¡Hola!
I am a third-year Ph.D. candidate at Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Princeton University, advised by Prof. Jason M. Klusowski. Previously, I obtained B.Sc. with First Class Honours in Computer Science from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, with a minor in Mathematics.
I am interested in sampling and diffusion for language models. My current research explores two relevant aspects:
- innovation — diffusion language models, discrete diffusion, post-training and sampling, generative models;
- foundation — statistical foundation of sampling methods, connections to optimization and game theory.
My hobbies include competitive soccer (football), tennis, piano, among others.
Publications
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Beyond Masks: Efficient, Flexible Diffusion Language Models via Deletion-Insertion Processes.
F. Ding*, D. Ding*, S. Chen*, K. Wang, P. Xu, Z. Feng, H. Bai, K. Han, Y. Yan, B. Yuan, and J. Sun,
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025. (*: equal contribution) -
Decoding Game: On Minimax Optimality of Heuristic Text Generation Strategies.
S. Chen, O. Hagrass, and J. M. Klusowski,
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025. -
Escaping Saddle Points in Heterogeneous Federated Learning via Distributed SGD with Communication Compression.
S. Chen, Z. Li, and Y. Chi,
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2024. -
Non-Convex Joint Community Detection and Group Synchronization via Generalized Power Method.
S. Chen, X. Cheng, and A. M.-C. So,
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2024. -
CIA-SSD: Confident IoU-Aware Single-Stage Object Detector from Point Cloud.
W. Zheng, W. Tang, S. Chen, L. Jiang, and C.-W. Fu,
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2021.
Talks
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Diffusion Language Models: From Foundational Principles to Advances in Variable-Length Efficiency and Flexibility
at Princeton Language and Intelligence (PLI), Nov. 2025
Teaching
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ORF309: Probability and Stochastic Systems
Teaching Assistant, Fall 2025 -
ORF570: Special Topics in Statistics and Operations Research: Transformers and Large Language Models
Teaching Assistant, Spring 2025 -
SML310: Research Projects in Data Science
Teaching Assistant, Fall 2024
Awards
- Princeton University SEAS Travel Grant
- Gordon Y. S. Wu Fellowship in Engineering
- Hong Kong Government Scholarship for Outstanding Performance
Professional Service
- Reviewer: International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)