Arash Vahdat ![](/sites/default/files/person/IMG_0230-10.jpg) Arash Vahdat is a Research Director, leading [the fundamental generative AI research (GenAIR) team](https://research.nvidia.com/labs/genair/) at NVIDIA Research. Before joining NVIDIA, he was a research scientist at D-Wave Systems, working on generative learning and its applications in label-efficient training. Before D-Wave, Arash was a research faculty member at Simon Fraser University (SFU), where he led deep learning-based video analysis research and taught master courses on machine learning for big data. Arash’s current area of research is focused on generative learning with applications in multimodal training, accelerated generative models and gen AI for science. A complete publication list is also available on Arash's personal [website](http://latentspace.cc/arash_vahdat/). Research Area(s) [Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning ](/index.php/research-area/machine-learning-artificial-intelligence) [Computer Vision](/index.php/research-area/computer-vision) [Generative AI](/index.php/research-area/generative-ai) Main Field of Interest [Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning ](/index.php/research-area/machine-learning-artificial-intelligence) Google Scholar [https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=p9-nlRIAAAAJ&hl=en](https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=p9-nlRIAAAAJ&hl=en) ### Publications ### 2026 [Proteina-Complexa: Scaling Atomistic Protein Binder Design with Generative Pretraining and Test-Time Compute](/index.php/publication/2026-01_proteina-complexa-scaling-atomistic-protein-binder-design-generative) [Kieran Didi](/index.php/person/kieran-didi), Zuobai Zhang, Guoqing Zhou, Danny Reidenbach, Zhonglin Cao, Sooyoung Cha, [Tomas Geffner](/index.php/person/tomas-geffner), Christian Dallago, Jian Tang, Michael M. Bronstein, Martin Steinegger, Emine Kucukbenli, [Arash Vahdat](/index.php/person/arash-vahdat), [Karsten Kreis](/index.php/person/karsten-kreis) [International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026 (Oral)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.27950) [Demystifying Data-Driven Probabilistic Medium-Range Weather Forecasting](/publication/2026-01_demystifying-data-driven-probabilistic-medium-range-weather-forecasting) [Jean Kossaifi](/person/jean-kossaifi), [Nikola Kovachki](/person/nikola-kovachki), [Morteza Mardani](/person/morteza-mardani), [Daniel Leibovici](/person/daniel-leibovici), Suman Ravuri, Ira Shokar, Edoardo Calvello, Mohammad Shoaib Abbas, Peter Harrington, Ashay Subramaniam, [Noah Brenowitz](/person/noah-brenowitz), [Boris Bonev](/person/boris-bonev), [Wonmin Byeon](/person/wonmin-byeon), [Karsten Kreis](/person/karsten-kreis), [Dale Durran](/person/dale-durran), [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat), [Mike Pritchard](/person/mike-pritchard), [Jan Kautz](/person/jan-kautz) [Exploring Synthesizable Chemical Space with Iterative Pathway Refinements](/publication/2026-01_exploring-synthesizable-chemical-space-iterative-pathway-refinements) Seul Lee, [Karsten Kreis](/person/karsten-kreis), Srimukh Prasad Veccham, Meng Liu, Danny Reidenbach, Saee Paliwal, Weili Nie, [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat) [International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026 (Oral)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16084) [La-Proteina: Atomistic Protein Generation via Partially Latent Flow Matching](/publication/2026-01_la-proteina-atomistic-protein-generation-partially-latent-flow-matching) [Tomas Geffner](/person/tomas-geffner), [Kieran Didi](/person/kieran-didi), Zhonglin Cao, Danny Reidenbach, Zuobai Zhang, Christian Dallago, Emine Kucukbenli, [Karsten Kreis](/person/karsten-kreis), [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat) [International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026](https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09466) ### 2025 [Elucidated Rolling Diffusion Models for Probabilistic Weather Forecasting](/publication/2025-12_elucidated-rolling-diffusion-models-probabilistic-weather-forecasting) Salva Rühling Cachay, [Miika Aittala](/person/miika-aittala), [Karsten Kreis](/person/karsten-kreis), [Noah Brenowitz](/person/noah-brenowitz), [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat), [Morteza Mardani](/person/morteza-mardani), Rose Yu [Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2025](https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20024) [GenMol: A Drug Discovery Generalist with Discrete Diffusion](/index.php/publication/2025-07_genmol-drug-discovery-generalist-discrete-diffusion) Seul Lee, [Karsten Kreis](/index.php/person/karsten-kreis), Srimukh Prasad Veccham, Meng Liu, Danny Reidenbach, Yuxing Peng, Saee Paliwal, Weili Nie, [Arash Vahdat](/index.php/person/arash-vahdat) [International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2025](https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.06158) [Score-based Diffusion Models in Function Space](/publication/2025-07_score-based-diffusion-models-function-space) Jae Hyun Lim, [Nikola Kovachki](/person/nikola-kovachki), Ricardo Baptista, Christopher Beckham, Kamyar Azizzadenesheli, [Jean Kossaifi](/person/jean-kossaifi), Vikram Voleti, Jiaming Song, [Karsten Kreis](/person/karsten-kreis), [Jan Kautz](/person/jan-kautz), Christopher Pal, [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat), Anima Anandkumar [Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) 2025](https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.07400) [Truncated Consistency Models](/index.php/publication/2025-01_truncated-consistency-models) Sangyun Lee, Yilun Xu, [Tomas Geffner](/index.php/person/tomas-geffner), Giulia Fanti, [Karsten Kreis](/index.php/person/karsten-kreis), [Arash Vahdat](/index.php/person/arash-vahdat), Weili Nie [International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025](https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14895) [Proteina: Scaling Flow-based Protein Structure Generative Models](/publication/2025-01_proteina-scaling-flow-based-protein-structure-generative-models) [Tomas Geffner](/person/tomas-geffner), [Kieran Didi](/person/kieran-didi), Zuobai Zhang, Danny Reidenbach, Zhonglin Cao, Jason Yim, Mario Geiger, Christian Dallago, Emine Kucukbenli, [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat), [Karsten Kreis](/person/karsten-kreis) [International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025 (Oral)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.00710) [Energy-Based Diffusion Language Models for Text Generation](/index.php/publication/2025-01_energy-based-diffusion-language-models-text-generation) Minkai Xu, [Tomas Geffner](/index.php/person/tomas-geffner), [Karsten Kreis](/index.php/person/karsten-kreis), Weili Nie, Yilun Xu, Jure Leskovec, Stefano Ermon, [Arash Vahdat](/index.php/person/arash-vahdat) [International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025](https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.21357) [ProtComposer: Compositional Protein Structure Generation with 3D Ellipsoids](/publication/2025-01_protcomposer-compositional-protein-structure-generation-3d-ellipsoids) Hannes Stark, Bowen Jing, [Tomas Geffner](/person/tomas-geffner), Jason Yim, Tommi Jaakkola, [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat), [Karsten Kreis](/person/karsten-kreis) [International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025 (Oral)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05025) ### 2024 [Aligning Target-Aware Molecule Diffusion Models with Exact Energy Optimization](/publication/2024-12_aligning-target-aware-molecule-diffusion-models-exact-energy-optimization) Siyi Gu, Minkai Xu, Alexander Powers, Weili Nie, [Tomas Geffner](/person/tomas-geffner), [Karsten Kreis](/person/karsten-kreis), Jure Leskovec, [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat), Stefano Ermon [Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2024](https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01648) [Warped Diffusion: Solving Video Inverse Problems with Image Diffusion Models](/publication/2024-12_warped-diffusion-solving-video-inverse-problems-image-diffusion-models) Giannis Daras, Weili Nie, [Karsten Kreis](/person/karsten-kreis), Alexandros G. Dimakis, [Morteza Mardani](/person/morteza-mardani), [Nikola Kovachki](/person/nikola-kovachki), [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat) [Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2024](https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16152) [Molecule Generation with Fragment Retrieval Augmentation](/publication/2024-12_molecule-generation-fragment-retrieval-augmentation) Seul Lee, [Karsten Kreis](/person/karsten-kreis), Srimukh Prasad Veccham, Meng Liu, Danny Reidenbach, Saee Paliwal, [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat), Weili Nie [Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2024](https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.12078) [DiffiT: Diffusion Vision Transformers for Image Generation](/publication/2024-09_diffit-diffusion-vision-transformers-image-generation) Ali Hatamizadeh , Jiaming Song, Guilin Liu, [Jan Kautz](/person/jan-kautz), [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat) [European Conference on Computer Vision ECCV 2024](https://eccv.ecva.net/) [Kilometer-Scale Convection Allowing Model Emulation using Generative Diffusion Modeling](/index.php/publication/2024-08_kilometer-scale-convection-allowing-model-emulation-using-generative-diffusion) [Jaideep Pathak](/index.php/person/jaideep-pathak), Yair Cohen, Piyush Garg, Peter Harrington, [Noah Brenowitz](/index.php/person/noah-brenowitz), [Dale Durran](/index.php/person/dale-durran), [Morteza Mardani](/index.php/person/morteza-mardani), [Arash Vahdat](/index.php/person/arash-vahdat), Shaoming Xu, Karthik Kashinath, [Mike Pritchard](/index.php/person/mike-pritchard) [DisCo-Diff: Enhancing Continuous Diffusion Models with Discrete Latents](/index.php/publication/2024-07_disco-diff-enhancing-continuous-diffusion-models-discrete-latents) Yilun Xu, Gabriele Corso, Tommi Jaakkola, [Arash Vahdat](/index.php/person/arash-vahdat), [Karsten Kreis](/index.php/person/karsten-kreis) [International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2024](https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03300) ### 2023 [Differentially Private Diffusion Models](/publication/2023-08_differentially-private-diffusion-models) Tim Dockhorn, Tianshi Cao, [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat), [Karsten Kreis](/person/karsten-kreis) [Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR) 2023](https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.09929) [Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Segmentation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](/publication/2023-06_open-vocabulary-panoptic-segmentation-text-image-diffusion-models) Jiarui Xu, [Sifei Liu](/person/sifei-liu), [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat), [Wonmin Byeon](/person/wonmin-byeon), Xiaolong Wang, [Shalini De Mello](/person/shalini-de-mello) [IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2023](https://cvpr2023.thecvf.com/) Hightlight top 10% ### 2022 [LION: Latent Point Diffusion Models for 3D Shape Generation](/index.php/publication/2022-11_lion-latent-point-diffusion-models-3d-shape-generation) Xiaohui Zeng, [Arash Vahdat](/index.php/person/arash-vahdat), Francis Williams, Zan Gojcic, Or Litany, Sanja Fidler, [Karsten Kreis](/index.php/person/karsten-kreis) [Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2022](https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.06978) [GENIE: Higher-Order Denoising Diffusion Solvers](/index.php/publication/2022-11_genie-higher-order-denoising-diffusion-solvers) Tim Dockhorn, [Arash Vahdat](/index.php/person/arash-vahdat), [Karsten Kreis](/index.php/person/karsten-kreis) [Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2022](https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.05475) [LANA: Latency Aware Network Acceleration](/publication/2022-10_lana-latency-aware-network-acceleration) [Pavlo Molchanov](/person/pavlo-molchanov), Jimmy Hall, [Hongxu Danny Yin](/person/danny-yin), [Jan Kautz](/person/jan-kautz), Nicolo Fusi, [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat) [European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022](https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.10624) [Diffusion Models for Adversarial Purification](/publication/2022-07_diffusion-models-adversarial-purification) Weili Nie, Brandon Guo, Yujia Huang, [Chaowei Xiao](/person/chaowei-xiao), [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat), Anima Anandkumar [International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2022](https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.07460) [A-ViT: Adaptive Tokens for Efficient Vision Transformer](/index.php/publication/2022-06_vit-adaptive-tokens-efficient-vision-transformer) [Hongxu Danny Yin](/index.php/person/danny-yin), [Arash Vahdat](/index.php/person/arash-vahdat), Jose M. Alvarez, Arun Mallya, [Jan Kautz](/index.php/person/jan-kautz), [Pavlo Molchanov](/index.php/person/pavlo-molchanov) IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2022 (Ora… [ Tackling the Generative Learning Trilemma with Denoising Diffusion GANs](/index.php/publication/2022-03_tackling-generative-learning-trilemma-denoising-diffusion-gans-0) Zhisheng Xiao, [Karsten Kreis](/index.php/person/karsten-kreis), [Arash Vahdat](/index.php/person/arash-vahdat) [International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2022 (Spotlight)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.07804) [Score-Based Generative Modeling with Critically-Damped Langevin Diffusion](/publication/2022-03_score-based-generative-modeling-critically-damped-langevin-diffusion) Tim Dockhorn, [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat), [Karsten Kreis](/person/karsten-kreis) [International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2022 (Spotlight)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.07068) ### 2021 [Don’t Generate Me: Training Differentially Private Generative Models with Sinkhorn Divergence](/publication/2021-11_don-t-generate-me-training-differentially-private-generative-models-sinkhorn) Tianshi Cao, Alex Bie, [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat), Sanja Fidler, [Karsten Kreis](/person/karsten-kreis) [Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2021](https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.01177) [Score-based Generative Modeling in Latent Space](/publication/2021-11_score-based-generative-modeling-latent-space) [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat), [Karsten Kreis](/person/karsten-kreis), [Jan Kautz](/person/jan-kautz) [Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2021](https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.05931) [A Contrastive Learning Approach for Training Variational Autoencoder Priors](/publication/2021-11_contrastive-learning-approach-training-variational-autoencoder-priors) Jyoti Aneja, Alexander Schwing, [Jan Kautz](/person/jan-kautz), [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat) [Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2021](https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02917) [Controllable and Compositional Generation with Latent-Space Energy-Based Models](/publication/2021-11_controllable-and-compositional-generation-latent-space-energy-based-models) Weili Nie, [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat), Anima Anandkumar [Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2021](https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.10873) [See through Gradients: Image Batch Recovery via GradInversion](/publication/2021-06_see-through-gradients-image-batch-recovery-gradinversion) [Hongxu Danny Yin](/person/danny-yin), Arun Mallya, [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat), Jose M. Alvarez, [Jan Kautz](/person/jan-kautz), [Pavlo Molchanov](/person/pavlo-molchanov) [IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2021](https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/CVPR2021/papers/Yin_See_Through_Gradients_Image_Batch_Recovery_via_GradInversion_CVPR_2021_paper.pdf) [VAEBM: A Symbiosis between Variational Autoencoders and Energy-based Models](/publication/2021-06_vaebm-symbiosis-between-variational-autoencoders-and-energy-based-models) Zhisheng Xiao, [Karsten Kreis](/person/karsten-kreis), [Jan Kautz](/person/jan-kautz), [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat) [International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2021 (Spotlight)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.00654) ### 2020 [UNAS: Differentiable Architecture Search Meets Reinforcement Learning](/publication/2020-08_unas-differentiable-architecture-search-meets-reinforcement-learning) [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat), Arun Mallya, [Ming-Yu Liu](/person/ming-yu-liu), [Jan Kautz](/person/jan-kautz) [IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2021](https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.07651) [NVAE: A Deep Hierarchical Variational Autoencoder](/index.php/publication/2020-07_nvae-deep-hierarchical-variational-autoencoder) [Arash Vahdat](/index.php/person/arash-vahdat), [Jan Kautz](/index.php/person/jan-kautz) [Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2020 (Spotlight)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.03898) [Contrastive Learning for Weakly Supervised Phrase Grounding](/publication/2020-06_contrastive-learning-weakly-supervised-phrase-grounding) Tanmay Gupta, [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat), [Gal Chechik](/person/gal-chechik), Xiaodong Yang, [Jan Kautz](/person/jan-kautz), Derek Hoiem [European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2020 (Spotlight)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.09920) [On the Distance between Two Neural Networks and the Stability of Learning](/publication/2020-02_distance-between-two-neural-networks-and-stability-learning) Jeremy Bernstein, [Arash Vahdat](/person/arash-vahdat), Yisong Yue, [Ming-Yu Liu](/person/ming-yu-liu) [Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2020](https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.03432)