Yidong Ouyang

Yidong Ouyang Ph.D. Candidate Department of Statistics & Data Science University of California, Los Angeles Email / CV / Github / Google Scholar

About

Hey, I am Yidong Ouyang, a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA, where I am advised by George Michailidis. Prior to this, I earned my MPhil from CUHK Shenzhen, where I was advised by Liyan Xie. My research interests lie in generative models, especially diffusion and flow models.

Research Experience

• Google AI Innovation and Research — Student Researcher, Acceleration of Video Generation Model
  Apr 2026 – Nov 2026, Mountain View

• Google AI Innovation and Research — Research Intern, Acceleration of Diffusion Language Model
  Jan 2026 – Apr 2026, Mountain View

• Amazon AWS Bedrock — Applied Scientist Intern, Multimodal Masked Diffusion Model
  Jun 2025 – Sep 2025, Arlington

Selected Publications (full list)

1. Acceleration of Diffusion Language Model through Discrete Average Generator
   Yidong Ouyang, Zhengyan Wan, Themis Haris, Tian Tan, Liqian Peng, Henry Li, Ziqian Lin, Jianhang Chen, Maryam Karimzadehgan, Alec Go, George Michailidis
   [arxiv]

2. dFlowGRPO: Rate-Aware Policy Optimization for Discrete Flow Models
   Zhengyan Wan, Yidong Ouyang, Panwen Hu, Qiang Sun
   [arxiv] [code]

3. Discrete Guidance Matching: Exact Guidance for Discrete Flow Matching
   Zhengyan Wan*, Yidong Ouyang*, Liyan Xie, Fang Fang, Hongyuan Zha, Guang Cheng
   International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026
   [arxiv] [code]

4. Transfer Learning for Diffusion Models
   Yidong Ouyang, Liyan Xie, Hongyuan Zha, Guang Cheng
   Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024
   [arxiv] [code]

Talks & Reading Groups

Some of the workshops and reading groups I have given:

• Diffusion Model for Solving Schrödinger Bridge Problem, CUHKSZ, May 2023

• Synthetic Generation for Tabular Data, CUHKSZ, Aug 2022

• All about OOD Generalization I—Invariant Representation, CUHKSZ, Aug 2021

• Regularization in Spectral Domain, CUFE, Dec 2020

Teaching

• Teaching Assistant, Stats 100C Linear Models, UCLA, 2026

• Teaching Assistant, Stats 10 Introduction to Statistical Reasoning, UCLA, 2025

• Teaching Assistant, DDA4010 Bayesian Statistics, CUHKSZ, 2022

• Teaching Assistant, STA3020 Statistical Inference, CUHKSZ, 2021

Service

• Conference reviewer: NeurIPS 2023–2025, ICLR 2024–2026, ICML 2024–2026, AAAI 2025, AISTATS 2025

• Journal reviewer: TMLR, TNNLS, TKDE