Shaoan Xie

Generative AI Researcher

Multimodal Learning Alignment & Understanding Reasoning Generation

My research focuses on building multimodal models that align, understand, reason, and generate while remaining controllable and generalizable.

I received my Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Kun Zhang and Prof. Peter Spirtes. Previously, I interned at Adobe Research and Google.

Google Scholar GitHub LinkedIn Email

Featured Research

View all publications

Process rewards evaluating intermediate diffusion language model denoising states

Reasoning & Post-training

Improved reasoning in diffusion language models using feedback throughout generation.

Advancing Reasoning in Diffusion Language Models with Denoising Process Rewards

SmartBrush generative editing demonstration

Generative Image Editing

Built controllable image-editing research deployed in Adobe Photoshop and Firefly.

SmartBrush: Text and Shape Guided Object Inpainting with Diffusion Model

Concept-level control changing a dog's crown while preserving its identity

Controllable Image Generation

Learned explicit vision and language concepts for more precise image generation.

Learning Vision and Language Concepts for Controllable Image Generation

SmartCLIP selectively aligning scene concepts with captions at different levels of detail

Multimodal Alignment

Built a more reliable way to align images and language through shared concepts.

SmartCLIP: Modular Vision-language Alignment with Identification Guarantees

Product ImpactSmartBrush integrated into Adobe Photoshop and Firefly

Research RecognitionCVPR 2023/2025 Highlights • ICLR 2023 Spotlight

Research LeadershipICLR ’26 & ’27 Area Chair • NeurIPS ’26 Area Chair

News

Jul. 2026New work on counterfactual prediction was accepted by TMLR. Two papers on identifiable interpretation and control in generative models and long video–text alignment were accepted to ECCV 2026.
Apr. 2026New work on controllable video generation and compositional generalization was accepted to ICLR 2026 and CVPR 2026, respectively. Our denoising-process rewards for diffusion language models paper was accepted to ACL 2026 Main.
Aug. 2025Selected to serve as an Area Chair for ICLR 2026.
May 2025Two papers on controllable image generation through vision–language concepts and nonparametric identification of latent concepts were accepted to ICML 2025.
Apr. 2025SmartCLIP received a CVPR 2025 Highlight distinction.

Publications

Publications

ACL

Advancing Reasoning in Diffusion Language Models with Denoising Process Rewards

Shaoan Xie*, Lingjing Kong*, Xiangchen Song, Xinshuai Dong, Guangyi Chen, Eric P.Xing, Kun Zhang

ACL main, 2026.

PDF Code
TMLR

Advancing Counterfactual Prediction through Nonlinear Quantile Regression

Shaoan Xie*, Biwei Huang*, Bin Gu, Tongliang Liu, Peter Spirtes, Kun Zhang

Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2026.

PDF Code
ECCV

Beyond the Black Box: Identifiable Interpretation and Control in Generative Models via Causal Minimality

Lingjing Kong*, Shaoan Xie*, Guangyi Chen, Yuewen Sun, Xiangchen Song, Eric P. Xing, Kun Zhang

European Conference on Computer Vision, 2026.

NeurIPS Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop, 2025.

PDF
ECCV

MoVA: Learning Asymmetric Dual Projections for Modular Long Video-Text Alignment

Peiyuan Zhu, Shaoan Xie, Zijian Li, Yifan Shen, Namrata Deka, Harsh Shrivastava, Guangyi Chen, and Kun Zhang

European Conference on Computer Vision, 2026.

PDF
CVPR

Learning by Analogy: A Causal Framework for Composition Generalization

Lingjing Kong, Shaoan Xie, Yang Jiao,Yetian Chen,Yanhui Guo, Simone Shao ,Yan Gao, Guangyi Chen, Kun Zhang

CVPR, 2026.

PDF
TAI

Emerging synergies in causality and deep generative models: A survey

Guanglin Zhou, Shaoan Xie, Guangyuan Hao, Shiming Chen, Biwei Huang, Xiwei Xu, Chen Wang, Liming Zhu, Lina Yao, Kun Zhang

IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, 2025.

PDF
ICLR

Controllable Video Generation with Provable Disentanglement

Yifan Shen*, Peiyuan Zhu*, Zijian Li, Shaoan Xie, Zeyu Tang, Namrata Deka, Zongfang Liu, Guangyi Chen, Kun Zhang

International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.

PDF
ICML

Learning Vision and Language Concepts for Controllable Image Generation

Shaoan Xie*, Lingjing Kong*, Yujia Zheng, Zeyu Tang, Eric P.Xing, Guangyi Chen, Kun Zhang

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025.

PDF Media
ICML

Nonparametric Identification of Latent Concepts

Yujia Zheng*, Shaoan Xie*, Kun Zhang

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025.

PDF
CVPR

SmartCLIP: Modular Vision-language Alignment with Identification Guarantees

Shaoan Xie*, Lingjing Kong*, Yujia Zheng, Yu Yao, Zeyu Tang, Eric P.Xing, Guangyi Chen, Kun Zhang

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025. Highlight

PDF Code
IJCV

From Small to Large: In-Context Learning as a New Paradigm for Domain Generalization

Guanglin Zhou*, Zhongyi Han*, Shaoan Xie*, Shiming Chen, Biwei Huang, Liming Zhu, Xin Gao, Lina Yao, Salman Khan

International Journal of Computer Vision , 2025.

PDF
AISTATS

Causal Representation Learning from General Environments under Nonparametric Mixing

Ignavier Ng, Shaoan Xie, Xingshuai Dong, Peter Spirtes, Kun Zhang

International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2025.

PDF
ICLR

Synergy Between Sufficient Changes and Sparse Mixing Procedure for Disentangled Representation Learning

Zijian Li, Shunxing Fan, Yujia Zheng, Ignavier Ng, Shaoan Xie, Guangyi Chen, Xinshuai Dong, Ruichu Cai, Kun Zhang

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.

PDF
ICML

Causal Representation Learning from Multiple Distributions: A General Setting

Kun Zhang*, Shaoan Xie*, Ignavier Ng*, Yujia Zheng

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2024.

PDF
arXiv

DreamInpainter: Text-Guided Subject-Driven Image Inpainting with Diffusion Models

Shaoan Xie, Yang Zhao, Zhisheng Xiao, Kelvin C.K. Chan, Yandong Li, Yanwu Xu, Kun Zhang, Tingbo Hou

(arXiv), 2024.

PDF
CVPR

Maximum Spatial Perturbation Consistency for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation

Yanwu Xu, Shaoan Xie, Wenhao Wu, and Kun Zhang, Mingming Gong, Kayhan Batmanghelich

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022.

PDF Code
MICCAI

Adversarial Consistency for Single Domain Generalization in Medical Image Segmentation

Yanwu Xu, Shaoan Xie, Maxwell Reynolds, and Matthew Ragoza, Mingming Gong, Kayhan Batmanghelich

International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), 2022.

PDF
NeurIPS

Semi-Implicit Denoising Diffusion Models (SIDDMs)

Yanwu Xu, Mingming Gong, Shaoan Xie, Wei Wei, Matthias Grundmann, Kayhan Batmanghelich, Tingbo Hou

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023.

PDF
CVPR

SmartBrush: Text and Shape Guided Object Inpainting with Diffusion Model

Shaoan Xie, Zhifei Zhang, Zhe Lin, Tobias Hinz and Kun Zhang

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023. Highlight

PDF Video Alive in Adobe Photoshop
CVPR

Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation with Shortest Path Regularization

Shaoan Xie, Yanwu Xu, Mingming Gong and Kun Zhang

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023.

PDF Code Video
ICLR

Multi-domain Image Generation and Translation with Identifiability Guarantees

Shaoan Xie, Lingjing Kong, Mingming Gong and Kun Zhang

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2023. Spotlight

PDF Code
NeurIPS

Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation with Density Changing Regularization

Shaoan Xie, Qirong Ho and Kun Zhang

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2022.

PDF Code
ICCV

Unaligned Image-to-Image Translation by Learning to Reweight

Shaoan Xie, Mingming Gong, Yanwu Xu and Kun Zhang

IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021.

PDF Code
ICML

Learning Semantic Representations for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Shaoan Xie, Zibin Zheng, Liang Chen, and Chuan Chen

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2018.

PDF Code
ICML

Partial Disentanglement for Domain Adaptation

Lingjing Kong, Shaoan Xie, Weiran Yao, and Yujia Zheng, Guangyi Chen, Petar Stojanov, Victor Akinwande, Kun Zhang

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2022. Spotlight

PDF

Academic Service

Area Chair

ICLR ’26 & ’27, NeurIPS ’26

Session Chair

ICDM ’24

Conference Reviewer

ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, UAI, AISTATS, SIGGRAPH

Journal Reviewer

TPAMI, TIP, AI, CSUR, TNNLS, PR, TMM, JASA, TVCG, IJCV