Generative Models

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Period ending 2026-09-21

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1,168 papers

Latest in Generative Models

May 26, 2026cs.LG

Diffuse to Detect: Generative Diffusion Models for Unsupervised IC Anomaly Detection

Latent defect screening is challenged by extremely low failure rates, high-dimensional test data, and absence of labeled anomalies. We propose the first unsupervised anomaly detection framework incorporating a Diffusion Transformer. Raw test measurements are first compressed by an autoencoder, then reshaped into a structured token sequence enriched with sinusoidal and per-device wafer-position embeddings. Anomaly scores are derived from the noise-prediction error over mid-range diffusion timesteps, enabling fast wafer-scale screening without any labeled defects or manual feature engineering. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on industrial 16nm IC test data under extreme class imbalance, offering interpretable failure localization through latent-space reconstruction residuals.
Yuxuan Yin, Chen He, Todd Jacobs +4
May 26, 2026cs.CR

Jailbreak susceptibility prediction and mitigation via the behavioral geometry of models

Evaluating and mitigating a generative system's susceptibility to jailbreak attacks is critical to its safe deployment. Given the number of deployable systems, full per-configuration evaluation and optimization is impractical. In this paper, we formalize the behavioral geometry of a population of models that, by leveraging previously evaluated and defended models, supports both efficient susceptibility prediction and effective defense transfer across a population. We apply the framework to 79 models spanning 24 providers and to 100 system configurations of a single base model. Simple methods that use the behavioral geometry reach an AUPRC of 0.940.94 for susceptibility detection with ≈98%\approx98\% fewer probes relative to a full evaluation. Using the behavioral geometry to select which model to transfer an optimized defense from outperforms same-provider assignment (+2%+2\%, p=0.03p = 0.03) at no additional probe cost, with a set of three models sufficient to cover the population. Results are robust to hyperparameter selection and judge.
Hayden Helm, Xiaodong Liu, Weiwei Yang
May 26, 2026cs.IR

Plans for Evaluating Structured Generative Search Summaries

We propose a framework for evaluating structured generative search summaries that are placed atop organic web search results. A structured summary, generated by a large language model, typically consists of an overview, several sections with section titles, and a list of source documents that are cited within the summary. We then describe our plans for implementing and evaluating the framework.
Tetsuya Sakai, Jina Lee, Hanpei Fang +1
May 25, 2026cs.CV

Personalized Generative Models for Contextual Debiasing

Different visual patterns appear with different frequencies in the world: e.g., beach balls appear on sand more often than they do on a road. These statistics are reflected in vision datasets, and as a result trained models more easily recognize objects in common scenarios. However, recognizing a beach ball on a road may arguably be even more important than recognizing it on sand. We study how to mitigate this discrepancy. Since collecting uncommon images in the real world may be difficult, we explore whether generating images with less frequent contexts can serve as effective training augmentation. A key challenge is guiding generations to remain close to the original dataset distribution while creating diverse images with uncommon contexts. We introduce Decoupling Contextual Patterns with Generations (DecoupleGen), a method that personalizes text-to-image diffusion models to facilitate coherent synthesis of images with rare contexts while preserving original visual details. The generated images contain semantically meaningful content and remain visually aligned with the original datasets. We further apply verification constraints to ensure relevance of the augmented data. We evaluate our approach on object classification and recognition tasks on complex scene datasets. Our experiments demonstrate consistent improvements over previous approaches, and our analyses identify factors underlying these improvements.
Xinran Liang, Esin Tureci, Prachi Sinha +3
May 25, 2026cs.CV

RoMo: A Large-Scale, Richly Organized Dataset and Semantic Taxonomy for Human Motion Generation

Success in generative modeling across language, image, and video demonstrates that large, well-curated datasets are the key driver for building capable models. 3D Human motion, however, has lagged behind, constrained by an unsatisfying choice between small, high-fidelity motion capture datasets and large-scale in-the-wild collections dominated by static or low-quality sequences. We introduce RoMo, a rich, large-scale, carefully curated dataset of in-the-wild human motions that resolves these tradeoffs. To ensure quality, we introduce a taxonomy-aware filtering pipeline that aggressively removes static and artifact-prone sequences. Every sequence is annotated with detailed captions and organized by a novel three-level semantic taxonomy. This hierarchical structure enables fine-grained, per-category evaluation, that reveals model strengths and weaknesses obscured by global metrics. We demonstrate that models trained on RoMo achieve state-of-the-art fidelity and diversity while gaining a superior understanding of complex, subtle text prompts. Finally, we release the Motion Toolbox to standardize metrics, data conversion, and visualization, establishing a foundation for reproducible and interpretable motion generation research.
Jiahao Zhang, Joseph Liu, Young-Yoon Lee +9
May 25, 2026cs.CV

Squeezing Capacity from Multimodal Large Language Models for Subject-driven Generation

Subject-driven image generation aims to synthesize new images that preserve the identity of the given subject while following textual instructions. Existing approaches often encode text and reference images separately. This limits cross-modal reasoning abilities and causes copy-paste artifacts. Recent frameworks that connect multimodal models and diffusion models improve instruction following, but largely overlook identity preservation. To address these limitations, we condition diffusion models on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that jointly encode text and reference images, and augment it with VAE-based identity conditioning. A novel Dual Layer Aggregation (DLA) module is designed to aggregate multi-level MLLM features for optimal conditioning, and a multi-stage denoising strategy is applied to progressively balance the semantic information from MLLM and fine-detail identity from VAE during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach harmonizes multimodal understanding with identity preservation, mitigates copy-paste issues, and achieves superior performance regarding human preference on subject-driven image generation. Our project website is available at https://zsh2000.github.io/squeeze-mllm-subject-gen/.
Shuhong Zheng, Aashish Kumar Misraa, Yu-Teng Li +2
May 25, 2026cs.CV

Reinforcing Few-step Generators via Reward-Tilted Distribution Matching

Recent advances in few-step diffusion distillation have enabled efficient image generation, yet aligning these models with human preferences remains challenging. We propose Reward-Tilted Distribution Matching Distillation (RTDMD), a two-stage framework that unifies distribution matching distillation with reward-guided reinforcement learning for few-step flow generators. We show that minimizing the KL divergence to a reward-tilted teacher distribution naturally decomposes into a distribution matching term and a reward maximization term. In the first stage, we introduce Ambient-Consistent Distribution Matching Distillation (AC-DMD), which performs subinterval-wise distribution matching and augments the fake score objective with a consistency regularizer to help the fake score model track the shifting generator distribution under limited updates. In the second stage, we jointly optimize both terms: for the reward maximization term, we derive a hybrid policy gradient that combines a GRPO-style estimator for the stochastic intermediate transitions with direct reward backpropagation through the deterministic final step, and further introduce step-subset GRPO (SubGRPO) to reduce variance. Experiments on SD3, SD3.5, and FLUX.2 demonstrate that RTDMD establishes new state-of-the-art results across preference, aesthetic, and compositional metrics with only 4 inference steps, outperforming previous few-step text-to-image generation methods. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Harahan/RTDMD.
Yushi Huang, Xiangxin Zhou, Ruoyu Wang +3
May 25, 2026cs.AI

LECTOR: Joint Optimization of Scientific Reasoning Graphs and Introduction Generation

AI Scientists have shown promising progress across multiple stages of the research pipeline, among which automatic scientific paper writing remains a formidable challenge. The Introduction writing is especially challenging, which demands not only linguistic fluency, but logical soundness and verifiable faithfulness. Most AI-assisted methods treat the task as text generation instead of reasoning and structuring, leading to severe drawbacks, e.g., hallucinating citations. To address this, we first formulate the Content-Conditional Introduction Generation (CCIG) task, which requires grounding the Introduction in the paper's core evidence. We then propose LECTOR, a novel Logic-Expression Co-Reinforcement Learning framework that can strictly follow the scientist's logic, add high-quality citations and keep structured expressions. LECTOR first constructs a logic-reasoning graph from the paper's main body to serve as a verifiable logical blueprint. Subsequently, it employs a Logic-Expression Co-Rewarding mechanism to jointly optimize for both the graph's structural fidelity and the final narrative's quality. We conduct a dataset from Nature Communications papers to assess our method. Extensive experiments show consistent improvements in both logic fidelity and Introduction generation quality metrics, e.g., Graph Quality (+26.7%), Citation Quality (+8.6%), and Paper Consistency (+3.3%). Code and data are available at https://github.com/Xiao-Youth/LECTOR.
Jiabei Xiao, Yizhou Wang, Chen Tang +3
May 25, 2026cs.IR

DeGRe: Dense-supervised Generative Reranking for Recommendation

In multi-stage recommender systems, reranking optimizes overall utility by capturing intra-list contextual dependencies, yet its central challenge lies in exploring optimal sequences within an exponentially large permutation space. Recent studies have shifted towards end-to-end generative frameworks, which typically leverage list-wise rewards or preference alignment to guide generator training. However, these methods still face two critical issues. First is the heuristic label bias. Existing methods often construct training targets based on simple rules, such as promoting clicked items to the top, while ignoring causal dependencies within the list context. Second is the credit assignment problem. Sparse list-level posterior rewards fail to directly guide intermediate steps in sequence generation, leading to ambiguous optimization directions. To address these issues, we propose DeGRe (Dense-supervised Generative Reranking), a generative reranking framework that bridges the gap between offline exploration and online efficiency through dense supervision. The core of DeGRe lies in its offline-online decoupled design. During the offline phase, we introduce a Lookahead Evaluator based on cumulative regression, which leverages beam search to actively mine high-value lookahead sequences in the unexposed space. During training, we transform the step-wise value estimations from the evaluator into dense supervision signals and distill them into a lightweight Online Generator. This mechanism enables the generator to internalize lookahead planning capabilities, requiring only a single efficient greedy decoding pass during online inference to approximate the global optimum. Experiments demonstrate that DeGRe outperforms baseline models on public benchmarks and industrial datasets. We have successfully deployed DeGRe on Taobao Flash Shopping, significantly improving online recommendations.
Chaotian Song, Jingyao Zhang, Chenghao Chen +6
May 25, 2026cs.CV

Diffusion Image Generation with Explicit Modeling of Data Manifold Geometry

Image generative models aim to sample data points from the underlying data manifold, a task that requires learning and decoding a dense, low-dimensional, and compact parameterization space. To achieve this, we propose the Data Manifold-aware Image diffusioN moDel (MIND), a novel framework that explicitly models manifold geometry by integrating discrete patch tokenization into the score function of a continuous diffusion model. This approach successfully leverages both the structural quantification capabilities of discrete tokens and the parallel generation flexibility of continuous diffusion. Moreover, we enable end-to-end differentiable training via a novel soft top-kk aggregation mechanism and introduce dual-branch high-frequency feature embedding layers to alleviate the spectral bias of transformer backbones on low-dimensional inputs. Furthermore, for inference, we design a multi-stage transition sampling scheme that dynamically adjusts the sampling scheme based on timestep. Extensive experiments on ImageNet 256×\times256 demonstrate the effectiveness of MIND. After 80-epoch training, our base model achieves an FID of 22.73 without guidance, nearly halving the 43.47 FID of the vanilla DiT-B/2 baseline. The proposed method reduces FID by 15.95 and 9.06 on average compared with the baselines DiT and SiT, respectively. For image generation on ImageNet-256×\times256 with guidance, the proposed MIND-B with only 130M parameters achieves an FID of 2.06, superpassing the LlamaGen-3B with 3.1B parameters. The proposed MIND-XL with 715M parameters further reduces the FID to 1.95. Our MIND introduces a fresh perspective on diffusion-based image generation, paving the way for future research and innovation in this community. The code will be publicly available.
Duoduo Xue, Zhiyu Zhu, Junhui Hou
May 24, 2026cs.CV

Guess the Unified Model: How Much Can We Recover from Generated Images?

With unified model-generated images now widespread online, attributing their model of origin offers a path toward transparency and deeper insight into the characteristic behaviors of individual models. Prior work has explored provenance in LLM-generated text, diffusion model images, and datasets, but the separability of unified model-generated images remains an underexplored area. We address this gap by examining separability across corruption, domains, and prompt languages using images generated by seven unified models. We show that model attribution is highly feasible as our model achieves near-perfect accuracy with around 20K images per model. Corruptions and structural perturbations have only a modest effect on attribution performance, and cross-domain generalization reveals that semantic content contributes to separability but is not the dominant signal. Finally, we observe that for most models, prompt language attribution is around chance levels, suggesting minimal language-specific visual signatures. These findings highlight consistent model-specific visual characteristics in unified models outputs and open new directions for tracing and auditing generative image pipelines.
Jasin Cekinmez, Ryo Mitsuhashi, Addison J. Wu +1
May 24, 2026cs.LG

Reinforcement Learning with a Bilevel World-Model Architecture for Scan-Order Optimisation in Laser Directed Energy Deposition

Scan-order design in laser directed energy deposition (LDED) is a delayed, path-dependent thermo-mechanical decision problem, because sequence quality becomes observable only after the complete deposition and cooling cycle. This work formulates LDED scan-order optimisation as a finite-horizon, permutation-constrained reinforcement-learning problem and develops a bilevel finite-element-teacher-labelled AI workflow. A surrogate-assisted teacher-guided optimisation loop learns the Abaqus-labelled response landscape and provides a tractable terminal-reward environment for policy training. A frozen Maskable Proximal Policy Optimization (MaskablePPO) policy is then used to generate legal scan-order candidates, which are independently validated through Abaqus thermo-mechanical simulations. The results show bounded, N-dependent policy-generation value rather than record-level dominance over the mature surrogate-assisted optimiser. The strongest scan orders are obtained by the teacher-guided surrogate loop, whereas PPO autonomously reaches competitive regions of the native response landscape, with stronger rank concentration at smaller track counts and a clear reliability boundary at longer horizons. The teacher-labelled landscape further supports a physically gated lexicographic reward hierarchy in which warpage admissibility is the primary constraint, plastic strain acts as a safety filter and residual-stress-related improvement is pursued conditionally within the admissible region. Validated sequences also reveal an interpretable scale-separated ordering tendency that combines global spatial dispersion with local structured grouping. This workflow provides a route from fixed scan-rule selection toward finite-element-teacher-validated policy generation, while preserving independent finite-element validation as the final physical gate.
Xian Wu, Haoran Li, Yuanqi Chu +2
May 24, 2026cs.IR

Self-Balancing Gradient Allocation for Heterogeneity-Aware Feature Generation in Click-Through Rate Prediction

Generative pre-training via discrete diffusion provides dense reconstruction supervision across all feature fields simultaneously, mitigating representation collapse from data sparsity in CTR prediction. However, all existing generative CTR methods share a fundamental limitation: the reconstruction objective assigns equal training weight to every feature field, ignoring the profound heterogeneity of reconstruction difficulty across high-cardinality ID fields, sparse categorical attributes, numerical values, and behavioral sequences. This causes easy fields to dominate training gradients while the hardest but most informative fields remain chronically underfit, a problem we term the generative difficulty imbalance.We propose HeteGenCTR, which resolves this imbalance through per-field learnable difficulty parameters jointly trained with the denoising network. This unified signal drives two coordinated components without additional hyperparameters: a self-balancing loss that automatically reallocates gradient budget toward harder fields with a provably stable equilibrium, and a difficulty-guided attention mechanism that suppresses the influence of already-converged easy fields while amplifying cross-field information flow toward hard fields. Both components share the same learned signal and remain mutually consistent throughout training. Experiments on five CTR benchmarks and a seven-day online A/B test demonstrate consistent, statistically significant improvements over state-of-the-art baselines, with disproportionate gains for cold-start and long-tail users.
Moyu Zhang, Yun Chen, Yujun Jin +3
May 24, 2026cs.CV

Tempered Self-Similarity Alignment for Physically Plausible Video Generation

Despite remarkable advances in video generative models, they still struggle to generate physically realistic videos, frequently exhibiting appearance drift, implausible motion, and temporal inconsistencies. In this work, we address this limitation by transferring relational knowledge encoded in spatio-temporal self-similarity (STSS) from visual foundation models into video generative models. STSS represents pairwise similarities among features across space and time, revealing the relational structure of how objects interact with other entities throughout a video, effectively capturing real-world dynamics, including object motion and semantic transformations. To transfer this relational knowledge, we propose Tempered Self-similarity Alignment (TSA) loss, which transforms STSS into probabilistic correspondence distributions and trains the video generative model to align its correspondence distributions with those of the visual foundation model on dynamically changing regions. Evaluated on VideoPhy and VideoPhy2 benchmarks, our method demonstrates substantial improvements in physical plausibility across diverse interaction scenarios, validating the effectiveness of transferring relational knowledge for physically realistic video generation.
Manjin Kim, Suha Kwak, Minsu Cho
May 24, 2026cs.CV

Three-Step Conditional Diffusion 3D Reconstruction for Light-Field Microscopy

Light-field microscopy (LFM) enables single-shot capture of multi-angular information from biological samples, supporting real-time volumetric imaging. However, traditional physics-based algorithms often suffer from limited spatial resolution, severe artifacts, and high computational costs. Existing learning-based methods improve inference efficiency but still face limitations in reconstruction accuracy and generalization capability. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a high-fidelity Three-Step Conditional Diffusion (TCD) 3D reconstruction method for LFM. Although conventional diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generative modeling, their slow sampling process and the inherent trade-off between quality and efficiency hinder their application in real-time 3D imaging. We redesign the diffusion process through a deterministic three-step sampling strategy coupled with a lightweight conditional U-Net, establishing a new paradigm for fast and accurate volumetric reconstruction. Furthermore, an Inter-Class Detection (ICD) module is incorporated to identify out-of-distribution or anomalous inputs during inference, thereby enhancing model stability and reliability. Extensive experiments and cross-dataset evaluations demonstrate that TCD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both reconstruction fidelity and generalization, providing an efficient and practical 3D reconstruction solution for light-field microscopy.
Qihong Zhao, Shaokang Yan, Zhimin Qiao +2
May 24, 2026cs.CV

Where Detectors Fail: Probing Generative Space for Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection

Detecting AI-generated images (AIGI) remains challenging because detectors often fail to generalize to unseen generators. Although existing methods are trained on large datasets, their performance still degrades when generation settings change, indicating that data scale alone is insufficient and that limited coverage of generative variations during training is a key factor. Studies on generative model editing show that small changes in internal representations can produce diverse and meaningful image variations, many of which are not explored under standard sampling. Leveraging this insight, we propose PROBE (Probing Robustness via Boundary Exploration), a framework that improves detector generalization by actively exploring challenging regions of the generative process. Instead of treating the generator as a fixed data source, PROBE uses the detector as a critic to steer the generator through manifold-level modifications, producing realistic samples that are difficult to classify. These samples expose failure cases that are uncommon under standard data sampling strategies and are used to refine the detector. Experimental results across multiple benchmarks indicate that PROBE enhances generalization to unseen generators, resulting in more generalizable AIGI detection performance. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Amamiya-C/PROBE-AIGI-Detection
Zijie Cao, Weijie Tu, Yao Xiao +3
May 24, 2026cs.CV

BFS: Back-to-Front Layered Image Synthesis via Knowledge Transfer

As generative models expand the possibilities of visual content creation, layered image synthesis has emerged as a promising direction for controllable and creative editing. However, existing methods struggle to fully realize this potential. Decomposition-based methods often struggle with clean separation, while generation-based methods suffer from difficulty in training data acquisition, reducing quality and scene diversity. In this paper, we propose BFS, a novel generation-based framework for layered image synthesis. Specifically, given a background image and user guidance, BFS synthesizes a foreground layer that incorporates not only a foreground object but also its associated visual effects, such as shadows and reflections, while seamlessly harmonizing with the background to produce a coherent composite. To enable diverse and high-quality foreground layer synthesis while overcoming data scarcity, we leverage the comparatively easy-to-learn knowledge of unlayered image synthesis for the foreground synthesis. To this end, we adopt a dual-branch diffusion framework in which two interconnected branches generate a composite image and a foreground layer, respectively, enabling bidirectional knowledge transfer. Based on this framework, we propose a two-stage training scheme that utilizes a high-quality unlayered composite image dataset to effectively enhance foreground quality. Extensive experiments, including a user study, show that BFS produces high-quality layered images, consistently outperforming prior methods.
Kyoungkook Kang, Gyujin Sim, Sunghyun Cho
May 23, 2026cs.LG

A computational phase transition for learning-to-sample from Ising models

We study \emph{learning-to-sample} -- a basic algorithmic task underlying generative modeling -- for Ising models, a standard testbed for algorithmic ideas in both theoretical computer science and machine learning. Given i.i.d. samples of an unknown target distribution, the goal of learning-to-sample is to learn a computationally efficient generation procedure that produces new samples following approximately the same distribution. We construct a family of Ising models of constantly bounded-width which lie just beyond the spectral threshold λmax⁡(J)−λmin⁡(J)=1λ_{\max}(J)-λ_{\min}(J)=1, and show that learning-to-sample for this family is computationally hard under standard cryptographic assumptions, even when the learner is given both polynomially many i.i.d. samples from the model and explicit access to its parameters. Combined with results of [AJKPV24,KLV25] showing tractability of learning-to-sample below the spectral threshold, this establishes a sharp computational phase transition at the spectral threshold. Moreover, combined with prior results on parameter learning for bounded-width Ising models [KM17,WSD19,VML20], this shows that learning-to-sample can be more difficult than parameter learning. Finally, we show that any efficient learner for these hard instances exhibits a natural memorization-hallucination dichotomy: the learner must either output configurations that, after a simple transformation, match the (transformed) training data or place substantial mass on configurations of negligible probability under the target distribution.
Andrej Risteski, Thuy-Duong Vuong
May 23, 2026cs.AI

AVBench: Human-Aligned and Automated Evaluation Benchmark for Audio-Video Generative Models

Rapid advances in audio-video (AV) generation have enabled high-fidelity synthesis with synchronized sound, particularly for human-related scenarios involving speech and interactions. Yet evaluation for AV generation remains at an early stage, with only a few coarse-grained benchmarks for human-related scenarios and relying on limited preset evaluations with generic multimodal LLMs, leading to inaccurate assessments of model capabilities. To address these issues, we introduce AVBench, a fully automated benchmark tailored for human-centric AV generation. AVBench is built on two key designs for comprehensive and accurate evaluation: (i) Human-centric and fine-grained metrics. AVBench integrates ten evaluation dimensions designed for human-centered real-world scenarios, covering visual quality, audio quality, and multi-level consistency across modalities. These practical metrics capture human-related details that existing benchmarks often overlook. (ii) Specialized evaluators via preference learning. To address the lack of specialized training data, we construct large-scale supervision by transforming real-world videos into diverse training pairs with controlled perturbations. After fine-tuning on this high-quality dataset, the evaluators learn to reliably detect subtle cross-modal inconsistencies. Crucially, instead of producing discrete textual judgment, AVBench derives continuous evaluation scores from the model's prediction confidence on binary decisions. This probabilistic scoring mechanism enables a more reliable assessment than traditional VQA-style evaluation and aligns closely with human judgment. Taken together, AVBench offers automated evaluation for AV generation, demonstrates strong potential for data filtering, and serves as a differentiable reward signal for Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF).
Jialiang Yang, Bin Xia, Ruihang Chu +6
May 23, 2026cs.CV

Φ-Noise: Training-Free Temporal Video Conditioning via Phase-Based Noise Manipulation

Latent video diffusion models generate videos by progressively transforming Gaussian noise into realistic samples conditioned on text or visual inputs. However, existing conditioning methods often require additional training and computational overhead. Motivated by recent findings on the importance of frequency components in generative models, we propose a simple, training-free approach for motion-conditioned video generation by injecting low-frequency phase information from a reference video directly into the diffusion noise latents. Our method transfers motion cues without modifying the model architecture or inference pipeline. Using several applications, we demonstrate effective control over both appearance and dynamics in generated videos, while achieving competitive or superior results compared to more complex conditioning approaches.
Ofir Abramovich, Nadav Z. Cohen, Adi Rosenthal +1
May 23, 2026cs.AI

Reasoning as an Attack Surface: Adaptive Evolutionary CoT Jailbreaks for LLMs

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and generation tasks and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. However, their explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) mechanism introduces new security risks, making them particularly vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Existing approaches often rely on static CoT templates to elicit harmful outputs, but such fixed designs suffer from limited diversity, adaptability, and effectiveness. To overcome these limitations, we propose an adaptive evolutionary CoT jailbreak framework, called AE-CoT. Specifically, the method first rewrites harmful goals into mild prompts with teacher role-play and decomposes them into semantically coherent reasoning fragments to construct a pool of CoT jailbreak candidates. Then, within a structured representation space, we perform multi-generation evolutionary search, where candidate diversity is expanded through fragment-level crossover and a mutation strategy with an adaptive mutation-rate control mechanism. An independent scoring model provides graded harmfulness evaluations, and high-scoring candidates are further enhanced with a harmful CoT template to induce more destructive generations. Extensive experiments across multiple models and datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed AE-CoT, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art jailbreak methods.
Jianan Li, Simeng Qin, Xiaojun Jia +5
May 23, 2026cs.LG

Generative OOD-regularized Model-based Policy Optimization

We study sequential decision-making with offline reinforcement learning (RL). Traditional offline RL policies may result in out-of-distribution (OOD) actions when training relies only on sparse offline representations. To ensure safe offline policies in a sparse state-action space, we explore how density estimation models can be integrated into model-based RL methods to avoid the OOD regions. Generative models are capable of explicitly modeling the density in sparse state-action spaces. Building on this, we introduce Generative OOD-regularized Model-based Policy Optimization (GORMPO), a density-regularized offline RL algorithm that uses generative density modeling to restrict policy updates to high-density areas of the dataset. Furthermore, we examine whether better OOD detection corresponds to better model-based offline policies. We compare (1) the OOD detection capabilities of various density estimators and (2) their performance within the GORMPO framework on a real-world medical dataset and sparse offline RL datasets. We theoretically guarantee GORMPO's performance under mild assumptions. Empirically, GORMPO outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 17% on a real-world medical dataset and enhances the base model on the offline RL datasets. Our empirical findings show that better OOD detection generally results in improved policies in environments with stable dynamics, while conservative penalties with poor density estimation are favored when dynamics are uncertain.
Aysin Tumay, Jiahe Huang, Elise Jortberg +1
May 22, 2026cs.LG

TUBE: Tangent Upper Bound on Evidence for Discrete Diffusion Language Models

Log-likelihood is a standard metric for evaluating generative models. Unfortunately, in contrast to autoregressive models (ARMs), discrete diffusion models generally do not admit exact computation of this quantity. Existing evaluations, therefore, rely on the evidence lower bound (ELBO), leaving unclear how much higher the true value may be. We address this by introducing the Tangent Upper Bound on Evidence (TUBE), a variational upper bound on log-likelihood that admits an unbiased Monte Carlo estimator. Our TUBE extends across latent-variable models, including masked diffusion models (MDMs), any-order ARMs (AO-ARMs), and block variants of both. Applied to block MDMs and block AO-ARMs, TUBE reveals our key empirical finding that these models lie strictly below the exact ARM baseline, showing that ARMs still dominate in likelihood.
Arseny Ivanov, Sergei Kholkin, Vladislav Gromadskii +3
May 22, 2026cs.LG

Leveraging Foundation Models for Causal Generative Modeling

Causal generative modeling is essential for developing reliable and transparent AI systems capable of counterfactual reasoning. While existing approaches focus on integrating causal constraints during the training of generative models, they often lack a unified framework to leverage the zero-shot reasoning capabilities of pretrained foundation models. We introduce FM-CGM, a modular framework for end-to-end visual causal reasoning using pretrained foundation models. FM-CGM formalizes the causal pipeline through three core components: a concept extractor, a concept manipulator, and a counterfactual generator. By leveraging a large reasoning model for causal inference and a text-to-image diffusion model for generation, our approach enables zero-shot causal discovery, intervention, and counterfactual generation. We then develop Causal Semantic Guidance (CSG), a cross-attention-based mechanism that ensures semantic interventions propagate to descendant concepts while preserving invariant regions. We empirically show that our approach can identify plausible causal structures and is suitable for faithful counterfactual image generation.
Aneesh Komanduri, Xintao Wu
May 22, 2026cs.CV

Not Too Generative, Not Too Discriminative: The Human Alignment Sweet Spot

A central question in computational vision is whether human-like visual representations are better explained by discriminative or generative learning. Existing comparisons, however, often confound the learning objective with architecture, scale, and training data, leaving open whether the objective itself drives alignment. We address this confound using Joint Energy-Based Models (JEMs), which interpolate continuously between discriminative and generative training within a fixed architecture. By varying a single mixing coefficient, we isolate the effect of the learning objective and evaluate the resulting models across six human-alignment benchmarks spanning perceptual similarity, gloss perception, human response uncertainty, robustness, shape-texture cue conflict, and diagnostic feature attribution. Across this diverse suite, human alignment is consistently maximized at intermediate points of the generative-discriminative continuum, rather than at either endpoint. Hybrid JEMs combine the categorical structure induced by discriminative learning with the sensitivity to input structure induced by generative learning, yielding more human-like behavior across multiple levels of vision. These results suggest that the generative-discriminative dichotomy is the wrong axis for understanding human-aligned vision: alignment emerges not from choosing one objective over the other, but from balancing both.
Jorge Chang Ortega, Bastien Le Lan, Thomas Serre +1
May 22, 2026cs.LG

Parametric Prior Mapping Framework for Non-stationary Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting

Effectively modeling non-stationary dynamics in probabilistic multivariate time series(MTS) forecasting requires balancing expressiveness with robustness. Existing parametric approaches benefit from strong inductive biases but lack flexibility, whereas deep generative models struggle to capture complex temporal dependencies without extensive data and computation. We introduce Parametric Prior Mapping (PPM), a framework that injects parametric structural priors into a generative modeling process. Specifically, PPM utilizes a parametric estimator to derive a dynamic, adaptive prior that guides the learning of a complex predictive distribution via a learnable mapping. This design allows the model to retain the efficiency of parametric methods while exploiting the expressive power of generative models. Trained with a hybrid objective, PPM yields precise forecasts with well-calibrated uncertainty estimates. Empirical results show that PPM outperforms existing baselines in handling non-stationary data, offering a superior trade-off between accuracy and computational efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/ljl8336/PPM.
Jinglin Li, Jun Tan, QI Fang +1
May 22, 2026cs.LG

Generative Representation Learning on Hyper-relational Knowledge Graphs via Masked Discrete Diffusion

Hyper-relational knowledge graphs (HKGs) effectively represent complex facts. While inferring new knowledge in HKGs is a critical problem, current methods cast it as a simple link prediction, assuming that nearly all entities and relations within a fact are known, leaving only a single blank to be filled. However, this restricted assumption may not hold in real-world scenarios in which multiple, or even all, constituent components of a fact may be missing simultaneously. To bridge this gap, we introduce a task called fact generation: generating a valid hyper-relational fact from an arbitrarily masked query, i.e., completing a partially observed fact or generating a fact from scratch. We propose KREPE, the first generative representation learning method for HKGs that learns to model the probability distributions of missing components conditioned on the local fact components and global structure of HKGs via a masked discrete diffusion. KREPE models both the intra-fact dependencies by contextual message passing and inter-fact correlations by aggregating stochastically sampled contexts. KREPE seamlessly unifies link prediction and fact generation within a single training framework, achieving state-of-the-art performance on standard HKG link prediction benchmarks and outperforming LLM-based baselines in generating novel and correct facts.
Jaejun Lee, Seheon Kim, Joyce Jiyoung Whang
May 22, 2026econ.GN

Generative AI and the Reorganization of Labor Demand

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to transform work, but less is known about how firms reorganize labor demand as the technology diffuses. Existing research has largely focused on which occupations are exposed to AI or whether exposed jobs decline. We extend this debate by examining whether firms adjust by changing where they hire, what jobs contain, or both. Using a nationwide dataset of job postings in the United States, covering all sectors of the economy, we construct a dynamic, posting-level measure of generative AI exposure with a two-stage large language model pipeline. The pipeline identifies the tasks described in each posting and classifies the extent to which generative AI can perform or assist them. We then decompose changes in aggregate exposure into two margins: reallocation of demand across jobs and redesign of tasks within jobs. We document three main findings. First, generative AI exposure is dynamic rather than fixed, changing substantially over time. Second, labor demand adjusts through both margins. Hiring reallocation explains the largest share of the aggregate decline in exposure, accounting for 52% on average, while within-job redesign becomes increasingly important, accounting for 39.5%. A complementary Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition shows that shifts in occupational composition account for about 90% of the exposure change attributable to observable job characteristics. Third, adjustment differs across the job ladder. Senior jobs adjust earlier and mainly through reallocation, whereas junior jobs adjust through a broader mix of reallocation, redesign, and their interaction. These findings suggest that labor-market adjustment to generative AI is a process of organizational reconfiguration, in which firms reshape both hiring demand and the task architecture of work.
Fangyan Wang, Zaiyan Wei, Yang Wang
May 22, 2026cs.LG

Robust OT-Guided Generative Residual Domain Adaptation for Bike-Sharing Demand Prediction under Temporal Domain Shift

Bike-sharing models trained on historical station-hour data may degrade when deployed in later years because travel patterns change over time. This paper studies March Citi Bike demand prediction from 2021 to 2026 as a temporal domain adaptation problem and proposes Gen-ROTDA, a robust optimal transport-guided residual domain adaptation framework. The method fits a target-domain station-time anchor with a small labeled target subset, transfers residual rather than raw demand, applies a deterministic label-preserving residual feature generator, and trims high-cost transport matches before training the final residual predictor. Experiments compare Gen-ROTDA with anchor-only, source-only, target-only, fine-tuning, MMD adaptation, Sinkhorn OTDA, ROTDA, and Gen-OTDA. Gen-ROTDA achieves the lowest MAE on the main 2025 to 2026 task and is the best OT-family method on average across multi-year tasks, although fine-tuning and MMD adaptation remain strong overall baselines. Under abnormal target-unlabeled records, Gen-ROTDA is much more stable than non-robust OT variants, suggesting that robust transport is useful for noisy temporal transfer in bike-sharing demand prediction.
Yiming Ma
May 21, 2026cs.LG

The Attribution Contract: Feature Attribution for Generative Language Models

Feature attribution methods promise to identify which input features matter for a model output. In generative language models, however, it is often unclear what should count as a feature in the first place. In autoregressive language models, earlier generated tokens are both outputs of the model and inputs to later predictions. In diffusion language models, generation proceeds through iterative denoising or unmasking rather than fixed left-to-right prediction, so local explanation may target a state of diffusion rather than a next token. We argue that this ambiguity is not merely an implementation detail, but a conceptual limitation of carrying classifier-era feature attribution directly into generative language modeling. We introduce the Attribution Contract, a specification for feature-attribution claims that names what output is being explained, which features are eligible to receive attribution, what generative process is assumed, what is held fixed, and what model score is being attributed. The contract clarifies why the same attribution method can answer different questions depending on how it is instantiated. We argue that many disagreements about feature attribution in generative language models are not disagreements about attribution algorithms, but about unstated explanatory contracts. Using autoregressive and diffusion language models as case studies, we show when attribution to earlier generated tokens, intermediate states, or denoising stages is informative, when it is misleading, and why feature-attribution methods in generative language models should be evaluated as method-contract pairs.
Giang Nguyen
May 21, 2026cs.LG

World Machine: Towards Generative World Modeling for Time-Series

World models represent a paradigm shift in generative AI, pursuing predictive understanding and controllable simulation of environments in a structured and generalizable way. We present World Machine, a generative world-modeling architecture for time series. It is a transformer-based architecture with latent states that enables adaptation to different amounts of observed data and contexts. This shows an improvement over traditional transformers, which have a computational and memory cost that scales quadratically with the context. Experiments on a proposed synthetic dataset, Toy1D, validate the approach's feasibility, demonstrate capabilities not found in conventional transformers, and highlight the contributions of each component of the training protocol.
Elton Cardoso do Nascimento, Alexandre da Silva Simões, Esther Luna Colombini +2
May 21, 2026cs.CV

Sensor2Sensor: Cross-Embodiment Sensor Conversion for Autonomous Driving

Robust training and validation of Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS) require massive, diverse datasets. Proprietary data collected by Autonomous Vehicle (AV) fleets, while high-fidelity, are limited in scale, diversity of sensor configurations, as well as geographic and long-tail-behavioral coverage. In contrast, in-the-wild data from sources like dashcams offers immense scale and diversity, capturing critical long-tail scenarios and novel environments. However, this unstructured, in-the-wild video data is incompatible with ADS expecting structured, multi-modal sensor inputs for validation and training. To bridge this data gap, we propose Sensor2Sensor, a novel generative modeling paradigm that translates in-the-wild monocular dashcam videos into a high-fidelity, multi-modal sensor suite (AV logs) comprising multi-view camera images and LiDAR point clouds. A core challenge is the lack of paired training data. We address this by converting real AV logs into dashcam-style videos via 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) reconstruction and novel-view rendering. Sensor2Sensor then utilizes a diffusion architecture to perform the generative conversion. We perform comprehensive quantitative evaluations on the fidelity and realism of the generated sensor data. We demonstrate Sensor2Sensor's practical utility by converting challenging in-the-wild internet and dashcam footage into realistic, multi-modal data formats, further unlocking vast external data sources for AV development.
Jiahao Wang, Bo Sun, Yijing Bai +12
May 21, 2026cs.CV

Spectral Tail Auxiliary Learning for AI-Generated Image Detection

As generative image models evolve rapidly, the perceptual gap between generated and real images continues to narrow, making AI-generated image detection increasingly challenging. Many existing methods exploit frequency-domain cues for detection, typically described as frequency-domain artifacts or high-frequency discrepancies. However, the specific and recurring spectral regularities remain insufficiently understood and characterized. In this paper, we systematically analyze the one-dimensional radial log-power spectra of real and generated images. We find that generated images do not necessarily exhibit higher or lower energy across the entire spectrum or high-band range. Instead, their spectra deviate from the power-law decay and show an anomalous uplift in the ultra-high-frequency tail. We term this phenomenon spectral tail uplift. We further attribute this phenomenon to nonlinear harmonic accumulation in trained generative models, suggesting that it can serve as a structural cue across generative architectures. Based on this observation, we propose Spectral Tail Auxiliary Learning (STAL), a frequency-domain auxiliary supervision framework for generalizable AI-generated image detection. STAL transfers spectral-tail cues from a tail-aware frequency teacher to a spatial detector during training, while all frequency-domain modules are discarded at inference time. Consequently, STAL introduces no inference overhead. Extensive experiments on 9 public datasets show that STAL achieves strong generalization and stability across generators, data distributions, and real-world scenarios.
Xingyi Li, Jiahui Zhang, Yiheng Li +2
May 21, 2026cs.LG

A Tutorial on Diffusion Theory: From Differential Equations to Diffusion Models

Diffusion models have emerged as a dominant framework for generative modeling, but their mathematical foundations are often presented separately through diffusion probabilistic models, score-based modeling, stochastic differential equations, and numerical sampling methods. We write this tutorial to provide a unified and self-contained account of these viewpoints from the perspective of differential equations. Starting from a conditional Gaussian noising process, we derive ordinary differential equation (ODE) and stochastic differential equation (SDE) representations, pass to the corresponding marginal forward dynamics, and then obtain the reverse-time SDE and probability-flow ODE that make generation possible. We show that the central unknown quantity in reverse sampling is the marginal score, explain how score matching becomes the standard denoising objective under a noise-prediction parameterization, and discuss practical reverse-time sampling and guidance. We further place DDPM, DDIM, flow matching, and score-based SDEs in a common framework, and conclude with diffusion language models in continuous embedding space together with a brief discussion of discrete masked-token diffusion. The tutorial is intended as a bridge between the analytical foundations of diffusion processes and the modern generative algorithms built upon them.
Jiayi Fu, Yuxia Wang
May 21, 2026cs.LG

Disentanglement Beyond Generative Models with Riemannian ICA

There is a gap between the theoretical foundations of disentanglement and the practice of modern representation learning. Existing theoretical frameworks, particularly Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and its nonlinear variants, assume a generative model with statistically independent latent variables underlying the data so that disentanglement amounts to identifying the latents that could have generated the data. This generative framework is interpretable and theoretically justified, but its strong assumptions make it difficult to apply to modern representation learning. Modern pretrained encoders often learn features that exhibit disentangled properties without making generative assumptions, yet there is no general theory for interpreting these features as independent factors of variation. We take a step toward such a theory by introducing Riemannian ICA (RICA), which replaces ICA's global generative model with local geometric structure. RICA is founded on the observation that in ICA, the factors of variation underlying a data point can be understood through radial curves emanating from the point that map to axis-aligned lines in the latent space. We formalize this perspective using Riemannian geometry and introduce our theory in a way that is consistent with the existing generative approach. Our main contribution is the disentanglement tensor, which encodes a second-order notion of disentanglement that we call pointwise disentanglement. This tensor depends on the Hessian of the data log likelihood as well as the Ricci curvature induced by the model. In a controlled source recovery setting with known ground-truth sources, RICA recovers sources across several manifolds, while the success of ICA baselines depends on the coordinates used to represent the observations. Our work provides a theoretical basis for studying local disentanglement without assuming a global generative model.
Edmond Cunningham
May 21, 2026cs.LG

Generative Modeling by Value-Driven Transport

We propose a new framework for generative modeling based on a discrete-time stochastic control formulation of measure transport. Adapting classic results from control theory, we formulate our problem as a linear program whose dual variables correspond to the \emph{optimal value function} of the control problem, which directly encodes the optimal control policy. Exploiting this LP formulation, we develop an efficient simulation-free primal-dual algorithm for computing approximately optimal value functions and the associated \emph{value-driven transport} (VDT) policies which approximate the true optimal policy. We show that well-trained VDT policies enjoy numerous favorable properties in comparison with other state-of-the-art methods based on flows, diffusions, or Schrödinger bridges: they lead to straight transport paths which can be simulated quickly and robustly, and can be enhanced in all the same ways as diffusion and flow-based models (e.g., conditional generation, classifier-free guidance, unpaired data-to-data translation are all easy to incorporate). We evaluate our methodology in a range of experiments, with results that indicate strong performance and good potential for scalability.
Pablo Moreno-Muñoz, Adrian Müller, Gergely Neu
May 21, 2026cs.LG

The Signal in the Noise: OOD Detection Through Goodness-of-Fit Testing in Factorised Latent Spaces

Deep generative models offer a natural foundation for out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, yet prior work has shown that their assigned likelihoods are notoriously unreliable indicators for in- vs out-of-distribution data. In this paper, we address this problem by leveraging the diffeomorphic and mass-preserving properties of continuous normalising flows. Our analysis shows that OOD samples are mapped to noise samples that are highly atypical under the noise prior in ways not captured by the likelihood. Based on this observation, we propose a new method -- Signal in the Noise (SITN) -- for OOD detection on the single-sample level. SITN requires no access to OOD data, incurs minimal computational overhead, and provides strict control of false positive rates. Comprehensive evaluations through standard benchmarks and synthetic perturbations highlight the method's effectiveness and the absence of the complexity bias inherent to likelihood-based methods.
Philipp Bomatter, Jack Geary, Henry Gouk
May 21, 2026cs.LG

E3E^3-Agent: An Executable and Evolving Agent for Resource Management of Edge Generative Inference

Edge deployments of generative inference increasingly face two practical realities: per-device per-model performance is often unknown at deployment time, and it is non-stationary due to user-driven semantic events, background load, and device churn. Consequently, a resource manager that is tuned offline under a fixed regime can become brittle and expensive to maintain. This paper presents E3E^3-Agent, an executable and evolving agent for edge artificial intelligence generated content (AIGC) resource management. E3E^3-Agent separates a fast-path router that makes millisecond-level dispatch decisions from a slow-path, event-driven large language model (LLM) meta-controller that mitigates regime shifts through a small, explicit control surface exposed via a tool interface, including risk gating, router configuration, and rapid performance calibration. The agent learns online from execution feedback and continuously adapts to unknown and time-varying service-time mappings. We evaluate E3E^3-Agent in a discrete-event simulator driven by MLPerf-derived device-model measurement priors, covering cold-start warmup and three dynamic regimes: semantic dynamics, device churn, and hidden drift. Across the dynamic scenarios, E3E^3-Agent reduces average latency by 65%-73% compared to the best static baseline, stays within 7%-10% of an online full-information Oracle used for evaluation, and effectively suppresses stutter rate under semantic degradation.
Rui Bao, Yaping Sun, Zhiyong Chen +4
May 21, 2026cs.LG

From Snapshots to Trajectories: Learning Single-Cell Gene Expression Dynamics via Conditional Flow Matching

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) provides high-dimensional profiles of cellular states, enabling data-driven modeling of cellular dynamics over time. In practice, time-resolved scRNA-seq is collected at only a few discrete time points as unpaired snapshot populations, leaving substantial temporal gaps. This motivates trajectory inference at unmeasured time points. Existing methods mainly follow two directions, optimal-transport (OT) alignment provides distribution-level matching between observed snapshots, while continuous-time generative models support forecasting via learned dynamics. However, two challenges remain: (i) unpaired snapshots render local transitions between adjacent time points ambiguous, leading to unstable supervision; and (ii) long-horizon prediction relies on repeated integration, where small modeling errors compound and cause distribution drift. To address these challenges, we propose single-cell Flow Matching (scFM), a latent generative framework based on coupling-conditioned flow matching. First, we compute entropically regularized OT couplings between adjacent snapshots and use them to construct soft, weighted flow-matching targets for learning time-dependent velocity fields. Second, we learn bidirectional velocity fields and leverage their consistency to refine couplings and improve temporal coherence under sparse supervision. Third, we introduce distribution-level alignment and latent dynamic regularization to anchor long rollouts and mitigate drift. Experiments on real-world time-series scRNA-seq datasets show that scFM consistently improves distributional prediction performance for both temporal interpolation and extrapolation. Moreover, scFM yields more accurate trajectory reconstruction and temporally coherent visualizations where intermediate time points are absent, indicating a more faithful recovery of underlying temporal gene expression dynamics.
Siyu Pu, Qingqing Long, Xiaohan Huang +7
May 21, 2026cs.CL

Ishigaki-IDS-Bench: A Benchmark for Generating Information Delivery Specification from BIM Information Requirements

Building Information Modeling (BIM) projects increasingly use Information Delivery Specification (IDS) to formalize information requirements in a machine-checkable XML format. Because IDS conditions are grounded in the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) vocabulary, authoring them requires expertise in IFC concepts, validation tools, and property set conventions. Existing benchmarks for structured generation do not adequately capture the additional burden of vocabulary conformance and external-validator agreement that IDS imposes. We present Ishigaki-IDS-Bench, the first publicly released benchmark for IDS generation from BIM information requirements. The benchmark contains 166 examples spanning 83 practical scenarios authored in Japanese and English by six BIM/IDS experts, each paired with a gold IDS file and metadata covering input format, turn setting, target IFC versions, and construction domain. Evaluation proceeds in two stages: (i) formal validity scored by the buildingSMART IDSAuditTool along Processability, Structure, and Content, and (ii) content fidelity scored by facet-level macro-F1 against the gold IDS. Across 10 LLMs in zero-shot, the highest Facet F1 is 65.6%, achieved by GPT-5.5, while the highest Content pass rate is only 33.1%, achieved by Claude Opus 4.5. Ishigaki-IDS-Bench is released on Hugging Face (DOI 10.57967/hf/8873) under CC BY 4.0, and the evaluation code is released on Zenodo (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20550510) under Apache-2.0.
Ryo Kanazawa, Koyo Hidaka, Teppei Miyamoto +9
May 21, 2026cs.CR

Safeguarding Text-to-Image Generative Models Against Unauthorized Knowledge Distillation

Closed-weight generative services are increasingly deployed through query-based APIs, where users can obtain generated outputs while model parameters remain inaccessible. However, such deployment does not prevent model stealing: an attacker can repeatedly query the service, collect large volumes of released synthetic images, and use them as training data for a private substitute model. This query-output-driven process enables unauthorized knowledge distillation and capability replication without direct access to the original weights. To mitigate this threat, a practical defense should preserve the visual fidelity of released images, provide explicit control over perturbation magnitude, and scale efficiently to large-volume output release. We present WaveGuard, a single-pass, generator-based protection framework that safeguards released synthetic images under a user-specified perturbation budget. WaveGuard employs a frequency-aware perturbation generator to inject structured, imperceptible perturbations that maintain perceptual utility for benign viewers while reducing the usefulness of protected images as training data for unauthorized student models. Extensive experiments under WikiArt-related synthetic-output distillation settings show that WaveGuard achieves a favorable efficacy--fidelity--efficiency trade-off, with explicit imperceptibility control and substantial gains in protection efficiency.
Yilan Gao, Sida Huang, Hongyuan Zhang +1
May 21, 2026cs.CV

Diverse Yet Consistent: Context-Guided Diffusion with Energy-Based Joint Refinement for Multi-Agent Motion Prediction

Deepgenerative models havebecomeapromisingapproach for human motion prediction due to their ability to capture multimodal distributions and represent diverse human be haviors. However, generating predictions that are both di verse and jointly consistent among interacting agents re mains challenging. In addition, most existing approaches are primarily evaluated using single-agent (marginal) met rics, which fail to fully reflect the joint dynamics of multi agent interactions. We propose a diffusion-based frame work that improves multi-agent motion prediction by lever aging rich contextual information from historical trajecto ries. This information is incorporated through a guidance mechanism to enhance the diversity and expressiveness of predicted motions. To further enforce interaction consis tency, we introduce an energy-based formulation that re fines the joint trajectory distribution while preserving the plausibility of individual trajectories. Extensive experi ments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing methods. No tably, our approach substantially improves both marginal (ADE/FDE) and joint (JADE/JFDE) metrics on ETH/UCY over strong marginal baselines. Compared with prior joint prediction methods, it delivers significant gains in marginal metrics while maintaining competitive joint performance.
Lei Chu, Yuhuan Zhao
May 20, 2026cs.RO

PGDG: Physically Grounded Data Generation for Robust Bimanual Policy Learning from a Single Demonstration

Behavior cloning for contact-rich bimanual manipulation remains challenging because diverse demonstrations are expensive to collect, and even small disturbances can push the system into off-manifold states where no recovery supervision is available. We propose PGDG, a data generation framework with zero-shot curation that expands a single demonstration into a compact dataset of physically plausible, successful, and diverse recovery behaviors without additional human labeling. PGDG iterates between a physics-grounded sampler and a dataset curator, where the curator selects informative, non-redundant, and recoverable behaviors to update the sampling distribution toward under-covered recovery modes, and the sampler draws physically plausible rollout candidates from this updated distribution and retains successful trajectories. To further improve data quality, PGDG applies short-horizon sampling-based control to relabel selected risky states with corrective actions. Across four bimanual manipulation tasks, PGDG consistently outperforms spatial-only augmentation in both simulation and zero-shot real-world transfer. On RotateBox-Pitch, success improves from 38% to 93% in simulation and from 35% to 82% in the real world. PGDG also enables effective foundation models fine-tuning such as GR00T, increasing success from 46% to 77%. Additional results are available in our website: https://cunxid.github.io/PGDG/.
Cunxi Dai, Haoran Chang, Aditya Nisal +5
May 20, 2026cs.CV

MRecover: A Conditional Generative Model for Recovering Motion-Corrupted MR images Using AI Generated Contrast

Hippocampal subfield segmentation requires high-resolution T2w turbo spin echo (TSE) MRI, yet this sequence is susceptible to motion artifacts, leading to substantial data loss. We developed a conditional generative model (MRecover) that synthesizes routinely acquired T1w images to create TSE images with autoregressive slice conditioning for volumetric consistency. Trained on 7T MRI data (n=577), the model achieved high in-domain fidelity (n=148, SSIM=0.84, FSIM=0.94) and generalized well to out-of-domain 3T data: subfield volumes from synthesized and the as-acquired images closely matched: (n=416, r=0.87-0.97) and yielded 31.8% more analyzable subjects in the motion-affected ADNI3 dataset after quality control (593 vs 450). The synthesized images also achieved larger effect sizes due to increasing the sample size for diagnostic group differences in hippocampal subfield atrophy (whole hippocampus ε2ε^2= 0.121-0.100 vs. 0.086-0.062, left-right hemispheres). Project page: https://jinghangli98.github.io/MRecover/
Jinghang Li, Tales Santini, Courtney Clark +13
May 20, 2026cs.CV

GenEvolve: Self-Evolving Image Generation Agents via Tool-Orchestrated Visual Experience Distillation

Open-ended image generation is no longer a simple prompt-to-image problem. High-quality generation often requires an agent to combine a model's internal generative ability with external resources. As requests become more diverse and demanding, we aim to develop a general image-generation agent that can self-evolve through trajectories and use tools more effectively across varied generation challenges. To this end, we propose GenEvolve, a self-evolving framework based on Tool-Orchestrated Visual Experience Distillation. In GenEvolve, each generation attempt is modeled as a tool-orchestrated trajectory, where the agent gathers evidence, selects references, invokes generation skills, and composes them into a prompt-reference program. Unlike existing agentic generation methods that mainly rely on image-level scalar rewards, GenEvolve compares multiple trajectories for the same request and abstracts best-worst differences into structured visual experience, provided only to a privileged teacher branch. Inspired by on-policy self-distillation, Visual Experience Distillation provides dense token-level supervision, helping the student internalize better search, knowledge activation, reference selection, and prompt construction. We further construct GenEvolve-Data and GenEvolve-Bench. Experiments on public benchmarks and GenEvolve-Bench show substantial gains over strong baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance among current image-generation frameworks. Our website is as follows: https://ephemeral182.github.io/GenEvolve/
Sixiang Chen, Zhaohu Xing, Tian Ye +7
May 20, 2026stat.ML

Memorisation, convergence and generalisation in generative models

Generative neural networks learn how to produce highly realistic images from a large, but finite number of examples - or do they simply memorise their training set? To settle this question, Kadkhodaie, Guth, Simoncelli and Mallat (ICLR '24) trained diffusion models independently on disjoint subsets of a dataset and showed that they converge to nearly the same density when the number of training images is large enough. This result raises two basic questions: how much data do you need for convergence, and what does convergence capture about learning the data distribution? Here, we address these questions by providing an exact analytical characterisation of the transition from memorisation to generalisation in linear generative models. We find that these models memorise at small load, while convergence emerges continuously when the number of samples is linear in the input dimension. Strikingly, we find that convergence is insensitive to recovery of the principal latent factors of the data, which are recovered in a sharp transition. After extending our approach to data with power-law spectra, we find the same distinction between convergence and latent recovery in our experiments with convolutional denoisers and in the data of Kadkhodaie et al. We thus show that generalisation in generative models decomposes into at least two distinct objectives: matching the bulk of the data distribution and recovering the principal latent factors. These objectives correspond to two different distances between true and learnt data distribution, and only the first one is captured by convergence.
Antoine Maillard, Sebastian Goldt
May 20, 2026cs.LG

On the Regularity and Generalization of One-Step Wasserstein-guided Generative Models for PDE-Induced Measures

Despite the remarkable empirical success of generative models, the available theory on their statistical accuracy in scientific computing remains largely pessimistic. This paper develops a theoretical framework for understanding the regularity of transport maps and the generalization properties of one-step Wasserstein-guided generative models for PDE-induced probability measures. We consider normalized target densities associated with linear elliptic and parabolic equations on bounded domains, as well as diffusion and Fokker--Planck equations on the torus. Under standard structural assumptions, we prove that these target measures satisfy doubling conditions. By combining this fact with regularity theory for optimal transport between doubling measures, we show that the optimal transport map from a uniform source measure to the target measure is Hölder continuous. This regularity yields an approximation-theoretic justification for one-step generative models that learn PDE-induced distributions via a single pushforward map. As a representative instance, we study DeepParticle and derive excess-risk bounds characterizing the discrepancy between the learned map and the population-optimal map. We also establish a robustness estimate under target shift and illustrate the theory with experiments which support the derived rates.
Likun Lin, Zhongjian Wang, Jack Xin +1
May 20, 2026cs.LG

Stochastic MeanFlow Policies: One-Step Generative Control with Entropic Mirror Descent

Online off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) is shaped by two coupled choices: the policy class and the update rule. Gaussian policies are fast and have tractable entropy, but struggle with multimodal action distributions. Generative policies are more expressive, but often require iterative sampling or lack tractable entropy estimates. On the optimisation side, SAC-style soft policy improvement and mirror descent (MD) can be viewed as minimising different KL divergences: the former moves the policy towards a value-induced Boltzmann distribution, while the latter regularises each update against the previous policy. Combining entropy regularisation with an MD constraint is therefore attractive, as it supports exploration while stabilising policy improvement; however, the resulting target can be multimodal and is poorly matched by unimodal Gaussian policies. We propose Stochastic MeanFlow Policies (SMFP), a one-step generative policy class that maps Gaussian noise to actions through a MeanFlow transformation. This stochastic reparameterisation yields a tractable entropy surrogate and allows MeanFlow policies to be trained within off-policy mirror descent under a unified objective for exploratory yet stable improvement. Across seven MuJoCo benchmarks, SMFP improves over Gaussian and generative baselines while retaining single-step inference efficiency.
Zeyuan Wang, Da Li, Yulin Chen +6
May 20, 2026cs.CV

Let EEG Models Learn EEG

High-fidelity EEG generation is critical for alleviating data scarcity and addressing privacy constraints in large-scale neural modeling. Despite recent progress, most existing approaches formulate EEG generation via discrete denoising objectives, which inadequately reflect the inherently continuous temporal dynamics and spectral structure of neural activity. As a result, these methods often struggle to preserve long-range temporal dependencies and exhibit mismatches in the spectral and temporal structure of the generated signals. In this work, we argue that effective EEG generation requires models that operate directly on the continuous evolution of neural signals. We introduce Just EEG Transformer (JET), a generative framework based on conditional flow matching that models EEG as raw sequences evolving along continuous trajectories. By learning a smooth vector field that transports noise to the EEG data distribution, JET captures temporal continuity and transient dynamics without relying on discretized denoising schemes or domain-specific representations. To ensure that the learned dynamics remain consistent with key properties of EEG signals, we introduce principled constraints that preserve spectral structure, temporal stationarity, and signal-level statistics. Across three large-scale benchmarks, JET consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, reducing TS-FID by over 40% compared to strong baselines. Extensive analyses show that JET captures key structural properties of neural dynamics, providing a scalable and principled approach to EEG generation. Project page: https://y-research-sbu.github.io/JET/ .
Yifan Wang, Yijia Ma, Wen Li +1
May 20, 2026cs.CV

Linear-DPO: Linear Direct Preference Optimization for Diffusion and Flow-Matching Generative Models

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is successful for alignment in LLMs but still faces challenges in text-to-image generation. Existing studies are confined to denoising diffusion models while overlooking flow-matching, and suffer from an objective mismatch when applying discrete NLP-based DPO to regression-based generative tasks.\ In this paper, we derive a generalized DPO objective that covers both diffusion and flow-matching via a unified reverse-time SDE framework, and point out from a gradient perspective that the standard DPO objective is suboptimal for text-to-image generation. Consequently, we propose Linear-DPO, which replaces the aggressive sigmoid-based utility function with a sustained linear utility and incorporates an EMA-updated reference model. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on diffusion models (SD1.5, SDXL) and flow-matching model (SD3-Medium) demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing baselines.
Kesong Li, Yixuan Xu, Kuo-kun Tseng +3
May 20, 2026cs.LG

Efficient Learning of Deep State Space Models via Importance Smoothing

Latent state space systems are ubiquitous in statistical modelling, arising naturally when time series are observed through noisy measurements. However, training deep state space models (DSSMs) at scale remains difficult. Two largely distinct strategies have emerged for training DSSMs. The first, auto-encoding DSSMs, trains generative models by optimising a variational lower bound. The second backpropagates through the outputs of classical sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms. Such approaches can train DSSMs for both discriminative and generative tasks, but their inherently sequential forward passes scale poorly on modern hardware. We propose \emph{parallel variational Monte Carlo} (PVMC), a new training method that bridges these paradigms and robustly trains DSSMs for both discriminative and generative tasks. Across a set of benchmark experiments, PVMC matches or exceeds state-of-the-art performance while training 10×10\times faster than the fastest competing SMC-based approach.
John-Joseph Brady, Nikolas Nusken, Yunpeng Li
May 20, 2026cs.LG

Modeling Temporal scRNA-seq Data with Latent Gaussian Process and Optimal Transport

Single-cell RNA sequencing provides insights into gene expression at single-cell resolution, yet inferring temporal processes from these static snapshot measurements remains a fundamental challenge. Current approaches utilizing neural differential equations and flows are sensitive to overfitting and lack careful considerations of biological variability. In this work, we propose a generative framework that models population trends using a latent heteroscedastic Gaussian process (GP) approximated by Hilbert space methods. To address the absence of genuine cell trajectories, we leverage an optimal transport (OT) objective that aligns generated and observed population distributions. Our method explicitly captures biological heterogeneity by incorporating cell-specific latent time and cell type conditioning to disentangle temporal asynchrony and trajectories to different cell types. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on complex interpolation and extrapolation benchmarks and introduce a novel gradient-based strategy for inferring perturbation trajectories.
Mehmet Yigit Balik, Harri Lähdesmäki
May 20, 2026cs.CY

Generative AI and Copyright Infringement: A Legal-Technical Analysis of AI Music Generation Systems Under 17 U.S.C. Title 17

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has enabled users to synthesize music with text prompts, combining copyrighted lyrics, AI-composed melodies, and synthetic vocals that imitate real artists. This paper examines the legal and technical dimensions of AI-based music creation (e.g., Google Gemini's music tools) under U.S. copyright law. We analyze whether a user who inputs one artist's protected lyrics into a GenAI system, directs it to use another artist's voice or style, publishes the resulting song, and monetizes it violates 17 U.S.C. Section 106's exclusive rights [3]. The analysis integrates Title 17 doctrine (rights of reproduction, derivative works, distribution), 17 U.S.C. Section 114's narrow sound recording protection [4], and the new voice-cloning laws emerging at the state level [20]. We argue that unauthorized lyric copying poses a high risk of infringement of the musical composition, whereas mere AI-generated voice imitation typically falls outside federal sound recording protection and instead implicates state publicity rights [12], [13]. Recent cases and legislation (Concord v. Anthropic [10]; Kadrey v. Meta [11]; Lehrman v. Lovo [12]; Tennessee's "ELVIS Act" [20]; UMG v. Uncharted Labs [14]; etc.) illustrate this split. We map AI technical components (prompt encoding, latent diffusion, neural vocoders, speaker embeddings) to legal risks and identify a regulatory gap: federal law robustly protects lyrics and melody but currently provides limited remedies for synthesized vocal likeness [22], [23]. The paper concludes with policy suggestions for clearer rules on AI music creation.
Zuhaib Hussain Butt
May 20, 2026cs.RO

DISC: Decoupling Instruction from State-Conditioned Control via Policy Generation

Language-conditioned manipulation policies typically process instructions and observations through shared network parameters. This task-state entanglement provides a pathway for observation leakage -- networks learn scene-to-action shortcuts that bypass language grounding entirely. DISC eliminates this failure structurally. Rather than conditioning a universal policy on language, DISC uses a hypernetwork to generate the entire parameter set of a task-specific visuomotor policy from the instruction alone. The generated policy never directly accesses language; therefore, its task-awareness must come from the language. Consequently, observation leakage has no pathway to emerge. On the other hand, generating coherent high-dimensional policy weights is itself a challenging problem. We address it with a two-stage hypernetwork whose refinement stage embeds the structure of gradient-based optimization as a feed-forward inductive bias, producing globally consistent parameters without actual gradient computation. Trained entirely from scratch on standard data budgets, DISC outperforms all entangled baselines on LIBERO-90 and Meta-World, with advantages that widen on complex, long-horizon tasks -- and surpasses the large-scale pretrained π0π_0 despite using no external pretraining data. On a real-world benchmark where all tasks share identical visual context, DISC substantially outperforms entangled alternatives, directly confirming that language-generated policy parameters, not visual shortcuts, drive behavior. The hypernetwork further learns a semantically structured parameter manifold that enables few-shot adaptation from minimal demonstrations and robust generalization across paraphrased instructions. Our code is available at: {https://github.com/ReNginx/DISC}.
Hanxiang Ren, Pei Zhou, Xunzhe Zhou +1
May 20, 2026cs.CV

Spatial Gram Alignment for Ultra-High-Resolution Image Synthesis

Modern ultra-high-resolution image synthesis relies heavily on the robust generative capacity of large-scale pre-trained Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs). While recent representation alignment methods have proven effective by distilling visual priors from foundation models (e.g., SAM or DINO) into generative latent features, scaling these approaches to pre-trained LDMs at extreme resolutions exposes a critical learnability-fidelity conflict. Specifically, forcing direct patch-wise feature distillation inherently perturbs the pre-trained latent manifold, ultimately leading to generation degradation. To address this bottleneck, we propose Spatial Gram Alignment (SGA), a novel framework that explicitly leverages the representation priors of vision foundation models while preserving the native generative capacity of LDMs. Moving beyond restrictive direct alignment, SGA imposes a non-invasive spatial constraint by aligning the internal self-similarities of the generative features with those of the foundation priors. This spatial constraint effectively establishes macroscopic structural coherence, while the native generative objectives retain the microscopic pixel-level fidelity inherent to the original LDMs. Notably, this versatile strategy integrates seamlessly across both intermediate diffusion features and VAE latents within pre-trained LDMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SGA achieves state-of-the-art performance for ultra-high-resolution text-to-image synthesis, yielding an effective reconciliation between global structural integrity and fine-grained visual details. Code is available at https://github.com/zhang0jhon/SGA.
Jinjin Zhang, Xiefan Guo, Di Huang
May 20, 2026cs.CV

What Semantics Survive the Connector? Diagnosing VLM-to-DiT Alignment in Video Editing

Flow matching based video generative models have been increasingly relying on prepended Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to handle complex, instruction-based video editing. The prevailing assumption underlying this paradigm is that a connector module can seamlessly align the VLM's rich multi-modal reasoning with the original text embedding space of DiTs. However, we hypothesize that this alignment acts as a severe semantic bottleneck, degrading fine-grained structural variables. Verifying this is challenging, as end-to-end evaluations conflate alignment failures with generation errors, and natural datasets lack disentangled annotations. To rigorously investigate this, we propose a controlled data processing pipeline based on video composition that results in TRACE-Edit, a diagnostic dataset focusing on relation-based editing. Leveraging this dataset, we propose a comprehensive diagnostic protocol to analyze two important designs of meta-query and connector in the existing video editing models. Systematic evaluation of four representative model cases reveals that fine-grained structural semantics can be severely degraded during alignment. Our findings overturn the assumption of lossless semantic transfer, identifying the VLM-to-DiT alignment as a major bottleneck and providing a new diagnostic foundation for future multi-modal alignment architectures.
Hangyu Lin, Chao Wen, Chengming Xu +4
May 20, 2026cs.RO

Jointly Learning Predicates and Actions Enables Zero-Shot Skill Composition

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) enables robots to learn complex behaviors from expert examples, yet existing approaches often fail to generalize to new compositions of known skills without retraining. Modern generative policies model distributions over action trajectories alone, thus are unable to reason about the symbolic outcomes required for robust composition. We propose that skills should jointly model action trajectories and the symbolic outcomes they induce. To address this gap, we introduce Predicate Action Skills (PACTS), a class of closed-loop visuomotor policies that model skills as a joint generative process over action and predicate belief trajectories, producing coherent action-outcome rollouts within a single model. Jointly generating actions and predicates enables PACTS to learn internal representations that improve both action generation and predicate classification. Furthermore, we demonstrate zero-shot composition of learned skills via planning by leveraging online predicate predictions from PACTS as a symbolic interface for sequencing and monitoring execution. Project website: https://planpacts.github.io/
Benedict Quartey, Sebastian Castro, Eric Rosen +3
May 19, 2026cs.LG

Latent Process Generator Matching

Many recent flow-matching and diffusion-style generative models rely on auxiliary stochastic dynamics during training: a richer process is simulated to define conditional targets, but the auxiliary state is either intractable to sample at generation time or simply not part of the desired output. Existing Generator Matching theory formalises conditioning on static latent random variables, and several recent papers prove special cases of projection results for particular augmented-state constructions. We introduce latent process generator matching, a general framework that treats the observed generative state as a deterministic image Xt=Φ(Yt)X_t=Φ(Y_t) of a tractable Markov process YtY_t. We show that in this setting one may learn the generator of a stochastic process on the image space which has the same one-time marginal distributions as the projected process. This generalizes and subsumes the discrete latent process results from the literature, and extends Generator Matching from static latent variables to a rich family of time-dependent latent conditional processes.
Lukas Billera, Hedwig Nora Nordlinder, Ben Murrell
May 19, 2026cs.LG

OpenSeisML: Open Large-Scale Real Seismic and well-log Dataset for Generative AI

The advent of machine learning (ML) and computer vision has significantly accelerated seismic inversion workflows by reducing the computational cost of traditionally expensive iterative methods. However, the development and evaluation of ML methods remain limited by the scarcity of realistic velocity models, as most high-quality data are privately owned by oil and gas companies. To address this gap, we present OpenSeisML, a collection of real seismic datasets designed to support generative AI (Gen-AI) workflows for seismic inversion. The datasets are curated from publicly available surveys in the UK National Data Repository (NDR). When seismic volumes are in the time domain and wells are in depth, a time-to-depth conversion is required. We use checkshot data to establish the time-depth relationship and construct a velocity model through interpolation for accurate conversion of post-stack seismic data. Here, we present an automated data curation pipeline that enables seismic data preparation while ensuring reproducibility. The objective is to train a generative model that captures the statistical distribution of subsurface properties, enabling the synthesis of multiple statistically consistent realizations for uncertainty quantification which can act as a prior for seismic inversion.
Ipsita Bhar, Huseyin Tuna Erdinc, Thales Souza +2
May 19, 2026cs.LG

When Does Model Collapse Occur in Structured Interactive Learning?

The proliferation of generative artificial intelligence has given rise to an interactive learning environment, where model parameters are continuously updated using not only data generated by natural processes, but also synthetic outputs produced by other models. This paradigm introduces two major challenges: (1) training data are no longer drawn exclusively from the target population, undermining a core assumption of classical statistical learning, and (2) model training processes become inherently correlated, as models interact with one another through repeated exposure to each other's synthetic outputs in a potentially complex manner. Establishing reliable statistical inference in such structured interactive learning environments therefore remains an important open problem. In particular, there is growing concern about model collapse, a phenomenon in which the performance of generative models progressively degrades as they are trained on synthetic data produced by earlier model generations. Prior work on model collapse primarily focuses on a single model trained on its own output, failing to capture model performance in multi-model interactive settings. In this work, we fill this gap by investigating the performance of generative models in an interactive learning environment with general interaction patterns. In particular, we formalize model interactions using directed graphs and show that the occurrence of model collapse depends critically on the topology of the interaction graph. We further derive an explicit necessary and sufficient condition characterizing when model collapse occurs, and establish finite-sample results for linear regression and asymptotic guarantees for general M-estimators. We support our theoretical findings through extensive numerical experiments.
Yuchen Wu, Kangjie Zhou, Weijie Su