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

2. Corrected Samplers for Discrete Flow Models
   Zhengyan Wan, Yidong Ouyang, Liyan Xie, Fang Fang, Hongyuan Zha, Guang Cheng
   International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026
   [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: TNNLS, TKDE