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arXiv AI Papers

Learning Discriminative Geometry for Drifting Models

Recently proposed Drifting Models shift iterative distribution refinement from inference to training, enabling effective one-step generation. However, their performance on complex image datasets depends strongly on the representation used to construct the drifting field: pixel-space drifting performs poorly, whereas pretrained feature spaces substantially improve sample quality for reasons that remain unclear. We trace this gap to the discriminative geometry of the representation, which determines sample weighting in kernel density estimation (KDE) and, consequently drift. We introduce persistent representation learning, which continuously learns a more discriminative representation geometry as the generator evolves across batches. We further establish a current-step gradient equivalence between the KDE ratio loss and drift regression loss under matched conditions, connecting density-ratio-based generator optimization to empirical drifting and motivating direct control of the drifting velocity. Across multiple datasets, our method learns effective discriminative representations directly from pixels and reduces FID by approximately 82-95\% over the original pixel-space Drifting Models, without pretrained encoders. Adapting pretrained representations and applying velocity clipping provide further gains.

arXiv AI Papers

Score-Calibrated Flow for Sampling from Unnormalized Densities with Applications to Generative Online Reinforcement Learning

Diffusion and flow models provide expressive policy classes for online reinforcement learning (RL), enabling multimodal behaviors and improved performance. However, training these policies remains challenging: the critic specifies the desired policy as an unnormalized Boltzmann density but does not provide direct samples from it. Many existing methods rely on importance sampling to construct training signals, which can suffer from high variance, increasing computational cost and destabilizing training. We propose Score-Calibrated Flow (SCF), a simple and efficient algorithm for training generative models to sample from unnormalized densities without importance sampling or backpropagation through the sampling trajectory. We learn the desired flow by enforcing self-consistency, bypassing target posterior mean estimation. By jointly exploiting the prescribed target score and the structure of flow matching, we establish these self-consistency requirements as score-calibrated optimality conditions, first for the terminal density and then for the trainable velocity field. We prove that their unique solutions are, respectively, the target density and the ideal flow model that conditional flow matching (CFM) would recover if target samples were available. We formulate the velocity condition as a fixed-point equation and exploit its conditional-expectation structure to construct a stop-gradient objective for enforcing it. The resulting training procedure retains the scalable sample-interpolate-regress structure of CFM despite the absence of target samples, using endpoints generated by the current flow. For online RL, the critic gradient supplies the target score at the generated actions, yielding a direct approach to actor training. Experiments on RL benchmarks demonstrate that SCF matches or improves upon state-of-the-art generative-policy baselines, while substantially reducing training time.

arXiv AI Papers

Asking the Crowd the Right Question: Bias-Cancelling Weights for Federated Learning

A federated objective is a weighted sum of client risks, and the weights are almost always fixed in advance. We treat them instead as the only instrument of a wisdom-of-crowds mechanism: clients are noisy views of one truth, each seeing it through an independent distortion that is unbiased across the crowd. That the optimal weights are inversely proportional to the clients' error energies is classical; we begin at the question that answer presupposes, which energies belong there and whether a crowd can recover them from itself. Excess risk on the truth is of the exact order of the aggregate bias energy, so no optimizer can repair a bad weight vector; the truth itself is identifiable only up to a linear tilt, so subtracting estimated client biases provably reproduces uniform weighting. The expected per-client second moments, however, are exactly identified from the law of the crowd's disagreement by a well-conditioned linear inversion, a step random-effects meta-analysis cannot take because a source reports once; their realized counterparts are estimable up to an incoherence floor the algorithm can measure. This yields CROWD, which reads the disagreement off the optimization trajectory at no extra cost and matches a Bayesian minimax lower bound in the same constant: per instance as the horizon grows, and unconditionally as the prior becomes diffuse. For arbitrary distortions it stays competitive with the optimal weights, at a ratio governed by a geometric incoherence the algorithm can measure. On real scans split into sites with their own miscalibrated detectors it attains the oracle excess risk; on a companion federation that pulls bias and noise apart, weighting by noise variance is worse than not weighting at all, and CROWD is not.

arXiv AI Papers

Efficient Neural Surrogates for Linear Radiation Transport on the Lattice and Hohlraum benchmarks

Linear radiation transport equations (RTEs) form the simulation foundations underpinning design and analysis tasks in nuclear engineering, inertial confinement fusion, medical imaging, and astrophysics, but resolving the high-dimensional phase space at engineering fidelity remains expensive enough that outer-loop workflows, such as design optimization, uncertainty quantification, and parameter sweeps, are routinely budget-bound on traditional solvers. Neural surrogates promise to relax this bottleneck by amortizing simulation cost across thousands of downstream queries, but the architectural choices and engineered inductive biases that make a surrogate accurate on one transport problem do not transfer straightforwardly across model families. We benchmark two parameter-matched neural surrogate architectures, the physics-attention Transolver and the multi-scale graph network Bi-Stride Multi-Scale MeshGraphNet (BSMS-MGN), as end-to-end approximations of the final-time particle concentration for the two-dimensional linear RTE on the canonical Lattice and Hohlraum benchmarks. An ablation across Fourier features and region-weighted training loss exposes strongly architecture-dependent inductive-bias preferences, indicating that design choices common to physics-informed surrogate workflows must be revisited per architecture rather than imported across model families, and that downstream utility depends on per-QoI sensitivity rather than a single field-level score. The model training recipe, training data, and evaluation pipeline are released alongside this paper to support reproduction, transfer to related transport problems, and evaluation as amortized forward-model components in larger outer-loop simulation workflows.

arXiv AI Papers

PermVLA: Factorization Order as a Regularizer for VLA Learning

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies commonly learn action chunks through a fixed left-to-right (LTR) factorization, although the same expert trajectory distribution admits many valid chain-rule factorizations. We identify factorization order as an overlooked regularization choice and introduce causally anchored permutation (CAP), which samples action reveal orders with a tunable chronological prefix. Its auxiliary objective trains one shared policy to predict actions from different known subsets of the same expert chunk, while deployment retains deterministic LTR control. We call this conditional-set augmentation: it creates multiple conditional prediction problems from one expert chunk without adding demonstrations. This discourages reliance on the single chronological prefix used by ordinary teacher forcing. Controlled experiments show that CAP consistently outperforms standard LTR training on LIBERO and LIBERO-Plus, with the same advantage appearing in cross-dataset CALVIN evaluation. A diagnostic that measures the expected squared difference between a chunk's joint log likelihood under two reveal orders verifies that CAP training internalizes agreement across reveal orders. These findings position sampled subset-conditioned auxiliary objectives as a general recipe for constructing VLA regularizers, illustrated by an extension to diffusion action generators.

arXiv AI Papers

Backward-Consistent Diffusion Sampling for Sparsely Observed PDE Inverse Problems

Recovering Partial Differential Equation (PDE) coefficient fields from extremely sparse observations is a severely ill-posed inverse problem for which generative machine learning methods (e.g., diffusion models) have become a leading way to encode the prior. Recent state-of-the-art diffusion solvers lift these priors to function spaces, finding a physics-consistent reconstruction in the output space of the diffusion denoiser. We prove that, in a discontinuous PDE setting, output space methods can result in failure to appropriately minimize the unobserved error with the correct coefficient field. Consequently, we propose Function space Backward-Consistent Sampling (FunBCS), an input space optimization approach for solving PDE problems which aims to find the best input such that the denoiser reconstruction is physics-consistent. We then prove that FunBCS appropriately minimizes the unobserved error, unlike output space optimization methods. Per our theoretical analysis, we also provide insights on how to dynamically allocate the number of input space optimization steps used throughout the sampling process. Our evaluations, across four PDE inverse problems (including the discontinuous Darcy flow), demonstrate that FunBCS reduces the reconstruction error by 27-64\% while running 1.4-2.1faster when compared to the current state-of-the-art.

arXiv AI Papers

ConEx: Human-Interpretable Saliency Maps via Concept-Aware Attribution

Many visual explanation methods in computer vision highlight pixel importance but struggle to link these low-level cues to semantically meaningful concepts, limiting their interpretability and trustworthiness. We introduce Concept-based Explanations (ConEx), a novel framework that bridges saliency visualization with concept-based reasoning to provide both faithfulness and interpretability. ConEx automatically discovers class-specific concepts and represents them through concept activation vectors (CAVs), learned without manual supervision using an architecture-specific masking mechanism that reduces noise introduced by the segmentation masks to enhance concept purity. ConEx generates faithful saliency maps that reveal where each concept appears in the image and how it contributes to the prediction. To evaluate the reliability of these learned concepts, we propose two complementary metrics, Vector-Concept Match (VCM) and Concept-Class Match (CCM), that quantify concept alignment and enable direct comparison with existing methods. Extensive experiments across diverse settings demonstrate that ConEx achieves state-of-the-art performance on faithfulness, segmentation, and concept-quality benchmarks. Overall, ConEx advances the field toward truly interpretable and concept-grounded explanations in vision models.

arXiv AI Papers

WASP: Weakly Aligned Spatiotemporal Pairs for Fetal Brain MRI-Ultrasound Learning

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is widely regarded as the optimal sensor for fetal brain analysis due to its superior soft-tissue contrast and anatomical detail. However, its high cost and operational burden make it invasive and difficult to obtain at scale. Ultrasound (US), in contrast, is cheap, safe, and routinely acquired, and as a result it has produced substantially larger datasets and a growing ecosystem of pretrained models. This asymmetry raises a natural question: Can we teach a US-only model to understand fetal MRI from only a limited set of examples? The standard recipe, training a foundation model on subject-to-subject paired MRI-US scans, is not viable since no such paired fetal dataset is publicly available. In this paper we address this gap with Weakly Aligned Spatiotemporal Pairs (WASP), a framework that formulates cross-modal correspondence as an entropic Optimal Transport problem driven by clinical metadata, in particular Gestational Age (GA) and diagnostic planes, enabling the fitting of a lightweight alignment module that lifts MRI representations into the US latent space, without fine-tuning the backbone. Empirically, WASP yields its largest gains when MRI is unseen by the model during pretraining (on USFM, GA estimation error drops from 21.9 to 17.4 days and standard plane classification accuracy climbs from 61.9% to 69.0%), while providing smaller, backbone-dependent refinements for backbones pretrained on both modalities (e.g., BioMedParse GA estimation error from 6.5 to 6.0 days and SAM-Med2d plane accuracy from 83.3% to 88.1%). Code is available at https://github.com/miccunifi/WASP.

arXiv AI Papers

4DCodeBench: Benchmarking Agents on Inverse Graphics of Dynamic Scenes

We introduce 4DCodeBench, a benchmark for 4D inverse graphics through code generation, in which agents reconstruct dynamic scenes from video as executable graphics programs. To accomplish this, agents must translate visual observations into compact representations of scene structure and dynamics, by implementing abstractions such as physical simulations to reproduce complex behavior. To evaluate this capability, we curate a set of real-world videos and construct synthetic scenes spanning diverse physical phenomena, including deformation, fluid flow, and fracture. We perform extensive benchmarking of frontier models, finding that strong static reconstruction capabilities do not yet translate into reliable reconstruction of complex dynamics. 4DCodeBench provides a testbed for tracking progress toward agents that can interpret the dynamics of the world through code. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/4DCodeBench/4DCodeBench

arXiv AI Papers

EyeRobot 2.0: Active Gaze for Precise Manipulation without Wrist Cameras

Inspired by human vision, we introduce a framework using active gaze to enable fine-grained bimanual manipulation with only a single stereo camera. EyeRobot 2.0 physically attends to a 3D fixation point in the scene by swiveling two eye viewpoints to center their gaze on it. The resulting images are processed foveally by allocating more visual tokens to the image centers, focusing computation on task-relevant features. Such Active Visual Fixation (AVF) requires carefully coordinated gaze during task execution, which we accomplish hierarchically by first training a low-level gaze servoing policy conditioned on a goal object, then training a target selector which emits fixation goals based on task progress. Both modules are trained with RL on real-world data: the first is trained with a dense geometric reward and the second co-trains with the BC gripper policy which allows it to discover fixation sequences that can resemble a human's fixation sequence while performing the task. EyeRobot 2.0 further takes advantage of fixation by canonicalizing gripper information into a fixation-relative SE(3) frame, which compacts the size of the action distribution to learn. We collect teleoperation data for 7 real-world and 6 simulated tasks, and conduct over 1000 physical and 1800 simulated robot trials comparing EyeRobot 2.0 against passive stereo and ego + wrist camera policies trained on the same data. Removing wrist cameras is costly for standard policies: with only passive stereo, real-world success drops from 52% to 27%. EyeRobot 2.0 closes this gap with only stereo, outperforming passive stereo by 40% in real and 20% in sim. It matches ego + wrist policies when their wrist views are clear (69% vs. 64%), and more than doubles their success when grasped objects occlude the wrist cameras (48% vs. 22%)

arXiv AI Papers

Pivot-SD: Efficient Self-Distillation for Masked Diffusion Language Models

Masked diffusion language models (dLMs) offer a promising parallel alternative to autoregressive models for complex reasoning. However, they face a distinct credit-assignment challenge, since a few commitments during denoising sharply reduce the uncertainty over the remaining masked positions and shape much of the response. Most post-training recipes for dLMs do not use this signal to decide which tokens to train on: they typically train on the final text or assign rewards to whole denoising steps, rather than selecting the individual commitments that shape the response. We introduce Pivot-SD, an efficient offline self-distillation framework that supervises only these high-impact commitments (pivots). Pivot-SD selects pivots using an information-gain metric measuring uncertainty reduction over the remaining masked positions. Pivots from successful trajectories are trained with cross-entropy, and pivots from failed trajectories with targeted unlikelihood, leaving the rest of the failed trajectory untouched. Using only 200 questions and four rollouts each, Pivot-SD improves LLaDA-8B-Instruct over full-sequence SFT and budget-matched diffusion RL baselines across math and code benchmarks.

arXiv AI Papers

On-Board Anomaly Detection for Efficient Marine Environmental Monitoring

Marine ecosystems are impacted by various threats such as oil spills, algal blooms, and sediment floods, which disrupt habitats, wildlife, and human activities. Advances in satellite imagery and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have enhanced our capabilities for early detection and mitigation of such hazards. In this paper, we propose a marine event detection pipeline for Earth observation satellites equipped with multi- or hyperspectral sensors. Our approach includes a self-supervised neural network encoder that compresses satellite images into a reduced latent space, enabling efficient onboard processing. A machine learning anomaly detection model identifies deviations from normal sea patterns to detect environmental anomalies. We compare its performance against traditional algorithms such as Isolation Forest, One-Class Support Vector Machine and Local Outlier Factors. Our lightweight, resource-efficient pipeline is optimized for deployment on satellites with limited computational resources, ranging from embedded CPUs to AI hardware accelerators. By prioritizing the transmission of critical information, our solution enhances system responsiveness and optimizes satellite communication bandwidth. Demonstrated through current integration across multiple missions, including European Space Agency's (ESA) Phisat-2 mission and Microsoft/Thales Alenia Space IMAGIN-e mission, our pipeline aims to improve marine environmental monitoring by providing timely alerts and efficient data reduction.

arXiv AI Papers

IDRF: Inverse-Distilled Reward Fine-tuning of Masked Discrete Diffusion Models

Masked discrete diffusion models offer a promising alternative to autoregressive generation, but iterative sampling can be costly, and intractable sequence likelihoods complicate reward fine-tuning. We introduce IDRF, a framework for reward fine-tuning of few-step masked discrete diffusion generators. Starting from a standard reverse-KL-regularized objective, IDRF replaces the intractable sequence-level KL penalty with inverse-distillation regularization. With an optimal auxiliary denoiser, we prove that the population inverse-distillation loss upper-bounds the sequence-level KL divergence to the reference distribution. IDRF optimizes a trajectory-based surrogate of this loss without reference-model rollouts, so the student keeps its own few-step sampler. We view few-step generation as a finite-horizon Markov decision process and optimize reward with a clipped policy-gradient objective over the student's trajectories. Across DNA, image, and text generation, IDRF achieves high reward with up to 32fewer denoising steps than the reference while mitigating reward hacking and preserving sample quality.

arXiv AI Papers

LoGo: Local-Global Rewards for Consistent Long-Horizon Video Generation

Camera-controlled video models are rapidly advancing toward long generation horizons and complex camera control. A key failure mode is 3D inconsistency: as the camera moves, objects lose permanence and scene structures shift. Existing post-training techniques, which assign a single scalar reward to the entire generation, are poorly suited to correcting these inconsistencies over long horizons. We introduce LoGo, which blends global and spatially localized rewards for camera-controlled video models. The local reward provides fine-grained credit assignment, which substantially improves 3D consistency, while the global reward preserves camera following and video quality. Across three base models, LoGo shows a clear advantage on DL3DV and TrajectoryBench, a new benchmark for long-horizon, complex-camera-control generation that current evaluations lack. LoGo effectively reduces local object shifts, artifacts, and global scene changes, illustrating the importance of credit assignment in post-training video models. Project website: https://ziqi-ma.github.io/logo-website/

arXiv AI Papers

World Embedding Benchmark

Physical fidelity has received increasing attention in world models and video generation, yet how video representations encode physical information remains less understood. We introduce the World Embedding Benchmark, comprising 8,000 controlled simulation cases from 80 families spanning fluid mechanics, solid mechanics, dynamics, and optics & electromagnetism. Each case pairs a rendered video with simulation-derived physical annotations, supporting three complementary tasks: text-video retrieval, physical-property regression, and multiple-choice video-description pair classification. We use these tasks to distinguish cross-modal physical alignment from the recoverability of quantitative physical information. Evaluated pre-trained omnimodal embedding models show weak retrieval and near-chance within-family pair classification, while lightweight probes recover useful physical information from frozen video embeddings. Continual contrastive training with physics-specific video-text pairs improves retrieval and pair classification but degrades physical-property regression, revealing a trade-off between alignment and quantitative information recoverability. Finally, we use the embeddings to retrieve reference videos for retrieval-augmented generation with MiniMax-H3. Retrieved references improve the physical fidelity of generated videos, with stronger retrieval models yielding larger gains in our experiments. Together, these findings highlight the need to evaluate physical alignment and property recoverability jointly, and demonstrate the utility of physical representations for improving video generation.

arXiv AI Papers

Depth as Time in One-Step Generative Models

The recent wave of one-step generative models, which compress the multi-step trajectory of diffusion via either distillation or learned flow maps, has reached an inflection point where they can generate high-quality images. Here, we ask a natural question that follows from these advances: what happens to the denoising trajectory of multi-step diffusion when generation is compressed into a single forward pass? We offer an empirical observation we call depth as time: the denoising computation that multi-step diffusion performs across sampling steps appears to unfold across the depth of a single forward pass, and can be recovered by decoding intermediate layers with the model's own output head. Most interestingly, we show that this depthwise computation depends on the transport task a flow map is trained to solve. The most surprising case is MeanFlow, where probing shorter transport intervals reveals both denoising and renoising within a single network evaluation. In contrast, generators trained without a time-indexed transport task, such as drifting models, do not exhibit the same depthwise denoising. Consequently, we show that models that exhibit the depthwise denoising phenomenon are more compressible across the layerwise computation: a MeanFlow SiT-L/2 model can be compressed by 16.6in parameters into a single time-conditioned block. We offer an explanation for this denoise-then-renoise behavior and show that, when we treat the layerwise computation explicitly as a flow, a single time-conditioned block can be trained to denoise across layers, compressing a MeanFlow SiT-L/2 model by 16.6in parameters. Together, these results suggest that the temporal computation of diffusion is not eliminated by one-step generation, but reorganized across network depth.

arXiv AI Papers

Low-Cost Video--Time Priors as a Strong Baseline for EEG--fNIRS Emotion Regression on Familiar Videos

Continuous emotion regression estimates moment-to-moment valence and arousal while a viewer watches a video. In familiar-video deployment, responses fron training participant-specific estimate, and prior-dominating fixed fusion tests whether physiology adds residual correction. In five-fold subject-held-out evaluation on 24was within 0.05 and 0.32 MAE of fusion in the internal and external evaluations, respectively. Source-explicit ablations showed that video identity and within-video tine accounted for most of the reduction, while EG-FNIRS gains were smaller and varied across participants and videos. These results identify the video-time prior as a strong, low-cost baseline and position EEG-fNIRS as an optional residual signal for familiar-video emotion regression.

arXiv AI Papers

A Path Integral Surrogate for Multi-Step Gradient Inversion in Federated Learning

Federated learning lets many clients train a shared model together without ever sending their private data to a central server. Each client shares only a model update, and this update should reveal far less about the client than its raw training examples would. This premise is what protects the privacy of the clients. Gradient inversion attacks challenge it directly by trying to reconstruct a client's private input images from the single update it shared. Under FedAvg, a client's update accumulates several local training steps, so the server sees only the two endpoints of a hidden weight trajectory. Recent gradient inversion attacks fit a surrogate model along the path between these two endpoints but they still read its gradient at a single point. We propose the Path-Integral Surrogate Model Extension (PI-SME) which treats the accumulated update as a path integral of the gradient field and approximates it by Gauss--Legendre quadrature over several nodes along a learnable Bézier path. On CIFAR-100 and FEMNIST images across a range of trajectory lengths and class-restricted batches PI-SME reconstructs the private inputs more faithfully than the strongest surrogate baseline on several inversion metrics and the matching loss.

arXiv AI Papers

Rethinking What to Cache in Few-Step Diffusion Transformers: Solver-Aware Target Selection

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) can generate high-quality images and videos, but generating each sample requires multiple costly DiT forward passes. Two common ways to accelerate DiT sampling are step distillation, which reduces the number of sampling steps, and caching, which skips some DiT evaluations by reusing a tensor computed at an earlier step. Most caching methods decide in advance which tensor to reuse. After distillation, adjacent sampling steps are farther apart. Reusing a tensor across this larger gap introduces more error, so choosing what to cache becomes especially important. We therefore introduce AutoTarget, a method that chooses the cached tensor for a given model, solver, and reuse schedule. AutoTarget uses a small set of runs without cache reuse to measure the error caused by reusing each candidate tensor, then selects the candidate with the lowest error. We also analyze how an error at one reuse step affects the final sample. For Euler sampling, we identify cache targets that produce the same trajectory and show why a stored solver update may not. Experiments on distilled image and video DiTs show that the best cache target changes with the model, image resolution, and solver. AutoTarget reduces DiT evaluations and retained cache storage. Generation quality remains close to the corresponding uncached run. On the tested PixArt-LCM and FLUX.1-schnell settings, its calibration ranking matches the ranking from held-out cached runs. To help others reproduce the method, we provide its core implementation on GitHub at https://github.com/wali1024-offical/AutoTarget.

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