Computational Trade-offs in Variational Inference: A Case Study in Inferential Model Selection

Kush Bhatia, Nikki Lijing Kuang, Yi-An Ma +1

Variational inference has recently emerged as a popular alternative to the classical Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in large-scale Bayesian inference. The core idea is to trade st…