Pixel-space diffusion models avoid the lossy VAE of latent models, which suggests an advantage on downstream tasks where fine-grained detail matters. We test this claim along both routes to a pixel-space backbone. We pretrain Iris-3B, a 3B-parameter pixel-space text-to-image transformer, from scratch through a $256\to512\to1024$ curriculum, after first ablating the prediction target and representation alignment at $256^2$ to decide what to scale. We also convert a pretrained latent model, FLUX.2 Klein base 4B, to pixel space. We fine-tune both families for monocular depth estimation and for image restoration/super-resolution. We find no significant improvement from using a pixel-space generative prior. Fine-tuned for depth with one matched direct-regression recipe, Iris-3B is level with the latent FLUX.2 Klein and the converted pixel FLUX.2 Klein falls behind it, and on $4\times$ DIV2K restoration neither pixel model beats a latent FLUX.2 Klein fine-tune, the converted one trailing it slightly. We document the recipes, the failure modes and the remaining confounds behind this negative result. Nevertheless, Iris-3B shows that pixel-space pretraining with the pixel-transformer (PiT) head of PixelDiT scales to 3B parameters and to text-to-image quality competitive with latent models, matching Qwen-Image on OneIG under the official evaluators at $1024^2$. We release its weights and training code in the hope that they help pave the way for further work on pixel-space generation.
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Pixel-space diffusion models avoid the lossy VAE of latent models, which suggests an advantage on downstream tasks where fine-grained detail matters. We test this claim along both routes to a pixel-space backbone. We pretrain Iris-3B, a 3B-parameter pixel-space text-to-image transformer, from scratch through a $256\to512\to1024$ curriculum, after first ablating the prediction target and representation alignment at $256^2$ to decide what to scale. We also convert a pretrained latent model, FLUX.2 Klein base 4B, to pixel space. We fine-tune both families for monocular depth estimation and for image restoration/super-resolution. We find no significant improvement from using a pixel-space generative prior. Fine-tuned for depth with one matched direct-regression recipe, Iris-3B is level with the latent FLUX.2 Klein and the converted pixel FLUX.2 Klein falls behind it, and on $4\times$ DIV2K restoration neither pixel model beats a latent FLUX.2 Klein fine-tune, the converted one trailing it slightly. We document the recipes, the failure modes and the remaining confounds behind this negative result. Nevertheless, Iris-3B shows that pixel-space pretraining with the pixel-transformer (PiT) head of PixelDiT scales to 3B parameters and to text-to-image quality competitive with latent models, matching Qwen-Image on OneIG under the official evaluators at $1024^2$. We release its weights and training code in the hope that they help pave the way for further work on pixel-space generation.
作者Arshia Hemmat, Amirhossein Vahidi, Amitis Shidani, Mohammad Vali Sanian, Hesam Asadollahzadeh, Aryan Yazdan Parast, Mohammad Lotfollahi
Text-to-image diffusion models fail predictably on compositional prompts: attributes bind to the wrong objects, spatial relations invert, and multi-object scenes lose count. Recent architectures already augment CLIP with a T5 encoder precisely because CLIP's contrastive embedding loses compositional structure, yet these failures persist. We argue the binding problem is therefore not one of missing information but of misaligned information: a text encoder preserves compositional structure, but in a representation space shaped by language modelling rather than vision, and the denoising objective does not directly reward aligning the two. We show this correspondence can be supplied as an explicit training signal, that the relevant cross-modal information is concentrated in a low-rank subspace of self-supervised visual features, and that supplying it can be folded into diffusion training as a single auxiliary loss. Our method, ORCA (Orthogonal Residual Compositional Alignment), aligns the latent of a diffusion transformer with a low-rank target derived from a frozen visual encoder, through a predictor whose orthogonal basis is parameterised by a learned residual between T5 and CLIP embeddings, which provides a prompt-dependent signal for selecting the visual readout subspace. We prove that the cross-modal information recoverable at a given rank is bounded by the spectral mass of the visual encoder's covariance in the top components. Across three diffusion-transformer backbones (DiT-B/2, DiT-L/2, U-ViT-L), ORCA improves FID and GenEval over both vanilla and REPA baselines at zero inference-time cost; on DiT-L/2 it reaches FID 16.65 and GenEval 0.291 at 200K steps, exceeding the strongest 400K baseline at half the training cost, with the largest gains concentrated on attribute binding, spatial relations, and multi-object prompts.
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Text-to-image diffusion models fail predictably on compositional prompts: attributes bind to the wrong objects, spatial relations invert, and multi-object scenes lose count. Recent architectures already augment CLIP with a T5 encoder precisely because CLIP's contrastive embedding loses compositional structure, yet these failures persist. We argue the binding problem is therefore not one of missing information but of misaligned information: a text encoder preserves compositional structure, but in a representation space shaped by language modelling rather than vision, and the denoising objective does not directly reward aligning the two. We show this correspondence can be supplied as an explicit training signal, that the relevant cross-modal information is concentrated in a low-rank subspace of self-supervised visual features, and that supplying it can be folded into diffusion training as a single auxiliary loss. Our method, ORCA (Orthogonal Residual Compositional Alignment), aligns the latent of a diffusion transformer with a low-rank target derived from a frozen visual encoder, through a predictor whose orthogonal basis is parameterised by a learned residual between T5 and CLIP embeddings, which provides a prompt-dependent signal for selecting the visual readout subspace. We prove that the cross-modal information recoverable at a given rank is bounded by the spectral mass of the visual encoder's covariance in the top components. Across three diffusion-transformer backbones (DiT-B/2, DiT-L/2, U-ViT-L), ORCA improves FID and GenEval over both vanilla and REPA baselines at zero inference-time cost; on DiT-L/2 it reaches FID 16.65 and GenEval 0.291 at 200K steps, exceeding the strongest 400K baseline at half the training cost, with the largest gains concentrated on attribute binding, spatial relations, and multi-object prompts.
作者Paweł Skierś, Małgorzata Grzanka, Wojciech Masarczyk, Jan-Willem van de Meent, Kamil Deja
Diffusion models generate realistic images but often fail on visual reasoning tasks, such as filling in a Sudoku or drawing the path through a maze. When a discrete symbolic representation is available, recursive methods such as the Tiny Recursive Model (TRM) solve even hard instances of these puzzles. We ask how such reasoning can be carried over to pixels, where no symbolic representation is available. We propose Painter-Thinker (PaTh): a small recursive network (the Thinker) reasons over a grid of learned tokens that encode the noisy image and the conditioning, refines a latent state within every denoising step, and steers a frozen diffusion model (the Painter) through ControlNet adapters. The Thinker is trained with the standard reconstruction loss alone, without symbolic targets, a solver, or a verifier. PaTh solves 92.5% of hard MNIST Sudoku puzzles (prior best 75%) and 71.2% of extreme ones (prior best 4.1%), with 10M parameters against 82M for a standard diffusion model. It also improves on mazes, Queens, and CLEVR scenes with specified spatial relations, and its advantage grows with problem size. Diagnostic experiments show that PaTh recovers from injected mistakes that the diffusion model cannot repair, especially when many cells are wrong. Together, these results show that reasoning mechanisms developed for symbolic data can be integrated into pixel-space diffusion without symbolic supervision, opening a path toward generating data under increasingly complex constraints.
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Diffusion models generate realistic images but often fail on visual reasoning tasks, such as filling in a Sudoku or drawing the path through a maze. When a discrete symbolic representation is available, recursive methods such as the Tiny Recursive Model (TRM) solve even hard instances of these puzzles. We ask how such reasoning can be carried over to pixels, where no symbolic representation is available. We propose Painter-Thinker (PaTh): a small recursive network (the Thinker) reasons over a grid of learned tokens that encode the noisy image and the conditioning, refines a latent state within every denoising step, and steers a frozen diffusion model (the Painter) through ControlNet adapters. The Thinker is trained with the standard reconstruction loss alone, without symbolic targets, a solver, or a verifier. PaTh solves 92.5% of hard MNIST Sudoku puzzles (prior best 75%) and 71.2% of extreme ones (prior best 4.1%), with 10M parameters against 82M for a standard diffusion model. It also improves on mazes, Queens, and CLEVR scenes with specified spatial relations, and its advantage grows with problem size. Diagnostic experiments show that PaTh recovers from injected mistakes that the diffusion model cannot repair, especially when many cells are wrong. Together, these results show that reasoning mechanisms developed for symbolic data can be integrated into pixel-space diffusion without symbolic supervision, opening a path toward generating data under increasingly complex constraints.
作者Jiyoung Kim, Paul Hyunbin Cho, Jisu Nam, Donghoon Lee, Hyunsung Go, Yeonkyeong Lee, Hansaem Kim, Seungryong Kim
Highly compressed video autoencoders offer an effective way to accelerate video diffusion models, as the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) operates on far fewer tokens. However, such autoencoders are challenging to train, since a higher compression ratio degrades reconstruction quality and recovering it requires more channels, which is known to slow the convergence of the DiT. The compressed latent also differs from the one the DiT was trained on, so the pretrained DiT must be either retrained from scratch or adapted at considerable cost. Compressing the autoencoder the DiT was trained with appears to preserve compatibility, yet optimizing it for reconstruction alone still shifts the latent away from the distribution the DiT has learned. To address this, we propose Generation-Aware Latent Compression for Efficient Video Generation (GRACE), a two-stage framework that compresses a pretrained video autoencoder while keeping it compatible with the pretrained DiT. Specifically, we keep a frozen base latent from the pretrained encoder and learn a residual latent for the information lost under stronger compression, while aligning the compressed latent with the pretrained latent in the feature space of the frozen DiT so that the autoencoder is optimized for generation. We then adapt the DiT with lightweight fine-tuning and asymmetric denoising, where the base is denoised ahead of the residual. GRACE reduces the token count of Wan2.1-I2V-14B by 8x and its latency by 11.1x at 480x832x81, while matching the generation quality of the pretrained pipeline before compression on VBench.
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Highly compressed video autoencoders offer an effective way to accelerate video diffusion models, as the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) operates on far fewer tokens. However, such autoencoders are challenging to train, since a higher compression ratio degrades reconstruction quality and recovering it requires more channels, which is known to slow the convergence of the DiT. The compressed latent also differs from the one the DiT was trained on, so the pretrained DiT must be either retrained from scratch or adapted at considerable cost. Compressing the autoencoder the DiT was trained with appears to preserve compatibility, yet optimizing it for reconstruction alone still shifts the latent away from the distribution the DiT has learned. To address this, we propose Generation-Aware Latent Compression for Efficient Video Generation (GRACE), a two-stage framework that compresses a pretrained video autoencoder while keeping it compatible with the pretrained DiT. Specifically, we keep a frozen base latent from the pretrained encoder and learn a residual latent for the information lost under stronger compression, while aligning the compressed latent with the pretrained latent in the feature space of the frozen DiT so that the autoencoder is optimized for generation. We then adapt the DiT with lightweight fine-tuning and asymmetric denoising, where the base is denoised ahead of the residual. GRACE reduces the token count of Wan2.1-I2V-14B by 8x and its latency by 11.1x at 480x832x81, while matching the generation quality of the pretrained pipeline before compression on VBench.
作者Jiahao Yu, Song Liu, José Miguel Hernández-Lobato, RuiKang OuYang
Mutual information (MI) provides an objective for suppressing or encouraging statistical dependence in implicit generative models. However, direct MI evaluation is challenging in implicit models due to typically intractable densities. A remedy is estimating the generator gradient from the difference between conditional and marginal scores. This score difference can, in turn, be estimated by differentiating a log density ratio learned through classification. This construction nevertheless faces two difficulties: (i) singular distributions need not admit the required score functions, and (ii) poor overlap can hinder density-ratio estimation. We therefore introduce Spread Mutual Information (SMI), a weighted integral of MI across noise levels obtained by applying a common spreading kernel to the generated variable. Gaussian spreading yields smooth, strictly positive conditional and marginal densities, extending the gradient construction to distributions that may originally be singular. Across a variaty of experiments, SMI consistently achieves effective dependence control among MI-based methods and remains competitive with established task-specific approaches.
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Mutual information (MI) provides an objective for suppressing or encouraging statistical dependence in implicit generative models. However, direct MI evaluation is challenging in implicit models due to typically intractable densities. A remedy is estimating the generator gradient from the difference between conditional and marginal scores. This score difference can, in turn, be estimated by differentiating a log density ratio learned through classification. This construction nevertheless faces two difficulties: (i) singular distributions need not admit the required score functions, and (ii) poor overlap can hinder density-ratio estimation. We therefore introduce Spread Mutual Information (SMI), a weighted integral of MI across noise levels obtained by applying a common spreading kernel to the generated variable. Gaussian spreading yields smooth, strictly positive conditional and marginal densities, extending the gradient construction to distributions that may originally be singular. Across a variaty of experiments, SMI consistently achieves effective dependence control among MI-based methods and remains competitive with established task-specific approaches.
Acquiring a complete set of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrasts is time-intensive and uncomfortable for patients, despite the diagnostic value of multi-contrast imaging. This motivates synthesizing missing contrasts from those already acquired, which is an inherently 3D problem requiring anatomical coherence across axial, sagittal, and coronal planes. However, fully 3D generative models are often impracti- cal under computational resources that scale cubically with volume size. We propose a unified Multi-Plane Autoregressive Diffusion (MPAD), a latent diffusion framework that achieves full-volume 3D synthesis using efficient plane-wise 2D operations while preserving volumetric coherence. A 3D autoencoder first compresses MRI scans into an isotropic 3D la- tent representation. A 2D diffusion model is then trained to reconstruct masked latent slices of the target contrast, conditioned on both source- contrast slices and unmasked target-contrast slices. During inference, we introduce plane-wise autoregressive synthesis with inter-plane priors. Slices are generated autoregressively in random order within one plane orientation to maintain intra-plane continuity, then propagated as con- ditioning priors to orthogonal plane orientations to enforce inter-plane consistency. Compared to 3D latent diffusion baselines, MPAD reduces training and inference FLOPs by 7x and 3x, respectively, while also lowering inference time and peak memory consumption. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that MPAD achieves superior perfor- mance, generating high-fidelity 3D volumes and supporting one-to-many translation within a single unified model.
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Acquiring a complete set of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrasts is time-intensive and uncomfortable for patients, despite the diagnostic value of multi-contrast imaging. This motivates synthesizing missing contrasts from those already acquired, which is an inherently 3D problem requiring anatomical coherence across axial, sagittal, and coronal planes. However, fully 3D generative models are often impracti- cal under computational resources that scale cubically with volume size. We propose a unified Multi-Plane Autoregressive Diffusion (MPAD), a latent diffusion framework that achieves full-volume 3D synthesis using efficient plane-wise 2D operations while preserving volumetric coherence. A 3D autoencoder first compresses MRI scans into an isotropic 3D la- tent representation. A 2D diffusion model is then trained to reconstruct masked latent slices of the target contrast, conditioned on both source- contrast slices and unmasked target-contrast slices. During inference, we introduce plane-wise autoregressive synthesis with inter-plane priors. Slices are generated autoregressively in random order within one plane orientation to maintain intra-plane continuity, then propagated as con- ditioning priors to orthogonal plane orientations to enforce inter-plane consistency. Compared to 3D latent diffusion baselines, MPAD reduces training and inference FLOPs by 7x and 3x, respectively, while also lowering inference time and peak memory consumption. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that MPAD achieves superior perfor- mance, generating high-fidelity 3D volumes and supporting one-to-many translation within a single unified model.
The widespread deployment of generative AI has made it increasingly difficult to distinguish synthetic content from real data. Consequently, synthetic data is inevitably incorporated into the training pipelines of future model generations, forming a self-consuming training loop. Prior work has studied the effects of such recursive self-consuming training, but analyses have largely been limited to isolated models, where a model consumes only its own synthetic data, or to simplified interactions between two models. This paper takes a first step toward understanding networked self-consuming generative models, in which multiple models consume synthetic data generated by one another through complex interaction pathways. We introduce a theoretical framework representing models as nodes in a directed, weighted graph, with edge weights governing the flow of synthetic data among models. Using this framework, we analyze the long-term behavior of networked models under retraining dynamics, establishing conditions for convergence and characterizing the resulting fixed points. We further investigate how the system's long-term stability and diversity are shaped by each model's access to real data, cross-model data consumption, and the structure of the interaction graph.
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The widespread deployment of generative AI has made it increasingly difficult to distinguish synthetic content from real data. Consequently, synthetic data is inevitably incorporated into the training pipelines of future model generations, forming a self-consuming training loop. Prior work has studied the effects of such recursive self-consuming training, but analyses have largely been limited to isolated models, where a model consumes only its own synthetic data, or to simplified interactions between two models. This paper takes a first step toward understanding networked self-consuming generative models, in which multiple models consume synthetic data generated by one another through complex interaction pathways. We introduce a theoretical framework representing models as nodes in a directed, weighted graph, with edge weights governing the flow of synthetic data among models. Using this framework, we analyze the long-term behavior of networked models under retraining dynamics, establishing conditions for convergence and characterizing the resulting fixed points. We further investigate how the system's long-term stability and diversity are shaped by each model's access to real data, cross-model data consumption, and the structure of the interaction graph.
First order Langevin algorithms for constrained sampling in machine learning, such as projected Langevin Monte Carlo which are based on discretizations of reflected Langevin dynamics, require differentiable log densities that limits their applicability. This paper introduces reflected anchored Langevin dynamics (RALD), a reflected diffusion that converges to non-differentiable targets on constrained domains. The method uses a smooth anchored reference potential and multiplies the drift and noise covariance of its reflected Langevin dynamics by the same state dependent scaling factor. Its Euler-Maruyama discretization with projection gives reflected anchored Langevin Monte Carlo (RALMC) algorithm. We prove explicit convergence bounds and iteration complexity for RALMC in the 2-Wasserstein distance to the target distribution. Numerical experiments are provided to illustrate the theoretical predictions and the empirical performance of the method.
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First order Langevin algorithms for constrained sampling in machine learning, such as projected Langevin Monte Carlo which are based on discretizations of reflected Langevin dynamics, require differentiable log densities that limits their applicability. This paper introduces reflected anchored Langevin dynamics (RALD), a reflected diffusion that converges to non-differentiable targets on constrained domains. The method uses a smooth anchored reference potential and multiplies the drift and noise covariance of its reflected Langevin dynamics by the same state dependent scaling factor. Its Euler-Maruyama discretization with projection gives reflected anchored Langevin Monte Carlo (RALMC) algorithm. We prove explicit convergence bounds and iteration complexity for RALMC in the 2-Wasserstein distance to the target distribution. Numerical experiments are provided to illustrate the theoretical predictions and the empirical performance of the method.
Diffusion models excel at image synthesis, but they remain limited in their ability to reliably satisfy structured spatial reasoning constraints. In conditional data distribution modeling tasks with implicit logical structure, such as puzzles defined by visible clues paired with consistent solutions, state-of-the-art generative models tend to approximate pixel-space distributions without learning the underlying logical rules required for inference. To address this limitation, we present a novel framework for spatial reasoning with diffusion models that leverages unsupervised object discovery and abstractions of object relations. We show that the relational knowledge derived from object-centric representations enriches diffusion models with structural primitives, allowing them to effectively guide the generative representation space during both training and inference, and enabling conditional image generation that satisfies reasoning constraints. Additionally, we introduce a large-scale generative spatial reasoning benchmark with four datasets inspired by human-solvable puzzles. Our results show that relational abstractions significantly improve reasoning capabilities of diffusion models on a variety of complex reasoning tasks, while enabling robust generalization in out-of-distribution settings.
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Diffusion models excel at image synthesis, but they remain limited in their ability to reliably satisfy structured spatial reasoning constraints. In conditional data distribution modeling tasks with implicit logical structure, such as puzzles defined by visible clues paired with consistent solutions, state-of-the-art generative models tend to approximate pixel-space distributions without learning the underlying logical rules required for inference. To address this limitation, we present a novel framework for spatial reasoning with diffusion models that leverages unsupervised object discovery and abstractions of object relations. We show that the relational knowledge derived from object-centric representations enriches diffusion models with structural primitives, allowing them to effectively guide the generative representation space during both training and inference, and enabling conditional image generation that satisfies reasoning constraints. Additionally, we introduce a large-scale generative spatial reasoning benchmark with four datasets inspired by human-solvable puzzles. Our results show that relational abstractions significantly improve reasoning capabilities of diffusion models on a variety of complex reasoning tasks, while enabling robust generalization in out-of-distribution settings.
Conditional density estimation targets the full distribution of a response given covariates, as required, for example, for per-galaxy photometric redshifts. We develop a scalable Bayesian estimator based on the logistic Gaussian process. The log conditional density has a separable covariance: a Matérn kernel along the response, represented in a truncated Fourier basis on a circle, and a covariate kernel represented by Nyström features, which accommodate non-stationary kernels with input-dependent amplitudes and length scales. Instead of a Laplace or variational approximation, we sample the latent field of this finite-feature model. Given the hyperparameters, its posterior is strongly log-concave with a uniformly bounded Hessian, and we draw from it by simulating kinetic Langevin dynamics with symmetric minibatch splitting in Kronecker-whitened coordinates. Marginal-likelihood gradients follow from Fisher's identity as posterior expectations. Under the conditions of our analysis their bias is controlled by the sampler's step size and run length, and the predictive averages over the non-Gaussian latent posterior instead of a Gaussian around its mode. On photometric-redshift benchmarks with up to 3.9 million training observations, trained on a single GPU, the estimator is competitive with state-of-the-art tabular foundation models on density and calibration metrics.
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Conditional density estimation targets the full distribution of a response given covariates, as required, for example, for per-galaxy photometric redshifts. We develop a scalable Bayesian estimator based on the logistic Gaussian process. The log conditional density has a separable covariance: a Matérn kernel along the response, represented in a truncated Fourier basis on a circle, and a covariate kernel represented by Nyström features, which accommodate non-stationary kernels with input-dependent amplitudes and length scales. Instead of a Laplace or variational approximation, we sample the latent field of this finite-feature model. Given the hyperparameters, its posterior is strongly log-concave with a uniformly bounded Hessian, and we draw from it by simulating kinetic Langevin dynamics with symmetric minibatch splitting in Kronecker-whitened coordinates. Marginal-likelihood gradients follow from Fisher's identity as posterior expectations. Under the conditions of our analysis their bias is controlled by the sampler's step size and run length, and the predictive averages over the non-Gaussian latent posterior instead of a Gaussian around its mode. On photometric-redshift benchmarks with up to 3.9 million training observations, trained on a single GPU, the estimator is competitive with state-of-the-art tabular foundation models on density and calibration metrics.
Feature caching accelerates diffusion sampling by replacing expensive network evaluations with predictions from previously computed activations. However, forecasts based only on past features cannot directly incorporate changes in the current denoising state. We investigate whether inexpensive, freshly computed features can serve as observations for correcting these predictions. We introduce an observation-corrected Koopman framework for accelerating frozen diffusion models. Using calibration trajectories, we identify finite-dimensional, time-dependent Koopman approximations that jointly describe the increments of shallow and deep network features. During accelerated sampling, these operators predict the evolution of expensive deep features, while innovations in the observed shallow features correct the predicted state. Periodic full evaluations refresh the observer, and all generative-model parameters remain unchanged. This formulation enables controlled comparisons of temporal prediction and observation correction. Across three 10,000-image runs per dataset, our method reduces paired Inception-feature MSE by $19.9%$ on CIFAR-10 and $11.9%$ on a ten-class ImageNet subset relative to channelwise affine prediction under the same four-partial-step schedule. Matched ablations attribute additional reductions of $4.54%$ and $4.67%$ to observation correction. The observer achieves $1.89\times$ and $1.85\times$ measured speedups over DDIM-50, supporting improved reference-sampler fidelity without retraining the denoiser.
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Feature caching accelerates diffusion sampling by replacing expensive network evaluations with predictions from previously computed activations. However, forecasts based only on past features cannot directly incorporate changes in the current denoising state. We investigate whether inexpensive, freshly computed features can serve as observations for correcting these predictions. We introduce an observation-corrected Koopman framework for accelerating frozen diffusion models. Using calibration trajectories, we identify finite-dimensional, time-dependent Koopman approximations that jointly describe the increments of shallow and deep network features. During accelerated sampling, these operators predict the evolution of expensive deep features, while innovations in the observed shallow features correct the predicted state. Periodic full evaluations refresh the observer, and all generative-model parameters remain unchanged. This formulation enables controlled comparisons of temporal prediction and observation correction. Across three 10,000-image runs per dataset, our method reduces paired Inception-feature MSE by $19.9%$ on CIFAR-10 and $11.9%$ on a ten-class ImageNet subset relative to channelwise affine prediction under the same four-partial-step schedule. Matched ablations attribute additional reductions of $4.54%$ and $4.67%$ to observation correction. The observer achieves $1.89\times$ and $1.85\times$ measured speedups over DDIM-50, supporting improved reference-sampler fidelity without retraining the denoiser.
In Bayesian inverse problems, posterior sampling requires generating samples that are consistent with given observations while capturing the range of plausible solutions. Direct conditional generative models introduce latent noise to model this ambiguity, but paired inverse-problem training can still encourage an almost deterministic map from the observation to the target. As a result, generated samples may be observation-consistent while under-representing posterior variability, especially when the posterior is multimodal, leading to undercoverage, mode distortion, or artificial transitions between distinct feasible solutions. We propose joint twist-flow, an augmented flow-matching formulation that learns a continuous transport from the augmented source state $(z_x, y)$ to the augmented terminal state $(x, z_y)$. Here x is the target variable, $y$ is the observation, $z_x$ is the Gaussian reference coordinate for posterior sampling, and $z_y$ is a Gaussian likelihood-side coordinate associated with the observation branch. Under a Gaussian observation model, $z_y$ is motivated by the normalized observation residual associated with observation compatibility. Its role is not to replace uncertainty in $x$, but to couple generated samples of x to observation consistency, helping reduce likelihood-inconsistent variation while preserving variability in weakly constrained directions. We validate the method on low-dimensional inverse problems with reference posterior samples, where joint twist-flow better preserves multimodal posterior support than a direct conditional-flow baseline. We further evaluate the method on image restoration and seismic subsurface velocity-model inversion, showing increased posterior variability while maintaining observation consistency.
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In Bayesian inverse problems, posterior sampling requires generating samples that are consistent with given observations while capturing the range of plausible solutions. Direct conditional generative models introduce latent noise to model this ambiguity, but paired inverse-problem training can still encourage an almost deterministic map from the observation to the target. As a result, generated samples may be observation-consistent while under-representing posterior variability, especially when the posterior is multimodal, leading to undercoverage, mode distortion, or artificial transitions between distinct feasible solutions. We propose joint twist-flow, an augmented flow-matching formulation that learns a continuous transport from the augmented source state $(z_x, y)$ to the augmented terminal state $(x, z_y)$. Here x is the target variable, $y$ is the observation, $z_x$ is the Gaussian reference coordinate for posterior sampling, and $z_y$ is a Gaussian likelihood-side coordinate associated with the observation branch. Under a Gaussian observation model, $z_y$ is motivated by the normalized observation residual associated with observation compatibility. Its role is not to replace uncertainty in $x$, but to couple generated samples of x to observation consistency, helping reduce likelihood-inconsistent variation while preserving variability in weakly constrained directions. We validate the method on low-dimensional inverse problems with reference posterior samples, where joint twist-flow better preserves multimodal posterior support than a direct conditional-flow baseline. We further evaluate the method on image restoration and seismic subsurface velocity-model inversion, showing increased posterior variability while maintaining observation consistency.
作者Jingqi Sun, Haozhan Tang, Shulin He, Zhong-Qiu Wang
Blind Source Separation(BSS) is a fundamental problem in signal processing, aiming to separate multiple source signals from their mixtures without prior knowledge of the sources or the mixing process. Traditional approaches, such as Independent Vector Analysis (IVA) exploits statistical independence of sources. Recently, diffusion-based approaches have emerged as a promising alternative by leveraging powerful generative priors. Among them, ArrayDPS formulates BSS problem as a posterior sampling problem, and utilizes a pretrained speech diffusion model to guide the recovery of clean source signals. A key factor behind its separation capability is the multi-channel consistency (MC) objective, which enforces the estimated source signals to reconstruct the observed microphone mixtures through the estimated acoustic transfer functions. However, the number of microphones in the array is often limited, which constrains the performance of ArrayDPS. To address this issue, we propose VM-ArrayDPS, a novel method that augments the microphone array with virtual microphones with higher-SNR, these microphones can offer extra MC constraints to enhance the separation performance. Experimental results demonstrate that VM-ArrayDPS significantly outperforms ArrayDPS on both 2-speaker and 3-speaker datasets, showcasing the effectiveness of virtual microphone augmentation in improving BSS performance. We also did ablation studies to show the influence of the number of virtual microphones and weight of the MC objective brought by virtual microphones.
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Blind Source Separation(BSS) is a fundamental problem in signal processing, aiming to separate multiple source signals from their mixtures without prior knowledge of the sources or the mixing process. Traditional approaches, such as Independent Vector Analysis (IVA) exploits statistical independence of sources. Recently, diffusion-based approaches have emerged as a promising alternative by leveraging powerful generative priors. Among them, ArrayDPS formulates BSS problem as a posterior sampling problem, and utilizes a pretrained speech diffusion model to guide the recovery of clean source signals. A key factor behind its separation capability is the multi-channel consistency (MC) objective, which enforces the estimated source signals to reconstruct the observed microphone mixtures through the estimated acoustic transfer functions. However, the number of microphones in the array is often limited, which constrains the performance of ArrayDPS. To address this issue, we propose VM-ArrayDPS, a novel method that augments the microphone array with virtual microphones with higher-SNR, these microphones can offer extra MC constraints to enhance the separation performance. Experimental results demonstrate that VM-ArrayDPS significantly outperforms ArrayDPS on both 2-speaker and 3-speaker datasets, showcasing the effectiveness of virtual microphone augmentation in improving BSS performance. We also did ablation studies to show the influence of the number of virtual microphones and weight of the MC objective brought by virtual microphones.
作者So Takao, Gregory David Bellchambers, Luke Ye, Sanmitra Ghosh, Michalis Michaelides
Pretrained diffusion models are powerful priors for inverse problems, but posterior sampling under nonlinear, non-differentiable forward models remain hard. We introduce diffusion waltz, an MCMC method using SDEdit-style noising-denoising as a proposal, corrected via Metropolis-Hastings for exact posterior sampling without prior evaluation. We further propose injecting observations into the proposal while preserving exactness, using a gradient-free ensemble Kalman update. On a non-differentiable Navier-Stokes initial condition recovery task, diffusion waltz outperforms existing baselines across different noise and nonlinearity regimes.
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Pretrained diffusion models are powerful priors for inverse problems, but posterior sampling under nonlinear, non-differentiable forward models remain hard. We introduce diffusion waltz, an MCMC method using SDEdit-style noising-denoising as a proposal, corrected via Metropolis-Hastings for exact posterior sampling without prior evaluation. We further propose injecting observations into the proposal while preserving exactness, using a gradient-free ensemble Kalman update. On a non-differentiable Navier-Stokes initial condition recovery task, diffusion waltz outperforms existing baselines across different noise and nonlinearity regimes.
Split Gibbs sampling (SGS) is a popular framework for posterior sampling in Bayesian imaging inverse problems. It decouples a Gaussian data-fidelity term from a complex prior through an auxiliary variable, so the data variable is updated exactly and only the prior-side conditional is hard to sample. Existing samplers treat this conditional in one of two ways. Plug-and-play SGS runs a multi-step diffusion denoiser at every iteration, which is expensive and lacks non-asymptotic guarantees. Langevin-within-SGS takes cheap overdamped Langevin steps but needs many iterations. We propose RED-KLwSGS, which keeps the exact Gaussian update for the data variable and updates the auxiliary variable with underdamped (kinetic) Langevin diffusions driven by a one-shot denoising score, at the same per-iteration cost as Langevin-within-SGS. We prove non-asymptotic Wasserstein-2 convergence in continuous and discrete time for strongly log-concave priors. We also introduce Joint-RED-KLwSGS, which applies kinetic Langevin diffusions to both variables. Experiments with Denoising diffusion probabilistic models as diffusion priors on FFHQ and ImageNet datasets show faster convergence and high-quality image reconstruction.
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Split Gibbs sampling (SGS) is a popular framework for posterior sampling in Bayesian imaging inverse problems. It decouples a Gaussian data-fidelity term from a complex prior through an auxiliary variable, so the data variable is updated exactly and only the prior-side conditional is hard to sample. Existing samplers treat this conditional in one of two ways. Plug-and-play SGS runs a multi-step diffusion denoiser at every iteration, which is expensive and lacks non-asymptotic guarantees. Langevin-within-SGS takes cheap overdamped Langevin steps but needs many iterations. We propose RED-KLwSGS, which keeps the exact Gaussian update for the data variable and updates the auxiliary variable with underdamped (kinetic) Langevin diffusions driven by a one-shot denoising score, at the same per-iteration cost as Langevin-within-SGS. We prove non-asymptotic Wasserstein-2 convergence in continuous and discrete time for strongly log-concave priors. We also introduce Joint-RED-KLwSGS, which applies kinetic Langevin diffusions to both variables. Experiments with Denoising diffusion probabilistic models as diffusion priors on FFHQ and ImageNet datasets show faster convergence and high-quality image reconstruction.
作者Ramón Calvo-González, Youssef Saied, François Fleuret
Representation Autoencoders (RAEs) generate images from pre-trained visual fea- tures, but their dense token grids make generative modeling expensive. Motivated by local feature correlations, we introduce PoolDINO, a learned affine pooling operator that merges neighboring tokens. Training the pooling operator jointly with the RGB decoder preserves the standard two-stage RAE procedure without a separate feature auto-encoder. On ImageNet-256, 4x token compression retains comparable generation quality under internal guidance, while 16x compression trades some quality for greater efficiency. At a fixed budget of 100 sampling steps, latent-sampling throughput increases by 3.7x and 9.0x, respectively, relative to the unpooled baseline. Classification and dense prediction evaluations show that comparable guided generation quality can coexist with weaker performance on other tasks.
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Representation Autoencoders (RAEs) generate images from pre-trained visual fea- tures, but their dense token grids make generative modeling expensive. Motivated by local feature correlations, we introduce PoolDINO, a learned affine pooling operator that merges neighboring tokens. Training the pooling operator jointly with the RGB decoder preserves the standard two-stage RAE procedure without a separate feature auto-encoder. On ImageNet-256, 4x token compression retains comparable generation quality under internal guidance, while 16x compression trades some quality for greater efficiency. At a fixed budget of 100 sampling steps, latent-sampling throughput increases by 3.7x and 9.0x, respectively, relative to the unpooled baseline. Classification and dense prediction evaluations show that comparable guided generation quality can coexist with weaker performance on other tasks.
作者Xinsong Feng, Peng Du, Zhizhuo Yang, Daniel M. Bikel, Jiayun Wang, Haipeng Chen
Diffusion language models (DLMs) generate text through iterative parallel refinement, offering the potential for higher throughput than autoregressive (AR) decoding. However, most DLMs still maintain one generative state per token, so every denoising step processes a state sequence as long as the output sequence, limiting the throughput gains from parallel generation. Continuous DLMs provide an additional degree of freedom: a single continuous state can represent multiple tokens, allowing diffusion to operate on a much shorter latent sequence. We introduce Branching Latent Diffusion (BLD), which exploits this flexibility by compressing a 1024-token sequence into only 64 block latents, a $16\times$ reduction. BLD combines latent compression with branching token realization, where each latent is decoded by a local AR branch and all branches run in parallel. Because strong compression makes joint latent generation difficult, BLD generates the latents in groups, conditioning each group on previously generated latents. In end-to-end evaluation on the same GPU, BLD reduces generation FLOPs by more than $80\times$ and increases throughput by more than $6\times$ relative to the similarly sized ELF-L baseline. Compared with the AR baseline, BLD achieves more than $6\times$ higher throughput and more than $4\times$ lower latency. Despite the compression, BLD maintains competitive local fluency and diversity, although long-range coherence remains challenging. Overall, BLD shows that moving diffusion from token-level states to compressed latent sequences can substantially improve the efficiency of long-sequence generation.
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Diffusion language models (DLMs) generate text through iterative parallel refinement, offering the potential for higher throughput than autoregressive (AR) decoding. However, most DLMs still maintain one generative state per token, so every denoising step processes a state sequence as long as the output sequence, limiting the throughput gains from parallel generation. Continuous DLMs provide an additional degree of freedom: a single continuous state can represent multiple tokens, allowing diffusion to operate on a much shorter latent sequence. We introduce Branching Latent Diffusion (BLD), which exploits this flexibility by compressing a 1024-token sequence into only 64 block latents, a $16\times$ reduction. BLD combines latent compression with branching token realization, where each latent is decoded by a local AR branch and all branches run in parallel. Because strong compression makes joint latent generation difficult, BLD generates the latents in groups, conditioning each group on previously generated latents. In end-to-end evaluation on the same GPU, BLD reduces generation FLOPs by more than $80\times$ and increases throughput by more than $6\times$ relative to the similarly sized ELF-L baseline. Compared with the AR baseline, BLD achieves more than $6\times$ higher throughput and more than $4\times$ lower latency. Despite the compression, BLD maintains competitive local fluency and diversity, although long-range coherence remains challenging. Overall, BLD shows that moving diffusion from token-level states to compressed latent sequences can substantially improve the efficiency of long-sequence generation.
作者Faissal Izermine, Hanru Bai, Oscar Davis, T. Konstantin Rusch
Flow matching enables language generation in few steps, but whether additional integration steps improve reasoning remains unclear. We prove that a flow parameterized by a two-layer Transformer can solve graph reachability, with the required number of integration steps increasing with the target's distance from the root. Yet, standard flow language models can fail to benefit from additional steps on reasoning tasks. We attribute this limitation to objectives that supervise each time point independently, without explicitly training successive steps to build on one another. To address this, we instead train through the model's own latent rollout over a randomly sampled subinterval of [0, 1], decoding only at the endpoint. On ProsQA, this raises accuracy to 97% and enables performance to improve with additional integration steps. For the longer rollouts required by reasoning tasks such as Sudoku and Maze, retracting the latent state onto a sphere stabilizes the dynamics and yields substantial gains over baselines with more than three times as many parameters. Sampling multiple rollouts further improves performance when paired with a parameter-free selection score, although reliable selection remains challenging for longer answers. Together, these results establish a theoretical basis for reasoning with flows and show how rollout training, stable latent dynamics, and rollout selection help realize this capacity in practice.
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Flow matching enables language generation in few steps, but whether additional integration steps improve reasoning remains unclear. We prove that a flow parameterized by a two-layer Transformer can solve graph reachability, with the required number of integration steps increasing with the target's distance from the root. Yet, standard flow language models can fail to benefit from additional steps on reasoning tasks. We attribute this limitation to objectives that supervise each time point independently, without explicitly training successive steps to build on one another. To address this, we instead train through the model's own latent rollout over a randomly sampled subinterval of [0, 1], decoding only at the endpoint. On ProsQA, this raises accuracy to 97% and enables performance to improve with additional integration steps. For the longer rollouts required by reasoning tasks such as Sudoku and Maze, retracting the latent state onto a sphere stabilizes the dynamics and yields substantial gains over baselines with more than three times as many parameters. Sampling multiple rollouts further improves performance when paired with a parameter-free selection score, although reliable selection remains challenging for longer answers. Together, these results establish a theoretical basis for reasoning with flows and show how rollout training, stable latent dynamics, and rollout selection help realize this capacity in practice.
作者Hanru Bai, Faissal Izermine, Oscar Davis, T. Konstantin Rusch
Flow Language Models (FLMs) have emerged as a continuous-state alternative to discrete diffusion language models, yet the role of their continuous representations in reasoning remains unclear. We investigate this question by comparing the reasoning efficiency of FLMs and discrete diffusion models, measured by solution accuracy under matched denoising steps. Unlike discrete diffusion, which passes categorical states between denoising steps, FLMs evolve a continuous sequence representation throughout denoising and decodes it into discrete tokens only at the end. Our theoretical analysis shows, from a superposition perspective, how information retained in these continuous states can benefit reasoning. Intermediate-state interventions provide further empirical support for this theoretical account, showing that removing information about alternative candidates reduces subsequent solution recovery. Together, these findings show that FLMs allow evidence for multiple candidates to persist and inform subsequent reasoning before a discrete answer is produced. Furthermore, our experiments on maze planning and Sudoku tasks show that FLMs achieve greater reasoning efficiency in the few-step regime: FLMs achieves higher sequence accuracy than discrete diffusion baselines at matched model sizes and small denoising steps. On maze planning tasks, FLMs can also achieve comparable accuracy with smaller models. For example, on Maze15, FLM reaches the 95% accuracy target at 64 denoising steps with 36.5% fewer parameters than MDLM. These findings point to continuous state spaces as a promising foundation for reasoning models that require fewer refinement steps.
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Flow Language Models (FLMs) have emerged as a continuous-state alternative to discrete diffusion language models, yet the role of their continuous representations in reasoning remains unclear. We investigate this question by comparing the reasoning efficiency of FLMs and discrete diffusion models, measured by solution accuracy under matched denoising steps. Unlike discrete diffusion, which passes categorical states between denoising steps, FLMs evolve a continuous sequence representation throughout denoising and decodes it into discrete tokens only at the end. Our theoretical analysis shows, from a superposition perspective, how information retained in these continuous states can benefit reasoning. Intermediate-state interventions provide further empirical support for this theoretical account, showing that removing information about alternative candidates reduces subsequent solution recovery. Together, these findings show that FLMs allow evidence for multiple candidates to persist and inform subsequent reasoning before a discrete answer is produced. Furthermore, our experiments on maze planning and Sudoku tasks show that FLMs achieve greater reasoning efficiency in the few-step regime: FLMs achieves higher sequence accuracy than discrete diffusion baselines at matched model sizes and small denoising steps. On maze planning tasks, FLMs can also achieve comparable accuracy with smaller models. For example, on Maze15, FLM reaches the 95% accuracy target at 64 denoising steps with 36.5% fewer parameters than MDLM. These findings point to continuous state spaces as a promising foundation for reasoning models that require fewer refinement steps.
Accurate and low latency channel estimation is critical for modern MIMO systems, particularly under mobility, where channels exhibit structured sparsity and strong temporal correlation. This paper proposes a time-series conditioned diffusion framework for channel estimation that performs denoising in the angular domain. Starting from least squares (LS) observations, we train a diffusion denoiser whose conditioning information is encoded by a long short-term memory (LSTM) network over a short observation sequence, enabling the model to exploit temporal dynamics beyond per-snapshot estimation. To robustly balance observation fidelity and learned generative priors across a wide signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) range, we introduce a learnable SNR-gated late-fusion shortcut that injects the network input into the final decoding stage through a sigmoid gate with trainable center and scale. To reduce inference latency, we adopt deterministic denoising diffusion implicit model (DDIM) style reverse updates with SNR-adaptive truncation and step allocation, which significantly reduces the number of reverse diffusion steps at high SNR while maintaining strong performance in low SNR regimes. Simulations on time-evolving standardized channel models demonstrate that the proposed method achieves consistent performance gains over existing diffusion-based channel estimation baselines, while retaining low latency through SNR-adaptive inference.
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Accurate and low latency channel estimation is critical for modern MIMO systems, particularly under mobility, where channels exhibit structured sparsity and strong temporal correlation. This paper proposes a time-series conditioned diffusion framework for channel estimation that performs denoising in the angular domain. Starting from least squares (LS) observations, we train a diffusion denoiser whose conditioning information is encoded by a long short-term memory (LSTM) network over a short observation sequence, enabling the model to exploit temporal dynamics beyond per-snapshot estimation. To robustly balance observation fidelity and learned generative priors across a wide signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) range, we introduce a learnable SNR-gated late-fusion shortcut that injects the network input into the final decoding stage through a sigmoid gate with trainable center and scale. To reduce inference latency, we adopt deterministic denoising diffusion implicit model (DDIM) style reverse updates with SNR-adaptive truncation and step allocation, which significantly reduces the number of reverse diffusion steps at high SNR while maintaining strong performance in low SNR regimes. Simulations on time-evolving standardized channel models demonstrate that the proposed method achieves consistent performance gains over existing diffusion-based channel estimation baselines, while retaining low latency through SNR-adaptive inference.
Cine cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) captures the cardiac cycle as a four-dimensional (4D) sequence, but standard acquisition requires electrocardiogram (ECG) gating and repeated breath holds. Visual realism alone does not establish accurate patient-specific ejection fraction (EF) or ventricular volumes. We present PhaseFlow3D, a generative framework that synthesizes a complete 4D cine sequence from a single end-diastolic (ED) three-dimensional (3D) volume without ECG. To capture asymmetric systolic and diastolic dynamics, it represents the cardiac cycle as a piecewise linear phase anchored at ED and end-systolic (ES) time points. At inference, a population-level canonical template supplies this phase without patient-specific temporal information. A phase-conditioned rectified flow model generates a cardiac motion trajectory in latent space. Radial Contraction Decomposition converts each latent state into a 3D displacement field, combining a physics-informed radial component for centripetal myocardial contraction with an image-conditioned residual for rotation and out-of-plane motion. Each frame is generated by directly warping the ED volume, bypassing variational autoencoder decoding. On the combined ACDC and M&Ms benchmark, PhaseFlow3D achieves the lowest EF mean absolute error, the only positive left-ventricular volume-curve $R^2$, and the best distributional quality among compared methods. Ablations confirm each component's contribution. Downstream evaluations demonstrate the utility of the synthesized sequences and displacement fields for segmentation, pathology classification, label propagation, and myocardial strain analysis.
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Cine cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) captures the cardiac cycle as a four-dimensional (4D) sequence, but standard acquisition requires electrocardiogram (ECG) gating and repeated breath holds. Visual realism alone does not establish accurate patient-specific ejection fraction (EF) or ventricular volumes. We present PhaseFlow3D, a generative framework that synthesizes a complete 4D cine sequence from a single end-diastolic (ED) three-dimensional (3D) volume without ECG. To capture asymmetric systolic and diastolic dynamics, it represents the cardiac cycle as a piecewise linear phase anchored at ED and end-systolic (ES) time points. At inference, a population-level canonical template supplies this phase without patient-specific temporal information. A phase-conditioned rectified flow model generates a cardiac motion trajectory in latent space. Radial Contraction Decomposition converts each latent state into a 3D displacement field, combining a physics-informed radial component for centripetal myocardial contraction with an image-conditioned residual for rotation and out-of-plane motion. Each frame is generated by directly warping the ED volume, bypassing variational autoencoder decoding. On the combined ACDC and M&Ms benchmark, PhaseFlow3D achieves the lowest EF mean absolute error, the only positive left-ventricular volume-curve $R^2$, and the best distributional quality among compared methods. Ablations confirm each component's contribution. Downstream evaluations demonstrate the utility of the synthesized sequences and displacement fields for segmentation, pathology classification, label propagation, and myocardial strain analysis.
Diffusion models can generate high-quality images, yet aligning their outputs with individual user preferences remains challenging. A key bottleneck is accurately modeling diverse user preferences from limited feedback. Existing approaches often rely on labor-intensive manual preference annotations or vision-language models (VLM) to extract preference information from user interaction histories, introducing substantial annotation or computational costs that limit scalability. We propose an approach that learns personalized reward models directly from users' historical image preference pairs. First, we use an autoencoder to compress hundreds of visual attributes into 50 attribute-anchored preference dimensions and train an evaluator to score images along these dimensions. We then represent each user's preferences as a linear combination of the shared dimension scores, estimating the user-specific weights by maximizing the likelihood of their observed pairwise preferences under the Bradley-Terry model. This formulation reduces per-user adaptation to optimizing a low-dimensional weight vector, simplifying optimization and enabling data-efficient personalization from sparse feedback. The learned personalized rewards guide image generation at inference time while keeping the diffusion model frozen. Experiments on real-user preference data show that our approach achieves approximately 77% held-out pairwise preference prediction accuracy and improves the alignment of generated images with individual user preferences.
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Diffusion models can generate high-quality images, yet aligning their outputs with individual user preferences remains challenging. A key bottleneck is accurately modeling diverse user preferences from limited feedback. Existing approaches often rely on labor-intensive manual preference annotations or vision-language models (VLM) to extract preference information from user interaction histories, introducing substantial annotation or computational costs that limit scalability. We propose an approach that learns personalized reward models directly from users' historical image preference pairs. First, we use an autoencoder to compress hundreds of visual attributes into 50 attribute-anchored preference dimensions and train an evaluator to score images along these dimensions. We then represent each user's preferences as a linear combination of the shared dimension scores, estimating the user-specific weights by maximizing the likelihood of their observed pairwise preferences under the Bradley-Terry model. This formulation reduces per-user adaptation to optimizing a low-dimensional weight vector, simplifying optimization and enabling data-efficient personalization from sparse feedback. The learned personalized rewards guide image generation at inference time while keeping the diffusion model frozen. Experiments on real-user preference data show that our approach achieves approximately 77% held-out pairwise preference prediction accuracy and improves the alignment of generated images with individual user preferences.
Continuous cardiac monitoring outside clinical settings requires signals that are both informative and practical to collect during daily life. Electrocardiography (ECG) provides rich information about cardiac rhythm and waveform morphology, while wearable photoplethysmography (PPG) is easier to acquire continuously but is only an indirect cardiovascular measurement and is highly sensitive to motion. We present BeatFlow-ECG, a conditional rectified-flow model for reconstructing single-channel ECG from synchronized PPG and inertial measurements. BeatFlow-ECG models reconstruction as conditional transport from noise to ECG using a convolutional encoder-decoder with a transformer bottleneck and explicit flow-time conditioning. Motion information is incorporated through IMU-derived conditioning features, motion-dependent loss weighting, and an easy-to-hard training curriculum. We evaluate the model under leave-one-subject-out protocols on PPG-DaLiA and WESAD. BeatFlow-ECG achieves the best results among the evaluated deterministic, adversarial, and diffusion-based baselines across all reported waveform and beat-timing metrics, with Pearson correlations of 0.983 and 0.986 and R-peak F1 scores of 0.946 and 0.955, respectively. Compared with Conditional DDPM-1D, L1 error decreases from 0.085 to 0.062 on PPG-DaLiA and from 0.074 to 0.055 on WESAD. Additional analyses on PPG-DaLiA show higher correlation in fixed R-peak-relative waveform regions and lower reconstruction error across low-, medium-, and high-motion subsets.
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Continuous cardiac monitoring outside clinical settings requires signals that are both informative and practical to collect during daily life. Electrocardiography (ECG) provides rich information about cardiac rhythm and waveform morphology, while wearable photoplethysmography (PPG) is easier to acquire continuously but is only an indirect cardiovascular measurement and is highly sensitive to motion. We present BeatFlow-ECG, a conditional rectified-flow model for reconstructing single-channel ECG from synchronized PPG and inertial measurements. BeatFlow-ECG models reconstruction as conditional transport from noise to ECG using a convolutional encoder-decoder with a transformer bottleneck and explicit flow-time conditioning. Motion information is incorporated through IMU-derived conditioning features, motion-dependent loss weighting, and an easy-to-hard training curriculum. We evaluate the model under leave-one-subject-out protocols on PPG-DaLiA and WESAD. BeatFlow-ECG achieves the best results among the evaluated deterministic, adversarial, and diffusion-based baselines across all reported waveform and beat-timing metrics, with Pearson correlations of 0.983 and 0.986 and R-peak F1 scores of 0.946 and 0.955, respectively. Compared with Conditional DDPM-1D, L1 error decreases from 0.085 to 0.062 on PPG-DaLiA and from 0.074 to 0.055 on WESAD. Additional analyses on PPG-DaLiA show higher correlation in fixed R-peak-relative waveform regions and lower reconstruction error across low-, medium-, and high-motion subsets.
We study the problem of learning transition kernels for time-homogeneous jump-diffusion processes using conditional diffusion models, with the goal of generating new sample paths from training data consisting of N independent trajectories observed on a high-frequency discrete time grid. On the theoretical side, we establish non-asymptotic bounds for the conditional score estimation error and for the KL divergence between the laws of the true and generated discretely observed paths. On the numerical side, we first evaluate our method on synthetic data to assess the theoretical findings and benchmark its performance against the approach of Gao et al. (2025). We then apply our method to real-world data and investigate its performance on a probabilistic forecasting task.
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We study the problem of learning transition kernels for time-homogeneous jump-diffusion processes using conditional diffusion models, with the goal of generating new sample paths from training data consisting of N independent trajectories observed on a high-frequency discrete time grid. On the theoretical side, we establish non-asymptotic bounds for the conditional score estimation error and for the KL divergence between the laws of the true and generated discretely observed paths. On the numerical side, we first evaluate our method on synthetic data to assess the theoretical findings and benchmark its performance against the approach of Gao et al. (2025). We then apply our method to real-world data and investigate its performance on a probabilistic forecasting task.
Flow and diffusion models suffer from slow inference due to computationally expensive numerical integration. Distillation provides a promising way for a student model to learn from a teacher's dynamics, enabling one-step or few-step generation. However, existing methods often depend on curated distillation datasets, costly teacher rollouts, or auxiliary proxy networks, which complicate model training and scaling. In this work, we propose Consistent Distribution Matching, a simulation-free and data-free distillation method for accelerating diffusion and flow models while preserving strong generative capacity. Our key insight is to unify sample generation and score estimation with one student network. Thus, our framework uses only two models, a frozen teacher and a trainable student, and optimizes one objective. We prove that minimizing our objective indicates Wasserstein convergence of the student flow-map pushforwards to the teacher marginals. On ImageNet 256$\times$256, our method attains an FID of 2.04 with a single function evaluation (1-NFE) and a 4-NFE FID of 1.37 within 40 epochs of training, surpassing the state-of-the-art distillation baselines without data. Our code code and model are available at https://consistentdmd.github.io/.
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Flow and diffusion models suffer from slow inference due to computationally expensive numerical integration. Distillation provides a promising way for a student model to learn from a teacher's dynamics, enabling one-step or few-step generation. However, existing methods often depend on curated distillation datasets, costly teacher rollouts, or auxiliary proxy networks, which complicate model training and scaling. In this work, we propose Consistent Distribution Matching, a simulation-free and data-free distillation method for accelerating diffusion and flow models while preserving strong generative capacity. Our key insight is to unify sample generation and score estimation with one student network. Thus, our framework uses only two models, a frozen teacher and a trainable student, and optimizes one objective. We prove that minimizing our objective indicates Wasserstein convergence of the student flow-map pushforwards to the teacher marginals. On ImageNet 256$\times$256, our method attains an FID of 2.04 with a single function evaluation (1-NFE) and a 4-NFE FID of 1.37 within 40 epochs of training, surpassing the state-of-the-art distillation baselines without data. Our code code and model are available at https://consistentdmd.github.io/.
Accurate thermal modeling is essential in metal additive manufacturing (AM) for understanding the process-structure-property chain. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) offer effective surrogate thermal modeling by minimizing physics-based residual losses at collocation points. However, prior works typically rely on manually-crafted, static collocation sampling strategies, which are neither principled nor scalable across process conditions, hindering their generalization capability. In this work, we provide theoretical analysis through empirical risk minimization, showing that process condition-aware adaptive sampling is strictly more favorable than conventional static sampling for generalization. Building on this insight, we propose an adaptive sampling strategy within a two-stage framework: (1) a conditional Flow Matching model that learns approximate high-residual distributions across different process conditions, and (2) a mixed sampling strategy combining this distribution with a domain-informed base distribution to generate adaptive collocation points for refining the PINN predictor. Experiments on metal AM numerical benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art PINN baselines, achieving an average 62.1% reduction in relative $L_2$ error under an identical collocation budget, by capturing process-dependent heat dissipation regions often overlooked in the literature. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first adaptive sampling strategy for PINNs in metal AM, contributing to the enhanced generalization and broader applicability.
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Accurate thermal modeling is essential in metal additive manufacturing (AM) for understanding the process-structure-property chain. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) offer effective surrogate thermal modeling by minimizing physics-based residual losses at collocation points. However, prior works typically rely on manually-crafted, static collocation sampling strategies, which are neither principled nor scalable across process conditions, hindering their generalization capability. In this work, we provide theoretical analysis through empirical risk minimization, showing that process condition-aware adaptive sampling is strictly more favorable than conventional static sampling for generalization. Building on this insight, we propose an adaptive sampling strategy within a two-stage framework: (1) a conditional Flow Matching model that learns approximate high-residual distributions across different process conditions, and (2) a mixed sampling strategy combining this distribution with a domain-informed base distribution to generate adaptive collocation points for refining the PINN predictor. Experiments on metal AM numerical benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art PINN baselines, achieving an average 62.1% reduction in relative $L_2$ error under an identical collocation budget, by capturing process-dependent heat dissipation regions often overlooked in the literature. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first adaptive sampling strategy for PINNs in metal AM, contributing to the enhanced generalization and broader applicability.
We revisit a standard accepted practice in the continuous diffusion language model literature of fixing conditioning prompt tokens clean during training. We make a very simple modification: also noise the conditioning prompt tokens during training. We demonstrate that under this modified training objective, we achieve better generalization in combinatorial reasoning tasks such as Sudoku and N-Queens, with the largest gains on harder variants ($3.73% \to 24.65%$ solve rate on Sudoku Hard), and increased diversity of generated solutions ($50.60% \to 73.79%$ coverage on 10x10 N-Queens). We also show measurable improvements to natural language generation quality in modest dataset regimes with Gigaword summarization, but notably demonstrate that gains do not transfer to all natural language tasks (e.g open ended dialogue generation). Our method is a single line change to the training objective, requires no additional inference costs by default, and provides the flexibility of classifier-free guidance inspired guided sampling. Our \href{https://github.com/LateralIntelligence/noise-your-prompt}{code} is publicly available.
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We revisit a standard accepted practice in the continuous diffusion language model literature of fixing conditioning prompt tokens clean during training. We make a very simple modification: also noise the conditioning prompt tokens during training. We demonstrate that under this modified training objective, we achieve better generalization in combinatorial reasoning tasks such as Sudoku and N-Queens, with the largest gains on harder variants ($3.73% \to 24.65%$ solve rate on Sudoku Hard), and increased diversity of generated solutions ($50.60% \to 73.79%$ coverage on 10x10 N-Queens). We also show measurable improvements to natural language generation quality in modest dataset regimes with Gigaword summarization, but notably demonstrate that gains do not transfer to all natural language tasks (e.g open ended dialogue generation). Our method is a single line change to the training objective, requires no additional inference costs by default, and provides the flexibility of classifier-free guidance inspired guided sampling. Our \href{https://github.com/LateralIntelligence/noise-your-prompt}{code} is publicly available.
Deciding whether two samples come from the same distribution is a classical problem in statistics, and generative transport offers a new way to approach it. We build a stochastic interpolant directly between the two samples and observe that, for a symmetric schedule, its law is invariant under the time reflection $t \mapsto 1-t$ whenever the two distributions coincide. We therefore test whether the marginals at times t and 1-t agree by computing their Jensen--Shannon divergence. Both marginals are explicit mixtures over all cross-pairs of observations, so nothing is learned, and permutation calibration gives an exact finite-sample level. For Gaussian noise, this divergence equals a time integral that pairs the reflection defects of the velocity field and of the score, so the test compares transport dynamics rather than endpoints alone. With a narrow-plus-broad noise design, the test attains the minimax separation rate n^{-2s/(4s+d)} over bounded, compactly supported densities whose difference has Sobolev smoothness s > 3d/4, with no lower bound on the densities. Fusing a dyadic grid of noise scales through their permutation ranks, without sample splitting, preserves exact level and adapts to unknown s at an iterated-logarithmic cost. Empirically, the test matches or outperforms state-of-the-art kernel two-sample tests.
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Deciding whether two samples come from the same distribution is a classical problem in statistics, and generative transport offers a new way to approach it. We build a stochastic interpolant directly between the two samples and observe that, for a symmetric schedule, its law is invariant under the time reflection $t \mapsto 1-t$ whenever the two distributions coincide. We therefore test whether the marginals at times t and 1-t agree by computing their Jensen--Shannon divergence. Both marginals are explicit mixtures over all cross-pairs of observations, so nothing is learned, and permutation calibration gives an exact finite-sample level. For Gaussian noise, this divergence equals a time integral that pairs the reflection defects of the velocity field and of the score, so the test compares transport dynamics rather than endpoints alone. With a narrow-plus-broad noise design, the test attains the minimax separation rate n^{-2s/(4s+d)} over bounded, compactly supported densities whose difference has Sobolev smoothness s > 3d/4, with no lower bound on the densities. Fusing a dyadic grid of noise scales through their permutation ranks, without sample splitting, preserves exact level and adapts to unknown s at an iterated-logarithmic cost. Empirically, the test matches or outperforms state-of-the-art kernel two-sample tests.
作者Cheng-Han Yeh, Kuan-chun Yu, Cheng-Chang Tsai, Chun-Shien Lu
Existing latent-based watermarking methods for diffusion models have overestimated their robustness to image distortions, including geometric transformations such as rotation, scaling, and translation (RST). Moreover, this paradigm of watermarking approaches may suffer from inherent limitations arising from the domain in which the watermark is embedded. In this paper, we provide the first theoretical analysis explaining why these methods lack invariance to perturbations. By relaxing the invariant relation, we derive a maximum perturbation bound that characterizes the relationship between pixel-space perturbations and their corresponding effects in latent space. In addition, we present the first analytical formulation that captures all components of practical detection mechanisms. Finally, we conduct experiments to validate the theoretical findings and the limitations of latent-based watermarking methods. Our theoretical and empirical results indicate that, under the current design paradigm, latent-based watermarking methods intrinsically exhibit limited robustness. We conclude by providing the analytical tool and design guidelines that future research could follow.
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Existing latent-based watermarking methods for diffusion models have overestimated their robustness to image distortions, including geometric transformations such as rotation, scaling, and translation (RST). Moreover, this paradigm of watermarking approaches may suffer from inherent limitations arising from the domain in which the watermark is embedded. In this paper, we provide the first theoretical analysis explaining why these methods lack invariance to perturbations. By relaxing the invariant relation, we derive a maximum perturbation bound that characterizes the relationship between pixel-space perturbations and their corresponding effects in latent space. In addition, we present the first analytical formulation that captures all components of practical detection mechanisms. Finally, we conduct experiments to validate the theoretical findings and the limitations of latent-based watermarking methods. Our theoretical and empirical results indicate that, under the current design paradigm, latent-based watermarking methods intrinsically exhibit limited robustness. We conclude by providing the analytical tool and design guidelines that future research could follow.
作者Huajie Chen, Xin Guo, Yuchen Shi, Yuchen Zhong, Minhui Xue, Chi Liu, Congcong Zhu, Kun Gao, Minfeng Qi, Tianqing Zhu
Protein Generative Models (PGMs) have revolutionized structural biology by enabling the design of complex 3D protein structures from sequence data. However, this breakthrough introduces a dual-use challenge, exposing high-value PGMs to economic risks like unauthorized model extraction and biosecurity threats such as biohazard synthesis. To mitigate these threats, we propose MARCO (\textsc{COnformation waterMARk}), the first radioactive watermarking framework specifically tailored for PGMs. MARCO establishes a Dual-Layer defense that simultaneously protects intellectual property and ensures the forensic traceability of potential biosecurity misuses. (i) To preserve efficiency, MARCO iteratively embeds watermarks during diffusion reverse denoising via an auxiliary encoder-decoder, allowing the original PGM parameters to remain frozen for broad compatibility. (ii) To preserve biophysical fidelity and maximize robustness, we employ specialized loss functions targeting $C_α$-atom pairwise distances and torsion angles ($ψ, φ$) within an adversarial training framework integrated with stochastic attack simulations. (iii) Crucially, MARCO exhibits ``radioactivity'' where the watermark automatically transfers to the outputs of any pirate models trained on the watermarked data, effectively countering model extraction attacks. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MARCO achieves superior fidelity and robustness while successfully validating watermark transferability.
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Protein Generative Models (PGMs) have revolutionized structural biology by enabling the design of complex 3D protein structures from sequence data. However, this breakthrough introduces a dual-use challenge, exposing high-value PGMs to economic risks like unauthorized model extraction and biosecurity threats such as biohazard synthesis. To mitigate these threats, we propose MARCO (\textsc{COnformation waterMARk}), the first radioactive watermarking framework specifically tailored for PGMs. MARCO establishes a Dual-Layer defense that simultaneously protects intellectual property and ensures the forensic traceability of potential biosecurity misuses. (i) To preserve efficiency, MARCO iteratively embeds watermarks during diffusion reverse denoising via an auxiliary encoder-decoder, allowing the original PGM parameters to remain frozen for broad compatibility. (ii) To preserve biophysical fidelity and maximize robustness, we employ specialized loss functions targeting $C_α$-atom pairwise distances and torsion angles ($ψ, φ$) within an adversarial training framework integrated with stochastic attack simulations. (iii) Crucially, MARCO exhibits ``radioactivity'' where the watermark automatically transfers to the outputs of any pirate models trained on the watermarked data, effectively countering model extraction attacks. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MARCO achieves superior fidelity and robustness while successfully validating watermark transferability.