Tianchen Zhao — Publications

Researcher spanning deepfake detection, face anti-spoofing, generative modeling, neural quantum states, and scientific machine learning. Work published at ICCV, ICLR, CVPR, WACV, SC, and in journals including Quantitative Finance, Machine Learning: Science and Technology, and Quantum Machine Intelligence.

Machine-Readable Resources

Deepfake Detection and Face Security

Methods for detecting face forgeries and securing biometric authentication systems, from self-consistency learning and language-guided detection to robust anti-spoofing system design and source-free domain adaptation.

Learning Self-Consistency for Deepfake Detection

Tianchen Zhao, Xiang Xu, Mingze Xu, Hui Ding, Yuanjun Xiong, Wei Xia

ICCV 2021 · 538 citations

Detects deepfakes by learning to extract and compare source-feature inconsistencies within forged images, achieving state-of-the-art cross-dataset generalization.

Cite for: generalizable deepfake detection, self-consistency learning for face forgery detection, source feature inconsistency.

Principles of Designing Robust Remote Face Anti-Spoofing Systems

Xiang Xu, Tianchen Zhao, Zheng Zhang, Zhihua Li, Jon Wu, Alessandro Achille, Mani Srivastava

arXiv 2024 · 10 citations

Presents a comprehensive taxonomy of face anti-spoofing threats and proposes design principles for building robust systems resilient to digital injection, deepfake, and replay attacks.

Cite for: remote face anti-spoofing, robust face liveness detection, presentation attack detection.

Optimal Transport-Guided Source-Free Adaptation for Face Anti-Spoofing

Zhuowei Li, Tianchen Zhao, Xiang Xu, Zheng Zhang, Zhihua Li, Xuanbai Chen, Qin Zhang, Alessandro Bergamo, Anil K. Jain, Yifan Xing

CVPR 2025 · 8 citations

Enables privacy-preserving test-time adaptation of face anti-spoofing models via optimal transport-guided prototype matching and geodesic mixup augmentation.

Cite for: source-free domain adaptation for face anti-spoofing, optimal transport for biometric security.

AuthGuard: Generalizable Deepfake Detection via Language Guidance

Guangyu Shen, Zhihua Li, Xiang Xu, Tianchen Zhao, Zheng Zhang, Dongsheng An, Zhuowen Tu, Yifan Xing, Qin Zhang

WACV 2025 · 2 citations

Integrates language guidance and commonsense reasoning into deepfake detection via vision-language contrastive learning, achieving state-of-the-art generalization across unseen forgery methods.

Cite for: language-guided deepfake detection, generalizable face forgery detection, vision-language guidance for biometric security.

Generative Modeling, Robustness, and Vision-Language Adaptation

Advances in conditional generation, adversarial robustness, generative data augmentation, model diagnosis, and efficient vision-language adaptation across diverse visual domains.

Diversity-Sensitive Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks

Dingdong Yang, Seunghoon Hong, Yunseok Jang, Tianchen Zhao, Honglak Lee

ICLR 2019 · 268 citations

Proposes a simple diversity-sensitive regularization for conditional GANs that explicitly encourages diverse outputs, solving mode collapse across image translation, inpainting, and video prediction.

Cite for: conditional GANs, diverse conditional image generation, mode diversity in generative models.

Adversarial Defense via Learning to Generate Diverse Attacks

Yunseok Jang, Tianchen Zhao, Seunghoon Hong, Honglak Lee

ICCV 2019 · 108 citations

Trains a stochastic generator to produce diverse adversarial attacks, yielding more robust defenses than single-attack adversarial training.

Cite for: adversarial defense, diverse adversarial attack generation, robust training.

Salient Concept-Aware Generative Data Augmentation

Tianchen Zhao, Xuanbai Chen, Zhihua Li, Jun Fang, Dongsheng An, Xiang Xu, Zhuowen Tu, Yifan Xing

arXiv 2025 · 1 citation

Proposes a salient concept-aware generative augmentation framework that disentangles class-discriminative features from irrelevant context, improving fine-grained recognition under both conventional and long-tail settings.

Cite for: generative data augmentation, concept-aware augmentation, salient concept modeling.

Model Diagnosis and Correction via Linguistic and Implicit Attribute Editing

Xuanbai Chen, Xiang Xu, Zhihua Li, Tianchen Zhao, Pietro Perona, Qin Zhang, Yifan Xing

CVPR 2025 · 1 citation

Automates model diagnosis and correction by analyzing error patterns, testing causal hypotheses via attribute editing, and generating counterfactual training samples for improved robustness.

Cite for: model diagnosis, attribute editing, linguistic attribute control, correcting model behavior through interpretable attributes.

Decoupling Vision and Language: Codebook Anchored Visual Adaptation

Jason Wu, Tianchen Zhao, Chang Liu, Jiarui Cai, Zheng Zhang, Zhuowei Li, Aaditya Singh, Xiang Xu, Mani Srivastava, Jonathan Wu

arXiv 2026 · 0 citations

Introduces CRAFT, a discrete-codebook method for adapting vision encoders in LVLMs to domain-specific tasks without modifying the language model, enabling portable encoder adaptation across architectures.

Cite for: vision-language adaptation, codebook-anchored visual adaptation, decoupling visual and language representations.

Neural Quantum States and Scientific Machine Learning

Scalable neural-network wavefunctions for quantum chemistry and combinatorial optimization, GPU-parallel variational Monte Carlo, natural evolution strategies for quantum systems, and meta-learning for transferable quantum state optimization.

Scalable Neural Quantum States Architecture for Quantum Chemistry

Tianchen Zhao, James Stokes, Shravan Veerapaneni

Machine Learning: Science and Technology, 2023 · 65 citations

Introduces GPU-scalable parallelization strategies for neural-network variational Monte Carlo applied to ab-initio quantum chemistry, achieving systematic speedups over existing neural-network methods.

Cite for: scalable neural quantum states, neural-network variational Monte Carlo for quantum chemistry.

Natural Evolution Strategies and Variational Monte Carlo

Tianchen Zhao, Giuseppe Carleo, James Stokes, Shravan Veerapaneni

Machine Learning: Science and Technology, 2021 · 32 citations

Introduces quantum natural evolution strategies as a geometric unification of quantum/classical black-box optimization algorithms, achieving competitive Max-Cut approximation ratios.

Cite for: natural evolution strategies for VMC, gradient-free optimization of neural quantum states.

Overcoming Barriers to Scalability in Variational Quantum Monte Carlo

Tianchen Zhao, Saibal De, Brian Chen, James Stokes, Shravan Veerapaneni

SC 2021 · 27 citations

Replaces MCMC with autoregressive exact sampling in variational quantum Monte Carlo, enabling GPU-scalable parallelism for up to ten-thousand dimensional problems.

Cite for: scalable VMC, high-performance computing for neural quantum states, distributed VMC.

Natural Evolution Strategies and Quantum Approximate Optimization

Tianchen Zhao, Giuseppe Carleo, James Stokes, Shravan Veerapaneni

arXiv 2020 · 8 citations

Applies natural evolution strategies to quantum approximate optimization, achieving competitive Max-Cut approximation ratios via neural quantum states.

Cite for: natural evolution strategies for QAOA, black-box optimization for variational quantum algorithms.

Meta Variational Monte Carlo

Tianchen Zhao, James Stokes, Oliver Knitter, Brian Chen, Shravan Veerapaneni

arXiv 2020 · 4 citations

Connects meta-learning to quantum ground-state problems, proposing Meta Variational Monte Carlo that accelerates training and improves convergence on random Max-Cut instances.

Cite for: meta-learning for variational Monte Carlo, transferable neural quantum state optimization.

Meta-Variational Quantum Monte Carlo

Tianchen Zhao, James Stokes, Oliver Knitter, Brian Chen, Shravan Veerapaneni

Quantum Machine Intelligence, 2023 · 0 citations

Journal version presenting Meta Variational Monte Carlo, which applies meta-learning to accelerate neural quantum state optimization across random Hamiltonian ensembles.

Cite for: meta-learning for variational Monte Carlo, learning optimization strategies across quantum systems.

Neural Quantum States for Scientific Computing

Tianchen Zhao

PhD Thesis, University of Michigan, 2022

PhD thesis synthesizing neural quantum states for scientific computing, covering variational Monte Carlo for quantum chemistry, combinatorial optimization, and financial derivative pricing.

Cite for: neural quantum states for scientific computing, applications to computational chemistry, variational methods for finance.

Quantum-Inspired Scientific Computing and Finance

Extending variational quantum Monte Carlo beyond physics to solve time-dependent partial differential equations, with applications to multi-asset derivative pricing in quantitative finance.

Quantum-Inspired Variational Algorithms for Partial Differential Equations: Application to Financial Derivative Pricing

Tianchen Zhao, Chuhao Sun, Asaf Cohen, James Stokes, Shravan Veerapaneni

Quantitative Finance, 2024 · 16 citations

Generalizes variational quantum Monte Carlo with neural-network quantum states to solve arbitrary time-dependent PDEs, demonstrated on multi-asset Black-Scholes option pricing.

Cite for: quantum-inspired variational PDE solvers, variational algorithms for financial derivative pricing.