Parameter settings in evolutionary algorithms and metaheuristics are important because such parameter values can influence the performance of algorithms under evaluation. For a given algorithm, there are many different numerical experiments to show that the algorithm can work well in practice; however, in most cases there is no theoretical analysis of parameter settings. In this work, we show that theoretical analysis using the theory of dynamical systems and evolution of population variance can give some good results in terms of parameter ranges for the bat algorithm. We also show that results from numerical experiments are consistent with theoretical bounds. Such analyses can provide good insights from different perspectives about the algorithmic characteristics such as variance evolution, transition between exploration and exploitation as well as convergence behaviour.
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Parameter settings in evolutionary algorithms and metaheuristics are important because such parameter values can influence the performance of algorithms under evaluation. For a given algorithm, there are many different numerical experiments to show that the algorithm can work well in practice; however, in most cases there is no theoretical analysis of parameter settings. In this work, we show that theoretical analysis using the theory of dynamical systems and evolution of population variance can give some good results in terms of parameter ranges for the bat algorithm. We also show that results from numerical experiments are consistent with theoretical bounds. Such analyses can provide good insights from different perspectives about the algorithmic characteristics such as variance evolution, transition between exploration and exploitation as well as convergence behaviour.
Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models typically require substantial computational resources and cloud infrastructure, posing significant challenges for edge deployment in terms of latency, cost, and user privacy. We present JuZhou 1.0, an ultra-lightweight T2I foundation model designed for fully offline, on-device execution. JuZhou 1.0 achieves its efficiency through four key designs: (1) a compact image-generation backbone consisting of a 0.385B-parameter denoising U-Net and a 1.90M-parameter distilled decoder, totaling approximately 0.387B parameters; (2) Rectified Flow training combined with DMD2 distillation, reducing inference to 4 sampling steps; (3) Chinese semantic alignment trained on 9M curated image-text pairs, enabling direct Chinese prompting without external translation at inference time; and (4) a training and distillation pipeline completed on domestically developed Sugon K100 AI accelerators without relying on NVIDIA GPUs for training or distillation. Despite its compact scale, the 28-step base model of JuZhou 1.0 achieves an overall GenEval score of 0.69, outperforming published baselines including SDXL (2.6B, 0.55), SD3-Medium (2B, 0.62), and IF-XL (4.3B, 0.61). We further validate the full poetry-to-image pipeline on Android and the core CLIP-U-Net-VAE generation branch on iOS. On a smartphone powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 Mobile Platform, the 4-step U-Net denoising branch runs in approximately 1.6 seconds, while the full Android poetry-to-image pipeline takes 4.5 seconds with on-device prompt refinement on Xiaomi 17 Pro Max. These results position JuZhou 1.0 as a practical approach to mobile text-to-image generation and provide a concrete reference for Chinese-native generation, domestic-compute training, and fully offline on-device deployment after one-time installation.
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Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models typically require substantial computational resources and cloud infrastructure, posing significant challenges for edge deployment in terms of latency, cost, and user privacy. We present JuZhou 1.0, an ultra-lightweight T2I foundation model designed for fully offline, on-device execution. JuZhou 1.0 achieves its efficiency through four key designs: (1) a compact image-generation backbone consisting of a 0.385B-parameter denoising U-Net and a 1.90M-parameter distilled decoder, totaling approximately 0.387B parameters; (2) Rectified Flow training combined with DMD2 distillation, reducing inference to 4 sampling steps; (3) Chinese semantic alignment trained on 9M curated image-text pairs, enabling direct Chinese prompting without external translation at inference time; and (4) a training and distillation pipeline completed on domestically developed Sugon K100 AI accelerators without relying on NVIDIA GPUs for training or distillation. Despite its compact scale, the 28-step base model of JuZhou 1.0 achieves an overall GenEval score of 0.69, outperforming published baselines including SDXL (2.6B, 0.55), SD3-Medium (2B, 0.62), and IF-XL (4.3B, 0.61). We further validate the full poetry-to-image pipeline on Android and the core CLIP-U-Net-VAE generation branch on iOS. On a smartphone powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 Mobile Platform, the 4-step U-Net denoising branch runs in approximately 1.6 seconds, while the full Android poetry-to-image pipeline takes 4.5 seconds with on-device prompt refinement on Xiaomi 17 Pro Max. These results position JuZhou 1.0 as a practical approach to mobile text-to-image generation and provide a concrete reference for Chinese-native generation, domestic-compute training, and fully offline on-device deployment after one-time installation.
The global minimum-variance portfolio (GMVP) is the canonical decision built from an estimated covariance matrix, yet covariance estimators are universally evaluated by matrix-norm loss, which is not the object the decision depends on. We characterise exactly how covariance-estimation error maps into GMVP suboptimality. We prove an exact regret identity and a non-asymptotic bound showing decision regret depends on the estimation error only through its action on the portfolio weights, scaled by portfolio concentration and the conditioning of the true covariance. From this we derive the decision geometry: GMVP regret is invariant to a (p-1)-dimensional projection of the p^2-dimensional error matrix, with invariance to the covariance-scale direction as an exact special case. We then apply the framework to heavy-tailed returns (tail index kappa in (2,4)), establishing the regret convergence rate implied by the centred operator-norm rate, and confirm the theory on a skew-t/t-copula simulation design with pre-registered analysis. The decision-focused advantage is a sharper constant and a concentration discount rather than a faster rate; we report an honest high-conditioning boundary of the rate prediction. The results complement recent decision-focused learning approaches by supplying the exact estimation geometry and consistency theory they lack.
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The global minimum-variance portfolio (GMVP) is the canonical decision built from an estimated covariance matrix, yet covariance estimators are universally evaluated by matrix-norm loss, which is not the object the decision depends on. We characterise exactly how covariance-estimation error maps into GMVP suboptimality. We prove an exact regret identity and a non-asymptotic bound showing decision regret depends on the estimation error only through its action on the portfolio weights, scaled by portfolio concentration and the conditioning of the true covariance. From this we derive the decision geometry: GMVP regret is invariant to a (p-1)-dimensional projection of the p^2-dimensional error matrix, with invariance to the covariance-scale direction as an exact special case. We then apply the framework to heavy-tailed returns (tail index kappa in (2,4)), establishing the regret convergence rate implied by the centred operator-norm rate, and confirm the theory on a skew-t/t-copula simulation design with pre-registered analysis. The decision-focused advantage is a sharper constant and a concentration discount rather than a faster rate; we report an honest high-conditioning boundary of the rate prediction. The results complement recent decision-focused learning approaches by supplying the exact estimation geometry and consistency theory they lack.
Generative models have achieved remarkable success in data synthesis, though recent advances driven by increasing model scale have introduced challenges in computational cost and efficiency. Quantum machine learning offers a promising alternative, representing complex data distributions using compact, highly expressive models. Here, we propose QDiffusion-TS, the first quantum generative diffusion model for time series synthesis, and validate it on the IQM quantum processor. The framework extends a classical diffusion architecture by replacing feed-forward components within the denoising transformer with quantum neural networks, yielding a hybrid quantum transformer that reduces the number of trainable parameters in each replaced component by nearly three orders of magnitude. Evaluated on financial time series from Apple and Amazon, the model generates synthetic data that more accurately reproduces the real distributions, reducing Wasserstein distance by approximately 44% relative to its classical counterpart across both datasets. In a downstream forecasting task, augmentation with the generated data improves predictive performance by up to 71% in RMSE over a baseline trained solely on real data. These results show that quantum enhanced architectures can consistently match and frequently surpass classical performance with substantially fewer parameters, establishing a practical framework towards more efficient and scalable data-driven generative modelling.
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Generative models have achieved remarkable success in data synthesis, though recent advances driven by increasing model scale have introduced challenges in computational cost and efficiency. Quantum machine learning offers a promising alternative, representing complex data distributions using compact, highly expressive models. Here, we propose QDiffusion-TS, the first quantum generative diffusion model for time series synthesis, and validate it on the IQM quantum processor. The framework extends a classical diffusion architecture by replacing feed-forward components within the denoising transformer with quantum neural networks, yielding a hybrid quantum transformer that reduces the number of trainable parameters in each replaced component by nearly three orders of magnitude. Evaluated on financial time series from Apple and Amazon, the model generates synthetic data that more accurately reproduces the real distributions, reducing Wasserstein distance by approximately 44% relative to its classical counterpart across both datasets. In a downstream forecasting task, augmentation with the generated data improves predictive performance by up to 71% in RMSE over a baseline trained solely on real data. These results show that quantum enhanced architectures can consistently match and frequently surpass classical performance with substantially fewer parameters, establishing a practical framework towards more efficient and scalable data-driven generative modelling.
We present a first study of a diffusion-based approach to accelerated sampling of the $N_f = 2$ lattice Schwinger model. Our work is inspired by recent and growing successes in developing such generative models for ensemble generation in LFT to overcome the well-known critical slowing down problem. We train a U(1)-equivariant score-based generative model to sample gauge link configurations from the marginal Schwinger model. By computing model likelihoods, we obtain unbiased estimates for observables that closely match those produced by MCMC simulations. We also demonstrate improvement over HMC as measured qualitatively by a reduction in topological freezing near critical parameters.
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We present a first study of a diffusion-based approach to accelerated sampling of the $N_f = 2$ lattice Schwinger model. Our work is inspired by recent and growing successes in developing such generative models for ensemble generation in LFT to overcome the well-known critical slowing down problem. We train a U(1)-equivariant score-based generative model to sample gauge link configurations from the marginal Schwinger model. By computing model likelihoods, we obtain unbiased estimates for observables that closely match those produced by MCMC simulations. We also demonstrate improvement over HMC as measured qualitatively by a reduction in topological freezing near critical parameters.
Learning governing equations from observed solution data is a fundamental challenge in scientific machine learning, yet the theoretical conditions under which a ground-truth ODE can be uniquely and stably identified from multiple solution observations remain largely undeveloped, and no quantitative analysis of the sample complexity of such learning tasks exists in the literature. To address this gap, we introduce the Hausdorff distance on solution sets as the natural metric for comparing differential equations, since it captures the worst-case separation between two equations over all admissible initial conditions and thus encodes the minimax structure of the identification problem. We establish identifiability bounds for governing ODEs across a wide class of structure equations--ranging from linear ODEs to nonlinear classes with Lipschitz (Hölder)-continuous vector fields--characterizing precisely when two distinct equations can be distinguished from solution data. Using this metric, we derive metric entropy estimates for the relevant ODE classes and analyze sample complexity bounds, quantifying how many solution observations are needed to reliably recover the governing equation.
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Learning governing equations from observed solution data is a fundamental challenge in scientific machine learning, yet the theoretical conditions under which a ground-truth ODE can be uniquely and stably identified from multiple solution observations remain largely undeveloped, and no quantitative analysis of the sample complexity of such learning tasks exists in the literature. To address this gap, we introduce the Hausdorff distance on solution sets as the natural metric for comparing differential equations, since it captures the worst-case separation between two equations over all admissible initial conditions and thus encodes the minimax structure of the identification problem. We establish identifiability bounds for governing ODEs across a wide class of structure equations--ranging from linear ODEs to nonlinear classes with Lipschitz (Hölder)-continuous vector fields--characterizing precisely when two distinct equations can be distinguished from solution data. Using this metric, we derive metric entropy estimates for the relevant ODE classes and analyze sample complexity bounds, quantifying how many solution observations are needed to reliably recover the governing equation.
Analog hardware platforms such as coupled oscillators and Analog Ising Machines naturally solve differential equations at a fraction of the energy cost of digital computation, making them attractive for low-power generative modeling, yet a fundamental mismatch exists: modern generative models assume flexible, software-defined dynamics, whereas analog hardware imposes fixed, physics-determined differential equations with limited approximation capacity. This paper introduces Analog Interaction Systems (AIS), a unified framework for hardware-implementable dynamical systems, and empirically characterizes their expressivity gap relative to neural network baselines. Two hardware-compatible mechanisms are proposed to narrow this gap - time-varying piecewise parameters and hidden physical states - and a Wasserstein GAN training procedure is developed to enable training of these models without requiring them to follow a specific trajectory. We characterize how area and power scale with connection density and precision, showing that sparse connectivity and low-bit-width quantized parameters are necessary for practical implementation, and estimate an energy cost of 23uJ per generated image for the chosen architecture, representing a 2-orders-of-magnitude improvement over digital baselines. On MNIST and Fashion-MNIST, our oscillator-based AIS achieves FID scores of 27.6 and 80.8, outperforming the best prior hardware-implementable analog generative models by 3-4x with a 4-bit sparse architecture.
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Analog hardware platforms such as coupled oscillators and Analog Ising Machines naturally solve differential equations at a fraction of the energy cost of digital computation, making them attractive for low-power generative modeling, yet a fundamental mismatch exists: modern generative models assume flexible, software-defined dynamics, whereas analog hardware imposes fixed, physics-determined differential equations with limited approximation capacity. This paper introduces Analog Interaction Systems (AIS), a unified framework for hardware-implementable dynamical systems, and empirically characterizes their expressivity gap relative to neural network baselines. Two hardware-compatible mechanisms are proposed to narrow this gap - time-varying piecewise parameters and hidden physical states - and a Wasserstein GAN training procedure is developed to enable training of these models without requiring them to follow a specific trajectory. We characterize how area and power scale with connection density and precision, showing that sparse connectivity and low-bit-width quantized parameters are necessary for practical implementation, and estimate an energy cost of 23uJ per generated image for the chosen architecture, representing a 2-orders-of-magnitude improvement over digital baselines. On MNIST and Fashion-MNIST, our oscillator-based AIS achieves FID scores of 27.6 and 80.8, outperforming the best prior hardware-implementable analog generative models by 3-4x with a 4-bit sparse architecture.
The prevalent dual-branch paradigm, i.e., training a side network to encode visual conditions and fusing its intermediate-layer features to a frozen pretrained main network, has shown remarkable success in visual-condition controllable generation. Despite its widespread adoption, the role of the side branch and its training efficiency remain underexplored. In this paper, we first revisit this mainstream paradigm through the lens of score-based generative modeling: 1) The main network preserves visual perceptual quality by providing a prior unconditional score. 2) The side network steers conditional control by implicitly contributing a likelihood score. Guided by this perspective, we propose LIkelihood Score Alignment (LISA), an effective regularization method that explicitly aligns the intermediate feature of the side network with an approximated likelihood score. Specifically, we first hook features from a designated layer of the side network and project them into the score latent space by a lightweight decoder. Then, we construct an approximated likelihood score target and calculate the distance between the decoder's output and this target as an additional regularization loss. Finally, we jointly optimize the side network and decoder with both standard diffusion loss and our regularization loss. Experiments across various image/video tasks, architectures, and diffusion/flow models demonstrated that LISA can not only consistently accelerate the training convergence and improve final synthetic results, but also encourage the side network's features to be more disentangled for conditional modeling with negligible additional training cost and zero extra inference cost.
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The prevalent dual-branch paradigm, i.e., training a side network to encode visual conditions and fusing its intermediate-layer features to a frozen pretrained main network, has shown remarkable success in visual-condition controllable generation. Despite its widespread adoption, the role of the side branch and its training efficiency remain underexplored. In this paper, we first revisit this mainstream paradigm through the lens of score-based generative modeling: 1) The main network preserves visual perceptual quality by providing a prior unconditional score. 2) The side network steers conditional control by implicitly contributing a likelihood score. Guided by this perspective, we propose LIkelihood Score Alignment (LISA), an effective regularization method that explicitly aligns the intermediate feature of the side network with an approximated likelihood score. Specifically, we first hook features from a designated layer of the side network and project them into the score latent space by a lightweight decoder. Then, we construct an approximated likelihood score target and calculate the distance between the decoder's output and this target as an additional regularization loss. Finally, we jointly optimize the side network and decoder with both standard diffusion loss and our regularization loss. Experiments across various image/video tasks, architectures, and diffusion/flow models demonstrated that LISA can not only consistently accelerate the training convergence and improve final synthetic results, but also encourage the side network's features to be more disentangled for conditional modeling with negligible additional training cost and zero extra inference cost.
作者William Aiken, Paula Branco, Guy-Vincent Jourdan, Iosif-Viorel Onut
Noise-based backdoor attacks on diffusion models typically rely on input-time trigger injection, untargeted activation, and out-of-distribution target generation. Such assumptions reduce both the stealthiness and the practical relevance of these attacks. In this work, we present TEMPO-Diffusion, a targeted backdoor framework that localizes the malicious distribution shift to a temporal, in-distribution exposure. TEMPO-Diffusion supports: (i) targeted attacks on and to specific classes, (ii) multiple sub-image backdoors that reconstruct specific features within multiple, different output images and at multiple locations, and (iii) in-painting with time-conditioned triggers. To study relevant, practical security concerns in leveraging backdoored diffusion models for synthetic training data, we also introduce CALISA: a balanced, region-aware traffic-sign dataset emphasizing Canadian and U.S. road signs. Across CIFAR10, GTSRB, and CALISA, our experiments show that TEMPO-Diffusion can reliably poison class-specific synthetic data generation and induce high attack success rates in downstream classifiers trained on that data.
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Noise-based backdoor attacks on diffusion models typically rely on input-time trigger injection, untargeted activation, and out-of-distribution target generation. Such assumptions reduce both the stealthiness and the practical relevance of these attacks. In this work, we present TEMPO-Diffusion, a targeted backdoor framework that localizes the malicious distribution shift to a temporal, in-distribution exposure. TEMPO-Diffusion supports: (i) targeted attacks on and to specific classes, (ii) multiple sub-image backdoors that reconstruct specific features within multiple, different output images and at multiple locations, and (iii) in-painting with time-conditioned triggers. To study relevant, practical security concerns in leveraging backdoored diffusion models for synthetic training data, we also introduce CALISA: a balanced, region-aware traffic-sign dataset emphasizing Canadian and U.S. road signs. Across CIFAR10, GTSRB, and CALISA, our experiments show that TEMPO-Diffusion can reliably poison class-specific synthetic data generation and induce high attack success rates in downstream classifiers trained on that data.
Rating systems such as Elo serve as the gold standard for matchmaking in competitive chess. However, they inherently suffer from response lag due to their exclusive reliance on match outcomes, neglecting the granular quality of gameplay. Nevertheless, incorporating move-by-move information into rating adjustments presents a significant challenge given the substantial noise and the vastness of the game-state space. To address this, we propose the Drift-Diffusion-Enhanced Elo Rating System (DD-Elo), a novel skill assessment framework inspired by the drift diffusion model (DDM) from cognitive neuroscience. By modeling skill expression as a decision-making process, our model integrates move-level data to capture rapid skill fluctuations. We provide a rigorous mathematical derivation proving that DD-Elo maintains a bounded deviation from the traditional Elo system, ensuring theoretical alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DD-Elo adapts to skill changes faster than Elo. Our findings suggest that DD-Elo offers an explainable, highly responsive, and backward-compatible solution for chess rating ecosystems. The implementation code is publicly available at https://github.com/Aquila-zhou1/DD-Elo .
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Rating systems such as Elo serve as the gold standard for matchmaking in competitive chess. However, they inherently suffer from response lag due to their exclusive reliance on match outcomes, neglecting the granular quality of gameplay. Nevertheless, incorporating move-by-move information into rating adjustments presents a significant challenge given the substantial noise and the vastness of the game-state space. To address this, we propose the Drift-Diffusion-Enhanced Elo Rating System (DD-Elo), a novel skill assessment framework inspired by the drift diffusion model (DDM) from cognitive neuroscience. By modeling skill expression as a decision-making process, our model integrates move-level data to capture rapid skill fluctuations. We provide a rigorous mathematical derivation proving that DD-Elo maintains a bounded deviation from the traditional Elo system, ensuring theoretical alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DD-Elo adapts to skill changes faster than Elo. Our findings suggest that DD-Elo offers an explainable, highly responsive, and backward-compatible solution for chess rating ecosystems. The implementation code is publicly available at https://github.com/Aquila-zhou1/DD-Elo .
作者Miguel Angel Rogel Garcia, Phone Thiha Kyaw, Jonathan Kelly
Recent studies suggest that diffusion models can recover geometric structure in the data manifolds they are trained on, yet the supporting evidence has so far come mostly from natural-image data, where the underlying geometry itself is unknown. We study this question in a setting where the geometry is analytically tractable: constrained inverse kinematics (IK). Each task-space constraint defines a configuration-space manifold with known intrinsic dimension, giving direct ground truth for evaluating the geometry learned by the model. For each of the 6-DoF UR5 and 7-DoF Franka, we train a single conditional diffusion model across seven constraint families, spanning solution manifolds from discrete IK branches to self-motion manifolds. Our empirical results reveal that the intrinsic dimension recovered from the model's score function matches the analytical degrees of freedom of the corresponding constraint manifold across both robots. Moreover, linear interpolation in the latent space leads to generated solutions that remain close to the appropriate constraint manifold, indicating that the learned representation further captures geometric structure of the constraint family beyond intrinsic dimension alone. Constrained IK therefore offers a controlled setting for studying the intrinsic geometry learned by diffusion models.
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Recent studies suggest that diffusion models can recover geometric structure in the data manifolds they are trained on, yet the supporting evidence has so far come mostly from natural-image data, where the underlying geometry itself is unknown. We study this question in a setting where the geometry is analytically tractable: constrained inverse kinematics (IK). Each task-space constraint defines a configuration-space manifold with known intrinsic dimension, giving direct ground truth for evaluating the geometry learned by the model. For each of the 6-DoF UR5 and 7-DoF Franka, we train a single conditional diffusion model across seven constraint families, spanning solution manifolds from discrete IK branches to self-motion manifolds. Our empirical results reveal that the intrinsic dimension recovered from the model's score function matches the analytical degrees of freedom of the corresponding constraint manifold across both robots. Moreover, linear interpolation in the latent space leads to generated solutions that remain close to the appropriate constraint manifold, indicating that the learned representation further captures geometric structure of the constraint family beyond intrinsic dimension alone. Constrained IK therefore offers a controlled setting for studying the intrinsic geometry learned by diffusion models.
Sea state prediction is essential for operational maritime applications and coupled earth system modeling, yet current spectral wave models remain computationally prohibitive for many use cases, including online coupling to climate simulations and making probabilistic (ensemble-based) predictions. While deep learning has recently demonstrated strong performance in weather forecasting, existing AI-based wave models are predominantly deterministic and largely limited to bulk variables such as significant wave height, leaving probabilistic sea state estimation largely unexplored. In this work, we propose a diffusion-based generative model for global sea state estimation that conditions on a relatively long history (5 days) of global wind forcing. This generative model directly samples the complex conditional distribution of sea state without autoregressive time-stepping. Unlike prior approaches, our framework naturally extends beyond bulk variables to estimate partition-related variables and derived quantities, such as Stokes drift and mean square slope. Trained on a 30-year global WAVEWATCH-III hindcast, the model achieves substantial computational acceleration compared with numerical spectral models while delivering skillful predictions and a calibrated ensemble spread for the bulk variables. Our results suggest that diffusion-based sea state sampling offers a promising path toward probabilistic wave forecasting and efficient coupling of sea state information into broader earth system models.
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Sea state prediction is essential for operational maritime applications and coupled earth system modeling, yet current spectral wave models remain computationally prohibitive for many use cases, including online coupling to climate simulations and making probabilistic (ensemble-based) predictions. While deep learning has recently demonstrated strong performance in weather forecasting, existing AI-based wave models are predominantly deterministic and largely limited to bulk variables such as significant wave height, leaving probabilistic sea state estimation largely unexplored. In this work, we propose a diffusion-based generative model for global sea state estimation that conditions on a relatively long history (5 days) of global wind forcing. This generative model directly samples the complex conditional distribution of sea state without autoregressive time-stepping. Unlike prior approaches, our framework naturally extends beyond bulk variables to estimate partition-related variables and derived quantities, such as Stokes drift and mean square slope. Trained on a 30-year global WAVEWATCH-III hindcast, the model achieves substantial computational acceleration compared with numerical spectral models while delivering skillful predictions and a calibrated ensemble spread for the bulk variables. Our results suggest that diffusion-based sea state sampling offers a promising path toward probabilistic wave forecasting and efficient coupling of sea state information into broader earth system models.
Normalizing Flows (NFs) are powerful generative models capable of exact density estimation and sampling. However, their strict invertibility often forces the model to exhaust its capacity on low-level pixel details, hindering the capture of high-level semantic structures. While Masked Image Modeling (MIM) has excelled in representation learning, its integration into generative pipelines has remained largely modular and disjointed. In this paper, we propose MIMFlow, a unified end-to-end framework that jointly optimizes latent semantics, pixel reconstruction, and generative flow. By employing a VAE encoder to infer semantic latent from masked images, MIMFlow achieves a principled decoupling of the generative task: the Normalizing Flow focuses on modeling a simplified, low-frequency semantic manifold, while a specialized decoder handles high-frequency synthesis. This design effectively resolves the inherent capacity bottleneck of NFs, allowing the model to prioritize global structural coherence over redundant noise. Empirical results on ImageNet 256$\times$256 show that MIMFlow-L reaches 71.3% linear probing accuracy and an FID of 2.50. Despite using only 128 tokens (50% fewer than standard models), it yields a 32.8% performance gain over similar-scale NF baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/MIMFlow.
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Normalizing Flows (NFs) are powerful generative models capable of exact density estimation and sampling. However, their strict invertibility often forces the model to exhaust its capacity on low-level pixel details, hindering the capture of high-level semantic structures. While Masked Image Modeling (MIM) has excelled in representation learning, its integration into generative pipelines has remained largely modular and disjointed. In this paper, we propose MIMFlow, a unified end-to-end framework that jointly optimizes latent semantics, pixel reconstruction, and generative flow. By employing a VAE encoder to infer semantic latent from masked images, MIMFlow achieves a principled decoupling of the generative task: the Normalizing Flow focuses on modeling a simplified, low-frequency semantic manifold, while a specialized decoder handles high-frequency synthesis. This design effectively resolves the inherent capacity bottleneck of NFs, allowing the model to prioritize global structural coherence over redundant noise. Empirical results on ImageNet 256$\times$256 show that MIMFlow-L reaches 71.3% linear probing accuracy and an FID of 2.50. Despite using only 128 tokens (50% fewer than standard models), it yields a 32.8% performance gain over similar-scale NF baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/MIMFlow.
Microwave satellite imagery plays a crucial role in monitoring tropical cyclone precipitation and intensity worldwide, but suffers from long revisit times, potentially missing rapid storm evolution phases. While this raises the need for an interpolation method, it is made challenging by the high level of heterogeneity of microwave data coming from different instruments. In this work, we introduce the first generative model that can be applied to multiple geospatial sources that change across samples, occur at irregular time intervals, are misaligned geographically, and come from instruments with varying characteristics. We apply this model to the case of spatio-temporal interpolation of tropical cyclone microwave images from other microwave and infrared instruments. We train using a self-supervised task in which a random source is masked and reconstructed, and show that it leads to a significant decrease in Continuous Ranked Probability Score over supervised training. We show a further improvement by combining infrared and microwave data compared to microwave only. Using these improvements, the generative model produces an ensemble mean on par with that of a deterministic model, while generating a power spectrum significantly closer to that of true observations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first generative model that interpolates microwave images of cyclones by combining multiple microwave instruments and infrared observations at irregular time intervals.
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Microwave satellite imagery plays a crucial role in monitoring tropical cyclone precipitation and intensity worldwide, but suffers from long revisit times, potentially missing rapid storm evolution phases. While this raises the need for an interpolation method, it is made challenging by the high level of heterogeneity of microwave data coming from different instruments. In this work, we introduce the first generative model that can be applied to multiple geospatial sources that change across samples, occur at irregular time intervals, are misaligned geographically, and come from instruments with varying characteristics. We apply this model to the case of spatio-temporal interpolation of tropical cyclone microwave images from other microwave and infrared instruments. We train using a self-supervised task in which a random source is masked and reconstructed, and show that it leads to a significant decrease in Continuous Ranked Probability Score over supervised training. We show a further improvement by combining infrared and microwave data compared to microwave only. Using these improvements, the generative model produces an ensemble mean on par with that of a deterministic model, while generating a power spectrum significantly closer to that of true observations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first generative model that interpolates microwave images of cyclones by combining multiple microwave instruments and infrared observations at irregular time intervals.
We study linear TD(0) under Markovian sampling, where data are generated along a single trajectory. We provide high-probability guarantees for a plain unprojected TD(0) algorithm with Polyak-Ruppert (PR) averaging, using a single stepsize schedule $η_t \propto \frac{1}{τ_{\mathrm{mix}}\log(t)\sqrt{t}}$ that depends on the mixing time but requires no prior knowledge of the curvature parameter $ω$. Our first result shows that such a choice of the stepsize guarantees that the TD(0) iterates are automatically and uniformly bounded with high probability, without projections and without any stability argument based on $ω$. Building on this result, we establish a simultaneous high-probability convergence guarantee for the PR average: the same stepsize yields both a robust curvature-free $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}\!\left(\frac{τ_{\mathrm{mix}}}{\sqrt{T}}\right)$ rate and a fast curvature-dependent $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}\!\left(\frac{τ_{\mathrm{mix}}^2}{ωT}\right)$rate, with the bound taking the minimum of the two. The core technical ingredient is a Poisson-equation toolkit for geometrically mixing Markov chains, which decomposes Markov noise into a martingale term plus a controlled remainder and enables a new self-bounding inductive argument for pathwise stability.
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We study linear TD(0) under Markovian sampling, where data are generated along a single trajectory. We provide high-probability guarantees for a plain unprojected TD(0) algorithm with Polyak-Ruppert (PR) averaging, using a single stepsize schedule $η_t \propto \frac{1}{τ_{\mathrm{mix}}\log(t)\sqrt{t}}$ that depends on the mixing time but requires no prior knowledge of the curvature parameter $ω$. Our first result shows that such a choice of the stepsize guarantees that the TD(0) iterates are automatically and uniformly bounded with high probability, without projections and without any stability argument based on $ω$. Building on this result, we establish a simultaneous high-probability convergence guarantee for the PR average: the same stepsize yields both a robust curvature-free $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}\!\left(\frac{τ_{\mathrm{mix}}}{\sqrt{T}}\right)$ rate and a fast curvature-dependent $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}\!\left(\frac{τ_{\mathrm{mix}}^2}{ωT}\right)$rate, with the bound taking the minimum of the two. The core technical ingredient is a Poisson-equation toolkit for geometrically mixing Markov chains, which decomposes Markov noise into a martingale term plus a controlled remainder and enables a new self-bounding inductive argument for pathwise stability.
作者Thomas Fel, Matthew Kowal, Mozes Jacobs, Dron Hazra, Usha Bhalla, Lee Sharkey, Lucius Bushnaq, Satchel Grant, Tal Haklay, Thomas Icard, Can Rager, Michael Pearce, Daniel Wurgaft, Aiden Swann, Fenil Doshi, Siddharth Boppana, Curt Tigges, Nick Cammarata, Thomas Serre, Vasudev Shyam, Owen Lewis, Thomas McGrath, Jack Merullo, Ekdeep Singh Lubana, Atticus Geiger
What is the geometry of a visual percept? The most widely used protocols for decomposing neural network representations into interpretable parts treat concepts as isolated directions, yet recent work shows that concepts are often realized as geometric structures in low dimensional regions of activation space. We turn to the literature of Structured sparsity to close this gap, and show that block sparsity, which groups directions into blocks, is the prior matched to a generative model in which a representation is a sparse sum of low-dimensional manifolds: the modern, learned form of a classical idea in visual neuroscience, where a visual feature is carried by a coordinated group of neurons rather than a single tuned one. We implement three variants of block-sparse featurizers (BSFs) and, through a minimum-description-length analysis, show that all three describe activations more compactly than direction-based featurizers, with the recovered concepts typically two- to four-dimensional. We then use BSFs to (i) recontextualize prior work, showing that curve detectors in InceptionV1 actually read from a single continuous curve manifold, (ii) discover novel manifolds including shadows and lighting in DINOv3, and (iii) support interpretable control of image generation in diffusion models (SDXL) via manifold steering.
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What is the geometry of a visual percept? The most widely used protocols for decomposing neural network representations into interpretable parts treat concepts as isolated directions, yet recent work shows that concepts are often realized as geometric structures in low dimensional regions of activation space. We turn to the literature of Structured sparsity to close this gap, and show that block sparsity, which groups directions into blocks, is the prior matched to a generative model in which a representation is a sparse sum of low-dimensional manifolds: the modern, learned form of a classical idea in visual neuroscience, where a visual feature is carried by a coordinated group of neurons rather than a single tuned one. We implement three variants of block-sparse featurizers (BSFs) and, through a minimum-description-length analysis, show that all three describe activations more compactly than direction-based featurizers, with the recovered concepts typically two- to four-dimensional. We then use BSFs to (i) recontextualize prior work, showing that curve detectors in InceptionV1 actually read from a single continuous curve manifold, (ii) discover novel manifolds including shadows and lighting in DINOv3, and (iii) support interpretable control of image generation in diffusion models (SDXL) via manifold steering.
Autonomous aerial vehicles operating in shared airspace must predict the future positions of non-cooperative obstacles to plan evasive maneuvers before a collision becomes unavoidable. Unlike cooperative systems that share intent, non-cooperative obstacles such as birds, uncontrolled drones, or debris exhibit multi-modal motion that deterministic predictors cannot adequately represent. Existing methods either rely on recurrent encoders that propagate temporal information sequentially, limiting their ability to capture long-range kinematic precursors of maneuver initiation, or produce point forecasts that provide no distributional information to downstream planners. This paper presents AeroCast, a probabilistic trajectory prediction framework that combines a Transformer encoder with a Mixture Density Network output head to predict per-timestep Gaussian mixture distributions over future three-dimensional displacements. A translation-invariant consecutive displacement encoding and a calibration-oriented training objective address the input design and mode-degeneracy challenges specific to mixture-based aerial trajectory prediction. On a hybrid real-and-synthetic quadrotor corpus spanning nine motion categories, AeroCast reduces Average Displacement Error and Final Displacement Error by approximately 50% relative to the baselines over a five-second horizon, and achieves the lowest negative log-likelihood and Continuous Ranked Probability Score among all compared methods. Ablation analysis identifies velocity input and model capacity as the primary contributors to prediction quality, and positional encoding as essential for long-horizon trajectory coherence. AeroCast inference completes in 0.1ms per sample, compatible with real-time onboard deployment at 100Hz.
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Autonomous aerial vehicles operating in shared airspace must predict the future positions of non-cooperative obstacles to plan evasive maneuvers before a collision becomes unavoidable. Unlike cooperative systems that share intent, non-cooperative obstacles such as birds, uncontrolled drones, or debris exhibit multi-modal motion that deterministic predictors cannot adequately represent. Existing methods either rely on recurrent encoders that propagate temporal information sequentially, limiting their ability to capture long-range kinematic precursors of maneuver initiation, or produce point forecasts that provide no distributional information to downstream planners. This paper presents AeroCast, a probabilistic trajectory prediction framework that combines a Transformer encoder with a Mixture Density Network output head to predict per-timestep Gaussian mixture distributions over future three-dimensional displacements. A translation-invariant consecutive displacement encoding and a calibration-oriented training objective address the input design and mode-degeneracy challenges specific to mixture-based aerial trajectory prediction. On a hybrid real-and-synthetic quadrotor corpus spanning nine motion categories, AeroCast reduces Average Displacement Error and Final Displacement Error by approximately 50% relative to the baselines over a five-second horizon, and achieves the lowest negative log-likelihood and Continuous Ranked Probability Score among all compared methods. Ablation analysis identifies velocity input and model capacity as the primary contributors to prediction quality, and positional encoding as essential for long-horizon trajectory coherence. AeroCast inference completes in 0.1ms per sample, compatible with real-time onboard deployment at 100Hz.
Discrete flow matching (DFM) provides a principled framework for generative modeling on discrete state spaces via continuous-time Markov chain dynamics. In practice, sampling for DFM commonly employs discretizations such as $τ$-leaping, yet efficient sampling methods under a limited number of function evaluations (NFE) remain less studied. To address this gap, we propose the Time-Reparameterized Cumulative Intensity Extrapolation (TR-CIE) sampler, which aims to improve sampling quality when function evaluations are restricted. TR-CIE consists of two components. First, a schedule-based time reparameterization rescales the time grid according to the noise schedule. Under standard factorized DFM rate parameterizations, this transformation of variables absorbs the schedule-dependent growth term and mitigates stiffness near the terminal sampling stage. Second, we introduce a cumulative-intensity extrapolation updating rule. By reusing cached model outputs from the previous step as a history term, this improves the approximation of stepwise cumulative intensities on the resulting non-uniform time grid. We provide a theoretical analysis that bounds the local approximation error of cumulative intensities and establishes convergence results. The resulting sampler requires one NFE per step and introduces no additional model evaluations compared to the standard $τ$-leaping sampler. Extensive experiments on synthetic tasks, text generation, and text-to-image benchmarks demonstrate that our method improves sampling quality under limited NFE.
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Discrete flow matching (DFM) provides a principled framework for generative modeling on discrete state spaces via continuous-time Markov chain dynamics. In practice, sampling for DFM commonly employs discretizations such as $τ$-leaping, yet efficient sampling methods under a limited number of function evaluations (NFE) remain less studied. To address this gap, we propose the Time-Reparameterized Cumulative Intensity Extrapolation (TR-CIE) sampler, which aims to improve sampling quality when function evaluations are restricted. TR-CIE consists of two components. First, a schedule-based time reparameterization rescales the time grid according to the noise schedule. Under standard factorized DFM rate parameterizations, this transformation of variables absorbs the schedule-dependent growth term and mitigates stiffness near the terminal sampling stage. Second, we introduce a cumulative-intensity extrapolation updating rule. By reusing cached model outputs from the previous step as a history term, this improves the approximation of stepwise cumulative intensities on the resulting non-uniform time grid. We provide a theoretical analysis that bounds the local approximation error of cumulative intensities and establishes convergence results. The resulting sampler requires one NFE per step and introduces no additional model evaluations compared to the standard $τ$-leaping sampler. Extensive experiments on synthetic tasks, text generation, and text-to-image benchmarks demonstrate that our method improves sampling quality under limited NFE.
A growing family of training-free solvers — FlowDPS, FLOWER, PnP-Flow and their diffusion ancestors (DPS, DAPS) — repurpose a pretrained flow-matching prior to solve imaging inverse problems by adding a measurement-guidance term to the deterministic probability-flow ODE. Despite strong empirical results, what these per-step corrections actually approximate — and how far the resulting samples are from the true posterior $p(x\mid y)$ — has not been characterized. We give a posterior-transport account of flow-based inverse problem solving. Our starting point is a simple but consequential fact: for a deterministic flow prior, Bayesian conditioning is realized entirely by a reweighting of the source distribution, not by a drift correction; pushing the reweighted source through the unmodified velocity field yields exact posterior samples. From this we show that trajectory-guidance solvers can be read as the minimum-kinetic-energy correction field needed to morph the unconditional source into the posterior, and that FlowDPS / FLOWER / PnP-Flow correspond to distinct zeroth-order / Gaussian / proximal approximations of this single object; we bound the resulting posterior bias in Wasserstein distance. A controlled $2$D study with a closed-form posterior confirms the theory decisively: source reweighting matches the true posterior to the Monte-Carlo floor on every metric, whereas trajectory guidance incurs $200$--$800\times$ larger error and collapses posterior modes, regardless of guidance strength. Guided by the analysis we propose a cheap, principled velocity-correction solver that is competitive across two in-domain priors (AFHQ, CelebA) and two out-of-distribution settings while, unlike point-estimate source-space optimizers, producing diverse posterior samples with uncertainty that correlates with reconstruction error.
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A growing family of training-free solvers — FlowDPS, FLOWER, PnP-Flow and their diffusion ancestors (DPS, DAPS) — repurpose a pretrained flow-matching prior to solve imaging inverse problems by adding a measurement-guidance term to the deterministic probability-flow ODE. Despite strong empirical results, what these per-step corrections actually approximate — and how far the resulting samples are from the true posterior $p(x\mid y)$ — has not been characterized. We give a posterior-transport account of flow-based inverse problem solving. Our starting point is a simple but consequential fact: for a deterministic flow prior, Bayesian conditioning is realized entirely by a reweighting of the source distribution, not by a drift correction; pushing the reweighted source through the unmodified velocity field yields exact posterior samples. From this we show that trajectory-guidance solvers can be read as the minimum-kinetic-energy correction field needed to morph the unconditional source into the posterior, and that FlowDPS / FLOWER / PnP-Flow correspond to distinct zeroth-order / Gaussian / proximal approximations of this single object; we bound the resulting posterior bias in Wasserstein distance. A controlled $2$D study with a closed-form posterior confirms the theory decisively: source reweighting matches the true posterior to the Monte-Carlo floor on every metric, whereas trajectory guidance incurs $200$--$800\times$ larger error and collapses posterior modes, regardless of guidance strength. Guided by the analysis we propose a cheap, principled velocity-correction solver that is competitive across two in-domain priors (AFHQ, CelebA) and two out-of-distribution settings while, unlike point-estimate source-space optimizers, producing diverse posterior samples with uncertainty that correlates with reconstruction error.
作者Manan Agarwal, Sheel Shah, Chanhyuk Lee, Jaehoon Yoo, Jerry Huang, Seunghoon Hong, Aditi Raghunathan, Jinwoo Kim, Nicholas M. Boffi
Non-autoregressive generation offers a powerful paradigm for iterative refinement, allowing models to recursively critique, erase and regenerate arbitrary subsets of tokens. However, existing non-autoregressive models fail to realize this potential. Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) suffer from factorization error, causing sample quality to collapse when generating multiple tokens simultaneously. Flow Map Language Models (FMLMs) circumvent this bottleneck via joint sequence transport for excellent few-step generation, but sacrifice the inference-time flexibility of MDMs. We introduce FMLM+, a framework that bridges this gap by equipping FMLM with masking-style noise schedules. While generating the full sequence in a single step, FMLM+ simultaneously scores the global consistency of each token a posteriori. We leverage this to introduce Posterior Refinement, a novel inference-time refinement strategy that enables the model to adaptively self-correct its outputs, matching the performance of discrete baselines with 32x fewer NFEs. Across diverse benchmarks, we demonstrate that FMLM+ with Posterior Refinement improves the speed--quality tradeoff over both MDM and FMLM families, providing a scalable foundation for high-fidelity language modeling.
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Non-autoregressive generation offers a powerful paradigm for iterative refinement, allowing models to recursively critique, erase and regenerate arbitrary subsets of tokens. However, existing non-autoregressive models fail to realize this potential. Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) suffer from factorization error, causing sample quality to collapse when generating multiple tokens simultaneously. Flow Map Language Models (FMLMs) circumvent this bottleneck via joint sequence transport for excellent few-step generation, but sacrifice the inference-time flexibility of MDMs. We introduce FMLM+, a framework that bridges this gap by equipping FMLM with masking-style noise schedules. While generating the full sequence in a single step, FMLM+ simultaneously scores the global consistency of each token a posteriori. We leverage this to introduce Posterior Refinement, a novel inference-time refinement strategy that enables the model to adaptively self-correct its outputs, matching the performance of discrete baselines with 32x fewer NFEs. Across diverse benchmarks, we demonstrate that FMLM+ with Posterior Refinement improves the speed--quality tradeoff over both MDM and FMLM families, providing a scalable foundation for high-fidelity language modeling.
Diffusion models have achieved strong performance in image, text-to-image, and video generation, where conditional generation is often controlled by classifier-free guidance (CFG). CFG improves condition consistency by increasing a guidance weight, but stronger guidance typically reduces diversity and distributional coverage. It remains unclear how this consistency-coverage trade-off should be controlled across the reverse trajectory, since the distribution induced by CFG is not simply the fixed-time tilted distribution given by the guided score field. To address this issue, we propose an information-theoretic framework for CFG schedule optimization. Our approach uses a clean endpoint reference to specify the desired consistency-coverage trade-off, while optimizing the actual distribution induced by the guided sampler toward this reference. We derive trajectory-level formulas to estimate the objective from samples and score evaluations, avoiding explicit density estimation. On ImageNet-512 with EDM-XXL and COCO with SD-XL, the learned schedules achieve competitive or improved trade-offs over constant guidance and allocate guidance selectively across noise levels.
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Diffusion models have achieved strong performance in image, text-to-image, and video generation, where conditional generation is often controlled by classifier-free guidance (CFG). CFG improves condition consistency by increasing a guidance weight, but stronger guidance typically reduces diversity and distributional coverage. It remains unclear how this consistency-coverage trade-off should be controlled across the reverse trajectory, since the distribution induced by CFG is not simply the fixed-time tilted distribution given by the guided score field. To address this issue, we propose an information-theoretic framework for CFG schedule optimization. Our approach uses a clean endpoint reference to specify the desired consistency-coverage trade-off, while optimizing the actual distribution induced by the guided sampler toward this reference. We derive trajectory-level formulas to estimate the objective from samples and score evaluations, avoiding explicit density estimation. On ImageNet-512 with EDM-XXL and COCO with SD-XL, the learned schedules achieve competitive or improved trade-offs over constant guidance and allocate guidance selectively across noise levels.
作者Miso Kim, Georu Lee, Yunji Kim, Hoki Kim, Jinseong Park, Woojin Lee
Unlearning has emerged as a key technique to mitigate harmful content generation in diffusion models. However, existing methods often remove not only the target concept, but also benign co-occurring concepts. As illustrated in Fig.1, unlearning nudity can unintentionally suppress the concept of person, preventing a model from generating images with person. We define these undesirably suppressed co-occurring concepts that must be preserved CARE (Co-occurring Associated REtained concepts). Then, we introduce the CARE score, a general metric that directly quantifies their preservation across unlearning tasks. With this foundation, we propose ReCARE (Robust erasure for CARE), a framework that explicitly safeguards CARE while erasing only the target concept. ReCARE automatically constructs the CARE-set, a curated vocabulary of benign co-occurring tokens extracted from target images, and leverages this vocabulary during training for stable unlearning. Extensive experiments across various target concepts (Nudity, Van Gogh style, and Tench object) demonstrate that ReCARE achieves overall state-of-the-art performance in balancing robust concept erasure, overall utility, and CARE preservation.
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Unlearning has emerged as a key technique to mitigate harmful content generation in diffusion models. However, existing methods often remove not only the target concept, but also benign co-occurring concepts. As illustrated in Fig.1, unlearning nudity can unintentionally suppress the concept of person, preventing a model from generating images with person. We define these undesirably suppressed co-occurring concepts that must be preserved CARE (Co-occurring Associated REtained concepts). Then, we introduce the CARE score, a general metric that directly quantifies their preservation across unlearning tasks. With this foundation, we propose ReCARE (Robust erasure for CARE), a framework that explicitly safeguards CARE while erasing only the target concept. ReCARE automatically constructs the CARE-set, a curated vocabulary of benign co-occurring tokens extracted from target images, and leverages this vocabulary during training for stable unlearning. Extensive experiments across various target concepts (Nudity, Van Gogh style, and Tench object) demonstrate that ReCARE achieves overall state-of-the-art performance in balancing robust concept erasure, overall utility, and CARE preservation.
作者Sabrina Bodmer, René Zurbrügg, Tifanny Portela, Hao Ma, Alexandre Didier, Marco Hutter, Colin Jones, Melanie Zeilinger
Diffusion models sample effectively from high-dimensional, multimodal distributions, but their outputs may violate deployment constraints. For task-space robot policies, generated grasps, waypoints, or trajectories can be distributionally valid yet infeasible, violating reachability, collision-avoidance, or closed-loop executability requirements. This embodiment gap limits zero-shot deployment across robots, even when the task-space behavior itself is transferable. We propose an inference-time optimization framework that couples the behavior generation to physical feasibility by formulating diffusion guidance as a constrained optimization problem. Our key insight is to replace the sampling perturbation in the backward process with an optimized correction, allowing hard constraints or soft penalties to be imposed during sampling without the need to retrain the diffusion model, while keeping samples close to the learned prior. We evaluate the method on dexterous grasp synthesis with reachability and collision-avoidance constraints, and dynamic manipulation with controller-level trackability constraints. Across settings and robot embodiments, optimization-guided denoising matches the feasibility of projection- and gradient-guidance baselines while better preserving grasp quality, and improving controller-level executability and task success, with task success improving by up to 20pp. on dexterous grasping and 23pp. on visuomotor manipulation over the best baseline.
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Diffusion models sample effectively from high-dimensional, multimodal distributions, but their outputs may violate deployment constraints. For task-space robot policies, generated grasps, waypoints, or trajectories can be distributionally valid yet infeasible, violating reachability, collision-avoidance, or closed-loop executability requirements. This embodiment gap limits zero-shot deployment across robots, even when the task-space behavior itself is transferable. We propose an inference-time optimization framework that couples the behavior generation to physical feasibility by formulating diffusion guidance as a constrained optimization problem. Our key insight is to replace the sampling perturbation in the backward process with an optimized correction, allowing hard constraints or soft penalties to be imposed during sampling without the need to retrain the diffusion model, while keeping samples close to the learned prior. We evaluate the method on dexterous grasp synthesis with reachability and collision-avoidance constraints, and dynamic manipulation with controller-level trackability constraints. Across settings and robot embodiments, optimization-guided denoising matches the feasibility of projection- and gradient-guidance baselines while better preserving grasp quality, and improving controller-level executability and task success, with task success improving by up to 20pp. on dexterous grasping and 23pp. on visuomotor manipulation over the best baseline.
Recent breakthroughs in 3D generation have advanced notably with the development of text-to-image diffusion model. However, existing methods remain two practical challenges: (1) They primarily generate single 3D object, but struggle to generate multi-object compositional 3D assets due to the lack of the modeling for Gaussian primitives in reasonable interactions. (2) They often suffer from cross-view inconsistency during 3D optimization, as Score Distillation Sampling inherently performs on each single view, inevitably resulting in cross-view hallucinations. To solve above issues, we propose I2C-3D, a novel optimization-based method to generate multi-view consistent compositional 3D assets with reasonable interactions. Specifically, we propose an Inclusive Interactive Collisions strategy to guide Gaussian primitives appearing in reasonable interaction regions naturally, thereby ensuring objects in the compositional scene interact in a physically plausible and visually coherent way. Additionally, to enhance multi-view consistency, Multi-View Adaptive Score Distillation Sampling is devised to distill multi-view consistency prior and layout prior from pre-trained diffusion model by modulating attention map of instance token and spatial token across viewpoints. Benefiting from above elaborate designs, I2C-3D not only generates high-fidelity multi-view consistent compositional 3D assets but also supports 3D editing flexibly, facilitating complex scene generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate our I2C-3D outperforms existing methods in generation quality and multi-view consistency.
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Recent breakthroughs in 3D generation have advanced notably with the development of text-to-image diffusion model. However, existing methods remain two practical challenges: (1) They primarily generate single 3D object, but struggle to generate multi-object compositional 3D assets due to the lack of the modeling for Gaussian primitives in reasonable interactions. (2) They often suffer from cross-view inconsistency during 3D optimization, as Score Distillation Sampling inherently performs on each single view, inevitably resulting in cross-view hallucinations. To solve above issues, we propose I2C-3D, a novel optimization-based method to generate multi-view consistent compositional 3D assets with reasonable interactions. Specifically, we propose an Inclusive Interactive Collisions strategy to guide Gaussian primitives appearing in reasonable interaction regions naturally, thereby ensuring objects in the compositional scene interact in a physically plausible and visually coherent way. Additionally, to enhance multi-view consistency, Multi-View Adaptive Score Distillation Sampling is devised to distill multi-view consistency prior and layout prior from pre-trained diffusion model by modulating attention map of instance token and spatial token across viewpoints. Benefiting from above elaborate designs, I2C-3D not only generates high-fidelity multi-view consistent compositional 3D assets but also supports 3D editing flexibly, facilitating complex scene generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate our I2C-3D outperforms existing methods in generation quality and multi-view consistency.
Medical point cloud completion is important for anatomical reconstruction and downstream clinical workflows, yet generative modeling in this setting remains insufficiently studied. We investigate completion through continuous-time generative modeling and introduce PCFM, a PTv3-backed flow matching approach for medical point cloud completion. We evaluate on SkullFix and SkullBreak, and additionally on the more recent Mandibular Defect dataset. We build strong baselines by adapting PTv3 to a deterministic encoder-decoder completion model and by instantiating diffusion completion (PCDiff) with both PVCNN and PTv3 denoisers. PCFM with PTv3 is competitive with the deterministic PTv3 baseline and achieves state-of-the-art generative performance across datasets, while requiring substantially fewer sampling steps than diffusion. At the best operating points, PTv3 also yields clear throughput gains, providing up to a 7$\times$ speed-up for PCFM compared to a PVCNN backbone. Finally, we study empirical scaling trends by varying model size and point cardinality, showing consistent gains with higher point resolution and informative trade-offs across model scales.
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Medical point cloud completion is important for anatomical reconstruction and downstream clinical workflows, yet generative modeling in this setting remains insufficiently studied. We investigate completion through continuous-time generative modeling and introduce PCFM, a PTv3-backed flow matching approach for medical point cloud completion. We evaluate on SkullFix and SkullBreak, and additionally on the more recent Mandibular Defect dataset. We build strong baselines by adapting PTv3 to a deterministic encoder-decoder completion model and by instantiating diffusion completion (PCDiff) with both PVCNN and PTv3 denoisers. PCFM with PTv3 is competitive with the deterministic PTv3 baseline and achieves state-of-the-art generative performance across datasets, while requiring substantially fewer sampling steps than diffusion. At the best operating points, PTv3 also yields clear throughput gains, providing up to a 7$\times$ speed-up for PCFM compared to a PVCNN backbone. Finally, we study empirical scaling trends by varying model size and point cardinality, showing consistent gains with higher point resolution and informative trade-offs across model scales.
The space $\mathcal{P}_2(\mathbb{R}^d$) of probability measures with finite second moment carries a natural geometry: the quadratic Wasserstein distance W_2 makes it a complete metric space and, following Otto, a (formal) Riemannian manifold whose geodesics are the optimal-transport interpolations. On this manifold, the gradient flow of the free energy F(rho) = KL(rho || π) is exactly the Fokker-Planck equation, and its implicit-Euler discretization is the JKO scheme. This is the geometry underlying diffusion models: the forward process descends the free energy, and each denoising step realizes one JKO step, which recovers DDPM, DDIM, NCSN/SMLD, and Energy Matching; this is one scheme, not separate theories. The same manifold supports a second variational principle. Its geodesics - the minimum-action curves of the Benamou-Brenier formula - are precisely the optimal-transport paths that Flow Matching learns. Fixing both endpoints and following the geodesic, generation becomes a deterministic ODE along a straight line, hence far fewer sampling steps. Placing both families of models on one manifold makes their relationship exact: diffusion follows a free-energy gradient flow, an initial-value problem; optimal-transport Flow Matching follows a Wasserstein geodesic, a boundary-value problem. The two reach the same endpoints along different paths.
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The space $\mathcal{P}_2(\mathbb{R}^d$) of probability measures with finite second moment carries a natural geometry: the quadratic Wasserstein distance W_2 makes it a complete metric space and, following Otto, a (formal) Riemannian manifold whose geodesics are the optimal-transport interpolations. On this manifold, the gradient flow of the free energy F(rho) = KL(rho || π) is exactly the Fokker-Planck equation, and its implicit-Euler discretization is the JKO scheme. This is the geometry underlying diffusion models: the forward process descends the free energy, and each denoising step realizes one JKO step, which recovers DDPM, DDIM, NCSN/SMLD, and Energy Matching; this is one scheme, not separate theories. The same manifold supports a second variational principle. Its geodesics - the minimum-action curves of the Benamou-Brenier formula - are precisely the optimal-transport paths that Flow Matching learns. Fixing both endpoints and following the geodesic, generation becomes a deterministic ODE along a straight line, hence far fewer sampling steps. Placing both families of models on one manifold makes their relationship exact: diffusion follows a free-energy gradient flow, an initial-value problem; optimal-transport Flow Matching follows a Wasserstein geodesic, a boundary-value problem. The two reach the same endpoints along different paths.
Motivated by an application in machine learning optimization, this paper focuses on the challenges of sampling a matrix uniformly from the unit spectral norm ball. It is proven that all singular values of sampled matrices converge to 1 almost surely as the matrix dimensions increase. This result provides the theoretical justification for a proposed simple sampling method applicable for large dimension sizes matching matrices found in modern large language models. Experimental results demonstrate both the convergence of the singular values, as well as the exact and proposed approximate sampling methods.
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Motivated by an application in machine learning optimization, this paper focuses on the challenges of sampling a matrix uniformly from the unit spectral norm ball. It is proven that all singular values of sampled matrices converge to 1 almost surely as the matrix dimensions increase. This result provides the theoretical justification for a proposed simple sampling method applicable for large dimension sizes matching matrices found in modern large language models. Experimental results demonstrate both the convergence of the singular values, as well as the exact and proposed approximate sampling methods.
There has been rapid progress in generative artificial intelligence (AI) models for inorganic crystal design, which can efficiently generate large numbers of candidate compounds after being trained on databases of known crystals. However, it remains unclear whether they genuinely expand the accessible materials search space beyond conventional strategies such as elemental substitution within known structure types. We address this question by developing a workflow to assess whether AI-generated crystals are duplicates of training structures, reproducible by elemental substitution, or unmatched by either criterion. Applying this workflow to representative generative models reveals that 81-92% of chemically valid and metastable generated crystals are either training duplicates or substitution-derived structures. This tendency is particularly strong in high-symmetry crystal systems, even though many possible structural prototypes remain unexplored. Further analysis of the underlying structural fingerprints shows that low-symmetry structures beyond duplication or substitution can be interpreted as interpolation in training-data-rich regions, while high-symmetry duplicates appear to result from memorisation in training-sparse regions. Our findings highlight a limitation in the current generation of models that exhibit a bias towards known structural prototypes in the high symmetry regions, but enable wider exploration of the low-symmetry structural space.
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There has been rapid progress in generative artificial intelligence (AI) models for inorganic crystal design, which can efficiently generate large numbers of candidate compounds after being trained on databases of known crystals. However, it remains unclear whether they genuinely expand the accessible materials search space beyond conventional strategies such as elemental substitution within known structure types. We address this question by developing a workflow to assess whether AI-generated crystals are duplicates of training structures, reproducible by elemental substitution, or unmatched by either criterion. Applying this workflow to representative generative models reveals that 81-92% of chemically valid and metastable generated crystals are either training duplicates or substitution-derived structures. This tendency is particularly strong in high-symmetry crystal systems, even though many possible structural prototypes remain unexplored. Further analysis of the underlying structural fingerprints shows that low-symmetry structures beyond duplication or substitution can be interpreted as interpolation in training-data-rich regions, while high-symmetry duplicates appear to result from memorisation in training-sparse regions. Our findings highlight a limitation in the current generation of models that exhibit a bias towards known structural prototypes in the high symmetry regions, but enable wider exploration of the low-symmetry structural space.
The exact computation of the Normalized Maximum Likelihood (NML) codelength for regular non-smooth estimators (e.g., Lasso) has been historically limited by the cubic scaling walls of manifold-constrained projection and volume integration. At each step of the geometric Propose-and-Project Metropolis--Hastings (PPMH) sampler, evaluating the projection operator requires inverting an $(N+k) \times (N+k)$ generalized KKT matrix, while calculating the volume factor requires the determinant of an $(N-k) \times (N-k)$ Gram matrix. This paper presents an exact, mathematically equivalent formulation that bypasses both bottlenecks by utilizing the block Schur complement and Sylvester's determinant identity. We prove that the computational complexity of both operations collapses from $\mathcal{O}(N^3)$ to $\mathcal{O}(k^3 + N^2 k)$ per step. We generalize this reduction to Sparse Support Vector Machines (SVMs), Elastic Net, and Group Lasso. Finally, we provide a rigorous numerical stability analysis and evaluate the sampler's efficiency using the Effective Sample Size (ESS) per second. Our empirical benchmarks on high-dimensional datasets confirm a constant speedup exceeding $14{,}100\times$ while maintaining double-precision numerical equivalence, rendering exact non-smooth NML estimation highly tractable for large-scale statistical inference.
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The exact computation of the Normalized Maximum Likelihood (NML) codelength for regular non-smooth estimators (e.g., Lasso) has been historically limited by the cubic scaling walls of manifold-constrained projection and volume integration. At each step of the geometric Propose-and-Project Metropolis--Hastings (PPMH) sampler, evaluating the projection operator requires inverting an $(N+k) \times (N+k)$ generalized KKT matrix, while calculating the volume factor requires the determinant of an $(N-k) \times (N-k)$ Gram matrix. This paper presents an exact, mathematically equivalent formulation that bypasses both bottlenecks by utilizing the block Schur complement and Sylvester's determinant identity. We prove that the computational complexity of both operations collapses from $\mathcal{O}(N^3)$ to $\mathcal{O}(k^3 + N^2 k)$ per step. We generalize this reduction to Sparse Support Vector Machines (SVMs), Elastic Net, and Group Lasso. Finally, we provide a rigorous numerical stability analysis and evaluate the sampler's efficiency using the Effective Sample Size (ESS) per second. Our empirical benchmarks on high-dimensional datasets confirm a constant speedup exceeding $14{,}100\times$ while maintaining double-precision numerical equivalence, rendering exact non-smooth NML estimation highly tractable for large-scale statistical inference.
Recent advances in quantum machine learning have motivated efficient models for sequential data processing. In this paper, we propose Self-Modulating Quantum Fast Weight Programmers, or Self-Modulating QFWP, which extends Quantum Fast Weight Programmers by introducing adaptive modulation over both newly generated fast-weight updates and historical fast-weight memory. Numerical results show that the proposed mechanism improves convergence stability and prediction performance across varying model settings, including different numbers of qubits and input sequence lengths. We further provide theoretical arguments explaining how self-modulation balances new information injection with memory retention, thereby enhancing temporal information propagation. These results suggest that Self-Modulating QFWP is a compact and effective framework for quantum machine learning on time-series data.
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Recent advances in quantum machine learning have motivated efficient models for sequential data processing. In this paper, we propose Self-Modulating Quantum Fast Weight Programmers, or Self-Modulating QFWP, which extends Quantum Fast Weight Programmers by introducing adaptive modulation over both newly generated fast-weight updates and historical fast-weight memory. Numerical results show that the proposed mechanism improves convergence stability and prediction performance across varying model settings, including different numbers of qubits and input sequence lengths. We further provide theoretical arguments explaining how self-modulation balances new information injection with memory retention, thereby enhancing temporal information propagation. These results suggest that Self-Modulating QFWP is a compact and effective framework for quantum machine learning on time-series data.