Shaorong Zhang

CV · szhan311@ucr.edu · GitHub · Google Scholar · Blogs

I am a 4th year PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California Riverside, advised by Greg Ver Steeg since 2024. I received my Master's degree in Control Science and Engineering from Xi'an Jiaotong University in 2022 and obtained my Bachelor's degree in Automation from Xi'an Jiaotong University in 2019. See my CV for details.

My research lie in fundamental diffusion (bridge) models, discrete diffusion models, diffusion posterior sampling, guidance and alignment. I also serve as a reviewer for NeurIPS, ICML, etc.

Shaorong Zhang

News

Publications

  1. ICML 2026 Local MAP Sampling for Diffusion Models
    Shaorong Zhang, Rob Brekelmans, Greg Ver Steeg
  2. ICML 2026 Is Your Diffusion Sampler Actually Correct? A Sampler-Centric Evaluation of Discrete Diffusion Language Models
    Luhan Tang, Longxuan Yu, Shaorong Zhang, Greg Ver Steeg
  3. NeurIPS 2025 Exploring the Design Space of Diffusion Bridge Models
    Shaorong Zhang, Yuanbin Cheng, Greg Ver Steeg
  4. EMBC 2025 Diffusion Bridge Models for 3D Medical Image Translation
    Shaorong Zhang, Tamoghna Chattopadhyay, Sophia I. Thomopoulos, Jose-Luis Ambite, Paul M. Thompson, Greg Ver Steeg
  5. IEEE TSG 2025 Generating Synthetic Net Load Data with Physics-Informed Diffusion Models
    Shaorong Zhang, Yuanbin Cheng, Nanpeng Yu
    IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, 2025
  6. Applied Energy 2025 Data-Driven Control, Optimization, and Decision-Making in Active Power Distribution Networks
    Nanpeng Yu, Shaorong Zhang, Jingtao Qin, Patricia Hidalgo-Gonzalez, Roel Dobbe, Yang Liu, Anamika Dubey, Yubo Wang, John Dirkman, Haiwang Zhong, et al.
    Applied Energy, Vol. 397, 126253, 2025 (Elsevier)
  7. IEEE PESGM 2024 Learning Power System Dynamics with Noisy Data Using Neural Ordinary Differential Equations
    Shaorong Zhang, Koji Yamashita, Nanpeng Yu
  8. IEEE PESGM 2023 Learning Power System Dynamics with Nearly-Hamiltonian Neural Networks
    Shaorong Zhang, Nanpeng Yu

Manuscripts Under Review

  1. Generation Order and Parallel Decoding in Masked Diffusion Models: An Information-Theoretic Perspective
    Shaorong Zhang, Longxuan Yu, Rob Brekelmans, Luhan Tang, Salman Asif, Greg Ver Steeg
  2. Thinking Out of Order: When Output Order Stops Reflecting Reasoning Order in Diffusion Language Models
    Longxuan Yu, Yu Fu, Shaorong Zhang, Hui Liu, Mukund Varma T, Greg Ver Steeg, Yue Dong
  3. Measurement-Aligned Flow for Inverse Problems
    Shaorong Zhang, Rob Brekelmans, Yunshu Wu, Greg Ver Steeg