Disentangled Representation Learning

Methods that recover individual latent variables of the world, from nonlinear ICA to dictionary learning and causal representation learning, anchor the latents to observations through reconstruction, auxiliary supervision, or distributional asymmetries such as non-Gaussianity. Methods without these anchors, including joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs), identify the latent state only up to a linear transformation, so individual latents remain mixed. We close this gap: individual world latents can be provably recovered with no reconstruction, no decoder, and no labels. The key condition is Structural Diversity: different latents leave distinct dependency footprints on observations, just as no two snowflakes are alike. Building on the linear identifiability that LeJEPA provides, we prove that under Structural Diversity, DSReg (Dependency-Sparsity Regularization) recovers individual world latents up to signed permutation, without reconstruction or a decoder. It applies post hoc to any linearly identified representation, reusing trained checkpoints at no loss over joint training, and establishes the first fully identifiable JEPA that recovers every world latent. Moreover, as a condition on dependency footprints, Structural Diversity is strictly weaker than all structural conditions of prior identifiable latent variable models. Across synthetic regimes, world model probes, learned visual encoders, and external renderers, DSReg preserves dense prediction while improving individual-latent recovery and downstream use with scales.

Variational autoencoders are powerful representation learning models that map complex data into low-dimensional latent spaces, enabling the discovery of interpretable and disentangled factors. Such representations can facilitate the interpretation and controllable generation of data describing complex scientific systems. Understanding how these factors are organized and encoded in latent space is therefore important for developing reliable representation learning models. Recently, quantum variational autoencoders (QVAEs) have been proposed as quantum representation models, demonstrating informative latent representations and improved latent-space occupancy through quantum regularization. However, it remains unclear whether and how QVAEs can learn disentangled and interpretable latent factors. A key challenge in investigating quantum latent factors is that a small number of qubits spans an exponentially large Hilbert space, making the notion of an individual quantum latent dimension nontrivial. Here, we investigate what constitutes an individual quantum latent dimension and whether it can encode a distinct factor. We develop theoretical insights into quantum latent dimensions and support them with empirical studies on representative synthetic problems, including MNIST variants. Across three datasets, we demonstrate that QVAEs can discover factorized and semantically interpretable latent representations, with individual qubits functioning as meaningful latent factors. These results establish a foundation for understanding quantum latent spaces and their potential for structured and interpretable representation learning.

Concept-based methods provide a semantic level for interpreting and manipulating learned representations, but existing editing approaches are typically specialized to particular interventions and do not provide a common and editable representation of concept organization. To achieve this, we introduce Topological Concept Representations (TCR), a post-hoc operational abstraction that jointly characterizes the concepts encoded in a learned representation and their relationships. TCR constructs an intermediate concept space from concept recoverability and interaction scores, and compactly encodes its organization through topology. Interventions are expressed through modifications of this abstraction that are propagated back to the underlying learned representation. This allows different concept-level operations to share the same optimization framework and separates the desired concept organization from the mechanism to achieve it. We establish stability and reparameterization-invariance properties of TCR and its connections to existing concept-editing formulations. We use TCR to disentangle concepts as a preprocessing step for existing erasure methods, improving worst-group accuracy by 21.89 on average at comparable concept leakage. We further use TCR to transfer concepts from teacher to student models, improving concept recoverability by up to 5.54 while also improving or maintaining competitive test top-1 accuracy.

Foundation models remain vulnerable to spurious correlations and ``Clever Hans'' strategies. Explainable machine learning can find and remove such strategies for classifiers without metadata. For foundation models, no such option exists yet. We propose Disentangled Diffusion Autoencoders (DiDAE). DiDAE wraps a frozen foundation model in a conditional diffusion decoder. A counterfactual is one closed-form edit along a direction of a disentangled dictionary, followed by decoding. The dictionary can be supervised (Procrustes) or unsupervised (Singular Value Decomposition, Sparse Autoencoders). No gradients are needed, so DiDAE is up to 2000 times faster than the state of the art. We evaluate on six datasets, two synthetic and four real-world. In a desiderata-driven benchmark on three of them, its counterfactuals are on par with or better than the state of the art, and they repair downstream classifiers through Counterfactual Knowledge Distillation (CFKD), where they beat metadata-based correction. The same machinery can rank a pretrained dictionary against a trained classifier. It returns the few directions the classifier actually reads, each causally verified by a counterfactual that flips the decision, and repairs the classifier along those a teacher marks spurious. The workflow is plug-and-play in our open-source Peal library we publish alongside the paper. With a public dictionary and a pretrained decoder, all that remains is a cheap linear distillation of the classifier and its own fine-tuning.

Value steering should change an LLM's normative priorities while preserving the scenario, facts, and task constraints underlying its answer. Conventional activation edits often change both. We introduce an editable semantic-value interface on frozen residual states, with a one-way semantic-to-value pathway that grounds value recognition in context. Stop-gradient blocks feedback through this pathway; swap consistency, topic de-confounding, and decorrelation encourage selective codes. At inference, editing the value code produces a residual delta while holding the semantic code fixed. On two instruction-tuned backbones, this interface improves semantic preservation and reduces benign refusals at comparable value alignment. A matched mixing-by-gating ablation separates representation learning from selective edit activation, and dimension-matched probes establish improved code selectivity. Against validation-selected prompting on LLaMA-3.1-8B, the method achieves comparable alignment (0.750 vs. 0.748), higher BERTScore (0.938 vs. 0.923), and fewer contradictions (5.1% vs. 7.6%). Human ratings and cross-taxonomy controls provide complementary evidence for low-damage value steering.

Given a target dataset, such as faces with eyeglasses, and a background dataset, such as faces without, contrastive analysis separates \textit{salient} factors specific to the target from \textit{common} content shared by both. We aim for salient representations that capture target-specific detail in each image, such as the shape, color, and position of the glasses, so that they reveal subtypes without subtype labels and guide the generation of new examples of a discovered subtype, even one with no name or text description. We introduce SAGE, which learns both factors directly in the high-dimensional spatial latent of a frozen representation autoencoder and conditions a diffusion transformer on the learned salient representation of a reference image. On Digits-ImageNet and FFHQ eyeglasses, SAGE combines high-fidelity \textit{reconstruction} (rFID below $2$) with unsupervised \textit{subtype discovery}, recovering the digits better than baselines (probe accuracy $0.950$ vs.\ at most $0.281$) and revealing eyewear types, finer sunglasses styles, and mislabeled images; salient-conditioned \textit{generation} raises Digits-ImageNet subtype accuracy over the unfactorized latent ($90.5\%$ vs.\ $27.7\%$) and diversity on both datasets. On retinal OCT, SAGE's salient space separates three diseases using only normal/disease labels.

Most video editing methods focus on changing the appearance of the source video, while offering limited control over its dynamics. We introduce Reimagine Video Dynamics (RVD), a framework that disentangles a compact, editable dynamics token from visual context. We learn this token through self-supervised reconstruction: given the first frame as visual context, a renderer must recover the original video from the dynamics token, encouraging it to capture how the scene evolves rather than how it looks. This disentanglement allows video dynamics to be edited directly while preserving visual context. We develop a language-guided dynamics-token editor that transforms source dynamics into target dynamics, and train it with a scalable counterfactual video-pair pipeline and a two-stage training strategy. Extensive experiments show that RVD enables effective video dynamics editing, training-free retiming, and appearance-controlled re-rendering.

Multi-view clustering aims to capture cross-view consistency while exploiting view-specific information. However, shared representations learned to capture cross-view consistency may still retain view-identifying information, potentially compromising the consistency of cross-view clustering structures. To address this issue, we propose ACGRL, an adversarial consistency-guided representation learning framework for multi-view clustering. ACGRL employs a gradient-reversal view discriminator to reduce view identifiability and obtain invariant reference representations. These representations are then frozen to provide fixed references for disentangling view-specific information from cross-view common information in the subsequent learning stage. The fixed reference representations are concatenated with the learned view-specific representations for reconstruction and clustering, with cross-view cluster alignment encouraging consistent clustering assignments. Experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior clustering performance of ACGRL compared with representative multi-view clustering methods.

Predicting cellular responses to perturbations is a central problem in cellular biology, with broad applications in systems biology and drug discovery. This task is challenging because cellular responses can be complex and cell-state dependent, intrinsic cell-to-cell variability can be confounded with perturbation effects, and destructive single-cell RNA sequencing precludes paired measurements of the same cell before and after treatment. Flow matching transports control cells to perturbed states flexibly, but acting on the full cell state can confound perturbation effects with pre-existing cell-to-cell variability. Disentangled approaches separate responsive from invariant components, but model perturbations through prescribed mechanisms, such as latent shifts or graph edits, limiting their flexibility. We address both limitations in a unified framework. A variational encoder disentangles each cell into an invariant block, capturing state unaffected by the perturbation, and a responsive block, capturing state it changes, through conditional priors and an information-theoretic invariance constraint. Conditional flow matching transports only the responsive block, conditioned on the perturbation and invariant state, yielding a flexible, data-driven model of perturbation effects without confounding pre-existing variability. Across several benchmarks, our method outperforms the strongest published method in settings involving combinatorial and unseen perturbation prediction.

Compact JEPA world models enable efficient latent-space planning, but low-dimensional representation trained under reward-free self-supervision must encode both action-conditioned dynamics and predictable visual context. This competition can entangle controllable state with high-rank nuisance appearance and degrade planning as scenes become more complex. We introduce LRC-JEPA, a lightweight end-to-end world model that routes information into a compact predictive latent $\mathbf{z}$ and learned-query residual-context embeddings $\mathbf{u}$. Only $\mathbf{z}$ is propagated by the dynamics model and used for planning, while $\mathbf{u}$ captures temporally persistent information for cross-attention reconstruction; a differentiable residual connection encourages the latent to retain complementary dynamic content. Under explicit assumptions, we show that the resulting representation is sufficient, minimal, nuisance-invariant, and disentangled. Across four simulated control environments, LRC-JEPA improves average planning success over a parameter-matched JEPA baseline by 9 percentage points and matches or exceeds substantially larger pretrained models. On the real-world Bridge-v2 set, its 5.5M-parameter active encoder outperforms DINO-WM (22.1M) and V-JEPA2 (303.9M) encoders while also enabling faster planning. Physical-state probes, reconstruction interventions, and ablations confirm the effectiveness of LRC-JEPA's representation disentanglement.

Speech technology penalizes some voices: recognition errs nearly twice as often for Black speakers, and accuracy declines for second-language accents and older speakers. We introduce TRIAD, an audit grid crossing 120 texts, 24 rendered demographic voice profiles (gender, age band, accent), and ten expressive styles via controllable text-to-speech, isolating perceived demographic attributes from content and affect. For ten open-weights encoders we define axis-fidelity functionals, principal-angle leakage between axis subspaces, and group-conditional gaps; a proposition proves that average probe disparity grows with the same aggregate voice-semantic leakage $Λ$ we measure, and a corollary shows that peak leakage forces worst-case disparity inside an active region. The measured mean-square probe disparity tracks $Λ$ (Pearson r = 0.93), and a black-box protocol exposes the same signature in two closed-source models. ORCA, an adapter combining axis-specific contrastive heads, an orthogonality penalty, and group-balanced sampling, cuts leakage 72% and roughly halves the gaps.

Infrared (IR) imaging is crucial for autonomous driving, remote sensing, and other perception tasks. However, adverse weather may introduce fake structural responses that are entangled with real thermal structures. Existing IR restoration methods are typically designed for a single degradation type or directly reconstruct from degradation-entangled representations. Consequently, they struggle to distinguish intrinsic thermal structures from weather-induced fake responses and to accommodate spatially varying degradation severity, leading to artifacts or the over-suppression of weak but meaningful thermal responses. To address these issues, we propose TSGPD-IR, a type-severity guided progressive disentanglement network for all-in-one infrared restoration that factorizes restoration guidance into task-level weather semantics and region-level degradation severity. Specifically, a Weather and Semantic Co-Guided Multi-Level Prompt Generation Module combines global weather semantics with stage-wise local features to generate adaptive prompts that progressively suppress degradation-induced responses while preserving intrinsic thermal structures. To complement global weather semantics with spatial restoration control, a Proxy-Supervised Regional Degradation Estimator derives severity supervision without manual annotations and predicts spatially varying degradation priors. Guided by these cues, a Multi-Source Collaborative Expert Selection Strategy uses a shared branch to preserve weather-invariant thermal structures and hierarchical routing to select weather-specific expert pools and severity-compatible regional experts. This design progressively separates degradation interference from genuine thermal content and enables region-adaptive restoration, reducing both residual artifacts and over-suppression.

A fundamental challenge in RF sensing is that Doppler signatures observed by a link entangle the target's motion with the sensing geometry, resulting in limited applicability to unconstrained real-world settings. In this paper, we establish a new foundation for physically interpretable RF sensing that disentangles reflector speed from geometry, jointly recovering the speed, geometry factor, relative amplitude, and width of each dominant Doppler ridge. More specifically, we first develop a compact parametric representation of WiFi spectrograms and establish its low-dimensional structure through a systematic computer-vision analysis of a large and diverse human-activity dataset, thereby providing a tractable foundation for learning. Building on this representation, we then design a physics-informed autoencoder whose structured bottleneck and differentiable RF forward model enforce physically meaningful estimates of reflector speed and geometry. We further introduce a synthetic-to-real training framework, eliminating the need for real WiFi training data. We extensively validate the proposed framework under both known and time-varying geometries, using both independently generated synthetic test sets and 31 real WiFi experiments. The results demonstrate the superior performance in speed and geometry extraction, robustly recovering the underlying geometry, speeds, Doppler-ridge amplitudes, and ridge widths across all settings, while substantially outperforming the strongest baselines.

Class disentanglement (the separation of a representation's class-conditional point clouds along depth and over training) is usually read off descriptive curves. We measure it as certified topological interaction between labeled point clouds, using the recently introduced Intersection Euler Characteristic Profile: the Euler characteristic of the overlap of the clouds' ball unions as a function of scale, computed by one Alpha-complex sweep with no boundary-matrix reduction. Every number carries a test: exact permutation tests in both directions, a guarded separation certificate, and a paired test for the comparative claims applications make. Across 111 trained networks and 52,650 certified measurements, disentanglement is depth-graded and concentrated in the first epochs, and interaction quotients rank class pairs by confusability (Spearman rho=0.83), on par with cheap separability statistics. In a 96-model factorial population, augmentation is the one training choice that separates classes relative to chance; weight decay compresses the overlap without separating, and depth and width do nothing. The structural finding is one only a k-fold statistic can pose: the joint entanglement of a class triple sits below that of its strongest pair in 97% of triple-layer cells and 99.5% of deep cells, far below a measured null floor, in vision encoders and frozen language models alike. This pairwise dominance is a regularity, not a law: expected from the nesting of overlaps but not forced by geometry, present at initialization and in raw pixels, and manufactured in the last stage alone when a network memorizes random labels. The unnormalized profile mass predicts test accuracy (R^2=0.94), the quotient does not, and neither beats a linear probe. One lesson is reported in full: the paired test must use a scale-free statistic, or it certifies feature-norm dynamics as disentanglement.

Semi-supervised learning has shown great potential for reducing annotation costs in medical image segmentation. However, most existing methods mainly exploit unlabeled data through prediction-level consistency, while the reliability of internal feature representations is often overlooked. In medical images, target-related structural cues are easily entangled with unstable appearance variations, which may lead to unreliable pseudo labels and error accumulation during training. To address these issues, we propose SAUF-Net, a Structure--Appearance Representation Learning with Uncertainty Feedback Network for semi-supervised medical image segmentation. SAUF-Net uses the Structure--Appearance Decomposition Module (SADM) to separate bottleneck features into structural and appearance representations. The Disentangled Guidance Module (DGM) injects these representations into the decoding process to enhance structure-aware segmentation. Meanwhile, the Auxiliary Decoder produces branch-specific predictions for reliability estimation and a fused prediction for appearance-swapped consistency. Furthermore, we introduce an Appearance-Swapped Consistency branch to encourage structural representations to remain stable under appearance variations. We also introduce a reliability-map-guided dual-head discriminator with a Validity Head and an Uncertainty Head to provide feature-level uncertainty feedback. Extensive experiments on ISIC-2016 and Kvasir-SEG demonstrate that SAUF-Net outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods, especially under low-label settings.

Cross-view video representation learning aims to capture viewpoint-invariant action semantics despite substantial appearance changes across egocentric and exocentric videos. However, existing methods encode each video as a unified embedding, where view-invariant and view-variant semantics inevitably entangle under co-occurrences - a failure mode we show persists even in cross-view methods explicitly trained for view-invariance. Our key insight is that a view-invariant feature is truly disentangled when it can be sufficiently recomposed with an arbitrary view-variant feature while preserving their independent semantics. Building on this, we propose PRISM, that decomposes video into view-invariant and view-variant latents and recompose them under language supervision encouraging clean decomposition of the two streams. PRISM achieves state-of-the-art results on EgoExo4D, EgoExoLearn, AE2, even surpassing in-domain models under zero-shot setting. Code is available at https://github.com/litcoderr/prism.

Social robots are expected to operate across diverse environments, where similar arrangements can imply different socially appropriate actions, e.g., starting a conversation may be acceptable in a crowded home but disruptive in an office meeting. Because such norms and environments cannot all be anticipated in advance, robots require continual learning (CL) to adapt from sequential experience while retaining previously acquired knowledge. Prior work has studied CL for generating socially appropriate robot actions, but it has not addressed domain-incremental settings in which the robot incrementally encounters diverse contexts (e.g., living room, meeting room, office, hallway), where both environmental (e.g., whether the space is open or cluttered with furniture) and social cues (e.g., how people or other agents are positioned around the robot) jointly shape the appropriateness of robot actions. We address this gap with the Explicit Disentanglement Dual-Branch (EDD) framework. EDD explicitly separates environmental and social-agent related knowledge and uses replay-based rehearsal to mitigate forgetting while learning the appropriateness of robot actions (e.g., cleaning, serving, starting a conversation) across several indoor domains. Experiments show that EDD outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines, and ablation studies further evaluate different disentanglement strategies and the sensitivity to domain ordering. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Cambridge-AFAR/Mind-the-Context.git.

Distance-based reliability estimation assumes that a representation's geometry reflects its trustworthiness, yet this assumption is rarely tested under training interventions that reshape geometry directly. We audit this assumption under domain-adversarial representation learning using a disentanglement dose-response ladder. Three checkpoint families share the same architecture and a 16-dimensional representation, differing only in orthogonality strength (lambda = 0, 1, 5). Representation geometry changed substantially with disentanglement strength: the condition number shifted by two orders of magnitude (Kendall tau = 0.84, exact p = 2.8e-5). This change was not accompanied by improved reliability estimation: Mahalanobis-distance AUROC (ISIC-test vs. PAD-UFES) remained flat and below chance (about 0.40) at every level, with no significant association with any of five geometry metrics tested. The same failure was observed for cosine-to-centroid and pooled k-nearest-neighbor scorers, plus three non-distance-based scorers: an energy-based confidence score, Virtual-Logit Matching, and a kernel density estimator. Seven of eight scorers converged on the same result; the energy-based score showed an isolated upward trend that we report but do not treat as evidence against the overall pattern. A supervised probe with no access to the training objective recovered domain membership from the identical embeddings at 0.72-0.81 AUROC across every level, showing that the relevant information was not absent from the representation. These findings indicate that classification performance alone can overlook whether information in a learned representation is organized in a form that downstream reliability estimators can use. Information can remain decodable while becoming largely inaccessible to non-probing reliability estimators.

Factorized generative models commonly regularize a latent style variable z_s by matching its marginal distribution to a fixed Gaussian prior and interpret this as evidence that the style representation is independent of class information. We show that this interpretation is incorrect. Matching only the marginal distribution places no constraint on the class-conditional distributions, allowing the latent style to remain highly predictive of the label despite appearing perfectly Gaussian in aggregate. We derive an exact decomposition showing that this mismatch is one of four conditions required for factorized sampling, and demonstrate that eliminating it is necessary but not sufficient to obtain the intended factorization. Empirically, our case-study model and four representative latent baselines achieve near-zero global MMD while still allowing a linear probe to recover class labels with 74%--100% accuracy (10% chance level). Our model reaches 99.15% clustering accuracy, whereas externally evaluated class-conditional generation succeeds only 16% of the time. This leakage remains under six independent perturbations involving model capacity, curriculum, prior geometry, and supervision across two datasets. Four mitigation strategies reduce probe accuracy to 21%--46%, although they leave within-class dependence largely unchanged. A post-hoc conditional prior improves externally evaluated class generation to 0.97 on MNIST without retraining but reaches only 0.41 on CIFAR-10, while an empirical style bank achieves 0.88 on CIFAR-10. These results demonstrate that no divergence computed solely on the marginal distribution of the style latent can certify independence from class labels, and that reporting marginal statistics alone does not verify the property commonly claimed in factorized generative models.

Image mixup is a widely adopted data augmentation strategy, yet it is ill-suited for ordinal classification tasks such as medical disease grading, where labels encode a progression of severity. By indiscriminately blending disease-severity cues (ordinal) with appearance-level variation (non-ordinal), standard mixup produces samples that distort the very ordinal structure that underpins clinical severity grading. We introduce DisMix, an order-aware mixup framework for ordinal classification. DisMix disentangles ordinal and non-ordinal features via a dual-codebook VQ-VAE, allowing each subspace to be mixed independently: ordinal codes are interpolated to produce meaningful intermediate ranks, while non-ordinal codes are varied to introduce appearance diversity without corrupting the ordinal signal. Across four medical imaging datasets, DisMix shows the best aggregate performance among six image mixup baselines paired with six ordinal classifiers and remains effective under data scarcity and clinical grading variability.

Latent diffusion models (LDMs) have recently significantly advanced embodied learning in constructing powerful embodied manipulation world models. However, despite the remarkable performance, existing LDMs predominantly rely on Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) optimized for natural scenes while failing to account for the unique characteristics of embodied manipulation scenarios, yielding latent representations that are neither compact nor controllable, thereby hindering efficient training of LDMs and precise robotic control. To solve this problem, we present EmbodiedVAE, a novel video VAE that provides compact yet controllable latent representations tailored for the robotic manipulation world models. Specifically, EmbodiedVAE adopts a dual-encoder, single-decoder architecture with an asymmetric spatio-temporal compression module, which automatically disentangles the robot arm's motion from background environment, resulting in overall compactness while providing explicit embodied latent to support fine-grained action control. To further preserve the temporal consistency of learned robotic motion latent, we introduce an optimal-transport-based consistency module that explicitly enforces motion fidelity and inter-frame coherence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed EmbodiedVAE achieves superior reconstruction quality with high compression rate, while enabling more precise action control in robotic manipulation scenarios with an average of 2dB PSNR improvement over state-of-the-art video VAEs.

Multilingual dense retrieval aims to handle queries and documents across different languages based on a unified retriever model. The challenge lies in enabling robust retrieval transfer to low-resource languages where annotated retrieval data is often scarce. Although previous studies transfer high-resource supervision to low-resource languages in multilingual semantic representation learning, the shared representation often entangles semantic and linguistic features, which may interfere with optimizing semantic relevance for retrieval. Different from existing methods that focus on learning language-agnostic semantic features under such entanglement, we propose a disentangled contrastive learning~(DCL) method for multilingual dense retrieval by separating multilingual representations into semantic and linguistic subspaces. Specifically, we design disentangled optimization objectives based on hierarchical semantic alignment and language debiasing contrastive learning. By aligning retrieval-relevant semantics across languages at both sentence and token levels while capturing language-specific variations in the linguistic subspace, these objectives reduce language-induced interference in semantic matching. We jointly optimize them with the retrieval objective to facilitate stable zero-shot transfer from English supervision to multilingual dense retrieval. Extensive experiments on mMARCO and MIRACL show that our method consistently outperforms several strong baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness and generalization ability.

Phenotypic drug discovery enables the discovery of functional relationships between molecular structures and cellular responses. However, existing multimodal representation learning methods often optimize cross-modal alignment without considering the intrinsic organization of chemical space, resulting in distorted molecular representations and loss of structural information. We propose \textbf{PhenMol}, a structure-preserving framework for phenotype-aware molecular representation learning. PhenMol disentangles molecular and cellular representations into shared and private components, enabling phenotype-guided alignment while preserving chemical structures through a dedicated molecular branch. This design integrates cellular phenotype information without disrupting molecular neighborhood organization. Experiments on approximately $3.04 \times 10^{4}$ molecule--cell morphology pairs demonstrate that PhenMol improves molecular property prediction across 270 bioactivity tasks, molecule--phenotype retrieval, and clinical trial outcome prediction. Moreover, ECFP4-based structural analysis shows that PhenMol better preserves molecular neighborhoods and reduces embedding distortion compared with existing multimodal alignment methods. These results highlight the importance of structure-aware constraints in multimodal molecular representation learning and provide an effective approach for integrating cellular phenotypes with chemical knowledge for drug discovery.

World models have attracted significant attention for their ability to capture and predict the structure and dynamics of the physical world. In this emerging landscape, Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA) offer a particularly compelling direction. We study a largely unexplored regime: populous, crowded, and chaotic Global South urban environments, which we call DENSEWORLD. Unlike the lower-density, lane-structured settings that dominate existing evaluations, these scenes exhibit soft spatial boundaries, extreme agent heterogeneity, persistent occlusion, and rapid social negotiation under mixed traffic. We introduce the first large-scale dataset for this regime: 1,000 hours of drive-through, walk-through, and aerial video across 22 cities. Existing JEPA formulations struggle to preserve dense interaction dynamics under heterogeneity and partial observability. We introduce FactorJEPA, which makes world structure a first-class predictive primitive. Rather than encoding the future in a monolithic latent, it composes layout, entities, and interactions, using a visibility gate and separated subspaces to preserve partially observed agents and discourage cross-factor shortcuts. FactorJEPA improves (i) future-latent accuracy (Future-frame L1), (ii) intervention-sensitive prediction (Causal L1), and (iii) robustness to reduced visual evidence (Mask-ratio slope), while exposing (iv) a reproducible motion-information trade-off (Motion cosine). Method rankings replicate across 2B and 1B V-JEPA 2.1 backbones, with rho = 0.895 to 0.978. We publicly release the DENSEWORLD-115k dataset (https://huggingface.co/datasets/anonymousML123/denseworld-115k) and the surgery-trained FactorJEPA checkpoints (https://huggingface.co/datasets/anonymousML123/factorjepa-outputs/tree/main/outputs/full/vjepa_2_1_vitg_1B/train/m09c_surgery_3stage_DI_diheavy_encoder).

Vision-language pretraining learns rich medical image representations from radiology reports, but previous model variants commonly operate within a single shared embedding space, so concept-level structure and interpretability must be recovered post hoc, limiting model transparency and, hence, clinical utility. We introduce RadPRISM, which makes a clinician-defined radiology schema a designated stratification axis: an on-premise large language model extracts per-concept text spans from free-text reports, and each clinical concept is aligned in its own dedicated visual subspace, turning concept stratification into direct, top-level alignment supervision. Instantiated on chest radiographs with a 19-concept schema over $203{,}602$ examinations from an internal multi-year archive, RadPRISM improved internal dataset zero-shot classification from $0.717$ (95% CI, $0.710-0.723$) to $0.868$ (95% CI, $0.863-0.872$) macro AUROC over a matched global-alignment baseline, performed on par with the purpose-built CARZero reference in external zero-shot classification while substantially outperforming it (up to 4.3-fold) in pointing-game visual grounding. In addition, a radiologist reader study demonstrated concept-stratified retrieval ability ($0.78$ macro retrieval correctness rate within rank 3), surfacing disentangled descriptive findings that report-level retrieval and fixed-label vocabularies cannot express. RadPRISM yields discriminative, spatially faithful, natively concept-stratified representations shaped by and transparently inspectable by clinicians.

Creating photorealistic animatable head avatars from a single image remains a fundamental challenge in digital human synthesis. While recent 3D Gaussian Splatting methods have achieved promising results, they rely on external tracking pipelines whose latency is excluded from inference measurements. Furthermore, they adopt unified representations that entangle geometrically distinct facial regions, limiting both expressiveness and rendering fidelity. We propose SpiD (Split and Drive), a single-image Gaussian head avatar framework built on two disentanglement axes. The compute axis internalizes per-frame driving, eliminating external tracking dependency at inference. The feature axis decomposes the avatar into three specialized Gaussian branches, each modeling a geometrically distinct facial domain. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistently strong performance against state-of-the-art methods while achieving the fastest inference speed among all compared methods on a single GPU with the complete driving pipeline included.

While large language models (LLMs) have advanced ID-based recommendation through Semantic ID (SID) modeling, existing SID generation frameworks largely follow a single-representation-then-quantization paradigm. This design faces two bottlenecks: semantic entanglement mixes heterogeneous attributes, such as geography, brand, and category, causing information loss during quantization, low-quality SIDs, and severe collisions; moreover, black-box representation learning provides neither explicit attribute semantics nor clear geographic or semantic meanings for SID positions. These limitations weaken both retrieval reliability and the ability to diagnose or control SID generation. We propose Interpretable Representation via LLM-Driven Generative Disentanglement for Local-Life Service Recommendation (LGRID). LGRID introduces a generative disentanglement paradigm through an Encode -> Disentangle -> Align -> Quantize pipeline. It first uses joint LLM encoding to preserve cross-attribute geographic-semantic dependencies, rather than encoding fields independently. A Structured Disentangled Block then routes hidden states into attribute-aligned slots for geographic and semantic factors. Synergistic Alignment Learning makes these slots both generatively decodable and discriminative for retrieval, while Dual-Stream Residual Quantization separately discretizes the two streams into compact SIDs with explicit attribute correspondence. This design yields interpretable SIDs with positions grounded in item attributes and local-service semantics. Experiments on Kuaishou and Foursquare show that LGRID consistently outperforms strong SID baselines, achieving up to a 5.44 percent relative AUC gain. It also achieves over 99 percent attribute-decoding accuracy for coarse geographic fields and reduces the full-SID collision rate to 39.9 percent, compared with 97.0 percent for LGSID.

Action recognition in complex scenes often involves multiple concurrent fine-grained actions, making it challenging to model internal action structures. Most existing methods rely on holistic representations, which are insufficient for capturing subtle interactions and fine-grained semantics. While recent prompt-based approaches introduce disentanglement, they lack explicit semantic guidance, and methods based solely on visual or structured cues remain coarse-grained. In this paper, we propose Knowledge-guided Disentanglement with Atomic Actions (KDA), which leverages fine-grained semantic knowledge to enhance action representations and enable more precise disentanglement. Specifically, we use Large Language Models (LLMs) to decompose action labels into atomic actions, providing explicit spatial-temporal semantics. A Knowledge Injection Module (KIM) first integrates atomic action knowledge into video features. Based on this enhanced representation, a Knowledge Disentanglement Module (KDM) further disentangles atomic action knowledge to produce more precise semantic guidance for action disentanglement. A Knowledge Disentanglement Loss (KD Loss) is introduced to encourage clearer disentanglement of knowledge components within KDM. Extensive experiments demonstrate that KDA improves feature discriminability and achieves state-of-the-art performance on multi-label action recognition benchmarks. Moreover, KIM and KDM can be readily integrated into other methods, demonstrating strong generality.

With the growth of gaming, animation, and virtual reality industries, the demand for efficient generation of stylized 3D assets is rapidly increasing. However, existing approaches still struggle to jointly preserve style fidelity, geometric consistency, and generation efficiency, as most of them still rely on indirect 2D-to-3D stylization pipelines. This motivates a native 3D stylization framework that can explicitly disentangle style from geometry while remaining efficient. To this end, we propose DreamStyle3D, an efficient framework for stylized 3D asset generation built on a Decoupled Dual Cross-Attention mechanism. Our method explicitly separates geometric and stylistic features to enable efficient style injection while preserving structural consistency, and further adopts a lightweight training strategy to enhance style consistency and model generalization. In addition, we build an automated data pipeline and construct a dataset of about 15K content-style-stylized triplets for training and evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DreamStyle3D can generate high-fidelity, geometrically consistent stylized 3D assets within 10 seconds, substantially improving efficiency while maintaining superior style quality and offering a new solution for 3D content creation. The project is available at https://github.com/NK-JittorCV/nk-3D/tree/main/models/DreamStyle3D.

Brain-Machine Interfaces (BMIs) provide a direct communication pathway between the brain and external devices, enabling humans to control assistive and robotic technologies, with potential applications in rehabilitation, human motor augmentation, and human-centered robotics. However, due to neural drift, the performance of BMIs decreases over time, posing challenges for long-term viability, particularly for invasive BMIs (iBMIs). Existing solutions suffer from two main drawbacks: (i) difficulty in learning robust neural representations, and (ii) neglecting that neural drift varies across motor parameters (e.g., velocity, direction, and speed). To overcome these limitations, we propose Self-Supervised Consistency enhanced Disentangled Learning (SSCDL), a neural decoding generalization framework built on two key innovations. We first design a backbone model named Consistency enhanced Neural Decoder (CND), using a novel teacher-student consistency constraint with simulated neural signal perturbations to learn robust representations invariant to neural drift. Then, we employ three dedicated CNDs under the Complementary-Disentangled Generalization (CDG) mechanism, which disentangles motor signals into velocity, direction, and speed with inspiration from neural preference theory. This disentangled learning enables SSCDL to capture invariant neural representations from diverse neural preference perspectives, significantly enhancing cross-day generalization. Extensive experimental results show that SSCDL delivers state-of-the-art decoding performance, exhibiting high robustness and cross-day stability. These capabilities underscore its strong potential for long-term interaction in human-centric robotic and fine-grained assistive applications.