About me

I am Dinghuai Zhang (张鼎怀), a PhD student at Mila. I belong to Prof. Bengio’s group as well as Aaron’s Army (aka A.A.). During my PhD, I’ve interned at FAIR labs. Previously, I was an undergraduate in School of Mathematical Sciences at Peking University, working with Prof. Zhanxing Zhu and Prof. Bin Dong.

I am open to possible cooperation or visiting opportunities. Further, I am always happy to collaborate with junior (undergraduate / master / junior PhD) students. Students from underrepresented groups are strongly encouraged to reach out! If you are interested, feel free to contact me by email, facebook, or wechat.

[News] We are going to have an interesting workshop on structured probabilistic methods in ICML @ Hawaii this summer! Please consider contributing through submitting and / or reviewing.

Research interests

• Scientific design & discovery as probabilistic inference
• Probabilistic methods: inference, generative models, uncertainty modeling
• Exploration with structure: RL, search, black-box optimization, active learning

I’ve also conducted AI safety research (distribution shift, causal representation learning).

Publications

Let the Flows Tell: Solving Graph Combinatorial Optimization Problems with GFlowNets
Dinghuai Zhang, Hanjun Dai, Nikolay Malkin, Aaron Courville, Yoshua Bengio, Ling Pan.
37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023 spotlight)

Stochastic Generative Flow Networks [openreview]
Ling Pan*, Dinghuai Zhang*, Moksh Jain, Longbo Huang, Yoshua Bengio.
39th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2023 spotlight)

Distributional GFlowNets with Quantile Flows [slides]
Dinghuai Zhang*, Ling Pan*, Ricky T. Q. Chen, Aaron Courville, Yoshua Bengio.
Preprint

Unifying Generative Models with GFlowNets and Beyond
Dinghuai Zhang, Ricky T. Q. Chen, Nikolay Malkin, Yoshua Bengio.
Preprint

Latent State Marginalization as a Low-cost Approach for Improving Exploration [openreview] [slides]
Dinghuai Zhang, Aaron Courville, Yoshua Bengio, Qinqing Zheng, Amy Zhang, Ricky T. Q. Chen.
11th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2023)

Predictive Inference with Feature Conformal Prediction [openreview] [poster]
Jiaye Teng*, Chuan Wen*, Dinghuai Zhang*, Yoshua Bengio, Yang Gao, Yang Yuan.
11th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2023)

Generative Flow Networks for Discrete Probabilistic Modeling [poster] [slides]
Dinghuai Zhang, Nikolay Malkin, Zhen Liu, Alexandra Volokhova, Aaron Courville, Yoshua Bengio.
39th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2022)

Building Robust Ensembles via Margin Boosting [poster] [slides]
Dinghuai Zhang, Hongyang Zhang, Aaron Courville, Yoshua Bengio, Pradeep Ravikumar, Arun Sai Suggala.
39th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2022)

Unifying Likelihood-free Inference with Black-box Optimization and Beyond [openreview] [slides]
Dinghuai Zhang, Jie Fu, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville.
10th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2022 spotlight)

Can Subnetwork Structure be the Key to Out-of-Distribution Generalization? [poster] [slides]
Dinghuai Zhang, Kartik Ahuja, Yilun Xu, Yisen Wang, Aaron Courville.
38th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2021 long talk)

Neural Approximate Sufficient Statistics for Implicit Models [openreview] [poster] [slides] [Michael’s slides]
Yanzhi Chen*, Dinghuai Zhang*, Michael Gutmann, Aaron Courville, Zhanxing Zhu.
9th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2021 spotlight)

Black-Box Certification with Randomized Smoothing: A Functional Optimization Based Framework [poster] [slides]
Dinghuai Zhang*, Mao Ye*, Chengyue Gong* , Zhanxing Zhu, Qiang Liu.
34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020)

Informative Dropout for Robust Representation Learning: A Shape-bias Perspective [slides] [zhihu]
Baifeng Shi*, Dinghuai Zhang*, Qi Dai, Zhanxing Zhu, Yadong Mu, Jingdong Wang.
37th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2020)

You Only Propagate Once: Accelerating Adversarial Training via Maximal Principle [poster] [slides] [zhihu]
Dinghuai Zhang*, Tianyuan Zhang*,Yiping Lu*, Zhanxing Zhu, Bin Dong.
33rd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2019)

( * denotes equal contribution)

Activities

Services

Reviewer for JMLR, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, AISTATS, UAI, CLeaR, EMNLP.

Miscs

• I enjoy reading. I feel lucky to learn about wisdom from sociologists such as Georg Simmel, Norbert Elias, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud. I occasionally write some thoughts at douban.
• I used to be a huge fan of Daido Moriyama and Henri Cartier-Bresson (street photography pioneers).
• I paint Chinese calligraphy well since a child.