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Sep 23, 2026cs.CV

On the Diffusibility of High-Dimensional Latents

Representation Autoencoders (RAEs) enable diffusion models to operate in the feature spaces of pretrained visual encoders. However, many off-the-shelf encoders are not optimized for faithful reconstruction, discarding fine-grained visual details. As expected, finetuning these encoders for image reconstruction recovers such details. However, perhaps counterintuitively, this procedure reduces the effective dimensionality of the resulting representation, and the altered geometry has downstream effects on generation. Specifically, we show that using the standard velocity prediction in flow matching in this high-dimensional space requires the model to fit orthogonal noise directions outside the low-dimensional signal manifold, making optimization inefficient. This motivates using the clean data parameterization (x0\boldsymbol{x}_{0}-prediction) instead, which focuses learning on the underlying signal manifold. Across experiments with multiple strong-reconstruction encoders, we show that x0\boldsymbol{x}_{0}-prediction consistently improves text-to-image generation performance.
Chao Feng, Zhiyang Xu, Bowei Chen +7
Sep 23, 2026cs.CL

Contrastive Learning for Authorship Verification

Our results show that contrastive learning outperforms a classification-based approach to authorship verification under the tested settings. We identify loss function, batch size, training duration, pre-trained model, input context length, and random text span data augmentation as important factors of model performance. Based on these considerations, we develop a ModernBERT Bi-Encoder model that achieves 98.4% accuracy on the PAN21 authorship verification task.
Peter Kirby
Sep 23, 2026cs.CV

The Past Frames the Future: Memory for Autoregressive Video Generation

Advances in generative models have improved video fidelity, enabling long-horizon generation, interactive world modeling, and evolving visual environments. Autoregressive (AR) video generation extends visual sequences through causal rollouts. However, a fundamental bottleneck emerges: as the generated sequence expands, practical models must operate under strictly bounded context windows, storage, and computational limits. Consequently, critical historical information, e.g., entity identities, dynamic states, and intervention-induced causal changes, often leaves the active context long before its relevance diminishes. Overcoming this limitation and maintaining temporal persistence constitutes a fundamental memory problem. We present a systematic and comprehensive review of memory mechanisms in AR video generation. We formulate memory operationally as persistent historical information maintained across outer AR steps, capable of influencing future generation even after the originating evidence is no longer locally accessible. Building upon this unified framework, we organize the literature through five complementary perspectives: (I) Forms, the representational carriers of history; (II) Functions, the specific semantic and physical information requiring preservation; (III) Operations, the lifecycle of writing, reading, updating, managing, and integrating memory; (IV) Learning, the optimization of memory behaviors under closed-loop rollouts; and (V) Evaluation, the paradigms for diagnosing genuine memory capabilities. We conclude by synthesizing open challenges, including composable and resource-aware memory architectures, trustworthy state updating, self-rollout learning, and standardized evaluation. By bridging representations, mechanisms, and learning paradigms, this paper establishes a structured foundation for developing reliable, memory-conditioned video generation systems.
Harold Haodong Chen, Rongjin Guo, Disen Lan +22
Sep 23, 2026cs.LG

Even Sharper Bounds for Transductive Learning and Its Applications

We introduce Sharper Transductive Local Complexity (STLC), a localized complexity method for transductive learning under uniform sampling without replacement. The construction starts from a Bernstein-type concentration inequality for the supremum of the test--train empirical process. Its proof uses the modified log-Sobolev inequality for the swap walk and a two-parameter entropy closure. A peeling argument with a surrogate localization functional then gives excess-risk bounds with the same fixed-point and confidence terms as the classical inductive local Rademacher-complexity bounds, without the additional logarithmic confidence factor in earlier transductive results. For realizable learning over a binary class of VC dimension \dVC\dVC, with training size mm, test size uu, and u≥m≥\dVCu\ge m\ge\dVC, STLC yields \cO{\dVClog⁡(me/\dVC)/m}\cO\{\dVC\log(me/\dVC)/m\}. This matches the standard inductive rate and, when m≥9m\ge9, is within a logarithmic factor of the transductive minimax lower bound of order \dVC/m\dVC/m. For transductive kernel learning, STLC gives a spectrum-adaptive excess-risk bound without the multiplicative imbalance factors appearing in the earlier local-complexity bound.
Yingzhen Yang
Sep 23, 2026cs.SE

Can LLMs Reason About Runtime Behavior? A Repository-Level Dynamic Benchmark

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in coding tasks, but their ability to reason about code execution remains unclear. Existing repository-level QA benchmarks mainly evaluate static code understanding and often rely on LLM-based evaluation, while execution-reasoning benchmarks are mostly limited to snippets or functions. We introduce SWE-Flux, a repository-level benchmark for dynamic execution reasoning containing 480 execution-grounded instances across 12 real Python repositories, with gold answers automatically harvested from instrumented test executions rather than written manually or judged by LLMs. The benchmark covers singletest and multi-test questions over control flow, loops, program state, dataflow, exceptions, and program invariants. Evaluating five LLMs shows that this task remains challenging. The best model achieves only 37% accuracy. Models perform better on localized behavior such as invariants, intra-procedural control flow, exceptions, and simple loops, but struggle with dataflow, inter-procedural execution, precise state reasoning, and suite-level aggregation. Finally, we show that the oracle-harvesting pipeline can generate fresh benchmark variants using input perturbation. It successfully harvests valid variants for almost 90% of the selected instances, and the resulting variants are substantially more challenging for the evaluated models.
Hamed Taherkhani, Mohammad Abdollahi, Melika Sepidband +3
Sep 23, 2026cond-mat.dis-nn

Nonequilibrium Phases of Repulsive Self-Attention: Chaos, Attention Condensation, and Emergent Locality

We study the nonequilibrium dynamics of a minimal recurrent transformer with NN normalized tokens, Q=K=IQ=K=I, and a negative value map V=−IV=-I. Similarity-based attention selects nearby representations, while the negative value map drives tokens away from the selected field. This feedback can continually reorganize both the representation geometry and the attention network. For d=2d=2, the tokens lie on a circle, where the regular polygon is an exact fixed point. As the attention feedback strength γγ is increased, the polygon loses stability through a flip bifurcation, giving rise to period-two motion, chaos, and cluster-exchange or cluster-flip states. Despite this temporal complexity, attention remains diffuse as N→∞N\to\infty at finite fixed softmax sharpness ββ. Attention condensation instead emerges in the scaling regime β∼N2β\sim N^2. In the hard-routing limit, repulsive updates amplify local perturbations and routing-partner switches transmit them ballistically, producing an emergent butterfly cone in representation space. High-dimensional geometry provides a distinct route to localization. For d=N→∞d=N\to\infty, simulations from Gaussian initial conditions provide evidence for a condensation transition at β=O(1)β=O(1), driven by dynamically generated finite overlap gaps. Depending on γγ, the resulting phases include diffuse simplex-like states, consensus flips, condensed active routing with signatures of chaos, and fragmented cluster flips. These results establish temporal activity, attention condensation, and geometric clustering as distinct collective phenomena, and show that sparse attention can sustain persistent dynamics rather than freeze it.
Qucheng Gao, Zuyi Yang, Xiao Chen

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