Tongzhou Wang

George Cazenavette, Tongzhou Wang, Antonio Torralba et al. · berkeley, mit

Dataset distillation is the task of synthesizing a small dataset such that a model trained on the synthetic set will match the test accuracy of the model trained on the full dataset. In this paper, we propose a new formulation that optimizes our distilled data to guide networks to a similar state as those trained on real data across many training steps. Given a network, we train it for several iterations on our distilled data and optimize the distilled data with respect to the distance between the synthetically trained parameters and the parameters trained on real data. To efficiently obtain the initial and target network parameters for large-scale datasets, we pre-compute and store training trajectories of expert networks trained on the real dataset. Our method handily outperforms existing methods and also allows us to distill higher-resolution visual data.

Tongzhou Wang, Antonio Torralba, Phillip Isola et al. · mit

In goal-reaching reinforcement learning (RL), the optimal value function has a particular geometry, called quasimetric structure. This paper introduces Quasimetric Reinforcement Learning (QRL), a new RL method that utilizes quasimetric models to learn optimal value functions. Distinct from prior approaches, the QRL objective is specifically designed for quasimetrics, and provides strong theoretical recovery guarantees. Empirically, we conduct thorough analyses on a discretized MountainCar environment, identifying properties of QRL and its advantages over alternatives. On offline and online goal-reaching benchmarks, QRL also demonstrates improved sample efficiency and performance, across both state-based and image-based observations.

Tongzhou Wang, Simon S. Du, Antonio Torralba et al. · mit

The ability to separate signal from noise, and reason with clean abstractions, is critical to intelligence. With this ability, humans can efficiently perform real world tasks without considering all possible nuisance factors.How can artificial agents do the same? What kind of information can agents safely discard as noises? In this work, we categorize information out in the wild into four types based on controllability and relation with reward, and formulate useful information as that which is both controllable and reward-relevant. This framework clarifies the kinds information removed by various prior work on representation learning in reinforcement learning (RL), and leads to our proposed approach of learning a Denoised MDP that explicitly factors out certain noise distractors. Extensive experiments on variants of DeepMind Control Suite and RoboDesk demonstrate superior performance of our denoised world model over using raw observations alone, and over prior works, across policy optimization control tasks as well as the non-control task of joint position regression.

Manel Baradad, Chun-Fu Chen, Jonas Wulff et al. · mit

Learning image representations using synthetic data allows training neural networks without some of the concerns associated with real images, such as privacy and bias. Existing work focuses on a handful of curated generative processes which require expert knowledge to design, making it hard to scale up. To overcome this, we propose training with a large dataset of twenty-one thousand programs, each one generating a diverse set of synthetic images. These programs are short code snippets, which are easy to modify and fast to execute using OpenGL. The proposed dataset can be used for both supervised and unsupervised representation learning, and reduces the gap between pre-training with real and procedurally generated images by 38%.

Aaditya Singh, Adam Fry, Adam Perelman et al. · berkeley, mila

This is the system card published alongside the OpenAI GPT-5 launch, August 2025. GPT-5 is a unified system with a smart and fast model that answers most questions, a deeper reasoning model for harder problems, and a real-time router that quickly decides which model to use based on conversation type, complexity, tool needs, and explicit intent (for example, if you say 'think hard about this' in the prompt). The router is continuously trained on real signals, including when users switch models, preference rates for responses, and measured correctness, improving over time. Once usage limits are reached, a mini version of each model handles remaining queries. This system card focuses primarily on gpt-5-thinking and gpt-5-main, while evaluations for other models are available in the appendix. The GPT-5 system not only outperforms previous models on benchmarks and answers questions more quickly, but -- more importantly -- is more useful for real-world queries. We've made significant advances in reducing hallucinations, improving instruction following, and minimizing sycophancy, and have leveled up GPT-5's performance in three of ChatGPT's most common uses: writing, coding, and health. All of the GPT-5 models additionally feature safe-completions, our latest approach to safety training to prevent disallowed content. Similarly to ChatGPT agent, we have decided to treat gpt-5-thinking as High capability in the Biological and Chemical domain under our Preparedness Framework, activating the associated safeguards. While we do not have definitive evidence that this model could meaningfully help a novice to create severe biological harm -- our defined threshold for High capability -- we have chosen to take a precautionary approach.

Jingwei Ma, Lucy Chai, Minyoung Huh et al. · mit

We introduce a new approach to image forensics: placing physical refractive objects, which we call totems, into a scene so as to protect any photograph taken of that scene. Totems bend and redirect light rays, thus providing multiple, albeit distorted, views of the scene within a single image. A defender can use these distorted totem pixels to detect if an image has been manipulated. Our approach unscrambles the light rays passing through the totems by estimating their positions in the scene and using their known geometric and material properties. To verify a totem-protected image, we detect inconsistencies between the scene reconstructed from totem viewpoints and the scene's appearance from the camera viewpoint. Such an approach makes the adversarial manipulation task more difficult, as the adversary must modify both the totem and image pixels in a geometrically consistent manner without knowing the physical properties of the totem. Unlike prior learning-based approaches, our method does not require training on datasets of specific manipulations, and instead uses physical properties of the scene and camera to solve the forensics problem.

Tongzhou Wang, Phillip Isola

Asymmetrical distance structures (quasimetrics) are ubiquitous in our lives and are gaining more attention in machine learning applications. Imposing such quasimetric structures in model representations has been shown to improve many tasks, including reinforcement learning (RL) and causal relation learning. In this work, we present four desirable properties in such quasimetric models, and show how prior works fail at them. We propose Interval Quasimetric Embedding (IQE), which is designed to satisfy all four criteria. On three quasimetric learning experiments, IQEs show strong approximation and generalization abilities, leading to better performance and improved efficiency over prior methods. Project Page: https://www.tongzhouwang.info/interval_quasimetric_embedding Quasimetric Learning Code Package: https://www.github.com/quasimetric-learning/torch-quasimetric

Sangnie Bhardwaj, Willie McClinton, Tongzhou Wang et al. · mit

Pre-trained deep image representations are useful for post-training tasks such as classification through transfer learning, image retrieval, and object detection. Data augmentations are a crucial aspect of pre-training robust representations in both supervised and self-supervised settings. Data augmentations explicitly or implicitly promote invariance in the embedding space to the input image transformations. This invariance reduces generalization to those downstream tasks which rely on sensitivity to these particular data augmentations. In this paper, we propose a method of learning representations that are instead equivariant to data augmentations. We achieve this equivariance through the use of steerable representations. Our representations can be manipulated directly in embedding space via learned linear maps. We demonstrate that our resulting steerable and equivariant representations lead to better performance on transfer learning and robustness: e.g. we improve linear probe top-1 accuracy by between 1% to 3% for transfer; and ImageNet-C accuracy by upto 3.4%. We further show that the steerability of our representations provides significant speedup (nearly 50x) for test-time augmentations; by applying a large number of augmentations for out-of-distribution detection, we significantly improve OOD AUC on the ImageNet-C dataset over an invariant representation.

Tongzhou Wang, Phillip Isola

Our world is full of asymmetries. Gravity and wind can make reaching a place easier than coming back. Social artifacts such as genealogy charts and citation graphs are inherently directed. In reinforcement learning and control, optimal goal-reaching strategies are rarely reversible (symmetrical). Distance functions supported on these asymmetrical structures are called quasimetrics. Despite their common appearance, little research has been done on the learning of quasimetrics. Our theoretical analysis reveals that a common class of learning algorithms, including unconstrained multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), provably fails to learn a quasimetric consistent with training data. In contrast, our proposed Poisson Quasimetric Embedding (PQE) is the first quasimetric learning formulation that both is learnable with gradient-based optimization and enjoys strong performance guarantees. Experiments on random graphs, social graphs, and offline Q-learning demonstrate its effectiveness over many common baselines.

Adrián Rodríguez-Muñoz, Tongzhou Wang, Antonio Torralba · mit

Adversarially robust models are locally smooth around each data sample so that small perturbations cannot drastically change model outputs. In modern systems, such smoothness is usually obtained via Adversarial Training, which explicitly enforces models to perform well on perturbed examples. In this work, we show the surprising effectiveness of instead regularizing the gradient with respect to model inputs on natural examples only. Penalizing input Gradient Norm is commonly believed to be a much inferior approach. Our analyses identify that the performance of Gradient Norm regularization critically depends on the smoothness of activation functions, and are in fact extremely effective on modern vision transformers that adopt smooth activations over piecewise linear ones (eg, ReLU), contrary to prior belief. On ImageNet-1k, Gradient Norm training achieves > 90% the performance of state-of-the-art PGD-3 Adversarial Training} (52% vs.~56%), while using only 60% computation cost of the state-of-the-art without complex adversarial optimization. Our analyses also highlight the relationship between model robustness and properties of natural input gradients, such as asymmetric sample and channel statistics. Surprisingly, we find model robustness can be significantly improved by simply regularizing its gradients to concentrate on image edges without explicit conditioning on the gradient norm.

Tongzhou Wang, Yihan Lin

CycleGAN provides a framework to train image-to-image translation with unpaired datasets using cycle consistency loss [4]. While results are great in many applications, the pixel level cycle consistency can potentially be problematic and causes unrealistic images in certain cases. In this project, we propose three simple modifications to cycle consistency, and show that such an approach achieves better results with fewer artifacts.

Rickard Brüel-Gabrielsson, Tongzhou Wang, Manel Baradad et al.

Despite dropout's ubiquity in machine learning, its effectiveness as a form of data augmentation remains under-explored. We address two key questions: (i) When is dropout effective as an augmentation strategy? (ii) Is dropout uniquely effective under these conditions? To explore these questions, we propose Deep Augmentation, a network- and modality-agnostic method that applies dropout or PCA transformations to targeted layers in neural networks. Through extensive experiments on contrastive learning tasks in NLP, computer vision, and graph learning, we find that uniformly applying dropout across layers does not consistently improve performance. Instead, dropout proves most beneficial in deeper layers and can be matched by alternative augmentations (e.g., PCA). We also show that a stop-gradient operation is critical for ensuring dropout functions effectively as an augmentation, and that performance trends invert when moving from contrastive tasks to supervised tasks. Our analysis suggests that Deep Augmentation helps mitigate inter-layer co-adaptation -- a notable issue in self-supervised learning due to the absence of labeled data. Drawing on these insights, we outline a procedure for selecting the optimal augmentation layer and demonstrate that Deep Augmentation can outperform traditional input-level augmentations. This simple yet powerful approach can be seamlessly integrated into a wide range of architectures and modalities, yielding notable gains in both performance and generalization.

Minyoung Huh, Brian Cheung, Tongzhou Wang et al.

We argue that representations in AI models, particularly deep networks, are converging. First, we survey many examples of convergence in the literature: over time and across multiple domains, the ways by which different neural networks represent data are becoming more aligned. Next, we demonstrate convergence across data modalities: as vision models and language models get larger, they measure distance between datapoints in a more and more alike way. We hypothesize that this convergence is driving toward a shared statistical model of reality, akin to Plato's concept of an ideal reality. We term such a representation the platonic representation and discuss several possible selective pressures toward it. Finally, we discuss the implications of these trends, their limitations, and counterexamples to our analysis.

Tongzhou Wang, Phillip Isola

Contrastive representation learning has been outstandingly successful in practice. In this work, we identify two key properties related to the contrastive loss: (1) alignment (closeness) of features from positive pairs, and (2) uniformity of the induced distribution of the (normalized) features on the hypersphere. We prove that, asymptotically, the contrastive loss optimizes these properties, and analyze their positive effects on downstream tasks. Empirically, we introduce an optimizable metric to quantify each property. Extensive experiments on standard vision and language datasets confirm the strong agreement between both metrics and downstream task performance. Remarkably, directly optimizing for these two metrics leads to representations with comparable or better performance at downstream tasks than contrastive learning. Project Page: https://tongzhouwang.info/hypersphere Code: https://github.com/SsnL/align_uniform , https://github.com/SsnL/moco_align_uniform

George Cazenavette, Tongzhou Wang, Antonio Torralba et al.

Dataset Distillation aims to distill an entire dataset's knowledge into a few synthetic images. The idea is to synthesize a small number of synthetic data points that, when given to a learning algorithm as training data, result in a model approximating one trained on the original data. Despite recent progress in the field, existing dataset distillation methods fail to generalize to new architectures and scale to high-resolution datasets. To overcome the above issues, we propose to use the learned prior from pre-trained deep generative models to synthesize the distilled data. To achieve this, we present a new optimization algorithm that distills a large number of images into a few intermediate feature vectors in the generative model's latent space. Our method augments existing techniques, significantly improving cross-architecture generalization in all settings.

Manel Baradad, Jonas Wulff, Tongzhou Wang et al.

Current vision systems are trained on huge datasets, and these datasets come with costs: curation is expensive, they inherit human biases, and there are concerns over privacy and usage rights. To counter these costs, interest has surged in learning from cheaper data sources, such as unlabeled images. In this paper we go a step further and ask if we can do away with real image datasets entirely, instead learning from noise processes. We investigate a suite of image generation models that produce images from simple random processes. These are then used as training data for a visual representation learner with a contrastive loss. We study two types of noise processes, statistical image models and deep generative models under different random initializations. Our findings show that it is important for the noise to capture certain structural properties of real data but that good performance can be achieved even with processes that are far from realistic. We also find that diversity is a key property to learn good representations. Datasets, models, and code are available at https://mbaradad.github.io/learning_with_noise.

David Bau, Steven Liu, Tongzhou Wang et al.

A deep generative model such as a GAN learns to model a rich set of semantic and physical rules about the target distribution, but up to now, it has been obscure how such rules are encoded in the network, or how a rule could be changed. In this paper, we introduce a new problem setting: manipulation of specific rules encoded by a deep generative model. To address the problem, we propose a formulation in which the desired rule is changed by manipulating a layer of a deep network as a linear associative memory. We derive an algorithm for modifying one entry of the associative memory, and we demonstrate that several interesting structural rules can be located and modified within the layers of state-of-the-art generative models. We present a user interface to enable users to interactively change the rules of a generative model to achieve desired effects, and we show several proof-of-concept applications. Finally, results on multiple datasets demonstrate the advantage of our method against standard fine-tuning methods and edit transfer algorithms.

Steven Liu, Tongzhou Wang, David Bau et al.

We introduce a simple but effective unsupervised method for generating realistic and diverse images. We train a class-conditional GAN model without using manually annotated class labels. Instead, our model is conditional on labels automatically derived from clustering in the discriminator's feature space. Our clustering step automatically discovers diverse modes, and explicitly requires the generator to cover them. Experiments on standard mode collapse benchmarks show that our method outperforms several competing methods when addressing mode collapse. Our method also performs well on large-scale datasets such as ImageNet and Places365, improving both image diversity and standard quality metrics, compared to previous methods.

Tongzhou Wang, Jun-Yan Zhu, Antonio Torralba et al.

Model distillation aims to distill the knowledge of a complex model into a simpler one. In this paper, we consider an alternative formulation called dataset distillation: we keep the model fixed and instead attempt to distill the knowledge from a large training dataset into a small one. The idea is to synthesize a small number of data points that do not need to come from the correct data distribution, but will, when given to the learning algorithm as training data, approximate the model trained on the original data. For example, we show that it is possible to compress 60,000 MNIST training images into just 10 synthetic distilled images (one per class) and achieve close to original performance with only a few gradient descent steps, given a fixed network initialization. We evaluate our method in various initialization settings and with different learning objectives. Experiments on multiple datasets show the advantage of our approach compared to alternative methods.

Tongzhou Wang, Yi Wu, David A. Moore et al.

Effective implementations of sampling-based probabilistic inference often require manually constructed, model-specific proposals. Inspired by recent progresses in meta-learning for training learning agents that can generalize to unseen environments, we propose a meta-learning approach to building effective and generalizable MCMC proposals. We parametrize the proposal as a neural network to provide fast approximations to block Gibbs conditionals. The learned neural proposals generalize to occurrences of common structural motifs across different models, allowing for the construction of a library of learned inference primitives that can accelerate inference on unseen models with no model-specific training required. We explore several applications including open-universe Gaussian mixture models, in which our learned proposals outperform a hand-tuned sampler, and a real-world named entity recognition task, in which our sampler yields higher final F1 scores than classical single-site Gibbs sampling.

Pratul P. Srinivasan, Tongzhou Wang, Ashwin Sreelal et al.

We present a machine learning algorithm that takes as input a 2D RGB image and synthesizes a 4D RGBD light field (color and depth of the scene in each ray direction). For training, we introduce the largest public light field dataset, consisting of over 3300 plenoptic camera light fields of scenes containing flowers and plants. Our synthesis pipeline consists of a convolutional neural network (CNN) that estimates scene geometry, a stage that renders a Lambertian light field using that geometry, and a second CNN that predicts occluded rays and non-Lambertian effects. Our algorithm builds on recent view synthesis methods, but is unique in predicting RGBD for each light field ray and improving unsupervised single image depth estimation by enforcing consistency of ray depths that should intersect the same scene point. Please see our supplementary video at https://youtu.be/yLCvWoQLnms