Author name cluster

Sirui Xie

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9 papers

2 author rows

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Latent Thought Models with Variational Bayes Inference-Time Computation

Deqian Kong
Minglu Zhao
Dehong Xu
Bo Pang 0004
Shu Wang 0002
Edouardo Honig
Zhangzhang Si
Chuan Li

We propose a novel class of language models, Latent Thought Models (LTMs), which incorporate explicit latent thought vectors that follow an explicit prior model in latent space. These latent thought vectors guide the autoregressive generation of ground tokens through a Transformer decoder. Training employs a dual-rate optimization process within the classical variational Bayes framework: fast learning of local variational parameters for the posterior distribution of latent vectors (inference-time computation), and slow learning of global decoder parameters. Empirical studies reveal that LTMs possess additional scaling dimensions beyond traditional Large Language Models (LLMs), such as the number of iterations in inference-time computation and number of latent thought vectors. Higher sample efficiency can be achieved by increasing training compute per token, with further gains possible by trading model size for more inference steps. Designed based on these scaling properties, LTMs demonstrate superior sample and parameter efficiency compared to autoregressive models and discrete diffusion models. They significantly outperform these counterparts in validation perplexity and zero-shot language modeling tasks. Additionally, LTMs exhibit emergent few-shot in-context reasoning capabilities that scale with model size, and achieve competitive performance in conditional and unconditional text generation. The project page is available at https: //deqiankong. github. io/blogs/ltm.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

EM Distillation for One-step Diffusion Models

Sirui Xie
Zhisheng Xiao
Diederik P. Kingma
Tingbo Hou
Ying N. Wu
Kevin Murphy
Tim Salimans
Ben Poole

While diffusion models can learn complex distributions, sampling requires a computationally expensive iterative process. Existing distillation methods enable efficient sampling, but have notable limitations, such as performance degradation with very few sampling steps, reliance on training data access, or mode-seeking optimization that may fail to capture the full distribution. We propose EM Distillation (EMD), a maximum likelihood-based approach that distills a diffusion model to a one-step generator model with minimal loss of perceptual quality. Our approach is derived through the lens of Expectation-Maximization (EM), where the generator parameters are updated using samples from the joint distribution of the diffusion teacher prior and inferred generator latents. We develop a reparametrized sampling scheme and a noise cancellation technique that together stabilizes the distillation process. We further reveal an interesting connection of our method with existing methods that minimize mode-seeking KL. EMD outperforms existing one-step generative methods in terms of FID scores on ImageNet-64 and ImageNet-128, and compares favorably with prior work on distilling text-to-image diffusion models.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Latent Plan Transformer for Trajectory Abstraction: Planning as Latent Space Inference

Deqian Kong
Dehong Xu
Minglu Zhao
Bo Pang
Jianwen Xie
Andrew Lizarraga
Yuhao Huang
Sirui Xie

In tasks aiming for long-term returns, planning becomes essential. We study generative modeling for planning with datasets repurposed from offline reinforcement learning. Specifically, we identify temporal consistency in the absence of step-wise rewards as one key technical challenge. We introduce the Latent Plan Transformer (LPT), a novel model that leverages a latent variable to connect a Transformer- based trajectory generator and the final return. LPT can be learned with maximum likelihood estimation on trajectory-return pairs. In learning, posterior sampling of the latent variable naturally integrates sub-trajectories to form a consistent abstrac- tion despite the finite context. At test time, the latent variable is inferred from an expected return before policy execution, realizing the idea of planning as inference. Our experiments demonstrate that LPT can discover improved decisions from sub- optimal trajectories, achieving competitive performance across several benchmarks, including Gym-Mujoco, Franka Kitchen, Maze2D, and Connect Four. It exhibits capabilities in nuanced credit assignments, trajectory stitching, and adaptation to environmental contingencies. These results validate that latent variable inference can be a strong alternative to step-wise reward prompting.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Learning Energy-Based Prior Model with Diffusion-Amortized MCMC

Peiyu Yu
Yaxuan Zhu
Sirui Xie
Xiaojian (Shawn) Ma
Ruiqi Gao
Song-Chun Zhu
Ying Nian Wu

Latent space EBMs, also known as energy-based priors, have drawn growing interests in the field of generative modeling due to its flexibility in the formulation and strong modeling power of the latent space. However, the common practice of learning latent space EBMs with non-convergent short-run MCMC for prior and posterior sampling is hindering the model from further progress; the degenerate MCMC sampling quality in practice often leads to degraded generation quality and instability in training, especially with highly multi-modal and/or high-dimensional target distributions. To remedy this sampling issue, in this paper we introduce a simple but effective diffusion-based amortization method for long-run MCMC sampling and develop a novel learning algorithm for the latent space EBM based on it. We provide theoretical evidence that the learned amortization of MCMC is a valid long-run MCMC sampler. Experiments on several image modeling benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared with strong counterparts.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Learning non-Markovian Decision-Making from State-only Sequences

Aoyang Qin
Feng Gao
Qing Li
Song-Chun Zhu
Sirui Xie

Conventional imitation learning assumes access to the actions of demonstrators, but these motor signals are often non-observable in naturalistic settings. Additionally, sequential decision-making behaviors in these settings can deviate from the assumptions of a standard Markov Decision Process (MDP). To address these challenges, we explore deep generative modeling of state-only sequences with non-Markov Decision Process (nMDP), where the policy is an energy-based prior in the latent space of the state transition generator. We develop maximum likelihood estimation to achieve model-based imitation, which involves short-run MCMC sampling from the prior and importance sampling for the posterior. The learned model enables $\textit{decision-making as inference}$: model-free policy execution is equivalent to prior sampling, model-based planning is posterior sampling initialized from the policy. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method in a prototypical path planning task with non-Markovian constraints and show that the learned model exhibits strong performances in challenging domains from the MuJoCo suite.

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ICML Conference 2022 Conference Paper

COAT: Measuring Object Compositionality in Emergent Representations

Sirui Xie
Ari S. Morcos
Song-Chun Zhu
Ramakrishna Vedantam

Learning representations that can decompose a multi-object scene into its constituent objects and recompose them flexibly is desirable for object-oriented reasoning and planning. Built upon object masks in the pixel space, existing metrics for objectness can only evaluate generative models with an object-specific “slot” structure. We propose to directly measure compositionality in the representation space as a form of objections, making such evaluations tractable for a wider class of models. Our metric, COAT (Compositional Object Algebra Test), evaluates if a generic representation exhibits certain geometric properties that underpin object compositionality beyond what is already captured by the raw pixel space. Our experiments on the popular CLEVR (Johnson et. al. , 2018) domain reveal that existing disentanglement-based generative models are not as compositional as one might expect, suggesting room for further modeling improvements. We hope our work allows for a unified evaluation of object-centric representations, spanning generative as well as discriminative, self-supervised models.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Emergent Graphical Conventions in a Visual Communication Game

Shuwen Qiu
Sirui Xie
Lifeng Fan
Tao Gao
Jungseock Joo
Song-Chun Zhu
Yixin Zhu

Humans communicate with graphical sketches apart from symbolic languages. Primarily focusing on the latter, recent studies of emergent communication overlook the sketches; they do not account for the evolution process through which symbolic sign systems emerge in the trade-off between iconicity and symbolicity. In this work, we take the very first step to model and simulate this process via two neural agents playing a visual communication game; the sender communicates with the receiver by sketching on a canvas. We devise a novel reinforcement learning method such that agents are evolved jointly towards successful communication and abstract graphical conventions. To inspect the emerged conventions, we define three key properties -- iconicity, symbolicity, and semanticity -- and design evaluation methods accordingly. Our experimental results under different controls are consistent with the observation in studies of human graphical conventions. Of note, we find that evolved sketches can preserve the continuum of semantics under proper environmental pressures. More interestingly, co-evolved agents can switch between conventionalized and iconic communication based on their familiarity with referents. We hope the present research can pave the path for studying emergent communication with the modality of sketches.

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ICML Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Latent Diffusion Energy-Based Model for Interpretable Text Modelling

Peiyu Yu
Sirui Xie
Xiaojian Ma 0001
Baoxiong Jia
Bo Pang 0004
Ruiqi Gao
Yixin Zhu 0001
Song-Chun Zhu

Latent space Energy-Based Models (EBMs), also known as energy-based priors, have drawn growing interests in generative modeling. Fueled by its flexibility in the formulation and strong modeling power of the latent space, recent works built upon it have made interesting attempts aiming at the interpretability of text modeling. However, latent space EBMs also inherit some flaws from EBMs in data space; the degenerate MCMC sampling quality in practice can lead to poor generation quality and instability in training, especially on data with complex latent structures. Inspired by the recent efforts that leverage diffusion recovery likelihood learning as a cure for the sampling issue, we introduce a novel symbiosis between the diffusion models and latent space EBMs in a variational learning framework, coined as the latent diffusion energy-based model. We develop a geometric clustering-based regularization jointly with the information bottleneck to further improve the quality of the learned latent space. Experiments on several challenging tasks demonstrate the superior performance of our model on interpretable text modeling over strong counterparts.

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Unsupervised Foreground Extraction via Deep Region Competition

Peiyu Yu
Sirui Xie
Xiaojian Ma
Yixin Zhu
Ying Nian Wu
Song-Chun Zhu

We present Deep Region Competition (DRC), an algorithm designed to extract foreground objects from images in a fully unsupervised manner. Foreground extraction can be viewed as a special case of generic image segmentation that focuses on identifying and disentangling objects from the background. In this work, we rethink the foreground extraction by reconciling energy-based prior with generative image modeling in the form of Mixture of Experts (MoE), where we further introduce the learned pixel re-assignment as the essential inductive bias to capture the regularities of background regions. With this modeling, the foreground-background partition can be naturally found through Expectation-Maximization (EM). We show that the proposed method effectively exploits the interaction between the mixture components during the partitioning process, which closely connects to region competition, a seminal approach for generic image segmentation. Experiments demonstrate that DRC exhibits more competitive performances on complex real-world data and challenging multi-object scenes compared with prior methods. Moreover, we show empirically that DRC can potentially generalize to novel foreground objects even from categories unseen during training.

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