Xinchen Zhang

I am a second-year master student at IIGroup in Tsinghua University, supervised by Prof. Yujiu Yang. I received my Bachelor's degree at School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University.

I am currently a research intern at ByteDance Seed, focusing on reinforcement learning in multimodal large language models. I work closely with Dr. Ling Yang from the AI Lab at Princeton University. Previously, I was honoured to work with Prof. Hao Zhu and Prof. Licheng Jiao at IPIU in Xidian University.

Email / WeChat / Github / Google Scholar

Welcome to any types of research collaboration and discussions! I am actively looking for research internship opportunities in either academia or industry. Feel free to contact me via email or WeChat.

Research

My current research focuses on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), specifically revolutionizing reinforcement learning for the alignment of unified models and continuously pushing the boundaries of their reasoning and generative ability to unlock full potential in complex scenarios.

Previously, my research centered on text-to-image generation, with a particular emphasis on investigating capabilities of diffusion models under complex and compositional prompts, including IterComp (ICLR'25), RealCompo (NeurIPS'24), HermesFlow, Diffusion-Sharpening.

News

[Sep. 2025] Three papers about reinforcement learning and MLLMs are accepted by NeurIPS 2025, including HermesFlow, MMaDA, and PeRL.
[Aug. 2025] RPF-Net is accepted by Pattern Recognition.
[Jan. 2025] IterComp is accepted by ICLR 2025.
[Nov. 2024] I gave a talk at TechBeat about compositional text-to-image generation.
[Oct. 2024] I propose IterComp, leveraging iterative RLHF to achieve fast and realistic text-to-image generation.
[Sep. 2024] RealCompo is accepted by NeurIPS 2024.
[Feb. 2024] I propose RealCompo, achieving the balance of compositionality and realism in controllable text-to-image generation.
[Sep. 2023] Qualified to be exempted from Tsinghua University for postgraduate studies.
[May. 2023] Check out our recent work, RPF-Net.

Publications

(* denotes equal contribution.)

	Generative Universal Verifier as Multimodal Meta-Reasoner Xinchen Zhang, Xiaoying Zhang, Youbin Wu, Yanbin Cao, Renrui Zhang, Ruihang Chu, Ling Yang, Yujiu Yang, Guang Shi Under Review Preprint / Code / Checkpoint / Benchmark
	HermesFlow: Seamlessly Closing the Gap in Multimodal Understanding and Generation Ling Yang, Xinchen Zhang, Ye Tian, Chenming Shang, Minghao Xu, Wentao Zhang, Bin Cui NeurIPS, 2025 Preprint / Code / Checkpoints
	MMaDA: Multimodal Large Diffusion Language Models Ling Yang, Ye Tian, Bowen Li, Xinchen Zhang, Ke Shen, Yunhai Tong, Mengdi Wang NeurIPS, 2025 Preprint / Code / Checkpoints
	PeRL: Permutation-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for Interleaved Vision-Language Reasoning Yizhen Zhang, Yang Ding, Shuoshuo Zhang, Xinchen Zhang, Haoling Li, Zhong-zhi Li, Peijie Wang, Jie Wu, Lei Ji, Yelong Shen, Yujiu Yang, Yeyun Gong NeurIPS, 2025 Preprint / Code
	Seed1.5-VL Technical Report Dong Guo, Faming Wu, Feida Zhu, Fuxing Leng, Guang Shi, Haobin Chen, Haoqi Fan, ...Xinchen Zhang, ... Technical Report Preprint / Github
	IterComp: Iterative Composition-Aware Feedback Learning from Model Gallery for Text-to-Image Generation Xinchen Zhang, Ling Yang, Guohao Li, Yaqi Cai, Jiake Xie, Yong Tang, Yujiu Yang, Mengdi Wang, Bin Cui ICLR 2025 Preprint / Code / Checkpoints (Over 3.2W downloads)
	RealCompo: Balancing Realism and Compositionality Improves Text-to-Image Diffusion Models Xinchen Zhang, Ling Yang, Yaqi Cai, Zhaochen Yu, Kaini Wang, Jiake Xie, Ye Tian, Minkai Xu, Yong Tang, Yujiu Yang, Bin Cui NeurIPS 2024 Project page / Preprint / Code
	HEAR: High-frequency Enhanced Autoregressive Modeling for Identity-Preserving Image Generation Shiyi Zhang, Xinchen Zhang, Youliang Zhang, Yongxin Xiao, Xiu Li, Jian Song, Yujiu Yang Under Review
	SparseAR: Not All Visual Tokens Are Crucial in Autoregressive Image Model Training Ling Yang, Zhaochen Yu, Xinchen Zhang, Peng Cao, Yujiu Yang, Bin Cui, Shuicheng Yan Under Review*
	Diffusion-Sharpening: Fine-tuning Diffusion Models with Denoising Trajectory Sharpening Ye Tian, Ling Yang, Xinchen Zhang, Yunhai Tong, Mengdi Wang, Bin Cui arXiv, 2025 Preprint / Code
	Compositional Generalization through Brain-inspired Geometric Constraints on Representation Structure Chenming Shang, Shiji Zhou, Hengyuan Zhang, Xinchen Zhang, Lei Ke, Yuwang Wang, Yujiu Yang Under Review
	Recurrent Progressive Fusion-based Learning for Multi-source Remote Sensing Image Classification Xinchen Zhang, Hao Zhu, Xiaotong Li, Biao Hou, Wenhao Zhao, Xiaoyu Yi, Wenping Ma, Licheng Jiao Pattern Recognition Paper / Code

Education

Tsinghua University
M.Eng. in Big Data Technology and Engineering (2024 - )
Advisor: Prof. Yujiu Yang

Xidian University
B.Eng. in Artificial Intelligence (2020 - 2024)
Advisor: Prof. Hao Zhu, Prof. Licheng Jiao

Experience

ByteDance Seed
Research Intern (Feb. 2025 - Present)
Topic: Multimodal Large Language Models
Advisor: Xiaoying Zhang, Youbin Wu, Guang Shi

Services

Conference Reviewer:
- International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2025
- International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2025
- IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2025, 2026
- International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025, 2026
- Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2025
Journal Reviewer:
- International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV)

Talks

IterComp, RealCompo: Towards Compositional Text-to-Image Generation, TechBeat, 2024

Honors & Awards

Special Prize Scholarship, 2022
First Prize Scholarship, 2021
First Prize, The Chinese Mathematics Competitions (CMC), 2021
First Prize, China Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling (CUMCM), 2021
First Prize (Meritorious Winner), International Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM/ICM), 2022