Aaron Lou (@aaron

Aaron Lou

272 posts

Aaron Lou

@aaron_lou

Leading Strategic Explorations @OpenAI, prev @Stanford. Invented modern diffusion LMs

Joined August 2013

Pinned
Aaron Lou
@aaron_lou
Nov 30, 2025
The Strategic Explorations team @OpenAI is looking to recruit researchers interested in working on the next frontier of language modeling! Feel free to reach out to me by email. @darkproger and I will also be at NeurIPS to connect and discuss in person.
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Aaron Lou
@aaron_lou
Jul 24, 2024
Exciting updates in the last month: 1. I got married!! 💕👩‍❤️‍👨💍 2. I joined OpenAI (currently feeling the AGI) 3. Our discrete diffusion paper recently won best paper at #ICML2024. I'll be giving a presentation at 10:30am in Hall A1, with the poster session shortly afterwords
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Aaron Lou
@aaron_lou
Feb 29, 2024
Announcing Score Entropy Discrete Diffusion (SEDD) w/ @chenlin_meng @StefanoErmon. SEDD challenges the autoregressive language paradigm, beating GPT-2 on perplexity and quality! Arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2310.16834 Code: github.com/louaaron/Score… Blog: aaronlou.com/blog/discrete-… 🧵1/n
GIF
164K
Aaron Lou
@aaron_lou
Apr 13, 2023
Presenting Reflected Diffusion Models w/ @StefanoErmon! Diffusion models should reverse a SDE, but common hacks break this. We provide a fix through a general framework. Arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2304.04740 Github: github.com/louaaron/Refle… Blog: aaronlou.com/blog/2023/refl… 🧵(1/n)
GIF
135K
Aaron Lou
@aaron_lou
Dec 29, 2023
Replying to @srush_nlp
@DrYangSong 's tutorial is all you need yang-song.net/blog/2021/scor… Probably a 7-8 but I found it to be extremely clear
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Aaron Lou
@aaron_lou
Jun 19, 2020
Excited to announce “Neural Manifold Ordinary Differential Equations”! @aaron_lou, @dereklim_lzh, @isaykatsman, Leo Huang, Qingxuan Jiang, @sernamlim, @chrismdesa Arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2006.10254 Code: github.com/CUVL/Neural-Ma…
Aaron Lou
@aaron_lou
Apr 5, 2021
Excited to share that I'll be starting my PhD in Computer Science at @Stanford after I graduate from @Cornell! A big thanks to my collaborators, advisors, and friends for helping me on this journey. Looking forward to what's to come.
Aaron Lou
@aaron_lou
Dec 8, 2023
Finished off the quarter with a guest lecture at CS 236 (thanks @StefanoErmon for the pic). Excited to head to NeurIPS ✈️; feel free to reach out if you want to chat! A thread of the work I'll be presenting (on geometric deep learning and text diffusion models). 🧵
19K
Aaron Lou
@aaron_lou
Jun 6, 2023
Finally cleaned up and released the code for Reflected Diffusion. See you all at ICML in Hawaii this summer! github.com/louaaron/Refle…
Aaron Lou
@aaron_lou
Apr 13, 2023
Presenting Reflected Diffusion Models w/ @StefanoErmon! Diffusion models should reverse a SDE, but common hacks break this. We provide a fix through a general framework. Arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2304.04740 Github: github.com/louaaron/Refle… Blog: aaronlou.com/blog/2023/refl… 🧵(1/n)
12K
Aaron Lou
@aaron_lou
Aug 24, 2024
Promising application of discrete diffusion as a better drafting model for speculative decoding! Diffusion seems to bring a sufficiently different structure to enable faster inference speeds. Congrats to @nandofioretto and team!
Nando Fioretto
@nandofioretto
Aug 23, 2024
🔥Excited to share our work on speculative diffusion decoding! We use discrete diffusion as a drafting model to massively speed up #LLM inference---up to 8.7x faster over standard generation and 2.5x faster than traditional spec dec approaches.🚀 🔗Links below
10K
Aaron Lou
@aaron_lou
Jul 17, 2022
Excited to be at ICML for the next week. This will be my first in-person conference ever! DM me if you want to meet up.
Aaron Lou
@aaron_lou
Mar 14, 2023
Replying to @cHHillee
GPT-4 also gets a 30 on AMC 10, but this is effectively random guessing (and leaving the entire test blank gets a higher score of 37.5). Reminds me of one time when I saw online that someone got a 10.5 somehow.
11K
Aaron Lou
@aaron_lou
Feb 29, 2024
Replying to @aaron_lou
For full details, check out the paper at arxiv.org/abs/2310.16834. Our code is on github (github.com/louaaron/Score…) with models on huggingface. Finally, we have a blog post at aaronlou.com/blog/discrete-… if you want a more intuitive guide. 9/9
arxiv.org
Discrete Diffusion Modeling by Estimating the Ratios of the Data...
Despite their groundbreaking performance for many generative modeling tasks, diffusion models have fallen short on discrete data domains such as natural language. Crucially, standard diffusion...
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Aaron Lou
@aaron_lou
Jun 1, 2020
I am pleased to announce that Differentiating through the Fréchet Mean has been accepted to ICML! Come check out our union of convex optimization and Riemannian geometry! @aaron_lou, @isaykatsman, Q. Jiang, @SergeBelongie, @sernamlim, @chrismdesa arxiv.org/abs/2003.00335