Siyi Chen

I am a PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (2022 - Present), advised by Prof. Qing Qu.

My research interests encompass generative AI and multimodal foundation models, such as diffusion models, vision-language models, and representation learning. I am interested in exploring their interpretability, controllability, and unification.

Prior to my PhD, I received a B.S.E. in Computer Science from University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and a B.S.E. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. During my undergraduate studies, I worked with Prof. David Fouhey and Dr. Shengyi Qian on 3D computer vision.

Email / Google Scholar / Twitter / Github

News

1. [05/2025] I joined NVIDIA as a Research Intern in the Learning and Perception Research Group!

2. [04/2025] I have received the Rackham Internship Fellowship!

3. [03/2025] I joined Sony AI America as a Research Intern in the Vision Foundation Model and Generative AI Team!

4. [03/2025] I have received the Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship!

Work Experience

	NVIDIA, Learning and Perception Research Group, 05/2025 - Present. Research Intern. Host: Jonathan Trembly, Valts Blukis, Stan Birchfield
	Sony AI America, Vision Foundation Model and Generative AI Team, 03/2025 - 05/2025. Research Intern. Host: Jingtao Li, Weiming Zhuang, Lingjuan Lv

Publicaions

	The Dual Power of Interpretable Token Embeddings: Jailbreaking Attacks and Defenses for Diffusion Model Unlearning Siyi Chen, Yimeng Zhang, Sijia Liu, Qing Qu Preprint, 2025 website / code / paper We study gradient flow to explain modality gap in CLIP, and propose new methods to mitigate modality gap while improving model performance.
	Explaining and Mitigating the Modality Gap in Contrastive Multimodal Learning Can Yaras, Siyi Chen, Peng Wang, Qing Qu CAPL, 2025 website / code / paper We study gradient flow to explain modality gap in CLIP, and propose new methods to mitigate modality gap while improving model performance.
	Exploring Low-Dimensional Subspaces in Diffusion Models for Controllable Image Editing Siyi Chen, Huijie Zhang, Minzhe Guo, Yifu Lu, Peng Wang, Qing Qu NeurIPS, 2024 website / code / paper We enable localized, transferable, linear, and composable image editing on diffsion models by exploring their low-rank and locally linear semantic spaces.
	Unfolding Videos Dynamics via Taylor Expansion Siyi Chen, Minkyu Choi, Zesen Zhao, Kuan Han, Qing Qu, Zhongming Liu NeurIPS SSL Workshop, 2024 paper Inspired by physical motion, we unfold a video clip via Taylor expansion and design an alternative algorithm for self-supervised video representation learning. Our proposed method can steer the model to dynamic parts in the video.
	Diffusion Models Learn Low-Dimensional Distributions via Subspace Clustering Peng Wang, Huijie Zhang, Zekai Zhang, Siyi Chen, Yi Ma, Qing Qu NeurIPS M3L Workshop, 2024 code / paper We provide theoretical insights into the connection between diffusion model and subspace clustering, which sheds light into the transition of diffusion model from memorization to generalization.
	Understanding 3D Object Articulation in Internet Videos Shengyi Qian, Linyi Jin, Chris Rockwell, Siyi Chen, David Fouhey CVPR, 2022 website / code / paper We propose to investigate detecting and characterizing the 3D planar articulation of objects from ordinary videos.

Teaching

Graduate Student Instructor, EECS 559 Optimization, 2024 & 2025

Undergraduate Instructional Assistant, EECS 442 Computer Vision, 2022

Teaching Assistant, VE 401 Probabilitic Methods, 2020

Teaching Assistant, VV 286 Honorable Mathematics, 2020

Selected Projects

	Self-designed Game: Asylum 7 Siyi Chen, Yigao Fang, Dawei Wang, Zhongqian Duan, Ruipu Li Course Project, University of Michigan, 2022 Advisor: Austin Yarger Play it here As a team of five, we designed a horror game, Asylum 7, with Unity.
	Generate 3D Indoor Synthetic Dataset Siyi Chen 3D Computer Vision Research, University of Michigan, 2022 Advisor: Shengyi Qian, David Fouhey code We generate 3D synthetic video dataset containing a moving object and a scene. The pose and position of the object is optimized via a differential render.
	Combined Understanding of 3D Plane Articulation and Partial Human Pose Estimation Siyi Chen 3D Computer Vision Research, University of Michigan, 2021 Advisor: Shengyi Qian, David Fouhey code / poster We predict 3D partial human poses as SMPL meshes, predict 2D plane masks as well as 3D articulation information, and use a differential render to optimize the position and pose of the person considering 3d space interactions.
	Convex Presentations of Translation Surfaces Siyi Chen, Andrew Keisling, Kaiwen Lu, Brendan Nell Computational Geometry Research, University of Michigan, 2021 Advisor: Chaya Norton, Paul Apisa code / poster / paper We designed and implemented beta versions of enumerating origamis in H(2) and utilized SageMath to implement the convexity test presented by Lelievre and Weiss.
	Design A Roller Coaster Siyi Chen, Yigao Fang, Qi Shen Gold Medal Winner (Top 2%) , The University Physics Competition 2019 paper We devise a rule to evaluate the safety and difficulty level of roller coasters, propose a novel roller coster model, and give a through analysis based on Euler's method and natural axes.

This webpage is based on Jon Barron.