PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Katherine Crowson

Also known as RiversHaveWings

As of October 2026, Katherine Crowson is an AI researcher whose work includes generative image models and model optimization. In 2022, she coauthored VQGAN-CLIP, a text-guided image-generation method, and LAION-5B, an open dataset of 5.85 billion image-text pairs. NeurIPS named the LAION-5B paper an Outstanding Paper in 2022. At Stability AI, she worked with Robin Rombach on next-generation media models and coauthored the Hourglass Diffusion Transformer in 2024. Her 2026 research includes LoRA-Muon, an optimizer method for low-rank fine-tuning.

Works
5
Citations
1,590
h-index
3

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2022

    VQGAN-CLIP image generation

    She uses the RiversHaveWings handle on Hugging Face. In 2022, she and her coauthors present VQGAN-CLIP, which uses CLIP to guide VQGAN for open-domain image generation and editing.

  2. 2022

    The LAION-5B dataset

    She coauthors LAION-5B, an open dataset of 5.85 billion CLIP-filtered image-text pairs designed to support research on large multimodal models.

  3. 2022

    A NeurIPS paper award

    The LAION-5B paper receives a NeurIPS 2022 Outstanding Paper award.

  4. 2022

    Next-generation media models

    At Stability AI, she works with Robin Rombach to create the next generation of media models.

  5. 2024

    Hourglass Diffusion Transformer

    At Stability AI, she coauthors the 2024 Hourglass Diffusion Transformer (HDiT), which trains at high resolution directly in pixel space.

  6. As of October 2026

    The LoRA-Muon optimizer

    She is an AI researcher and coauthors LoRA-Muon, a June 2026 paper that applies Muon's spectral steepest-descent rule to low-rank fine-tuning.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Katherine Crowson yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. RiversHaveWings (Katherine Crowson) huggingface.co. Checked 14 October 2026.
  2. VQGAN-CLIP: Open Domain Image Generation and Editing with Natural Language Guidance arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  3. LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  4. NeurIPS 2022 Awards neurips.cc. Checked 14 October 2026.
  5. Stable Diffusion 2.0 Release stability.ai. Checked 14 October 2026.
  6. Hourglass Diffusion Transformers crowsonkb.github.io. Checked 14 October 2026.
  7. LoRA-Muon: Spectral Steepest Descent on the Low-Rank Manifold arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.