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Kuan-Chieh Wang

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12 papers

2 author rows

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

I Think, Therefore I Diffuse: Enabling Multimodal In-Context Reasoning in Diffusion Models

Zhenxing Mi
Kuan-Chieh Wang
Guocheng Qian
Hanrong Ye
Runtao Liu
Sergey Tulyakov
Kfir Aberman
Dan Xu 0002

This paper presents ThinkDiff, a novel alignment paradigm that empowers text-to-image diffusion models with multimodal in-context understanding and reasoning capabilities by integrating the strengths of vision-language models (VLMs). Existing multimodal diffusion finetuning methods largely focus on pixel-level reconstruction rather than in-context reasoning, and are constrained by the complexity and limited availability of reasoning-based datasets. ThinkDiff addresses these challenges by leveraging vision-language training as a proxy task, aligning VLMs with the decoder of an encoder-decoder large language model (LLM) instead of a diffusion decoder. This proxy task builds on the observation that the LLM decoder shares the same input feature space with diffusion decoders that use the corresponding LLM encoder for prompt embedding. As a result, aligning VLMs with diffusion decoders can be simplified through alignment with the LLM decoder. Without complex training and datasets, ThinkDiff effectively unleashes understanding, reasoning, and composing capabilities in diffusion models. Experiments demonstrate that ThinkDiff significantly improves accuracy from 19. 2% to 46. 3% on the challenging CoBSAT benchmark for multimodal in-context reasoning generation, with only 5 hours of training on 4 A100 GPUs. Additionally, ThinkDiff demonstrates exceptional performance in composing multiple images and texts into logically coherent images. Project page: https: //mizhenxing. github. io/ThinkDiff.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Preventing Shortcuts in Adapter Training via Providing the Shortcuts

Anujraaj Goyal
Guocheng Qian
Huseyin Coskun
Aarush Gupta
Himmy Tam
Daniil Ostashev
Ju Hu
Dhritiman Sagar

Adapter-based training has emerged as a key mechanism for extending the capabilities of powerful foundation image generators, enabling personalized and stylized text-to-image synthesis. These adapters are typically trained to capture a specific target attribute, such as subject identity, using single-image reconstruction objectives. However, because the input image inevitably contains a mixture of visual factors, adapters are prone to entangle the target attribute with incidental ones, such as pose, expression, and lighting. This spurious correlation problem limits generalization and obstructs the model's ability to adhere to the input text prompt. In this work, we uncover a simple yet effective solution: provide the very shortcuts we wish to eliminate during adapter training. In Shortcut-Rerouted Adapter Training, confounding factors are routed through auxiliary modules, such as ControlNet or LoRA, eliminating the incentive for the adapter to internalize them. The auxiliary modules are then removed during inference. When applied to tasks like facial and full-body identity injection, our approach improves generation quality, diversity, and prompt adherence. These results point to a general design principle in the era of large models: when seeking disentangled representations, the most effective path may be to establish shortcuts for what should NOT be learned.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Interpreting the Weight Space of Customized Diffusion Models

Amil Dravid
Yossi Gandelsman
Kuan-Chieh Wang
Rameen Abdal
Gordon Wetzstein
Alexei A. Efros
Kfir Aberman

We investigate the space of weights spanned by a large collection of customized diffusion models. We populate this space by creating a dataset of over 60, 000 models, each of which is a base model fine-tuned to insert a different person's visual identity. We model the underlying manifold of these weights as a subspace, which we term $\textit{weights2weights}$. We demonstrate three immediate applications of this space that result in new diffusion models -- sampling, editing, and inversion. First, sampling a set of weights from this space results in a new model encoding a novel identity. Next, we find linear directions in this space corresponding to semantic edits of the identity (e. g. , adding a beard), resulting in a new model with the original identity edited. Finally, we show that inverting a single image into this space encodes a realistic identity into a model, even if the input image is out of distribution (e. g. , a painting). We further find that these linear properties of the diffusion model weight space extend to other visual concepts. Our results indicate that the weight space of fine-tuned diffusion models can behave as an interpretable $\textit{meta}$-latent space producing new models.

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ICLR Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Diagnosing and Rectifying Vision Models using Language

Yuhui Zhang
Jeff Z. HaoChen
Shih-Cheng Huang
Kuan-Chieh Wang
James Y. Zou
Serena Yeung

Recent multi-modal contrastive learning models have demonstrated the ability to learn an embedding space suitable for building strong vision classifiers, by leveraging the rich information in large-scale image-caption datasets. Our work highlights a distinct advantage of this multi-modal embedding space: the ability to diagnose vision classifiers through natural language. The traditional process of diagnosing model behaviors in deployment settings involves labor-intensive data acquisition and annotation. Our proposed method can discover high-error data slices, identify influential attributes and further rectify undesirable model behaviors, without requiring any visual data. Through a combination of theoretical explanation and empirical verification, we present conditions under which classifiers trained on embeddings from one modality can be equivalently applied to embeddings from another modality. On a range of image datasets with known error slices, we demonstrate that our method can effectively identify the error slices and influential attributes, and can further use language to rectify failure modes of the classifier.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

LOVM: Language-Only Vision Model Selection

Orr Zohar
Shih-Cheng Huang
Kuan-Chieh Wang
Serena Yeung

Pre-trained multi-modal vision-language models (VLMs) are becoming increasingly popular due to their exceptional performance on downstream vision applications, particularly in the few- and zero-shot settings. However, selecting the best-performing VLM for some downstream applications is non-trivial, as it is dataset and task-dependent. Meanwhile, the exhaustive evaluation of all available VLMs on a novel application is not only time and computationally demanding but also necessitates the collection of a labeled dataset for evaluation. As the number of open-source VLM variants increases, there is a need for an efficient model selection strategy that does not require access to a curated evaluation dataset. This paper proposes a novel task and benchmark for efficiently evaluating VLMs' zero-shot performance on downstream applications without access to the downstream task dataset. Specifically, we introduce a new task LOVM: L anguage- O nly V ision M odel Selection, where methods are expected to perform both model selection and performance prediction based solely on a text description of the desired downstream application. We then introduced an extensive LOVM benchmark consisting of ground-truth evaluations of 35 pre-trained VLMs and 23 datasets, where methods are expected to rank the pre-trained VLMs and predict their zero-shot performance.

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Grad2Task: Improved Few-shot Text Classification Using Gradients for Task Representation

Jixuan Wang
Kuan-Chieh Wang
Frank Rudzicz
Michael Brudno

Large pretrained language models (LMs) like BERT have improved performance in many disparate natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, fine tuning such models requires a large number of training examples for each target task. Simultaneously, many realistic NLP problems are "few shot", without a sufficiently large training set. In this work, we propose a novel conditional neural process-based approach for few-shot text classification that learns to transfer from other diverse tasks with rich annotation. Our key idea is to represent each task using gradient information from a base model and to train an adaptation network that modulates a text classifier conditioned on the task representation. While previous task-aware few-shot learners represent tasks by input encoding, our novel task representation is more powerful, as the gradient captures input-output relationships of a task. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms traditional fine-tuning, sequential transfer learning, and state-of-the-art meta learning approaches on a collection of diverse few-shot tasks. We further conducted analysis and ablations to justify our design choices.

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Variational Model Inversion Attacks

Kuan-Chieh Wang
Yan Fu
Ke Li
Ashish Khisti
Richard Zemel
Alireza Makhzani

Given the ubiquity of deep neural networks, it is important that these models do not reveal information about sensitive data that they have been trained on. In model inversion attacks, a malicious user attempts to recover the private dataset used to train a supervised neural network. A successful model inversion attack should generate realistic and diverse samples that accurately describe each of the classes in the private dataset. In this work, we provide a probabilistic interpretation of model inversion attacks, and formulate a variational objective that accounts for both diversity and accuracy. In order to optimize this variational objective, we choose a variational family defined in the code space of a deep generative model, trained on a public auxiliary dataset that shares some structural similarity with the target dataset. Empirically, our method substantially improves performance in terms of target attack accuracy, sample realism, and diversity on datasets of faces and chest X-ray images.

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ICML Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Learning the Stein Discrepancy for Training and Evaluating Energy-Based Models without Sampling

Will Grathwohl
Kuan-Chieh Wang
Jörn-Henrik Jacobsen
David Duvenaud
Richard S. Zemel

We present a new method for evaluating and training unnormalized density models. Our approach only requires access to the gradient of the unnormalized model’s log-density. We estimate the Stein discrepancy between the data density p(x) and the model density q(x) based on a vector function of the data. We parameterize this function with a neural network and fit its parameters to maximize this discrepancy. This yields a novel goodness-of-fit test which outperforms existing methods on high dimensional data. Furthermore, optimizing q(x) to minimize this discrepancy produces a novel method for training unnormalized models. This training method can fit large unnormalized models faster than existing approaches. The ability to both learn and compare models is a unique feature of the proposed method.

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ICLR Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Your classifier is secretly an energy based model and you should treat it like one

Will Grathwohl
Kuan-Chieh Wang
Jörn-Henrik Jacobsen
David Duvenaud
Mohammad Norouzi 0002
Kevin Swersky

We propose to reinterpret a standard discriminative classifier of p(y|x) as an energy based model for the joint distribution p(x, y). In this setting, the standard class probabilities can be easily computed as well as unnormalized values of p(x) and p(x|y). Within this framework, standard discriminative architectures may be used and the model can also be trained on unlabeled data. We demonstrate that energy based training of the joint distribution improves calibration, robustness, and out-of-distribution detection while also enabling our models to generate samples rivaling the quality of recent GAN approaches. We improve upon recently proposed techniques for scaling up the training of energy based models and present an approach which adds little overhead compared to standard classification training. Our approach is the first to achieve performance rivaling the state-of-the-art in both generative and discriminative learning within one hybrid model.

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ICML Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Adversarial Distillation of Bayesian Neural Network Posteriors

Kuan-Chieh Wang
Paul Vicol
James Lucas
Li Gu
Roger B. Grosse
Richard S. Zemel

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) allow us to reason about uncertainty in a principled way. Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) enables efficient BNN learning by drawing samples from the BNN posterior using mini-batches. However, SGLD and its extensions require storage of many copies of the model parameters, a potentially prohibitive cost, especially for large neural networks. We propose a framework, Adversarial Posterior Distillation, to distill the SGLD samples using a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). At test-time, samples are generated by the GAN. We show that this distillation framework incurs no loss in performance on recent BNN applications including anomaly detection, active learning, and defense against adversarial attacks. By construction, our framework distills not only the Bayesian predictive distribution, but the posterior itself. This allows one to compute quantities such as the approximate model variance, which is useful in downstream tasks. To our knowledge, these are the first results applying MCMC-based BNNs to the aforementioned applications.

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ICML Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Neural Relational Inference for Interacting Systems

Thomas Kipf
Ethan Fetaya
Kuan-Chieh Wang
Max Welling
Richard S. Zemel

Interacting systems are prevalent in nature, from dynamical systems in physics to complex societal dynamics. The interplay of components can give rise to complex behavior, which can often be explained using a simple model of the system’s constituent parts. In this work, we introduce the neural relational inference (NRI) model: an unsupervised model that learns to infer interactions while simultaneously learning the dynamics purely from observational data. Our model takes the form of a variational auto-encoder, in which the latent code represents the underlying interaction graph and the reconstruction is based on graph neural networks. In experiments on simulated physical systems, we show that our NRI model can accurately recover ground-truth interactions in an unsupervised manner. We further demonstrate that we can find an interpretable structure and predict complex dynamics in real motion capture and sports tracking data.

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NeurIPS Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Dualing GANs

Yujia Li
Alexander Schwing
Kuan-Chieh Wang
Richard Zemel

Generative adversarial nets (GANs) are a promising technique for modeling a distribution from samples. It is however well known that GAN training suffers from instability due to the nature of its saddle point formulation. In this paper, we explore ways to tackle the instability problem by dualizing the discriminator. We start from linear discriminators in which case conjugate duality provides a mechanism to reformulate the saddle point objective into a maximization problem, such that both the generator and the discriminator of this ‘dualing GAN’ act in concert. We then demonstrate how to extend this intuition to non-linear formulations. For GANs with linear discriminators our approach is able to remove the instability in training, while for GANs with nonlinear discriminators our approach provides an alternative to the commonly used GAN training algorithm.

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