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Jiajun Fan

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6 papers

2 author rows

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Adaptive Divergence Regularized Policy Optimization for Fine-tuning Generative Models

Jiajun Fan
Tong Wei
Chaoran Cheng
Yuxin Chen
Ge Liu

Balancing exploration and exploitation during reinforcement learning fine-tuning of generative models presents a critical challenge, as existing approaches rely on fixed divergence regularization that creates an inherent dilemma: strong regularization preserves model capabilities but limits reward optimization, while weak regularization enables greater alignment but risks instability or reward hacking. We introduce Adaptive Divergence Regularized Policy Optimization (ADRPO), which automatically adjusts regularization strength based on advantage estimates—reducing regularization for high-value samples while applying stronger regularization to poor samples, enabling policies to navigate between exploration and aggressive exploitation according to data quality. Our implementation with Wasserstein-2 regularization for flow matching generative models achieves remarkable results on text-to-image generation, achieving better semantic alignment and diversity than offline methods like DPO and online methods with fixed regularization like ORW-CFM-W2. ADRPO enables a 2B parameter SD3 model to surpass much larger models with 4. 8B and 12B parameters in attribute binding, semantic consistency, artistic style transfer, and compositional control while maintaining generation diversity. ADRPO generalizes to KL-regularized fine-tuning of both text-only LLMs and multi-modal reasoning models, enhancing existing online RL methods like GRPO while requiring no additional networks or complex architectural changes. In LLM fine-tuning, ADRPO demonstrates an emergent ability to escape local optima through active exploration, while in multi-modal audio reasoning, it outperforms GRPO through superior step-by-step reasoning, enabling a 7B model to outperform substantially larger commercial models including Gemini 2. 5 Pro and GPT-4o Audio, offering an effective plug-and-play solution to the exploration-exploitation challenge across diverse generative architectures and modalities.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Online Reward-Weighted Fine-Tuning of Flow Matching with Wasserstein Regularization

Jiajun Fan
Shuaike Shen
Chaoran Cheng
Yuxin Chen
Chumeng Liang
Ge Liu

Recent advancements in reinforcement learning (RL) have achieved great success in fine-tuning diffusion-based generative models. However, fine-tuning continuous flow-based generative models to align with arbitrary user-defined reward functions remains challenging, particularly due to issues such as policy collapse from overoptimization and the prohibitively high computational cost of likelihoods in continuous-time flows. In this paper, we propose an easy-to-use and theoretically sound RL fine-tuning method, which we term Online Reward-Weighted Conditional Flow Matching with Wasserstein-2 Regularization (ORW-CFM-W2). Our method integrates RL into the flow matching framework to fine-tune generative models with arbitrary reward functions, without relying on gradients of rewards or filtered datasets. By introducing an online reward-weighting mechanism, our approach guides the model to prioritize high-reward regions in the data manifold. To prevent policy collapse and maintain diversity, we incorporate Wasserstein-2 (W2) distance regularization into our method and derive a tractable upper bound for it in flow matching, effectively balancing exploration and exploitation of policy optimization. We provide theoretical analyses to demonstrate the convergence properties and induced data distributions of our method, establishing connections with traditional RL algorithms featuring Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization and offering a more comprehensive understanding of the underlying mechanisms and learning behavior of our approach. Extensive experiments on tasks including target image generation, image compression, and text-image alignment demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, where our method achieves optimal policy convergence while allowing controllable trade-offs between reward maximization and diversity preservation.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Variational Supervised Contrastive Learning

Ziwen Wang
Jiajun Fan
Thao Nguyen
Heng Ji
Ge Liu

Contrastive learning has proven to be highly efficient and adaptable in shaping representation spaces across diverse modalities by pulling similar samples together and pushing dissimilar ones apart. However, two key limitations persist: (1) Without explicit regulation of the embedding distribution, semantically related instances can inadvertently be pushed apart unless complementary signals guide pair selection, and (2) excessive reliance on large in-batch negatives and tailored augmentations hinders generalization. To address these limitations, we propose Variational Supervised Contrastive Learning (VarCon), which reformulates supervised contrastive learning as variational inference over latent class variables and maximizes a posterior-weighted evidence lower bound (ELBO) that replaces exhaustive pair-wise comparisons for efficient class-aware matching and grants fine-grained control over intra-class dispersion in the embedding space. Trained exclusively on image data, our experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet-100, and ImageNet-1K show that VarCon (1) achieves state-of-the-art performance for contrastive learning frameworks, reaching 79. 36% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K and 78. 29% on CIFAR-100 with a ResNet-50 encoder while converging in just 200 epochs; (2) yields substantially clearer decision boundaries and semantic organization in the embedding space, as evidenced by KNN classification, hierarchical clustering results, and transfer-learning assessments; and (3) demonstrates superior performance in few-shot learning than supervised baseline and superior robustness across various augmentation strategies.

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ICLR Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Learnable Behavior Control: Breaking Atari Human World Records via Sample-Efficient Behavior Selection

Jiajun Fan
Yuzheng Zhuang
Yuecheng Liu
Jianye Hao
Bin Wang 0034
Jiangcheng Zhu
Hao Wang 0049
Shu-Tao Xia

The exploration problem is one of the main challenges in deep reinforcement learning (RL). Recent promising works tried to handle the problem with population-based methods, which collect samples with diverse behaviors derived from a population of different exploratory policies. Adaptive policy selection has been adopted for behavior control. However, the behavior selection space is largely limited by the predefined policy population, which further limits behavior diversity. In this paper, we propose a general framework called Learnable Behavioral Control (LBC) to address the limitation, which a) enables a significantly enlarged behavior selection space via formulating a hybrid behavior mapping from all policies; b) constructs a unified learnable process for behavior selection. We introduce LBC into distributed off-policy actor-critic methods and achieve behavior control via optimizing the selection of the behavior mappings with bandit-based meta-controllers. Our agents have achieved 10077.52% mean human normalized score and surpassed 24 human world records within 1B training frames in the Arcade Learning Environment, which demonstrates our significant state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance without degrading the sample efficiency.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Optimal Transport for Treatment Effect Estimation

Hao Wang
Jiajun Fan
Zhichao Chen
Haoxuan Li
Weiming Liu
Tianqiao Liu
Quanyu Dai
Yichao Wang

Estimating individual treatment effects from observational data is challenging due to treatment selection bias. Prevalent methods mainly mitigate this issue by aligning different treatment groups in the latent space, the core of which is the calculation of distribution discrepancy. However, two issues that are often overlooked can render these methods invalid: (1) mini-batch sampling effects (MSE), where the calculated discrepancy is erroneous in non-ideal mini-batches with outcome imbalance and outliers; (2) unobserved confounder effects (UCE), where the unobserved confounders are not considered in the discrepancy calculation. Both of these issues invalidate the calculated discrepancy, mislead the training of estimators, and thus impede the handling of treatment selection bias. To tackle these issues, we propose Entire Space CounterFactual Regression (ESCFR), which is a new take on optimal transport technology in the context of causality. Specifically, based on the canonical optimal transport framework, we propose a relaxed mass-preserving regularizer to address the MSE issue and design a proximal factual outcome regularizer to handle the UCE issue. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ESCFR estimates distribution discrepancy accurately, handles the treatment selection bias effectively, and outperforms prevalent competitors significantly.

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ICML Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Generalized Data Distribution Iteration

Jiajun Fan
Changnan Xiao

To obtain higher sample efficiency and superior final performance simultaneously has been one of the major challenges for deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Previous work could handle one of these challenges but typically failed to address them concurrently. In this paper, we try to tackle these two challenges simultaneously. To achieve this, we firstly decouple these challenges into two classic RL problems: data richness and exploration-exploitation trade-off. Then, we cast these two problems into the training data distribution optimization problem, namely to obtain desired training data within limited interactions, and address them concurrently via i) explicit modeling and control of the capacity and diversity of behavior policy and ii) more fine-grained and adaptive control of selective/sampling distribution of the behavior policy using a monotonic data distribution optimization. Finally, we integrate this process into Generalized Policy Iteration (GPI) and obtain a more general framework called Generalized Data Distribution Iteration (GDI). We use the GDI framework to introduce operator-based versions of well-known RL methods from DQN to Agent57. Theoretical guarantee of the superiority of GDI compared with GPI is concluded. We also demonstrate our state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on Arcade Learning Environment (ALE), wherein our algorithm has achieved 9620. 98% mean human normalized score (HNS), 1146. 39% median HNS, and surpassed 22 human world records using only 200M training frames. Our performance is comparable to Agent57’s while we consume 500 times less data. We argue that there is still a long way to go before obtaining real superhuman agents in ALE.

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