Yunfan Liu

Biography

I am an Associate Professor at the School of Advanced Interdisciplinary Sciences (SAIS), University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS). I am affiliated with the Learning and Machine Perception (LAMP) Lab, where I work with Prof. Qixiang Ye. Before joining SAIS, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the LAMP Lab.

I received my Ph.D. from UCAS in 2023, advised by Prof. Tieniu Tan. Before that, I received my M.S. from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor in 2017 and my B.Eng. from Tsinghua University in 2015.

Research Interests

My research interests include multimodal representation and generative models, post-training techniques, and their applications to autonomous agents.

Recently, I have been particularly interested in how these models can support self-improving agentic systems.

[Opening Positions] I am actively looking for highly motivated and self-driven students. Prospective students with strong initiative and interests aligned with the topics above are welcome to contact me by email.

News

[2026-05] Our paper, "Balancing Understanding and Generation in Discrete Diffusion Models", has been accepted by ICML 2026 (Spotlight, 2.2%)!
[2026-03] I joined the School of Advanced Interdisciplinary Sciences at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences!
[2026-02] Our paper, "RebRL: Reinforcing Discrete Visual Diffusion Models with Rebalanced Timestep Credits", has been accepted by CVPR 2026!
[2025-09] Our paper, "CC-Diff++: Spatially Controllable Text-to-Image Synthesis for Remote Sensing with Enhanced Contextual Coherence", has been accepted by TGRS!
[2025-08] Our paper, "Expandable Residual Approximation for Knowledge Distillation", has been accepted by TNNLS!
[2025-02] Two papers have been accepted by CVPR 2025, including one Highlight.

Selected Publications

^* Equal contribution. ^# Corresponding author.

Balancing Understanding and Generation in Discrete Diffusion Models

Yue Liu, Yuzhong Zhao, Zheyong Xie, Qixiang Ye, Jianbin Jiao, Yao Hu, Shaosheng Cao, Yunfan Liu^#

ICML 2026 (Spotlight, 2.2%)

[Paper] [Code]
RebRL: Reinforcing Discrete Visual Diffusion Models with Rebalanced Timestep Credits

Mu Zhang, Tianren Ma, Yunfan Liu^#, Kun Hu, Qixiang Ye

CVPR 2026

[Paper] [Code (Coming Soon)]
CC-Diff++: Spatially Controllable Text-to-Image Synthesis for Remote Sensing with Enhanced Contextual Coherence

Mu Zhang, Yunfan Liu^#, Yue Liu, Yuzhong Zhao, Qixiang Ye

TGRS 2025

[Paper] [Code]
Revealing Key Details to See Differences: A Novel Prototypical Perspective for Skeleton-based Action Recognition

Hongda Liu, Yunfan Liu^#, Min Ren, Hao Wang, Yunlong Wang, Zhenan Sun

CVPR 2025 (Highlight, 2.98%)

[Paper] [Code]
Building Vision Models upon Heat Conduction

Zhaozhi Wang^*, Yue Liu^*, Yunjie Tian, Yunfan Liu, Yaowei Wang, Qixiang Ye

CVPR 2025

[Paper] [Code]
VMamba: Visual State Space Model

Yue Liu, Yunjie Tian, Yuzhong Zhao, Hongtian Yu, Lingxi Xie, Yaowei Wang, Qixiang Ye, Yunfan Liu^#

NeurIPS 2024 (Spotlight, 2.08%)

[Paper] [Code]
Spatial Transform Decoupling for Oriented Object Detection

Hongtian Yu^*, Yunjie Tian^*, Qixiang Ye, Yunfan Liu^#

AAAI 2024

[Paper] [Code]
GAN-based Facial Attribute Manipulation

Yunfan Liu, Qi Li, Qiyao Deng, Zhenan Sun, Ming-Hsuan Yang

TPAMI 2023

[Paper]
Towards Spatially Disentangled Manipulation of Face Images With Pre-Trained StyleGANs

Yunfan Liu, Qi Li, Qiyao Deng, Zhenan Sun

TCSVT 2022

[Paper]
A³GAN: An Attribute-Aware Attentive Generative Adversarial Network for Face Aging

Yunfan Liu, Qi Li, Zhenan Sun, Tieniu Tan

TIFS 2021

[Paper]
Age Progression and Regression with Spatial Attention Modules

Qi Li^*, Yunfan Liu^*, Zhenan Sun

AAAI 2020 (Oral)

[Paper] [Code]
Attribute-Aware Face Aging With Wavelet-Based Generative Adversarial Networks

Yunfan Liu^*, Qi Li^*, Zhenan Sun

CVPR 2019

[Paper]