作者Lee Cheuk-Kit, Florentin Coeurdoux, Peter Potaptchik, Yilun Du, Michael Samuel Albergo, Eric Vanden-Eijnden
We propose an instantiation of flow matching that relies on a time-independent velocity field (an autonomous flow) to exactly map between two distributions, so long as the target is singular, i.e.\ supported on a lower-dimensional data manifold. We also show that the one-step generative map associated with this flow is the unique solution of a simple conservation equation, which can be used to learn the map directly from samples. These autonomous flows and maps give a dynamical meaning to the flux constraint of Beckmann's transportation problem. Their construction provides a unifying framework that recovers, for instance, the closed-form Poisson-flow generative model and equilibrium matching with a quadratic flow-matching regression loss. We illustrate how this theory corrects inconsistencies in existing methods and demonstrate the effectiveness of the autonomous flow and the one-step map on ImageNet 256x256.
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We propose an instantiation of flow matching that relies on a time-independent velocity field (an autonomous flow) to exactly map between two distributions, so long as the target is singular, i.e.\ supported on a lower-dimensional data manifold. We also show that the one-step generative map associated with this flow is the unique solution of a simple conservation equation, which can be used to learn the map directly from samples. These autonomous flows and maps give a dynamical meaning to the flux constraint of Beckmann's transportation problem. Their construction provides a unifying framework that recovers, for instance, the closed-form Poisson-flow generative model and equilibrium matching with a quadratic flow-matching regression loss. We illustrate how this theory corrects inconsistencies in existing methods and demonstrate the effectiveness of the autonomous flow and the one-step map on ImageNet 256x256.
Haptic feedback is widely employed to enhance immersion in Virtual Reality (VR) environments. However, designing haptic stimuli that cover diverse interaction conditions remains a significant scalability challenge. Data-driven haptic generation has emerged as a promising approach, yet existing models face an inherent trade-off between waveform expressiveness and inference responsiveness, which becomes increasingly critical as training data grow in scale and diversity. To address this challenge, we propose HaptoFlow, a vibrotactile generative model based on Flow Matching, designed for interactive real-time haptic rendering in VR. Flow Matching learns a continuous vector field that transforms a base distribution into the target data distribution, enabling efficient representation of complex haptic data distributions and thereby facilitating both high-quality generation and computational efficiency. We train HaptoFlow conditioned on material labels and interaction parameters (stroking velocity and applied force), and integrate it into a VR system. Technical evaluation demonstrates that HaptoFlow outperforms all baseline methods in both waveform reproduction accuracy and inference latency. Furthermore, user studies confirm that the system latency falls well within the perceptual threshold of visual-haptic delay, and statistically significant improvements in perceived haptic quality are observed for a subset of materials. These findings establish a practical foundation for scalable, data-driven haptic content creation in VR, and provide latency benchmarks that inform the design of future real-time haptic rendering systems. Project page: https://tamago117.github.io/HaptoFlow/.
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Haptic feedback is widely employed to enhance immersion in Virtual Reality (VR) environments. However, designing haptic stimuli that cover diverse interaction conditions remains a significant scalability challenge. Data-driven haptic generation has emerged as a promising approach, yet existing models face an inherent trade-off between waveform expressiveness and inference responsiveness, which becomes increasingly critical as training data grow in scale and diversity. To address this challenge, we propose HaptoFlow, a vibrotactile generative model based on Flow Matching, designed for interactive real-time haptic rendering in VR. Flow Matching learns a continuous vector field that transforms a base distribution into the target data distribution, enabling efficient representation of complex haptic data distributions and thereby facilitating both high-quality generation and computational efficiency. We train HaptoFlow conditioned on material labels and interaction parameters (stroking velocity and applied force), and integrate it into a VR system. Technical evaluation demonstrates that HaptoFlow outperforms all baseline methods in both waveform reproduction accuracy and inference latency. Furthermore, user studies confirm that the system latency falls well within the perceptual threshold of visual-haptic delay, and statistically significant improvements in perceived haptic quality are observed for a subset of materials. These findings establish a practical foundation for scalable, data-driven haptic content creation in VR, and provide latency benchmarks that inform the design of future real-time haptic rendering systems. Project page: https://tamago117.github.io/HaptoFlow/.
We propose a diffusion-based generative framework for controllable generation of triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) structures with low residual mean curvature. Existing TPMS generation approaches are often restricted to a small set of canonical families or produce TPMS-like approximations that deviate from exact minimality. To enable this generative framework, we first construct a large-scale dataset of over 18K unique TPMS by enumerating admissible boundary loops on mirrorable fundamental bounding volumes and solving for diverse minimal-surface patches. Each surface is then projected onto a compact Fourier latent space that explicitly enforces periodicity and $D_{2h}$ symmetry. Next, a transformer-based diffusion model is trained in this latent space to support unconditional sampling, deterministic inversion, local editing, and conditional generation under user-specified constraints. Experiments demonstrate that the model generates diverse, low-curvature TPMS candidates that, under conditioning, satisfy sparse geometric constraints and match target homogenized linear elastic properties, providing a practical tool for TPMS inverse design.
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We propose a diffusion-based generative framework for controllable generation of triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) structures with low residual mean curvature. Existing TPMS generation approaches are often restricted to a small set of canonical families or produce TPMS-like approximations that deviate from exact minimality. To enable this generative framework, we first construct a large-scale dataset of over 18K unique TPMS by enumerating admissible boundary loops on mirrorable fundamental bounding volumes and solving for diverse minimal-surface patches. Each surface is then projected onto a compact Fourier latent space that explicitly enforces periodicity and $D_{2h}$ symmetry. Next, a transformer-based diffusion model is trained in this latent space to support unconditional sampling, deterministic inversion, local editing, and conditional generation under user-specified constraints. Experiments demonstrate that the model generates diverse, low-curvature TPMS candidates that, under conditioning, satisfy sparse geometric constraints and match target homogenized linear elastic properties, providing a practical tool for TPMS inverse design.
Denoising diffusion transformers achieve strong generation quality but converge slowly during training. Regularizing their internal representations has emerged as an effective accelerator, yet existing methods split into two families with complementary costs. Target-based methods strengthen representations by aligning them to external features, which requires an external encoder and a learnable projection head to bridge feature spaces. Target-free methods hold no reference at all, and can only repel the model's own features across samples or layers, discarding whatever structure the data contains. Prior work suggests that spatial structure, rather than global semantics, drives the gains of alignment. We therefore ask whether such structure can serve as a target directly, and whether it exists not only within an image but across images. Our key insight is that the clean data latent already carries this structure in the relations among its tokens, where a relation is the similarity between two tokens, a single scalar comparable across feature spaces without a projection head. We propose Structural Parameter-free Affinity Regularization (SPARE), a regularizer that matches the pairwise affinities of intermediate tokens to those of the clean latents. To exploit this structure fully, SPARE extends the matching to token pairs across images, precisely the pairs that prior target-free methods repel by default, and calibrates both relation types with a single learning objective. On ImageNet $256 \times 256$ with SiT backbones under matched 400K-iteration budgets, SPARE adds no encoder, head, or parameters and only 0.08 GB of training memory, yet attains the lowest FID among parameter-free regularizers in every tested setting, recovers 37 to 54% of REPA's FID reduction, and improves over REPA when combined with it, reaching FID 1.90 under classifier-free guidance at 1M iterations.
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Denoising diffusion transformers achieve strong generation quality but converge slowly during training. Regularizing their internal representations has emerged as an effective accelerator, yet existing methods split into two families with complementary costs. Target-based methods strengthen representations by aligning them to external features, which requires an external encoder and a learnable projection head to bridge feature spaces. Target-free methods hold no reference at all, and can only repel the model's own features across samples or layers, discarding whatever structure the data contains. Prior work suggests that spatial structure, rather than global semantics, drives the gains of alignment. We therefore ask whether such structure can serve as a target directly, and whether it exists not only within an image but across images. Our key insight is that the clean data latent already carries this structure in the relations among its tokens, where a relation is the similarity between two tokens, a single scalar comparable across feature spaces without a projection head. We propose Structural Parameter-free Affinity Regularization (SPARE), a regularizer that matches the pairwise affinities of intermediate tokens to those of the clean latents. To exploit this structure fully, SPARE extends the matching to token pairs across images, precisely the pairs that prior target-free methods repel by default, and calibrates both relation types with a single learning objective. On ImageNet $256 \times 256$ with SiT backbones under matched 400K-iteration budgets, SPARE adds no encoder, head, or parameters and only 0.08 GB of training memory, yet attains the lowest FID among parameter-free regularizers in every tested setting, recovers 37 to 54% of REPA's FID reduction, and improves over REPA when combined with it, reaching FID 1.90 under classifier-free guidance at 1M iterations.
With AI systems gaining more access to individuals' information, it is important to protect privacy when reporting statistical answers. Equally important is to privatize the reporting of uncertainty in such answers. To this end, we adopt a Bayesian likelihood-free framework and make simulation from the posterior private. In particular, we propose a new private instantiation of the Bayesian bootstrap using a blocking strategy. Rather than assigning idiosyncratic random weights to each individual, we randomly group individuals and assign a single weight to each group. By concealing individuals' contributions within a group, we fortify differential privacy gates. We harness amortized inference that decouples private learning from posterior sampling. A push-forward map from observation weights to posterior samples is learned privately by adding calibrated noise during training. Subsequent posterior draws require no additional privacy and computation budget. We call the resulting method the Private Generative Bayesian Bootstrap (PGBB). We establish a differential privacy guarantee, analyze convergence to the non-private blocked-bootstrap target, and quantify the discrepancy between the ordinary and blocked Bayesian-bootstrap posteriors. In addition, we derive data-free tuning of the block Dirichlet concentration parameter that restores posterior dispersion asymptotically. We also show a single fit of PGBB can support a family of loss-based decision rules simultaneously without additional privacy cost. In simulations and in applications to U.S. Census returns to schooling and U.S. natality birthweight quantiles, PGBB gives competitive private uncertainty quantification and improves over private Bayesian alternatives that require a specified data-generating model in common settings.
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With AI systems gaining more access to individuals' information, it is important to protect privacy when reporting statistical answers. Equally important is to privatize the reporting of uncertainty in such answers. To this end, we adopt a Bayesian likelihood-free framework and make simulation from the posterior private. In particular, we propose a new private instantiation of the Bayesian bootstrap using a blocking strategy. Rather than assigning idiosyncratic random weights to each individual, we randomly group individuals and assign a single weight to each group. By concealing individuals' contributions within a group, we fortify differential privacy gates. We harness amortized inference that decouples private learning from posterior sampling. A push-forward map from observation weights to posterior samples is learned privately by adding calibrated noise during training. Subsequent posterior draws require no additional privacy and computation budget. We call the resulting method the Private Generative Bayesian Bootstrap (PGBB). We establish a differential privacy guarantee, analyze convergence to the non-private blocked-bootstrap target, and quantify the discrepancy between the ordinary and blocked Bayesian-bootstrap posteriors. In addition, we derive data-free tuning of the block Dirichlet concentration parameter that restores posterior dispersion asymptotically. We also show a single fit of PGBB can support a family of loss-based decision rules simultaneously without additional privacy cost. In simulations and in applications to U.S. Census returns to schooling and U.S. natality birthweight quantiles, PGBB gives competitive private uncertainty quantification and improves over private Bayesian alternatives that require a specified data-generating model in common settings.
作者Rishov Paul, Frederick H. Epstein, Miaomiao Zhang
Myocardial strain analysis of cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images provides an important tool for evaluating cardiac function. However, current techniques require either human-adjusted post-processing with suboptimal regional accuracy, or specialized and costly imaging acquisitions. In this paper, we propose to leverage the power of generative models to synthesize high-quality motion-derived strain values from routinely acquired CMR sequences. Specifically, we develop a novel Brownian bridge diffusion model in motion space to learn the probabilistic mapping between standard CMR motion estimated from widely adopted registration methods and highly accurate motion provided by advanced strain imaging techniques. To promote the fidelity of anatomical structure in the generation process, our model is conditioned on the corresponding CMR images. We validate our method on large-scale multi-center CMR datasets including subjects of paired standard cine CMR and advanced strain imaging acquisitions. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework significantly improves the accuracy of motion prediction and strain analysis from standard CMRs compared to existing learning-based approaches. Our research represents a new paradigm for potentially developing cost-effective, clinically deployable AI tools for cardiac function assessment with enhanced strain accuracy in busy clinical workflows. Our code is publicly available at anonymous.4open.science/r/Brownian-Bridge-strain-analysis-1140.
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Myocardial strain analysis of cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images provides an important tool for evaluating cardiac function. However, current techniques require either human-adjusted post-processing with suboptimal regional accuracy, or specialized and costly imaging acquisitions. In this paper, we propose to leverage the power of generative models to synthesize high-quality motion-derived strain values from routinely acquired CMR sequences. Specifically, we develop a novel Brownian bridge diffusion model in motion space to learn the probabilistic mapping between standard CMR motion estimated from widely adopted registration methods and highly accurate motion provided by advanced strain imaging techniques. To promote the fidelity of anatomical structure in the generation process, our model is conditioned on the corresponding CMR images. We validate our method on large-scale multi-center CMR datasets including subjects of paired standard cine CMR and advanced strain imaging acquisitions. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework significantly improves the accuracy of motion prediction and strain analysis from standard CMRs compared to existing learning-based approaches. Our research represents a new paradigm for potentially developing cost-effective, clinically deployable AI tools for cardiac function assessment with enhanced strain accuracy in busy clinical workflows. Our code is publicly available at anonymous.4open.science/r/Brownian-Bridge-strain-analysis-1140.
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in visual generative modeling, yet their training remains computationally prohibitive. While the recently proposed Momentum Orthogonalization (Muon) optimizer offers a promising alternative to AdamW, its direct application to DiTs yields suboptimal late-stage convergence. In this paper, we identify the root cause of this bottleneck: standard DiT architectures fuse functionally distinct weights (e.g., within AdaLN and QKV layers) into unified tensors for computational efficiency. Applying Muon to these fused tensors inadvertently induces implicit subspace coupling, which distorts update directions and degrades global optimization. To address this, we introduce Chunked Muon (CMuon), a simple yet highly effective strategy that partitions these matrices into independent sub-components prior to orthogonalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that a 675M-parameter DiT trained with CMuon achieves a FID of 1.18 on ImageNet 256 in just 200 epochs. This represents more than a 2x training speedup over AdamW, while effectively overcoming the late-stage convergence plateaus of vanilla Muon.
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Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in visual generative modeling, yet their training remains computationally prohibitive. While the recently proposed Momentum Orthogonalization (Muon) optimizer offers a promising alternative to AdamW, its direct application to DiTs yields suboptimal late-stage convergence. In this paper, we identify the root cause of this bottleneck: standard DiT architectures fuse functionally distinct weights (e.g., within AdaLN and QKV layers) into unified tensors for computational efficiency. Applying Muon to these fused tensors inadvertently induces implicit subspace coupling, which distorts update directions and degrades global optimization. To address this, we introduce Chunked Muon (CMuon), a simple yet highly effective strategy that partitions these matrices into independent sub-components prior to orthogonalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that a 675M-parameter DiT trained with CMuon achieves a FID of 1.18 on ImageNet 256 in just 200 epochs. This represents more than a 2x training speedup over AdamW, while effectively overcoming the late-stage convergence plateaus of vanilla Muon.
Existing generative models for earth observation (EO) predominantly rely on fine-tuning natural image priors, which limits their scalability and introduces perspective biases that conflict with geospatial constraints. To address this, we introduce GeoCore-9B, a 9-billion-parameter generative foundation model, which is the first of its scale to be trained from scratch exclusively on EO data. Unlike previous EO foundation models, GeoCore-9B is built upon a Flow Matching-based Diffusion Transformer (DiT) and natively conditions generation on text descriptions and continuous geospatial metadata, including ground sample distances, latitudes, and longitudes. To overcome the convergence and spatial disorientation challenges of training at this scale, we propose a Geospatial Semantic Alignment loss. This objective distills structural Earth surface priors (e.g., terrain and urban areas) from a frozen specialist teacher network, constraining the diffusion latent trajectory during training without adding inference overhead. Pre-trained on the global-scale Git-10M dataset, GeoCore-9B demonstrates strong downstream versatility. Beyond standard proxy generative tasks, we show that GeoCore-9B can be effectively adapted for practical EO applications, including highly challenging tasks such as cloud removal and SAR-to-optical cross-modal translation. Extensive evaluations confirm that GeoCore-9B establishes new state-of-the-art performance in both visual fidelity and geographic structural accuracy.
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Existing generative models for earth observation (EO) predominantly rely on fine-tuning natural image priors, which limits their scalability and introduces perspective biases that conflict with geospatial constraints. To address this, we introduce GeoCore-9B, a 9-billion-parameter generative foundation model, which is the first of its scale to be trained from scratch exclusively on EO data. Unlike previous EO foundation models, GeoCore-9B is built upon a Flow Matching-based Diffusion Transformer (DiT) and natively conditions generation on text descriptions and continuous geospatial metadata, including ground sample distances, latitudes, and longitudes. To overcome the convergence and spatial disorientation challenges of training at this scale, we propose a Geospatial Semantic Alignment loss. This objective distills structural Earth surface priors (e.g., terrain and urban areas) from a frozen specialist teacher network, constraining the diffusion latent trajectory during training without adding inference overhead. Pre-trained on the global-scale Git-10M dataset, GeoCore-9B demonstrates strong downstream versatility. Beyond standard proxy generative tasks, we show that GeoCore-9B can be effectively adapted for practical EO applications, including highly challenging tasks such as cloud removal and SAR-to-optical cross-modal translation. Extensive evaluations confirm that GeoCore-9B establishes new state-of-the-art performance in both visual fidelity and geographic structural accuracy.
Diffusion models rely on stochastic inputs, yet on finite-precision hardware, the "randomness" they consume is realized as deterministic numerical orbits generated by pseudorandom rules. Accessible orbit structure can become a learnable input and affect both training and generation because the realized loss and its gradient depend on the concrete pseudorandom values consumed at each optimization step. A small multilayer perceptron predicts the next value of an orbit from its recent history, measuring general sequence predictability. A diffusion probe replaces real images with online random tensors while preserving the diffusion architecture and training objective, measuring whether the target system can exploit orbit structure. After controlling marginal statistics and screening out clear dynamical and finite-precision failures, the remaining orbits still produce markedly different diffusion losses and generation quality on MNIST and CIFAR-10. Both measures show strong rank correlations with macroscopic generation degradation, although their local rankings differ. After normalization by the IID baseline, the probe loss and the real-data diffusion loss approximately follow an empirical power law, with different exponents on the two datasets. These results suggest that a pseudorandom source is not only a distributional choice, but also a model-dependent structured input.
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Diffusion models rely on stochastic inputs, yet on finite-precision hardware, the "randomness" they consume is realized as deterministic numerical orbits generated by pseudorandom rules. Accessible orbit structure can become a learnable input and affect both training and generation because the realized loss and its gradient depend on the concrete pseudorandom values consumed at each optimization step. A small multilayer perceptron predicts the next value of an orbit from its recent history, measuring general sequence predictability. A diffusion probe replaces real images with online random tensors while preserving the diffusion architecture and training objective, measuring whether the target system can exploit orbit structure. After controlling marginal statistics and screening out clear dynamical and finite-precision failures, the remaining orbits still produce markedly different diffusion losses and generation quality on MNIST and CIFAR-10. Both measures show strong rank correlations with macroscopic generation degradation, although their local rankings differ. After normalization by the IID baseline, the probe loss and the real-data diffusion loss approximately follow an empirical power law, with different exponents on the two datasets. These results suggest that a pseudorandom source is not only a distributional choice, but also a model-dependent structured input.
作者Leda Wang, Zhehao Xu, Qiang Liu, Harrison H. Zhou
Recently, rectified flow has emerged as a fundamental framework for large-scale image generation, powering state-of-the-art systems such as FLUX.1 and Stable Diffusion 3. Despite its remarkable empirical success, the computational and statistical guarantees of iterative rectified flow have remained largely unexplored. We address this problem by studying c-rectified flow, a cost-aware class of rectified flow that projects velocity fields onto a gradient class while preserving endpoint marginals. The ordinary rectified flow can fail to recover the optimal transport coupling: in a Gaussian case study, the iteration converges to the optimal coupling if and only if the source and target covariance matrices commute. In contrast, under suitable compactness and uniform-integrability assumptions, iterative c-rectified flow always converges to the optimal transport coupling. We further establish quantitative one-step contraction and exponential convergence guarantees under projection-stability assumptions for both quadratic and strongly convex displacement costs. Finally, under a Hölder ball assumption, we develop new minimax-optimal score estimation rates and show that, when combined with iterative c-rectified flow, they yield a rate-optimal estimator of the optimal transport for the dimension \(d \ge 3\) and a nearly parametric rate for \(d=1,2\).
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Recently, rectified flow has emerged as a fundamental framework for large-scale image generation, powering state-of-the-art systems such as FLUX.1 and Stable Diffusion 3. Despite its remarkable empirical success, the computational and statistical guarantees of iterative rectified flow have remained largely unexplored. We address this problem by studying c-rectified flow, a cost-aware class of rectified flow that projects velocity fields onto a gradient class while preserving endpoint marginals. The ordinary rectified flow can fail to recover the optimal transport coupling: in a Gaussian case study, the iteration converges to the optimal coupling if and only if the source and target covariance matrices commute. In contrast, under suitable compactness and uniform-integrability assumptions, iterative c-rectified flow always converges to the optimal transport coupling. We further establish quantitative one-step contraction and exponential convergence guarantees under projection-stability assumptions for both quadratic and strongly convex displacement costs. Finally, under a Hölder ball assumption, we develop new minimax-optimal score estimation rates and show that, when combined with iterative c-rectified flow, they yield a rate-optimal estimator of the optimal transport for the dimension \(d \ge 3\) and a nearly parametric rate for \(d=1,2\).
We introduce a unified framework for the error analysis of generative models based on the entropy production rate of the forward-reverse diffusion process pair. For a pair of continuity equation flows, the rate admits a closed velocity form identity whose time integral decomposes the terminal Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence into the sum of an initialization error, a score approximation error, and a time-discretization error. By analyzing the entropy production at the level of marginal distributions, rather than in path space, our framework yields a sharp convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}(h^2)$ for the Euler-Maruyama sampler, where $h$ is the step size. This improves upon the $\mathcal{O}(h)$ rates typically obtained from Girsanov's path-space analyses. Furthermore, our framework unifies the analysis of score-based SDEs, probability-flow ODEs, and stochastic interpolants by varying diffusion coefficients within a single inequality, revealing the trade-off between deterministic and stochastic sampling. Numerical experiments confirm the predicted scaling with step size and terminal time.
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We introduce a unified framework for the error analysis of generative models based on the entropy production rate of the forward-reverse diffusion process pair. For a pair of continuity equation flows, the rate admits a closed velocity form identity whose time integral decomposes the terminal Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence into the sum of an initialization error, a score approximation error, and a time-discretization error. By analyzing the entropy production at the level of marginal distributions, rather than in path space, our framework yields a sharp convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}(h^2)$ for the Euler-Maruyama sampler, where $h$ is the step size. This improves upon the $\mathcal{O}(h)$ rates typically obtained from Girsanov's path-space analyses. Furthermore, our framework unifies the analysis of score-based SDEs, probability-flow ODEs, and stochastic interpolants by varying diffusion coefficients within a single inequality, revealing the trade-off between deterministic and stochastic sampling. Numerical experiments confirm the predicted scaling with step size and terminal time.
作者Jiajun Liang, Yucheng Liao, Yukang Cao, Jiazhe Wei, Ken Li, Wende Tan, Jiankun Zhang, ZY Cui, Jingkang Yang, Liucheng Guo, Shiqi Yang, B. Yang, Caifeng Shan, Ziwei Liu, Chenyang Si
Language remains an outlier in generative modeling: while images, video, and audio are increasingly modeled in continuous latent spaces, text generation still relies predominantly on discrete tokens. Existing continuous language models either inherit embedding spaces not designed for joint generation and decoding, or compress autoencoded latents to ease diffusion, sacrificing token-level fidelity. Instead of simplifying the representation to suit the generative model, we preserve a high-capacity, decodable text latent and design the diffusion model to learn its distribution directly. We introduce AURORA-LM, a continuous-latent diffusion language model that separates the construction of a decodable text representation from the modeling of its distribution. A Query-based Encoder-Decoder organizes text into a high-capacity, prefix-aligned latent sequence, and a Block-causal Diffusion Transformer learns its distribution through flow matching, generating blocks left to right while denoising positions within each block in parallel. Because such a latent is harder for diffusion to model, AURORA-LM restricts only the noisy-input pathway while retaining the full clean-latent prediction target, accommodating full-width latents without reducing decoder-facing capacity. We further calibrate the noise-level distribution to the latent width, and introduce self-trajectory consistency to bridge independently sampled training noise and iterative denoising at inference. AURORA-LM achieves the strongest performance among evaluated continuous and diffusion-based language models on OpenWebText free generation and XSum summarization. Scaling to 1B parameters with about 1500 EFLOPs of total compute yields further gains, surpassing a larger publicly released latent-diffusion language model under a matched evaluation protocol. All experiments are conducted on Ascend NPUs.
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Language remains an outlier in generative modeling: while images, video, and audio are increasingly modeled in continuous latent spaces, text generation still relies predominantly on discrete tokens. Existing continuous language models either inherit embedding spaces not designed for joint generation and decoding, or compress autoencoded latents to ease diffusion, sacrificing token-level fidelity. Instead of simplifying the representation to suit the generative model, we preserve a high-capacity, decodable text latent and design the diffusion model to learn its distribution directly. We introduce AURORA-LM, a continuous-latent diffusion language model that separates the construction of a decodable text representation from the modeling of its distribution. A Query-based Encoder-Decoder organizes text into a high-capacity, prefix-aligned latent sequence, and a Block-causal Diffusion Transformer learns its distribution through flow matching, generating blocks left to right while denoising positions within each block in parallel. Because such a latent is harder for diffusion to model, AURORA-LM restricts only the noisy-input pathway while retaining the full clean-latent prediction target, accommodating full-width latents without reducing decoder-facing capacity. We further calibrate the noise-level distribution to the latent width, and introduce self-trajectory consistency to bridge independently sampled training noise and iterative denoising at inference. AURORA-LM achieves the strongest performance among evaluated continuous and diffusion-based language models on OpenWebText free generation and XSum summarization. Scaling to 1B parameters with about 1500 EFLOPs of total compute yields further gains, surpassing a larger publicly released latent-diffusion language model under a matched evaluation protocol. All experiments are conducted on Ascend NPUs.
Discrete diffusion and flow-matching models denoise a sequence over many steps, but to keep each step cheap, they factorize the transition across positions and decide every token independently. This makes few-step generation challenging for text when the target couples two positions, such as a subject and a verb that must agree. An independent update commits to them separately, and many function evaluations are spent repairing the mismatch. Existing few-step methods buy back the lost correlation by distilling or rectifying a slow teacher, and so inherit the teacher's quality ceiling. We ask instead whether a model can express correlated steps natively, and answer with Latent-Kernel Discrete Flow Maps (LKF), a from-scratch flow-map kernel that is a mixture of M factorized components tied by a single shared latent. Conditioned on the latent, each component is cheap, and the mixture is summed over the latent in closed form for small M. We show that a single step places mass on correlated completions with the same sampling time complexity as a factorized model, since one latent is drawn per sequence and reused across the entire denoising trajectory. We also show that the Masked Diffusion Language Model (MDLM) is a special case of our LKF model at M=1. The experiments for unconditional text generation on the One-Billion-Word (LM1B) and WikiText-103 benchmarks show that our LKF model learns strongly heterogeneous components and improves generative perplexity by 2.1x to 3.3x over the likelihood baselines without losing diversity. The gain grows with M, and at M=8, it surpasses distilled and rectified few-step samplers. The source code is available at: https://github.com/mansoor181/lkf.git
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Discrete diffusion and flow-matching models denoise a sequence over many steps, but to keep each step cheap, they factorize the transition across positions and decide every token independently. This makes few-step generation challenging for text when the target couples two positions, such as a subject and a verb that must agree. An independent update commits to them separately, and many function evaluations are spent repairing the mismatch. Existing few-step methods buy back the lost correlation by distilling or rectifying a slow teacher, and so inherit the teacher's quality ceiling. We ask instead whether a model can express correlated steps natively, and answer with Latent-Kernel Discrete Flow Maps (LKF), a from-scratch flow-map kernel that is a mixture of M factorized components tied by a single shared latent. Conditioned on the latent, each component is cheap, and the mixture is summed over the latent in closed form for small M. We show that a single step places mass on correlated completions with the same sampling time complexity as a factorized model, since one latent is drawn per sequence and reused across the entire denoising trajectory. We also show that the Masked Diffusion Language Model (MDLM) is a special case of our LKF model at M=1. The experiments for unconditional text generation on the One-Billion-Word (LM1B) and WikiText-103 benchmarks show that our LKF model learns strongly heterogeneous components and improves generative perplexity by 2.1x to 3.3x over the likelihood baselines without losing diversity. The gain grows with M, and at M=8, it surpasses distilled and rectified few-step samplers. The source code is available at: https://github.com/mansoor181/lkf.git
Matrix factorisation is a fundamental tool for exploiting low-dimensional structure in high-dimensional data, with applications such as data compression, denoising, structure discovery, interpretable representation learning, and dimensionality reduction. Compared to conventional two-factor models, matrix tri-factorisation provides greater modelling flexibility, while sparsity constraints often improve both interpretability and recovery performance. Although the role of sparsity has been extensively studied for two-factor matrix factorisation, rigorous theoretical guarantees for general real-valued matrix tri-factorisation remain largely unexplored. To address this gap, we establish, to the best of our knowledge, the first rigorous theoretical study for sparsity-induced identifiability in general real-valued matrix tri-factorisation. Our analysis is enabled by a novel decomposition strategy that transforms the original problem into two coupled auxiliary factorisation problems, while preserving the structural information necessary to the recovery of the original factor matrices from the observations. Building upon this decomposition, we derive recovery guarantees and structural consistency results that characterise how coefficient sparsity influences the sufficient recovery conditions, convergence behaviour, spectral approximation error, high-probability bounds, and structure preservation. Comprehensive Monte Carlo experiments validate the proposed theory and demonstrate close agreement between the theoretical results and empirical observations.
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Matrix factorisation is a fundamental tool for exploiting low-dimensional structure in high-dimensional data, with applications such as data compression, denoising, structure discovery, interpretable representation learning, and dimensionality reduction. Compared to conventional two-factor models, matrix tri-factorisation provides greater modelling flexibility, while sparsity constraints often improve both interpretability and recovery performance. Although the role of sparsity has been extensively studied for two-factor matrix factorisation, rigorous theoretical guarantees for general real-valued matrix tri-factorisation remain largely unexplored. To address this gap, we establish, to the best of our knowledge, the first rigorous theoretical study for sparsity-induced identifiability in general real-valued matrix tri-factorisation. Our analysis is enabled by a novel decomposition strategy that transforms the original problem into two coupled auxiliary factorisation problems, while preserving the structural information necessary to the recovery of the original factor matrices from the observations. Building upon this decomposition, we derive recovery guarantees and structural consistency results that characterise how coefficient sparsity influences the sufficient recovery conditions, convergence behaviour, spectral approximation error, high-probability bounds, and structure preservation. Comprehensive Monte Carlo experiments validate the proposed theory and demonstrate close agreement between the theoretical results and empirical observations.
作者Bowen Chen, Shreshth Saini, Balu Adsumilli, Alan C. Bovik
Pretrained diffusion models generate realistic images but are constrained by the statistical biases of their training data, limiting their ability to produce high dynamic range (HDR) content. In this work, we introduce LumaGuide, a training-free framework for distribution shaping in diffusion models. Instead of modifying model parameters, LumaGuide steers the sampling process to match target feature distributions via differentiable energy-based guidance. We instantiate this framework for HDR generation by controlling luminance distributions in perceptually uniform PQ space. Our results show that aligning luminance histograms is sufficient to induce HDR-consistent behavior, including coherent highlights and preserved shadow detail, while maintaining semantic fidelity. Beyond HDR, LumaGuide enables flexible specification of target distributions through data-driven presets, reference images, or text-driven predictors, and extends naturally to video generation with temporal consistency constraints. More broadly, our work demonstrates that controllable generation can be achieved by directly shaping output distributions at sampling time, without retraining diffusion models.
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Pretrained diffusion models generate realistic images but are constrained by the statistical biases of their training data, limiting their ability to produce high dynamic range (HDR) content. In this work, we introduce LumaGuide, a training-free framework for distribution shaping in diffusion models. Instead of modifying model parameters, LumaGuide steers the sampling process to match target feature distributions via differentiable energy-based guidance. We instantiate this framework for HDR generation by controlling luminance distributions in perceptually uniform PQ space. Our results show that aligning luminance histograms is sufficient to induce HDR-consistent behavior, including coherent highlights and preserved shadow detail, while maintaining semantic fidelity. Beyond HDR, LumaGuide enables flexible specification of target distributions through data-driven presets, reference images, or text-driven predictors, and extends naturally to video generation with temporal consistency constraints. More broadly, our work demonstrates that controllable generation can be achieved by directly shaping output distributions at sampling time, without retraining diffusion models.
Two central challenges in diffusion-based sampling are the theoretical one of understanding their remarkable effectiveness even in high-dimensional settings, and the practical one of designing algorithms with certified performance guarantees. We show that these questions are intimately connected via the denoising growth complexity ($\mathsf{DGC}$). It is a geometric measure defined by a log-time weighted integral of the derivative of the denoising mean-squared error along the Gaussian heat flow. We show how the $\mathsf{DGC}$ increments lead to a simple and explicit bound on the KL error of an Euler scheme applied to the stochastic innovations representation. The bound is local along the path: each step is controlled by the corresponding $\mathsf{DGC}$ increment and its relative stepsize. This structure allows us to derive KL sampling guarantees for optimized stepsize schedules, both in a simpler single-block setting and in a more refined $K$-block setting. The $\mathsf{DGC}$ function has a natural martingale structure, which we exploit to develop fully data-certified versions of these algorithms. It also admits information-theoretic upper bounds in terms of covariance, rate distortion, metric entropy, and the Poincar'e constant, thereby recovering and sharpening a range of existing diffusion-sampling guarantees, as well as giving new results. In log heat-time, the fine partition limit is governed by an integral involving the square root of the $\mathsf{DGC}$ density, whereas a single-block schedule depends on its ordinary integral. This comparison precisely characterizes when adaptation to data geometry yields substantial computational gains, including logarithmic-to-constant separations for simple Gaussian mixture models.
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Two central challenges in diffusion-based sampling are the theoretical one of understanding their remarkable effectiveness even in high-dimensional settings, and the practical one of designing algorithms with certified performance guarantees. We show that these questions are intimately connected via the denoising growth complexity ($\mathsf{DGC}$). It is a geometric measure defined by a log-time weighted integral of the derivative of the denoising mean-squared error along the Gaussian heat flow. We show how the $\mathsf{DGC}$ increments lead to a simple and explicit bound on the KL error of an Euler scheme applied to the stochastic innovations representation. The bound is local along the path: each step is controlled by the corresponding $\mathsf{DGC}$ increment and its relative stepsize. This structure allows us to derive KL sampling guarantees for optimized stepsize schedules, both in a simpler single-block setting and in a more refined $K$-block setting. The $\mathsf{DGC}$ function has a natural martingale structure, which we exploit to develop fully data-certified versions of these algorithms. It also admits information-theoretic upper bounds in terms of covariance, rate distortion, metric entropy, and the Poincar'e constant, thereby recovering and sharpening a range of existing diffusion-sampling guarantees, as well as giving new results. In log heat-time, the fine partition limit is governed by an integral involving the square root of the $\mathsf{DGC}$ density, whereas a single-block schedule depends on its ordinary integral. This comparison precisely characterizes when adaptation to data geometry yields substantial computational gains, including logarithmic-to-constant separations for simple Gaussian mixture models.
作者Guan-Yu Chen, Dong-Yue Xie, Xi Yang, Zun-Hao Zheng
We propose a randomized iterative method for the ordinary least-squares estimation problem in large-scale linear statistical models, namely the Sequential Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient Method (SPCG). SPCG constructs a sequence of sketched least-squares subproblems with increasing sketch sizes, applies PCG as the inner solver, and warm-starts each subproblem from the previous solution. A final refinement stage is then performed on the full-scale problem. Since most iterations are carried out on smaller subproblems, the overall computational cost is significantly reduced. We establish the convergence theory, prove that SPCG attains OLS prediction accuracy, and derive per-subproblem iteration bounds and complexity estimates. Numerical experiments show that SPCG reaches the target prediction accuracy with fewer iterations and less CPU time than full-data PCG and Iterative Double Sketching (IDS).
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We propose a randomized iterative method for the ordinary least-squares estimation problem in large-scale linear statistical models, namely the Sequential Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient Method (SPCG). SPCG constructs a sequence of sketched least-squares subproblems with increasing sketch sizes, applies PCG as the inner solver, and warm-starts each subproblem from the previous solution. A final refinement stage is then performed on the full-scale problem. Since most iterations are carried out on smaller subproblems, the overall computational cost is significantly reduced. We establish the convergence theory, prove that SPCG attains OLS prediction accuracy, and derive per-subproblem iteration bounds and complexity estimates. Numerical experiments show that SPCG reaches the target prediction accuracy with fewer iterations and less CPU time than full-data PCG and Iterative Double Sketching (IDS).
We study stochastic composite nonconvex optimization over a compact convex set when gradient samples arrive along a single trajectory of a fixed ergodic Markov chain. Existing single-trajectory variance-reduction theory covers smooth unconstrained objectives; we address the projection-free composite setting using the generalized Frank-Wolfe gap. We propose MC-ALFCG, which combines a momentum conditional-gradient method with coupled capped multilevel Monte Carlo estimation and per-iteration clipping. The deepest nested average uses consecutive states from the same trajectory, yielding conditional bias $O(τ_{\mathrm{mix}}/T)$ uniformly over the starting state, while coupling controls the gradient-difference second moment through the iterate displacement. Clipping enforces the pathwise bounds needed by the adaptive analysis. We reduce the Markovian recursion to its independent-sampling counterpart under $σ^2\mapsto 2ΛG_σ^2$ and $L^2\mapsto 2ΛL^2$, where $Λ=O(τ_{\mathrm{mix}}\log T)$. For positive centered noise, the tuned method achieves expected sample complexity $\widetilde{O}((τ_{\mathrm{mix}}^2G_σ+τ_{\mathrm{mix}}^{5/2}G_σ^2)\varepsilon^{-3}+τ_{\mathrm{mix}}^5\varepsilon^{-2})$. The exactly noiseless specialization achieves $\widetilde{O}(\varepsilon^{-2})$ with mixing-time-free constants, while a mixing-time-oblivious variant achieves $\widetilde{O}(τ_{\mathrm{mix}}^6\varepsilon^{-3}+τ_{\mathrm{mix}}^3\varepsilon^{-2})$. All guarantees are in expectation under a fixed transition kernel. Controlled numerical studies examine dependence sensitivity, a nonconvex composite instance, and clipping behavior.
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We study stochastic composite nonconvex optimization over a compact convex set when gradient samples arrive along a single trajectory of a fixed ergodic Markov chain. Existing single-trajectory variance-reduction theory covers smooth unconstrained objectives; we address the projection-free composite setting using the generalized Frank-Wolfe gap. We propose MC-ALFCG, which combines a momentum conditional-gradient method with coupled capped multilevel Monte Carlo estimation and per-iteration clipping. The deepest nested average uses consecutive states from the same trajectory, yielding conditional bias $O(τ_{\mathrm{mix}}/T)$ uniformly over the starting state, while coupling controls the gradient-difference second moment through the iterate displacement. Clipping enforces the pathwise bounds needed by the adaptive analysis. We reduce the Markovian recursion to its independent-sampling counterpart under $σ^2\mapsto 2ΛG_σ^2$ and $L^2\mapsto 2ΛL^2$, where $Λ=O(τ_{\mathrm{mix}}\log T)$. For positive centered noise, the tuned method achieves expected sample complexity $\widetilde{O}((τ_{\mathrm{mix}}^2G_σ+τ_{\mathrm{mix}}^{5/2}G_σ^2)\varepsilon^{-3}+τ_{\mathrm{mix}}^5\varepsilon^{-2})$. The exactly noiseless specialization achieves $\widetilde{O}(\varepsilon^{-2})$ with mixing-time-free constants, while a mixing-time-oblivious variant achieves $\widetilde{O}(τ_{\mathrm{mix}}^6\varepsilon^{-3}+τ_{\mathrm{mix}}^3\varepsilon^{-2})$. All guarantees are in expectation under a fixed transition kernel. Controlled numerical studies examine dependence sensitivity, a nonconvex composite instance, and clipping behavior.
作者Neta Shaul, Chao Liu, Arash Vahdat, Julius Berner
Generation in video diffusion or flow models is computationally expensive due to the slow and iterative sampling process. Current state-of-the-art (SOTA) acceleration methods heavily rely on variational score distillation (VSD) and adversarial losses to distill diffusion models into few-step generators. Albeit achieving high-quality video generation, these training losses are notoriously hard to optimize and suffer from mode collapse, leading to loss of video diversity and lack of motion. In this paper, we introduce Parallel Decoding Distillation (PDD), a simplified and scalable trajectory-based distillation method for fast inference of diffusion and flow matching models. Our architecture and training procedure are compatible with any pre-trained model and support sampling with a varying number of function evaluations (NFE). PDD accelerates generation by predicting multiple denoising steps per network evaluation. Conceptually, it learns a representation of the mean velocity without regressing its derivative using JVPs or finite-difference approximations. Our method achieves SOTA performance with 4-8 NFE on LTX-2.3 Text-to-Video/Audio, Wan 14B Text-to-Video, and Qwen-Image Text-to-Image. Moreover, PDD presents a significant improvement in generated video diversity.
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Generation in video diffusion or flow models is computationally expensive due to the slow and iterative sampling process. Current state-of-the-art (SOTA) acceleration methods heavily rely on variational score distillation (VSD) and adversarial losses to distill diffusion models into few-step generators. Albeit achieving high-quality video generation, these training losses are notoriously hard to optimize and suffer from mode collapse, leading to loss of video diversity and lack of motion. In this paper, we introduce Parallel Decoding Distillation (PDD), a simplified and scalable trajectory-based distillation method for fast inference of diffusion and flow matching models. Our architecture and training procedure are compatible with any pre-trained model and support sampling with a varying number of function evaluations (NFE). PDD accelerates generation by predicting multiple denoising steps per network evaluation. Conceptually, it learns a representation of the mean velocity without regressing its derivative using JVPs or finite-difference approximations. Our method achieves SOTA performance with 4-8 NFE on LTX-2.3 Text-to-Video/Audio, Wan 14B Text-to-Video, and Qwen-Image Text-to-Image. Moreover, PDD presents a significant improvement in generated video diversity.
作者Xia Du, Zhuosen Bao, Zheng Lin, Jizhe Zhou, Jiawei Lian, Chi-man Pun, Jun Luo, Wei Ni, Symeon Chatzinotas
Recent diffusion models have achieved remarkable realism in facial image synthesis, posing growing challenges to artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) forensic detectors.Existing evasion methods typically perturb pre-generated images or require detector-aware training, which may introduce visible or statistical artifacts and limit applicability when the diffusion model must remain frozen and the target detector is accessible only through black-box queries. We propose Trajectory-Injected Generative Attack (TIGA), a source-image-free and training free framework that generates detector-evasive images within a single diffusion sampling trajectory. TIGA steers the latent Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM) trajectory so that adversarial properties emerge during generation rather than being added afterward. TIGA first aggregates gradients from multiple white-box surrogate detectors to form a transferable, sign-aware prior, and then performs anisotropic directional search with symmetric finite-difference queries to estimate the black-box target response. The estimated directions are stabilized by decayed momentum and injected according to the DDIM noise schedule, with frequency-domain reshaping to suppress high frequency artifacts. Experiments on surrogate and unseen specialized forensic detectors show that TIGA achieves strong blackbox attack performance, transferability, and high robustness under common post-processing operations without source images or diffusion-model retraining, while preserving high perceptual quality.
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Recent diffusion models have achieved remarkable realism in facial image synthesis, posing growing challenges to artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) forensic detectors.Existing evasion methods typically perturb pre-generated images or require detector-aware training, which may introduce visible or statistical artifacts and limit applicability when the diffusion model must remain frozen and the target detector is accessible only through black-box queries. We propose Trajectory-Injected Generative Attack (TIGA), a source-image-free and training free framework that generates detector-evasive images within a single diffusion sampling trajectory. TIGA steers the latent Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM) trajectory so that adversarial properties emerge during generation rather than being added afterward. TIGA first aggregates gradients from multiple white-box surrogate detectors to form a transferable, sign-aware prior, and then performs anisotropic directional search with symmetric finite-difference queries to estimate the black-box target response. The estimated directions are stabilized by decayed momentum and injected according to the DDIM noise schedule, with frequency-domain reshaping to suppress high frequency artifacts. Experiments on surrogate and unseen specialized forensic detectors show that TIGA achieves strong blackbox attack performance, transferability, and high robustness under common post-processing operations without source images or diffusion-model retraining, while preserving high perceptual quality.
Deep generative models (DGMs) are widely used for complex high-dimensional data and increasingly applied to spatial and spatio-temporal modeling. Their generated samples implicitly represent the learned data distribution and associated uncertainty. However, for real-world data, assessing whether DGMs have learned the underlying process is difficult because the ground truth is unknown and evaluation often relies on observations alone. We evaluate representative DGMs, flow matching (FM), DDPM, score-SDE, and VAE, on a known non-stationary Gaussian random field. This paper provides comprehensive metrics to assess recovery of the ground-truth mean and covariance structures, with oracle samples and a stationary control as references. All four models recover the mean surface, while their covariance recovery differs across model families: DDPM and score-SDE recover the covariance structure reasonably well, FM exhibits mildly attenuated non-stationarity and slight variance under-dispersion, and VAE has difficulty recovering the covariance structure. An experiment on ERA5 temperature anomalies further demonstrates how the framework can support the validation and development of DGMs for complex real-world spatio-temporal data.
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Deep generative models (DGMs) are widely used for complex high-dimensional data and increasingly applied to spatial and spatio-temporal modeling. Their generated samples implicitly represent the learned data distribution and associated uncertainty. However, for real-world data, assessing whether DGMs have learned the underlying process is difficult because the ground truth is unknown and evaluation often relies on observations alone. We evaluate representative DGMs, flow matching (FM), DDPM, score-SDE, and VAE, on a known non-stationary Gaussian random field. This paper provides comprehensive metrics to assess recovery of the ground-truth mean and covariance structures, with oracle samples and a stationary control as references. All four models recover the mean surface, while their covariance recovery differs across model families: DDPM and score-SDE recover the covariance structure reasonably well, FM exhibits mildly attenuated non-stationarity and slight variance under-dispersion, and VAE has difficulty recovering the covariance structure. An experiment on ERA5 temperature anomalies further demonstrates how the framework can support the validation and development of DGMs for complex real-world spatio-temporal data.
作者Taimoor Rizwan, Sara Atito, Zhenhua Feng, Muhammad Awais, Josef Kittler
Face morphing attacks create synthetic images verifiable against multiple identities, threatening border control and identity verification systems. We introduce MorphUNet, a diffusion morphing framework formulating two-parent generation as alpha-controlled biometric transport: each parent is decomposed into CLIP appearance and ArcFace identity evidence, aligned into a CLIP-compatible token space, with the two contributors preserved as separate identity-aware token banks. To our knowledge, MorphUNet is the first diffusion-based morphing framework using trainable parent-separated dual cross-attention inside the denoising U-Net: a Biometric Transport Layer carrying parent-specific identity evidence through denoising, attending to each parent separately before combining residuals via the morphing parameter alpha. DDIM-inverted latent interpolation gives a coherent denoising start, while weaker-parent-guided selection favours morphs maximising the lower parent-similarity score, reducing collapse toward one contributor. We evaluate MorphUNet against three state-of-the-art baselines (StableMorph, MIPGAN-II, and MorDIFF) on FEI and FRLL using six recognition systems, and propose CFD-based unseen-identity stress testing across gender and ethnicity pairing, demographic shifts, and parent-similarity extremes. MorphUNet achieves the best Morphing Attack Potential (MAP) when at least three of six systems are fooled by one morph, reaching 0.919 on FEI and 0.886 on FRLL, and obtains the best FID on both datasets (35.19 FEI, 44.86 FRLL). It also gives the highest APCER at 5% BPCER in the same-dataset setting, and remains highly difficult to detect under cross-dataset transfer, with APCER 0.996 on FEI and 0.946 on FRLL. The full evaluation analyses MAP, MAD, per-system vulnerability, identity balance, image quality, top/bottom-similarity stress tests, and CFD unseen-identity robustness.
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Face morphing attacks create synthetic images verifiable against multiple identities, threatening border control and identity verification systems. We introduce MorphUNet, a diffusion morphing framework formulating two-parent generation as alpha-controlled biometric transport: each parent is decomposed into CLIP appearance and ArcFace identity evidence, aligned into a CLIP-compatible token space, with the two contributors preserved as separate identity-aware token banks. To our knowledge, MorphUNet is the first diffusion-based morphing framework using trainable parent-separated dual cross-attention inside the denoising U-Net: a Biometric Transport Layer carrying parent-specific identity evidence through denoising, attending to each parent separately before combining residuals via the morphing parameter alpha. DDIM-inverted latent interpolation gives a coherent denoising start, while weaker-parent-guided selection favours morphs maximising the lower parent-similarity score, reducing collapse toward one contributor. We evaluate MorphUNet against three state-of-the-art baselines (StableMorph, MIPGAN-II, and MorDIFF) on FEI and FRLL using six recognition systems, and propose CFD-based unseen-identity stress testing across gender and ethnicity pairing, demographic shifts, and parent-similarity extremes. MorphUNet achieves the best Morphing Attack Potential (MAP) when at least three of six systems are fooled by one morph, reaching 0.919 on FEI and 0.886 on FRLL, and obtains the best FID on both datasets (35.19 FEI, 44.86 FRLL). It also gives the highest APCER at 5% BPCER in the same-dataset setting, and remains highly difficult to detect under cross-dataset transfer, with APCER 0.996 on FEI and 0.946 on FRLL. The full evaluation analyses MAP, MAD, per-system vulnerability, identity balance, image quality, top/bottom-similarity stress tests, and CFD unseen-identity robustness.
作者Farzana Yasmin Ahmad, Vanamala Venkataswamy, Geoffrey Fox
Monte Carlo simulation of calorimeter showers is a principal bottleneck for the High-Luminosity LHC, and diffusion models have emerged as fast, high-fidelity surrogates. Their denoising objective is purely statistical, however: a model can minimize it while placing the physics wrong. Existing physics-informed generative methods cannot close this gap, because they assume a closed-form law, a governing PDE residual or a hard per-sample constraint, that a shower does not supply: no per-sample PDE governs a stochastic cascade, and energy conservation fixes only one scalar per shower. Standard metrics ignore the correlation structure across calorimeter layers and voxels, comparing showers only in a physics feature space. We address both gaps. We introduce the Correlation Frobenius Distance (CFD), a single normalized score for correlation fidelity at layer-wise and voxel-wise scales. We then encode the soft per-sample structure available in a shower as two physics-aware auxiliary losses: a variance-stabilized voxel residual loss grounded in counting statistics, and a graph Laplacian loss over the detector geometry. We combine both with denoising through GradBlend, which anchors the step magnitude to the denoising gradient while letting the auxiliary steer its direction, yielding Lantern, a physics-guided diffusion surrogate. On CaloChallenge Dataset 2, injecting the physics losses through task-symmetric rules such as PCGrad, GradNorm, IMTL-G, and ConFIG inflates FPD by 2-100x relative to denoising alone, whereas GradBlend admits the same signal without regression and, with the Laplacian loss, Lantern improves both FPD and CFD. Our ablation on the auxiliary loss scheduler shows that the voxel residual loss, whose gradient conflicts with denoising, requires a terminal denoising-only phase to preserve shower fidelity, whereas the non-conflicting Laplacian loss is insensitive to the schedule.
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Monte Carlo simulation of calorimeter showers is a principal bottleneck for the High-Luminosity LHC, and diffusion models have emerged as fast, high-fidelity surrogates. Their denoising objective is purely statistical, however: a model can minimize it while placing the physics wrong. Existing physics-informed generative methods cannot close this gap, because they assume a closed-form law, a governing PDE residual or a hard per-sample constraint, that a shower does not supply: no per-sample PDE governs a stochastic cascade, and energy conservation fixes only one scalar per shower. Standard metrics ignore the correlation structure across calorimeter layers and voxels, comparing showers only in a physics feature space. We address both gaps. We introduce the Correlation Frobenius Distance (CFD), a single normalized score for correlation fidelity at layer-wise and voxel-wise scales. We then encode the soft per-sample structure available in a shower as two physics-aware auxiliary losses: a variance-stabilized voxel residual loss grounded in counting statistics, and a graph Laplacian loss over the detector geometry. We combine both with denoising through GradBlend, which anchors the step magnitude to the denoising gradient while letting the auxiliary steer its direction, yielding Lantern, a physics-guided diffusion surrogate. On CaloChallenge Dataset 2, injecting the physics losses through task-symmetric rules such as PCGrad, GradNorm, IMTL-G, and ConFIG inflates FPD by 2-100x relative to denoising alone, whereas GradBlend admits the same signal without regression and, with the Laplacian loss, Lantern improves both FPD and CFD. Our ablation on the auxiliary loss scheduler shows that the voxel residual loss, whose gradient conflicts with denoising, requires a terminal denoising-only phase to preserve shower fidelity, whereas the non-conflicting Laplacian loss is insensitive to the schedule.
Generative semantic communication receivers deliver high perceptual quality but suffer from prohibitive decoding latency. This bottleneck arises because diffusion receivers rely on stochastic iterative decoding, while existing flow matching receivers employ independent endpoint coupling that ignores the physical source--channel link, yielding unnecessarily long and curved sampling trajectories. In this paper, we reformulate receiver-side recovery as a realization-coupled bridge flow matching problem under explicit bandwidth and power constraints. Specifically, we propose Realization-Coupled Bridge Flow Matching (RC-BFM), where the decoder initializes from a channel-induced semantic state rather than isotropic noise. Crucially, training pairs are linked via a realization-coupled entropic optimal transport (RC-OT) plan that preserves the physical channel realization of each transmission while maintaining robustness to stochastic fading. Furthermore, we identify independent coupling as the fundamental source of a conditional train--test distribution shift in conditional flow matching-based receivers, and derive an end-to-end distortion bound whose discretization error decays as \(O(K^{-2})\). Experiments on CIFAR-10 and FFHQ-64\(\times\)64 over AWGN and Rayleigh fading channels demonstrate that RC-BFM achieves a superior fidelity--perception trade-off, reducing decoding latency by over 10\(\times\) compared to diffusion-based receivers.
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Generative semantic communication receivers deliver high perceptual quality but suffer from prohibitive decoding latency. This bottleneck arises because diffusion receivers rely on stochastic iterative decoding, while existing flow matching receivers employ independent endpoint coupling that ignores the physical source--channel link, yielding unnecessarily long and curved sampling trajectories. In this paper, we reformulate receiver-side recovery as a realization-coupled bridge flow matching problem under explicit bandwidth and power constraints. Specifically, we propose Realization-Coupled Bridge Flow Matching (RC-BFM), where the decoder initializes from a channel-induced semantic state rather than isotropic noise. Crucially, training pairs are linked via a realization-coupled entropic optimal transport (RC-OT) plan that preserves the physical channel realization of each transmission while maintaining robustness to stochastic fading. Furthermore, we identify independent coupling as the fundamental source of a conditional train--test distribution shift in conditional flow matching-based receivers, and derive an end-to-end distortion bound whose discretization error decays as \(O(K^{-2})\). Experiments on CIFAR-10 and FFHQ-64\(\times\)64 over AWGN and Rayleigh fading channels demonstrate that RC-BFM achieves a superior fidelity--perception trade-off, reducing decoding latency by over 10\(\times\) compared to diffusion-based receivers.
作者Taimoor Rizwan, Sara Atito, Muhammad Awais, Zhenhua Feng, Josef Kittler
Generative diffusion models have revolutionized facial image synthesis, yet robust identity preservation in high resolution outputs remains a critical challenge. This issue is especially vital for security systems, biometric authentication, and privacy sensitive applications, where any drift in identity integrity can undermine trust and functionality. We introduce Diff-ID, a diffusion based framework that enforces identity consistency while delivering photorealistic quality. Central to our approach is a custom 210K image dataset synthesized from CelebA-HQ, FFHQ, and LAION-Face and captioned via a fine tuned BLIP model to bolster identity awareness during training. Diff-ID integrates ArcFace and CLIP embeddings through a dual cross attention adapter within a fine tuned Stable Diffusion UNet. To further reinforce identity fidelity, we propose a pseudo discriminator loss based on ArcFace cosine similarity with exponential timestep weighting. Experiments on held out and unseen faces show that Diff-ID does not exceed InstantID in raw ArcFace Face Similarity, but achieves substantially lower FID and the strongest FIQ based identity--realism trade off among the evaluated methods. We also present a unified DDIM based morphing pipeline that enables qualitative facial interpolation without per identity fine tuning. We further argue that identity preservation and photorealism should be evaluated jointly rather than in isolation, as high identity similarity alone does not guarantee realistic outputs. To make this trade off explicit, we report Face Image Quality (FIQ) as a complementary ratio based score that combines identity similarity and perceptual realism while keeping FS and FID as the primary metrics.
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Generative diffusion models have revolutionized facial image synthesis, yet robust identity preservation in high resolution outputs remains a critical challenge. This issue is especially vital for security systems, biometric authentication, and privacy sensitive applications, where any drift in identity integrity can undermine trust and functionality. We introduce Diff-ID, a diffusion based framework that enforces identity consistency while delivering photorealistic quality. Central to our approach is a custom 210K image dataset synthesized from CelebA-HQ, FFHQ, and LAION-Face and captioned via a fine tuned BLIP model to bolster identity awareness during training. Diff-ID integrates ArcFace and CLIP embeddings through a dual cross attention adapter within a fine tuned Stable Diffusion UNet. To further reinforce identity fidelity, we propose a pseudo discriminator loss based on ArcFace cosine similarity with exponential timestep weighting. Experiments on held out and unseen faces show that Diff-ID does not exceed InstantID in raw ArcFace Face Similarity, but achieves substantially lower FID and the strongest FIQ based identity--realism trade off among the evaluated methods. We also present a unified DDIM based morphing pipeline that enables qualitative facial interpolation without per identity fine tuning. We further argue that identity preservation and photorealism should be evaluated jointly rather than in isolation, as high identity similarity alone does not guarantee realistic outputs. To make this trade off explicit, we report Face Image Quality (FIQ) as a complementary ratio based score that combines identity similarity and perceptual realism while keeping FS and FID as the primary metrics.
Generative models are increasingly adopted in distributionally robust optimization (DRO), but existing approaches trade off model compatibility and adversarial structure: methods that accept arbitrary samplers do not restrict worst-case laws to a generator family, while generator-parameterized adversaries rely on model-specific access such as likelihoods, scores, or training data. We propose Generative Distributionally Robust Optimization (GDRO), a principled framework that accepts any sampleable conditional generator as the nominal model and restricts worst-case laws to a chosen conditional generator family. The key is the sampler-Sinkhorn pairing: samplers represent the conditional laws exactly, while Sinkhorn divergence compares their induced distributions without likelihood access and can be estimated from samples alone. The resulting population problem admits a direct finite-sample approximation and differentiable primal-dual implementation at the active decision context. For Lipschitz losses, the population Sinkhorn radius bounds downstream degradation. Across explicit and implicit generators, our method reduces rare-context inventory regret by 60% and SocialGAN navigation collisions by 50% relative to nominal decisions.
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Generative models are increasingly adopted in distributionally robust optimization (DRO), but existing approaches trade off model compatibility and adversarial structure: methods that accept arbitrary samplers do not restrict worst-case laws to a generator family, while generator-parameterized adversaries rely on model-specific access such as likelihoods, scores, or training data. We propose Generative Distributionally Robust Optimization (GDRO), a principled framework that accepts any sampleable conditional generator as the nominal model and restricts worst-case laws to a chosen conditional generator family. The key is the sampler-Sinkhorn pairing: samplers represent the conditional laws exactly, while Sinkhorn divergence compares their induced distributions without likelihood access and can be estimated from samples alone. The resulting population problem admits a direct finite-sample approximation and differentiable primal-dual implementation at the active decision context. For Lipschitz losses, the population Sinkhorn radius bounds downstream degradation. Across explicit and implicit generators, our method reduces rare-context inventory regret by 60% and SocialGAN navigation collisions by 50% relative to nominal decisions.
We introduce ViDS, a Video Diffusion Shader that leverages 3D face tracking for expressive and identity-preserving portrait animation. We first reconstruct the identity-specific 3DMM mesh from the reference image, and then animate it using expression and pose parameters from a driving video. Leveraging dense geometric cues from 3DMM normal maps, we employ a video diffusion model as a neural shader to synthesize lifelike portrait animations while preserving the appearance and identity of the reference image. We find that more accurate 3DMM tracking enables finer-grained expression control. We also introduce an autoregressive diffusion sampling process that extends generation beyond the model's native window while reducing discontinuities between adjacent clips. Compared with prior diffusion-based approaches for portrait animation that rely on landmark-based conditioning or implicit motion latents, our method achieves more detailed and consistent expression and pose control while faithfully preserving identity and appearance. Detailed ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our design choices. Project page: https://fusheng-ji.github.io/ViDS/
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We introduce ViDS, a Video Diffusion Shader that leverages 3D face tracking for expressive and identity-preserving portrait animation. We first reconstruct the identity-specific 3DMM mesh from the reference image, and then animate it using expression and pose parameters from a driving video. Leveraging dense geometric cues from 3DMM normal maps, we employ a video diffusion model as a neural shader to synthesize lifelike portrait animations while preserving the appearance and identity of the reference image. We find that more accurate 3DMM tracking enables finer-grained expression control. We also introduce an autoregressive diffusion sampling process that extends generation beyond the model's native window while reducing discontinuities between adjacent clips. Compared with prior diffusion-based approaches for portrait animation that rely on landmark-based conditioning or implicit motion latents, our method achieves more detailed and consistent expression and pose control while faithfully preserving identity and appearance. Detailed ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our design choices. Project page: https://fusheng-ji.github.io/ViDS/
On-policy distillation (OPD) adapts diffusion models by querying a teacher along trajectories generated by the current student, but how it should behave under classifier-free guidance (CFG), a default component of modern diffusion systems, remains poorly understood. Existing OPD methods naturally extend velocity matching to the CFG-composed prediction, directly matching teacher and student guided velocities. We show that this objective is under-identified at the branch level: positive- and negative-branch errors can compensate in the guided prediction. Through two contrasting cases, we find that naive matching remains effective under shared negative conditioning, where both branch errors decrease jointly. When the model's native CFG schema retains privileged information in the teacher's negative branch that is unavailable to the student, however, this joint reduction breaks down and the composed objective induces antagonistic branch-error dynamics, reducing the positive-branch error while increasing the negative-branch error. We term this failure mode Negative Branch Asymmetry (NBA). To address NBA, we introduce Positive--Direction Matching (PDM), a branch-aware OPD objective that separately constrains the positive prediction and the CFG conditional direction. We apply PDM to dense-to-sparse video control, where naive guided matching is highly sensitive to inference guidance scales, while branch-aware supervision enables more robust and effective knowledge transfer.
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On-policy distillation (OPD) adapts diffusion models by querying a teacher along trajectories generated by the current student, but how it should behave under classifier-free guidance (CFG), a default component of modern diffusion systems, remains poorly understood. Existing OPD methods naturally extend velocity matching to the CFG-composed prediction, directly matching teacher and student guided velocities. We show that this objective is under-identified at the branch level: positive- and negative-branch errors can compensate in the guided prediction. Through two contrasting cases, we find that naive matching remains effective under shared negative conditioning, where both branch errors decrease jointly. When the model's native CFG schema retains privileged information in the teacher's negative branch that is unavailable to the student, however, this joint reduction breaks down and the composed objective induces antagonistic branch-error dynamics, reducing the positive-branch error while increasing the negative-branch error. We term this failure mode Negative Branch Asymmetry (NBA). To address NBA, we introduce Positive--Direction Matching (PDM), a branch-aware OPD objective that separately constrains the positive prediction and the CFG conditional direction. We apply PDM to dense-to-sparse video control, where naive guided matching is highly sensitive to inference guidance scales, while branch-aware supervision enables more robust and effective knowledge transfer.
While on-policy distillation (OPD) effectively addresses sparse rewards and exposure bias in large language model post-training, its extension to flow models remains underexplored. To this end, we propose Flow Continuous Trajectory Supervision (FlowCTS), which matches subsequent student and reference trajectories initialized from the same student-visited state. Using the integral relation between trajectories and velocity fields, we derive a temporally weighted velocity-matching upper bound and discretize it into practical objectives parameterized by the number of supervision steps. Under a multi-reference setup, single-state FlowCTS-OPD outperforms vanilla KL-based OPD with faster convergence. FlowCTS-OPD improves GenEval from 0.90 to 0.93, OCR from 0.90 to 0.92, and PickScore from 22.75 to 23.06, while outperforming a mixed-reward RL baseline across all target metrics. Further analysis reveals a clear temporal supervision mismatch in vanilla KL-based OPD arising from its auxiliary SDE transition kernels. Beyond on-policy setting,FlowCTS also consistently outperforms vanilla SFT , particularly on OCR, while increasing supervision steps exhibit a trade-off between richer trajectory information and greater optimization difficulty.
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While on-policy distillation (OPD) effectively addresses sparse rewards and exposure bias in large language model post-training, its extension to flow models remains underexplored. To this end, we propose Flow Continuous Trajectory Supervision (FlowCTS), which matches subsequent student and reference trajectories initialized from the same student-visited state. Using the integral relation between trajectories and velocity fields, we derive a temporally weighted velocity-matching upper bound and discretize it into practical objectives parameterized by the number of supervision steps. Under a multi-reference setup, single-state FlowCTS-OPD outperforms vanilla KL-based OPD with faster convergence. FlowCTS-OPD improves GenEval from 0.90 to 0.93, OCR from 0.90 to 0.92, and PickScore from 22.75 to 23.06, while outperforming a mixed-reward RL baseline across all target metrics. Further analysis reveals a clear temporal supervision mismatch in vanilla KL-based OPD arising from its auxiliary SDE transition kernels. Beyond on-policy setting,FlowCTS also consistently outperforms vanilla SFT , particularly on OCR, while increasing supervision steps exhibit a trade-off between richer trajectory information and greater optimization difficulty.
Diffusion language models enable flexible arbitrary-order generation, but existing sampling methods are mostly designed for early masked diffusion models (MDMs). In this work, we study sampling for recent block diffusion language models (BDLMs). We show empirically and analytically that these models are naturally more aligned with left-to-right decoding than MDMs. Based on this observation, we propose Parallel Autoregressive Decoding (PARD), a simple training-free sampling method that preserves left-to-right unmasking structure while allowing parallel token commitment. Extensive experiments show that PARD consistently outperforms existing parallel samplers in generation quality, while achieving substantial speedups over pure AR decoding with only a small quality gap.
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Diffusion language models enable flexible arbitrary-order generation, but existing sampling methods are mostly designed for early masked diffusion models (MDMs). In this work, we study sampling for recent block diffusion language models (BDLMs). We show empirically and analytically that these models are naturally more aligned with left-to-right decoding than MDMs. Based on this observation, we propose Parallel Autoregressive Decoding (PARD), a simple training-free sampling method that preserves left-to-right unmasking structure while allowing parallel token commitment. Extensive experiments show that PARD consistently outperforms existing parallel samplers in generation quality, while achieving substantial speedups over pure AR decoding with only a small quality gap.