Daily Papers

Generating temporal data under conditions is crucial for forecasting, imputation, and generative tasks. Such data often has metadata and partially observed signals that jointly influence the generated values. However, existing methods face three key limitations: (1) they condition on either the metadata or observed values, but rarely both together; (2) they adopt either training-time approaches that fail to generalize to unseen scenarios, or inference-time approaches that ignore metadata; and (3) they suffer from trade-offs between generation speed and temporal coherence across time windows--choosing either slow but coherent autoregressive methods or fast but incoherent parallel ones. We propose WaveStitch, a novel diffusion-based method to overcome these hurdles through: (1) dual-sourced conditioning on both metadata and partially observed signals; (2) a hybrid training-inference architecture, incorporating metadata during training and observations at inference via gradient-based guidance; and (3) a novel pipeline-style paradigm that generates time windows in parallel while preserving coherence through an inference-time conditional loss and a stitching mechanism. Across diverse datasets, WaveStitch demonstrates adaptability to arbitrary patterns of observed signals, achieving 1.81x lower mean-squared-error compared to the state-of-the-art, and generates data up to 166.48x faster than autoregressive methods while maintaining coherence. Our code is available at: https://github.com/adis98/WaveStitch

Object swapping aims to replace a source object in a scene with a reference object while preserving object fidelity, scene fidelity, and object-scene harmony. Existing methods either require per-object finetuning and slow inference or rely on extra paired data that mostly depict the same object across contexts, forcing models to rely on background cues rather than learning cross-object alignment. We propose SourceSwap, a self-supervised and source-aware framework that learns cross-object alignment. Our key insight is to synthesize high-quality pseudo pairs from any image via a frequency-separated perturbation in the initial-noise space, which alters appearance while preserving pose, coarse shape, and scene layout, requiring no videos, multi-view data, or additional images. We then train a dual U-Net with full-source conditioning and a noise-free reference encoder, enabling direct inter-object alignment, zero-shot inference without per-object finetuning, and lightweight iterative refinement. We further introduce SourceBench, a high-quality benchmark with higher resolution, more categories, and richer interactions. Experiments demonstrate that SourceSwap achieves superior fidelity, stronger scene preservation, and more natural harmony, and it transfers well to edits such as subject-driven refinement and face swapping.

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in image generation and editing tasks. Inversion within these models aims to recover the latent noise representation for a real or generated image, enabling reconstruction, editing, and other downstream tasks. However, to date, most inversion approaches suffer from an intrinsic trade-off between reconstruction accuracy and editing flexibility. This limitation arises from the difficulty of maintaining both semantic alignment and structural consistency during the inversion process. In this work, we introduce Dual-Conditional Inversion (DCI), a novel framework that jointly conditions on the source prompt and reference image to guide the inversion process. Specifically, DCI formulates the inversion process as a dual-condition fixed-point optimization problem, minimizing both the latent noise gap and the reconstruction error under the joint guidance. This design anchors the inversion trajectory in both semantic and visual space, leading to more accurate and editable latent representations. Our novel setup brings new understanding to the inversion process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DCI achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple editing tasks, significantly improving both reconstruction quality and editing precision. Furthermore, we also demonstrate that our method achieves strong results in reconstruction tasks, implying a degree of robustness and generalizability approaching the ultimate goal of the inversion process.

Zero-shot voice conversion (VC) aims to convert a source utterance into the voice of an unseen target speaker while preserving its linguistic content. Although recent systems have improved conversion quality, building zero-shot VC systems for interactive scenarios remains challenging because high-fidelity speaker transfer and low-latency streaming inference are difficult to achieve simultaneously. In this work, we present X-VC, a zero-shot streaming VC system that performs one-step conversion in the latent space of a pretrained neural codec. X-VC uses a dual-conditioning acoustic converter that jointly models source codec latents and frame-level acoustic conditions derived from target reference speech, while injecting utterance-level target speaker information through adaptive normalization. To reduce the mismatch between training and inference, we train the model with generated paired data and a role-assignment strategy that combines standard, reconstruction, and reversed modes. For streaming inference, we further adopt a chunkwise inference scheme with overlap smoothing that is aligned with the segment-based training paradigm of the codec. Experiments on Seed-TTS-Eval show that X-VC achieves the best streaming WER in both English and Chinese, strong speaker similarity in same-language and cross-lingual settings, and substantially lower offline real-time factor than the compared baselines. These results suggest that codec-space one-step conversion is a practical approach for building high-quality low-latency zero-shot VC systems. Audio samples are available at https://x-vc.github.io. Our code and checkpoints will also be released.

Activity difference based learning algorithms-such as contrastive Hebbian learning and equilibrium propagation-have been proposed as biologically plausible alternatives to error back-propagation. However, on traditional digital chips these algorithms suffer from having to solve a costly inference problem twice, making these approaches more than two orders of magnitude slower than back-propagation. In the analog realm equilibrium propagation may be promising for fast and energy efficient learning, but states still need to be inferred and stored twice. Inspired by lifted neural networks and compartmental neuron models we propose a simple energy based compartmental neuron model, termed dual propagation, in which each neuron is a dyad with two intrinsic states. At inference time these intrinsic states encode the error/activity duality through their difference and their mean respectively. The advantage of this method is that only a single inference phase is needed and that inference can be solved in layerwise closed-form. Experimentally we show on common computer vision datasets, including Imagenet32x32, that dual propagation performs equivalently to back-propagation both in terms of accuracy and runtime.

We present DuPO, a dual learning-based preference optimization framework that generates annotation-free feedback via a generalized duality. DuPO addresses two key limitations: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR)'s reliance on costly labels and applicability restricted to verifiable tasks, and traditional dual learning's restriction to strictly dual task pairs (e.g., translation and back-translation). Specifically, DuPO decomposes a primal task's input into known and unknown components, then constructs its dual task to reconstruct the unknown part using the primal output and known information (e.g., reversing math solutions to recover hidden variables), broadening applicability to non-invertible tasks. The quality of this reconstruction serves as a self-supervised reward to optimize the primal task, synergizing with LLMs' ability to instantiate both tasks via a single model. Empirically, DuPO achieves substantial gains across diverse tasks: it enhances the average translation quality by 2.13 COMET over 756 directions, boosts the mathematical reasoning accuracy by an average of 6.4 points on three challenge benchmarks, and enhances performance by 9.3 points as an inference-time reranker (trading computation for accuracy). These results position DuPO as a scalable, general, and annotation-free paradigm for LLM optimization.

Continual learning aims to enable a single model to learn a sequence of tasks without catastrophic forgetting. Top-performing methods usually require a rehearsal buffer to store past pristine examples for experience replay, which, however, limits their practical value due to privacy and memory constraints. In this work, we present a simple yet effective framework, DualPrompt, which learns a tiny set of parameters, called prompts, to properly instruct a pre-trained model to learn tasks arriving sequentially without buffering past examples. DualPrompt presents a novel approach to attach complementary prompts to the pre-trained backbone, and then formulates the objective as learning task-invariant and task-specific "instructions". With extensive experimental validation, DualPrompt consistently sets state-of-the-art performance under the challenging class-incremental setting. In particular, DualPrompt outperforms recent advanced continual learning methods with relatively large buffer sizes. We also introduce a more challenging benchmark, Split ImageNet-R, to help generalize rehearsal-free continual learning research. Source code is available at https://github.com/google-research/l2p.

We introduce DualMind, a generalist agent designed to tackle various decision-making tasks that addresses challenges posed by current methods, such as overfitting behaviors and dependence on task-specific fine-tuning. DualMind uses a novel "Dual-phase" training strategy that emulates how humans learn to act in the world. The model first learns fundamental common knowledge through a self-supervised objective tailored for control tasks and then learns how to make decisions based on different contexts through imitating behaviors conditioned on given prompts. DualMind can handle tasks across domains, scenes, and embodiments using just a single set of model weights and can execute zero-shot prompting without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. We evaluate DualMind on MetaWorld and Habitat through extensive experiments and demonstrate its superior generalizability compared to previous techniques, outperforming other generalist agents by over 50% and 70% on Habitat and MetaWorld, respectively. On the 45 tasks in MetaWorld, DualMind achieves over 30 tasks at a 90% success rate.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made remarkable progress in video understanding. However, they suffer from a critical vulnerability: an over-reliance on language priors, which can lead to visual ungrounded hallucinations, especially when processing counterfactual videos that defy common sense. This limitation, stemming from the intrinsic data imbalance between text and video, is challenging to address due to the substantial cost of collecting and annotating counterfactual data. To address this, we introduce DualityForge, a novel counterfactual data synthesis framework that employs controllable, diffusion-based video editing to transform real-world videos into counterfactual scenarios. By embedding structured contextual information into the video editing and QA generation processes, the framework automatically produces high-quality QA pairs together with original-edited video pairs for contrastive training. Based on this, we build DualityVidQA, a large-scale video dataset designed to reduce MLLM hallucinations. In addition, to fully exploit the contrastive nature of our paired data, we propose Duality-Normalized Advantage Training (DNA-Train), a two-stage SFT-RL training regime where the RL phase applies pair-wise ell_1 advantage normalization, thereby enabling a more stable and efficient policy optimization. Experiments on DualityVidQA-Test demonstrate that our method substantially reduces model hallucinations on counterfactual videos, yielding a relative improvement of 24.0% over the Qwen2.5-VL-7B baseline. Moreover, our approach achieves significant gains across both hallucination and general-purpose benchmarks, indicating strong generalization capability. We will open-source our dataset and code.

Recent advances in diffusion-based controllable visual generation have led to remarkable improvements in image quality. However, these powerful models are typically deployed on cloud servers due to their large computational demands, raising serious concerns about user data privacy. To enable secure and efficient on-device generation, we explore in this paper controllable diffusion models built upon linear attention architectures, which offer superior scalability and efficiency, even on edge devices. Yet, our experiments reveal that existing controllable generation frameworks, such as ControlNet and OminiControl, either lack the flexibility to support multiple heterogeneous condition types or suffer from slow convergence on such linear-attention models. To address these limitations, we propose a novel controllable diffusion framework tailored for linear attention backbones like SANA. The core of our method lies in a unified gated conditioning module working in a dual-path pipeline, which effectively integrates multi-type conditional inputs, such as spatially aligned and non-aligned cues. Extensive experiments on multiple tasks and benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art controllable generation performance based on linear-attention models, surpassing existing methods in terms of fidelity and controllability.

We present DualFocus, a novel framework for integrating macro and micro perspectives within multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to enhance vision-language task performance. Current MLLMs typically singularly focus on inputs at a predefined resolution, resulting in deficiencies in detailed questions involving local regions. We introduced a DualFocus mechanism where the model concentrates on the image from a macro perspective, responses to the question, and identifies suitable sub-regions to zoom in for subsequent micro perspective analysis. Via the integration of answers from both macro and micro perspectives, the model is adept at addressing tasks that encompass global, detailed, and combined considerations. To endows the DualFocus mechanism in MLLMs, we curated a tailored dataset derived from the Visual Genome (VG) and adapted it to align with the training regimen of DualFocus. Through comparative studies across different model sizes and benchmarks, we demonstrate DualFocus's superiority in balancing detailed examination with holistic insight, significantly reducing hallucination instances in MLLMs and improving their performance in various vision-language tasks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress through Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), yet still rely heavily on external supervision (e.g., curated labels). Adversarial learning, particularly through self-play, offers a promising alternative that enables models to iteratively learn from themselves - thus reducing reliance on external supervision. Dual-play extends adversarial learning by assigning specialized roles to two models and training them against each other, fostering sustained competition and mutual evolution. Despite its promise, adapting dual-play training to LLMs remains limited, largely due to their susceptibility to reward hacking and training instability. In this paper, we introduce PasoDoble, a novel LLM dual-play framework. PasoDoble adversarially trains two models initialized from the same base model: a Proposer, which generates challenging questions with ground-truth answers, and a Solver, which attempts to solve them. We enrich the Proposer with knowledge from a pre-training dataset to ensure the questions' quality and diversity. To avoid reward hacking, the Proposer is rewarded for producing only valid questions that push the Solver's limit, while the Solver is rewarded for solving them correctly, and both are updated jointly. To further enhance training stability, we introduce an optional offline paradigm that decouples Proposer and Solver updates, alternately updating each for several steps while holding the other fixed. Notably, PasoDoble operates without supervision during training. Experimental results show that PasoDoble can improve the reasoning performance of LLMs. Our project page is available at https://hcy123902.github.io/PasoDoble.

To build a generalizable Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model with strong reasoning ability, a common strategy is to first train a specialist VLA on robot demonstrations to acquire reliable manipulation skills, and then incorporate mixed annotated robot data together with multimodal data to restore broader reasoning capabilities. However, we observe that the resulting reasoning VLA often suffers from degraded action performance compared to the specialist model before fine-tuning, a phenomenon we refer to as action degeneration. To address this issue, we propose DualVLA, which enhances action performance through carefully designed post-training while still preserving reasoning capability. We first introduce a dual-layer data pruning method that removes redundant embodied reasoning, preventing it from adversely influencing action learning. To further strengthen action generation, we design a dual-teacher adaptive distillation strategy that assigns different supervision signals to different data domains while maintaining reasoning ability. To fill the evaluation gap for generalist VLAs, we also propose VLA Score, which decouples VLA capability into reasoning, intention, action, and alignment dimensions for a more fine-grained assessment. Experiments show that DualVLA achieves an average success rate of 61.0 in SimplerEnv and an average score of 65.4 across eight competitive multimodal benchmarks, demonstrating a stronger balance between precise action execution and multimodal understanding. Project Website: https://costaliya.github.io/DualVLA/.

This study explores the interference in temporal processing within a dual-task paradigm from an artificial intelligence (AI) perspective. In this context, the dual-task setup is implemented as a simplified version of the Overcooked environment with two variations, single task (T) and dual task (T+N). Both variations involve an embedded time production task, but the dual task (T+N) additionally involves a concurrent number comparison task. Two deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents were separately trained for each of these tasks. These agents exhibited emergent behavior consistent with human timing research. Specifically, the dual task (T+N) agent exhibited significant overproduction of time relative to its single task (T) counterpart. This result was consistent across four target durations. Preliminary analysis of neural dynamics in the agents' LSTM layers did not reveal any clear evidence of a dedicated or intrinsic timer. Hence, further investigation is needed to better understand the underlying time-keeping mechanisms of the agents and to provide insights into the observed behavioral patterns. This study is a small step towards exploring parallels between emergent DRL behavior and behavior observed in biological systems in order to facilitate a better understanding of both.

Recent progress in image generation has sparked research into controlling these models through condition signals, with various methods addressing specific challenges in conditional generation. Instead of proposing another specialized technique, we introduce a simple, unified framework to handle diverse conditional generation tasks involving a specific image-condition correlation. By learning a joint distribution over a correlated image pair (e.g. image and depth) with a diffusion model, our approach enables versatile capabilities via different inference-time sampling schemes, including controllable image generation (e.g. depth to image), estimation (e.g. image to depth), signal guidance, joint generation (image & depth), and coarse control. Previous attempts at unification often introduce significant complexity through multi-stage training, architectural modification, or increased parameter counts. In contrast, our simple formulation requires a single, computationally efficient training stage, maintains the standard model input, and adds minimal learned parameters (15% of the base model). Moreover, our model supports additional capabilities like non-spatially aligned and coarse conditioning. Extensive results show that our single model can produce comparable results with specialized methods and better results than prior unified methods. We also demonstrate that multiple models can be effectively combined for multi-signal conditional generation.

We present a neural framework for learning conditional optimal transport (OT) maps between probability distributions. Our approach introduces a conditioning mechanism capable of processing both categorical and continuous conditioning variables simultaneously. At the core of our method lies a hypernetwork that generates transport layer parameters based on these inputs, creating adaptive mappings that outperform simpler conditioning methods. Comprehensive ablation studies demonstrate the superior performance of our method over baseline configurations. Furthermore, we showcase an application to global sensitivity analysis, offering high performance in computing OT-based sensitivity indices. This work advances the state-of-the-art in conditional optimal transport, enabling broader application of optimal transport principles to complex, high-dimensional domains such as generative modeling and black-box model explainability.

3D Human motion generation is pivotal across film, animation, gaming, and embodied intelligence. Traditional 3D motion synthesis relies on costly motion capture, while recent work shows that 2D videos provide rich, temporally coherent observations of human behavior. Existing approaches, however, either map high-level text descriptions to motion or rely solely on video conditioning, leaving a gap between generated dynamics and real-world motion statistics. We introduce MotionDuet, a multimodal framework that aligns motion generation with the distribution of video-derived representations. In this dual-conditioning paradigm, video cues extracted from a pretrained model (e.g., VideoMAE) ground low-level motion dynamics, while textual prompts provide semantic intent. To bridge the distribution gap across modalities, we propose Dual-stream Unified Encoding and Transformation (DUET) and a Distribution-Aware Structural Harmonization (DASH) loss. DUET fuses video-informed cues into the motion latent space via unified encoding and dynamic attention, while DASH aligns motion trajectories with both distributional and structural statistics of video features. An auto-guidance mechanism further balances textual and visual signals by leveraging a weakened copy of the model, enhancing controllability without sacrificing diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MotionDuet generates realistic and controllable human motions, surpassing strong state-of-the-art baselines.

Deep learning classifiers face significant challenges when dealing with heterogeneous multi-modal and multi-organ biomedical datasets. The low-level feature distinguishability limited to imaging-modality hinders the classifiers' ability to learn high-level semantic relationships, resulting in sub-optimal performance. To address this issue, image augmentation strategies are employed as regularization techniques. While additive noise input during network training is a well-established augmentation as regularization method, modern pipelines often favor more robust techniques such as dropout and weight decay. This preference stems from the observation that combining these established techniques with noise input can adversely affect model performance. In this study, we propose a novel pretraining pipeline that learns to generate conditional noise mask specifically tailored to improve performance on multi-modal and multi-organ datasets. As a reinforcement learning algorithm, our approach employs a dual-component system comprising a very light-weight policy network that learns to sample conditional noise using a differentiable beta distribution as well as a classifier network. The policy network is trained using the reinforce algorithm to generate image-specific noise masks that regularize the classifier during pretraining. A key aspect is that the policy network's role is limited to obtaining an intermediate (or heated) model before fine-tuning. During inference, the policy network is omitted, allowing direct comparison between the baseline and noise-regularized models. We conducted experiments and related analyses on RadImageNet datasets. Results demonstrate that fine-tuning the intermediate models consistently outperforms conventional training algorithms on both classification and generalization to unseen concept tasks.

The reliance of mobile GUI agents on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) introduces a severe privacy vulnerability: screenshots containing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) are often sent to untrusted, third-party routers. These routers can exploit their own MLLMs to mine this data, violating user privacy. Existing privacy perturbations fail the critical dual challenge of this scenario: protecting PII from the router's MLLM while simultaneously preserving task utility for the agent's MLLM. To address this gap, we propose the Dual-Task Adversarial Protector (DualTAP), a novel framework that, for the first time, explicitly decouples these conflicting objectives. DualTAP trains a lightweight generator using two key innovations: (i) a contrastive attention module that precisely identifies and targets only the PII-sensitive regions, and (ii) a dual-task adversarial objective that simultaneously minimizes a task-preservation loss (to maintain agent utility) and a privacy-interference loss (to suppress PII leakage). To facilitate this study, we introduce PrivScreen, a new dataset of annotated mobile screenshots designed specifically for this dual-task evaluation. Comprehensive experiments on six diverse MLLMs (e.g., GPT-5) demonstrate DualTAP's state-of-the-art protection. It reduces the average privacy leakage rate by 31.6 percentage points (a 3.0x relative improvement) while, critically, maintaining an 80.8% task success rate - a negligible drop from the 83.6% unprotected baseline. DualTAP presents the first viable solution to the privacy-utility trade-off in mobile MLLM agents.

Neural posterior estimation has emerged as a powerful tool for amortized inference, with growing adoption across scientific and applied domains. In many of these applications, the conditioning variable is a set of observations whose elements depend not only on the target but also on unknown factors shared across the set. Optimal inference therefore requires treating the set jointly, which in turn requires training the estimator at the deployment set size -- a regime where memory and compute quickly become prohibitive. We introduce a simple, theoretically grounded strategy that decouples representation learning from posterior modeling. Our method trains a mean-pool Deep Set on sets of size at most two, producing an encoder that generalizes to arbitrary set sizes. The inference head is then finetuned on pre-aggregated embeddings, making training cost essentially independent of the deployment set size N. Across scalar, image, multi-view 3D, molecular, and high-dimensional conditional generation benchmarks with N in the thousands, our approach matches or outperforms standard baselines at a fraction of the compute.

In human cognition theory, human thinking is governed by two systems: the fast and intuitive System 1 and the slower but more deliberative System 2. Recent studies have shown that incorporating System 2 process into Transformers including large language models (LLMs), significantly enhances their reasoning capabilities. Nevertheless, models that purely resemble System 2 thinking require substantially higher computational costs and are much slower to respond. To address this challenge, we present Dualformer, a single Transformer model that seamlessly integrates both the fast and slow reasoning modes. Dualformer is obtained by training on data with randomized reasoning traces, where different parts of the traces are dropped during training. The dropping strategies are specifically tailored according to the trace structure, analogous to analyzing our thinking process and creating shortcuts with patterns. At inference time, our model can be configured to output only the solutions (fast mode) or both the reasoning chain and the final solution (slow mode), or automatically decide which mode to engage (auto mode). In all cases, Dualformer outperforms the corresponding baseline models in both performance and computational efficiency: (1) in slow mode, Dualformer optimally solves unseen 30 x 30 maze navigation tasks 97.6% of the time, surpassing the Searchformer (trained on data with complete reasoning traces) baseline performance of 93.3%, while only using 45.5% fewer reasoning steps; (2) in fast mode, Dualformer completes those tasks with an 80% optimal rate, significantly outperforming the Solution-Only model (trained on solution-only data), which has an optimal rate of only 30%. For math problems, our techniques have also achieved improved performance with LLM fine-tuning, showing its generalization beyond task-specific models.

Consistency-based generative models like Shortcut and MeanFlow achieve impressive results via a target-aware design for solving the Probability Flow ODE (PF-ODE). Typically, such methods introduce a target time r alongside the current time t to modulate outputs between a local multi-step derivative (r = t) and a global few-step integral (r = 0). However, the conventional "one input, one output" paradigm enforces a partition of the training budget, often allocating a significant portion (e.g., 75% in MeanFlow) solely to the multi-step objective for stability. This separation forces a trade-off: allocating sufficient samples to the multi-step objective leaves the few-step generation undertrained, which harms convergence and limits scalability. To this end, we propose Duality Models (DuMo) via a "one input, dual output" paradigm. Using a shared backbone with dual heads, DuMo simultaneously predicts velocity v_t and flow-map u_t from a single input x_t. This applies geometric constraints from the multi-step objective to every sample, bounding the few-step estimation without separating training objectives, thereby significantly improving stability and efficiency. On ImageNet 256 times 256, a 679M Diffusion Transformer with SD-VAE achieves a state-of-the-art (SOTA) FID of 1.79 in just 2 steps. Code is available at: https://github.com/LINs-lab/DuMo

Building upon large language models (LLMs), recent large multimodal models (LMMs) unify cross-model understanding and generation into a single framework. However, LMMs still struggle to achieve accurate image-text alignment, prone to generating text responses contradicting the visual input or failing to follow the text-to-image prompts. Current solutions require external supervision (e.g., human feedback or reward models) and only address unidirectional tasks-either understanding or generation. In this work, based on the observation that understanding and generation are inverse dual tasks, we introduce a self-supervised dual reward mechanism to reinforce the understanding and generation capabilities of LMMs. Specifically, we sample multiple outputs for a given input in one task domain, then reverse the input-output pairs to compute the dual likelihood of the model as self-rewards for optimization. Extensive experimental results on visual understanding and generation benchmarks demonstrate that our method can effectively enhance the performance of the model without any external supervision, especially achieving remarkable improvements in text-to-image tasks.

The fine-tuning of deep pre-trained models has revealed compositional properties, with multiple specialized modules that can be arbitrarily composed into a single, multi-task model. However, identifying the conditions that promote compositionality remains an open issue, with recent efforts concentrating mainly on linearized networks. We conduct a theoretical study that attempts to demystify compositionality in standard non-linear networks through the second-order Taylor approximation of the loss function. The proposed formulation highlights the importance of staying within the pre-training basin to achieve composable modules. Moreover, it provides the basis for two dual incremental training algorithms: the one from the perspective of multiple models trained individually, while the other aims to optimize the composed model as a whole. We probe their application in incremental classification tasks and highlight some valuable skills. In fact, the pool of incrementally learned modules not only supports the creation of an effective multi-task model but also enables unlearning and specialization in certain tasks. Code available at https://github.com/aimagelab/mammoth.

Visual reasoning through reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has achieved remarkable progress. However, when dealing with multi-source inputs, existing approaches tend to treat them as a mere accumulation of information, lacking explicit mechanisms to distinguish whether integrating additional sources yields information gain or introduces interference. Therefore, they struggle to effectively model dynamic interaction when integrating multiple sources, particularly when they differ significantly in physical properties and semantics, e.g., infrared and depth, leading to inferior performance to mono-source reasoning when a certain source holds the dominant signal. To address this issue, we propose MARS, a novel mono-anchored multi-source reasoning framework that models each visual modality as an independent information source. Specifically, by treating mono-source rewards as dynamic anchors, our method explicitly incorporates the information gain introduced by multi-source fusion into advantage normalization and adaptively emphasizes mutual promotion between sources while suppressing potential noise or conflicts during RLVR. From theoretical analysis, our method effectively quantifies information gain introduced by multi-source integration in gradient estimation, enabling consistent modality regulation. Empirical results also show impressive 3.2% and 4.9% performance gains on GRPO and DAPO across diverse datasets, confirming effectiveness of our method.

We provide a two-way integration for the widely adopted ControlNet by integrating external condition generation algorithms into a single dense prediction method and incorporating its individually trained image generation processes into a single model. Despite its tremendous success, the ControlNet of a two-stage pipeline bears limitations in being not self-contained (e.g. calls the external condition generation algorithms) with a large model redundancy (separately trained models for different types of conditioning inputs). Our proposed OmniControlNet consolidates 1) the condition generation (e.g., HED edges, depth maps, user scribble, and animal pose) by a single multi-tasking dense prediction algorithm under the task embedding guidance and 2) the image generation process for different conditioning types under the textual embedding guidance. OmniControlNet achieves significantly reduced model complexity and redundancy while capable of producing images of comparable quality for conditioned text-to-image generation.

Solving multi-label recognition (MLR) for images in the low-label regime is a challenging task with many real-world applications. Recent work learns an alignment between textual and visual spaces to compensate for insufficient image labels, but loses accuracy because of the limited amount of available MLR annotations. In this work, we utilize the strong alignment of textual and visual features pretrained with millions of auxiliary image-text pairs and propose Dual Context Optimization (DualCoOp) as a unified framework for partial-label MLR and zero-shot MLR. DualCoOp encodes positive and negative contexts with class names as part of the linguistic input (i.e. prompts). Since DualCoOp only introduces a very light learnable overhead upon the pretrained vision-language framework, it can quickly adapt to multi-label recognition tasks that have limited annotations and even unseen classes. Experiments on standard multi-label recognition benchmarks across two challenging low-label settings demonstrate the advantages of our approach over state-of-the-art methods.

Conditional image generation enhances text-to-image synthesis with structural, spatial, or stylistic priors, but current methods face challenges in handling conflicts between sources. These include 1) input-level conflicts, where the conditioning image contradicts the text prompt, and 2) model-bias conflicts, where generative biases disrupt alignment even when conditions match the text. Addressing these conflicts requires nuanced solutions, which standard supervised fine-tuning struggles to provide. Preference-based optimization techniques like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) show promise but are limited by gradient entanglement between text and condition signals and lack disentangled training data for multi-constraint tasks. To overcome this, we propose a bidirectionally decoupled DPO framework (BideDPO). Our method creates two disentangled preference pairs-one for the condition and one for the text-to reduce gradient entanglement. The influence of pairs is managed using an Adaptive Loss Balancing strategy for balanced optimization. We introduce an automated data pipeline to sample model outputs and generate conflict-aware data. This process is embedded in an iterative optimization strategy that refines both the model and the data. We construct a DualAlign benchmark to evaluate conflict resolution between text and condition. Experiments show BideDPO significantly improves text success rates (e.g., +35%) and condition adherence. We also validate our approach using the COCO dataset. Project Pages: https://limuloo.github.io/BideDPO/.

Dominant dual-encoder models enable efficient image-text retrieval but suffer from limited accuracy while the cross-encoder models offer higher accuracy at the expense of efficiency. Distilling cross-modality matching knowledge from cross-encoder to dual-encoder provides a natural approach to harness their strengths. Thus we investigate the following valuable question: how to make cross-encoder a good teacher for dual-encoder? Our findings are threefold:(1) Cross-modal similarity score distribution of cross-encoder is more concentrated while the result of dual-encoder is nearly normal making vanilla logit distillation less effective. However ranking distillation remains practical as it is not affected by the score distribution.(2) Only the relative order between hard negatives conveys valid knowledge while the order information between easy negatives has little significance.(3) Maintaining the coordination between distillation loss and dual-encoder training loss is beneficial for knowledge transfer. Based on these findings we propose a novel Contrastive Partial Ranking Distillation (CPRD) method which implements the objective of mimicking relative order between hard negative samples with contrastive learning. This approach coordinates with the training of the dual-encoder effectively transferring valid knowledge from the cross-encoder to the dual-encoder. Extensive experiments on image-text retrieval and ranking tasks show that our method surpasses other distillation methods and significantly improves the accuracy of dual-encoder.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse tasks by leveraging rich textual information with minimal labeled data. However, deploying such large models remains challenging, particularly in resource-constrained environments. Knowledge distillation (KD) offers a well-established solution to this problem; however, recent KD approaches from VLMs often involve multi-stage training or additional tuning, increasing computational overhead and optimization complexity. In this paper, we propose texttt{D}ual-texttt{H}ead texttt{O}ptimization (texttt{DHO}) -- a simple yet effective KD framework that transfers knowledge from VLMs to compact, task-specific models in semi-supervised settings. Specifically, we introduce dual prediction heads that independently learn from labeled data and teacher predictions, and propose to linearly combine their outputs during inference. We observe that DHO mitigates gradient conflicts between supervised and distillation signals, enabling more effective feature learning than single-head KD baselines. As a result, extensive experiments show that DHO consistently outperforms baselines across multiple domains and fine-grained datasets. Notably, on ImageNet, it achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving accuracy by 3% and 0.1% with 1% and 10% labeled data, respectively, while using fewer parameters.

Diffusion-based video generation can create realistic videos, yet existing image- and text-based conditioning fails to offer precise motion control. Prior methods for motion-conditioned synthesis typically require model-specific fine-tuning, which is computationally expensive and restrictive. We introduce Time-to-Move (TTM), a training-free, plug-and-play framework for motion- and appearance-controlled video generation with image-to-video (I2V) diffusion models. Our key insight is to use crude reference animations obtained through user-friendly manipulations such as cut-and-drag or depth-based reprojection. Motivated by SDEdit's use of coarse layout cues for image editing, we treat the crude animations as coarse motion cues and adapt the mechanism to the video domain. We preserve appearance with image conditioning and introduce dual-clock denoising, a region-dependent strategy that enforces strong alignment in motion-specified regions while allowing flexibility elsewhere, balancing fidelity to user intent with natural dynamics. This lightweight modification of the sampling process incurs no additional training or runtime cost and is compatible with any backbone. Extensive experiments on object and camera motion benchmarks show that TTM matches or exceeds existing training-based baselines in realism and motion control. Beyond this, TTM introduces a unique capability: precise appearance control through pixel-level conditioning, exceeding the limits of text-only prompting. Visit our project page for video examples and code: https://time-to-move.github.io/.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in problem-solving by incorporating reasoning processes. However, this enhanced reasoning capability results in an increased number of output tokens during inference, leading to higher computational costs. To address this challenge, we propose TwT (Thinking without Tokens), a method that reduces inference-time costs through habitual reasoning distillation with multi-teachers' guidance, while maintaining high performance. Our approach introduces a Habitual Reasoning Distillation method, which internalizes explicit reasoning into the model's habitual behavior through a Teacher-Guided compression strategy inspired by human cognition. Additionally, we propose Dual-Criteria Rejection Sampling (DCRS), a technique that generates a high-quality and diverse distillation dataset using multiple teacher models, making our method suitable for unsupervised scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that TwT effectively reduces inference costs while preserving superior performance, achieving up to a 13.6% improvement in accuracy with fewer output tokens compared to other distillation methods, offering a highly practical solution for efficient LLM deployment.

While diffusion models have gained prominence in image synthesis, their generative pre-training has been shown to yield discriminative representations, paving the way towards unified visual generation and understanding. However, two key questions remain: 1) Can these representations be leveraged to improve the training of diffusion models themselves, rather than solely benefiting downstream tasks? 2) Can the feature quality be enhanced to rival or even surpass modern self-supervised learners, without compromising generative capability? This work addresses these questions by introducing self-conditioning, a straightforward yet effective mechanism that internally leverages the rich semantics inherent in denoising network to guide its own decoding layers, forming a tighter bottleneck that condenses high-level semantics to improve generation. Results are compelling: our method boosts both generation FID and recognition accuracy with 1% computational overhead and generalizes across diverse diffusion architectures. Crucially, self-conditioning facilitates an effective integration of discriminative techniques, such as contrastive self-distillation, directly into diffusion models without sacrificing generation quality. Extensive experiments on pixel-space and latent-space datasets show that in linear evaluations, our enhanced diffusion models, particularly UViT and DiT, serve as strong representation learners, surpassing various self-supervised models.

Self-Rewarding Language Models propose an architecture in which the Large Language Models(LLMs) both generates responses and evaluates its own outputs via LLM-as-a-Judge prompting, dynamically improving its generative capabilities through iterative Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). However, our analysis reveals a critical limitation in existing Self-Rewarding paradigms: the synchronized improvement of chosen and rejected responses progressively narrows the representational difference between contrasting samples, undermining effective preference learning. We propose Temporal Self-Rewarding Language Models that strategically coordinate past, present, and future model generations to sustain learning signals. Our dual-phase framework introduces: (1) Anchored Rejection - fixing rejected responses using the past initial model's outputs and (2) Future-Guided Chosen - dynamically curating chosen samples using next-generation model predictions. Extensive experiments across three model families (Llama, Qwen, Mistral) and different model sizes (Llama3B/8B/70B) demonstrate significant improvements when trained with our method compared to Self-Rewarding using same computation resources. For example, Llama3.1-8B reaches a 29.44 win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0 with our method, outperforming the Self-Rewarding baseline (19.69) by 9.75. Notably, our method also demonstrates superior out-of-distribution generalization across mathematical reasoning (GSM8K), knowledge-based QA (ARC, TruthfulQA), and code generation (HumanEval) tasks, even though we do not specifically collect such training data.

Multi-reference image generation aims to synthesize images from textual instructions while faithfully preserving subject identities from multiple reference images. Existing VLM-enhanced diffusion models commonly rely on decoupled visual conditioning: semantic ViT features are processed by the VLM for instruction understanding, whereas appearance-rich VAE features are injected later into the diffusion backbone. Despite its intuitive design, this separation makes it difficult for the model to associate each semantically grounded subject with visual details from the correct reference image. As a result, the model may recognize which subject is being referred to, but fail to preserve its identity and fine-grained appearance, leading to attribute leakage and cross-reference confusion in complex multi-reference settings. To address this issue, we propose UniCustom, a unified visual conditioning framework that fuses ViT and VAE features before VLM encoding. This early fusion exposes the VLM to both semantic cues and appearance-rich details, enabling its hidden states to jointly encode the referred subject and corresponding visual appearance with only a lightweight linear fusion layer. To learn such unified representations, we adopt a two-stage training strategy: reconstruction-oriented pretraining that preserves reference-specific appearance details in the fused hidden states, followed by supervised finetuning on single- and multi-reference generation tasks. We further introduce a slot-wise binding regularization that encourages each image slot to preserve low-level details of its corresponding reference, thereby reducing cross-reference entanglement. Experiments on two multi-reference generation benchmarks demonstrate that UniCustom consistently improves subject consistency, instruction following, and compositional fidelity over strong baselines.

Future- or return-conditioned supervised learning is an emerging paradigm for offline reinforcement learning (RL), where the future outcome (i.e., return) associated with an observed action sequence is used as input to a policy trained to imitate those same actions. While return-conditioning is at the heart of popular algorithms such as decision transformer (DT), these methods tend to perform poorly in highly stochastic environments, where an occasional high return can arise from randomness in the environment rather than the actions themselves. Such situations can lead to a learned policy that is inconsistent with its conditioning inputs; i.e., using the policy to act in the environment, when conditioning on a specific desired return, leads to a distribution of real returns that is wildly different than desired. In this work, we propose the dichotomy of control (DoC), a future-conditioned supervised learning framework that separates mechanisms within a policy's control (actions) from those beyond a policy's control (environment stochasticity). We achieve this separation by conditioning the policy on a latent variable representation of the future, and designing a mutual information constraint that removes any information from the latent variable associated with randomness in the environment. Theoretically, we show that DoC yields policies that are consistent with their conditioning inputs, ensuring that conditioning a learned policy on a desired high-return future outcome will correctly induce high-return behavior. Empirically, we show that DoC is able to achieve significantly better performance than DT on environments that have highly stochastic rewards and transition

Teaching large language models (LLMs) to be faithful in the provided context is crucial for building reliable information-seeking systems. Therefore, we propose a systematic framework, CANOE, to improve the faithfulness of LLMs in both short-form and long-form generation tasks without human annotations. Specifically, we first synthesize short-form question-answering (QA) data with four diverse tasks to construct high-quality and easily verifiable training data without human annotation. Also, we propose Dual-GRPO, a rule-based reinforcement learning method that includes three tailored rule-based rewards derived from synthesized short-form QA data, while simultaneously optimizing both short-form and long-form response generation. Notably, Dual-GRPO eliminates the need to manually label preference data to train reward models and avoids over-optimizing short-form generation when relying only on the synthesized short-form QA data. Experimental results show that CANOE greatly improves the faithfulness of LLMs across 11 different downstream tasks, even outperforming the most advanced LLMs, e.g., GPT-4o and OpenAI o1.

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have achieved impressive success in visual generation. While, they suffer from slow inference speed due to iterative sampling. Employing fewer sampling steps is an intuitive solution, but this will also introduces discretization error. Existing fast samplers make inspiring efforts to reduce discretization error through the adoption of high-order solvers, potentially reaching a plateau in terms of optimization. This raises the question: can the sampling process be accelerated further? In this paper, we re-examine the nature of sampling errors, discerning that they comprise two distinct elements: the widely recognized discretization error and the less explored approximation error. Our research elucidates the dynamics between these errors and the step by implementing a dual-error disentanglement strategy. Building on these foundations, we introduce an unified and training-free acceleration framework, DualFast, designed to enhance the speed of DPM sampling by concurrently accounting for both error types, thereby minimizing the total sampling error. DualFast is seamlessly compatible with existing samplers and significantly boost their sampling quality and speed, particularly in extremely few sampling steps. We substantiate the effectiveness of our framework through comprehensive experiments, spanning both unconditional and conditional sampling domains, across both pixel-space and latent-space DPMs.

Mechanism-targeted synthetic data is increasingly proposed as a way to steer pretraining toward desirable capabilities, but it remains unclear how such interventions should be evaluated. We study this question for in-context learning (ICL) under matched compute (iso-FLOPs) using Bi-Induct, a lightweight data rewrite that interleaves short directional copy snippets into a natural pretraining stream: forward-copy (induction), backward-copy (anti-induction, as a directional control), or a balanced mix. Across 0.13B-1B decoder-only models, we evaluate (i) few-shot performance on standard LM benchmarks and function-style ICL probes, (ii) head-level copy telemetry, and (iii) held-out perplexity as a guardrail. Bi-Induct reliably increases induction-head activity, but this does not translate into consistent improvements in few-shot generalization: on standard LM benchmarks, Bi-Induct is largely performance-neutral relative to natural-only training, while on function-style probes the 1B natural-only model performs best. Despite explicit backward-copy cues, anti-induction scores remain near zero across scales, revealing a strong forward/backward asymmetry. Targeted ablations show a sharper distinction: removing the top 2% induction heads per layer harms ICL more than matched random ablations, with the largest relative drop occurring in the natural-only models. This indicates that natural-only training produces more centralized, load-bearing induction circuitry, whereas Bi-Induct tends to create more distributed and redundant induction activity. Our main conclusion is that eliciting a mechanism is not the same as making it load-bearing. For data-centric foundation model design, this suggests that synthetic data interventions should be evaluated not only by signature amplification, but by whether they create causally necessary computation while preserving natural-data modeling quality.

In an effort to further advance semi-supervised generative and classification tasks, we propose a simple yet effective training strategy called dual pseudo training (DPT), built upon strong semi-supervised learners and diffusion models. DPT operates in three stages: training a classifier on partially labeled data to predict pseudo-labels; training a conditional generative model using these pseudo-labels to generate pseudo images; and retraining the classifier with a mix of real and pseudo images. Empirically, DPT consistently achieves SOTA performance of semi-supervised generation and classification across various settings. In particular, with one or two labels per class, DPT achieves a Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) score of 3.08 or 2.52 on ImageNet 256x256. Besides, DPT outperforms competitive semi-supervised baselines substantially on ImageNet classification tasks, achieving top-1 accuracies of 59.0 (+2.8), 69.5 (+3.0), and 74.4 (+2.0) with one, two, or five labels per class, respectively. Notably, our results demonstrate that diffusion can generate realistic images with only a few labels (e.g., <0.1%) and generative augmentation remains viable for semi-supervised classification. Our code is available at https://github.com/ML-GSAI/DPT.

Although Long Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved superior performance on various reasoning scenarios, they often suffer from increased computational costs and inference latency caused by overthinking. To address these limitations, we propose Adaptive Dual Reasoner, which supports two reasoning modes: fast thinking and slow thinking. ADR dynamically alternates between these modes based on the contextual complexity during reasoning. ADR is trained in two stages: (1) A cold-start stage using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to equip the model with the ability to integrate both fast and slow reasoning modes, in which we construct a hybrid reasoning dataset through a dedicated pipeline to provide large-scale supervision. (2) A reinforcement learning stage for optimizing reasoning effort, where we introduce Entropy-guided Hybrid Policy Optimization EHPO, an RL training framework employing an entropy-guided dynamic rollout strategy for branching at high-entropy units and a difficulty-aware penalty to balance fast and slow reasoning. Across challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, ADR achieves an effective balance between reasoning performance and efficiency among state-of-the-art approaches. Specifically, ADR yields a performance gain of up to 6.1%, while reducing the reasoning output length by 49.5% to 59.3%.

Reward-based finetuning is crucial for aligning language policies with intended behaviors (e.g., creativity and safety). A key challenge here is to develop steerable language models that trade-off multiple (conflicting) objectives in a flexible and efficient manner. This paper presents Conditioned Language Policy (CLP), a general framework for finetuning language models on multiple objectives. Building on techniques from multi-task training and parameter-efficient finetuning, CLP can learn steerable models that effectively trade-off conflicting objectives at inference time. Notably, this does not require training or maintaining multiple models to achieve different trade-offs between the objectives. Through an extensive set of experiments and ablations, we show that the CLP framework learns steerable models that outperform and Pareto-dominate the current state-of-the-art approaches for multi-objective finetuning.

With the widespread adoption of machine learning systems, the need to curtail their behavior has become increasingly apparent. This is evidenced by recent advancements towards developing models that satisfy robustness, safety, and fairness requirements. These requirements can be imposed (with generalization guarantees) by formulating constrained learning problems that can then be tackled by dual ascent algorithms. Yet, though these algorithms converge in objective value, even in non-convex settings, they cannot guarantee that their outcome is feasible. Doing so requires randomizing over all iterates, which is impractical in virtually any modern applications. Still, final iterates have been observed to perform well in practice. In this work, we address this gap between theory and practice by characterizing the constraint violation of Lagrangian minimizers associated with optimal dual variables, despite lack of convexity. To do this, we leverage the fact that non-convex, finite-dimensional constrained learning problems can be seen as parametrizations of convex, functional problems. Our results show that rich parametrizations effectively mitigate the issue of feasibility in dual methods, shedding light on prior empirical successes of dual learning. We illustrate our findings in fair learning tasks.

We build a dual-way neural dictionary to retrieve words given definitions, and produce definitions for queried words. The model learns the two tasks simultaneously and handles unknown words via embeddings. It casts a word or a definition to the same representation space through a shared layer, then generates the other form in a multi-task fashion. Our method achieves promising automatic scores on previous benchmarks without extra resources. Human annotators prefer the model's outputs in both reference-less and reference-based evaluation, indicating its practicality. Analysis suggests that multiple objectives benefit learning.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) serves as a potent paradigm for enhancing reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet standard outcome-based approaches often suffer from reward sparsity and inefficient credit assignment. In this paper, we propose a novel framework designed to provide continuous reward signals, which introduces a Step-wise Marginal Information Gain (MIG) mechanism that quantifies the intrinsic value of reasoning steps against a Monotonic Historical Watermark, effectively filtering out training noise. To ensure disentangled credit distribution, we implement a Decoupled Masking Strategy, applying process-oriented rewards specifically to the chain-of-thought (CoT) and outcome-oriented rewards to the full completion. Additionally, we incorporate a Dual-Gated SFT objective to stabilize training with high-quality structural and factual signals. Extensive experiments across textual and multi-modal benchmarks (e.g., MATH, Super-CLEVR) demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms baselines such as GRPO in both sample efficiency and final accuracy. Furthermore, our model exhibits superior out-of-distribution robustness, demonstrating promising zero-shot transfer capabilities to unseen and challenging reasoning tasks.

The growing safety concerns surrounding large language models raise an urgent need to align them with diverse human preferences to simultaneously enhance their helpfulness and safety. A promising approach is to enforce safety constraints through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). For such constrained RLHF, typical Lagrangian-based primal-dual policy optimization methods are computationally expensive and often unstable. This paper presents a perspective of dualization that reduces constrained alignment to an equivalent unconstrained alignment problem. We do so by pre-optimizing a smooth and convex dual function that has a closed form. This shortcut eliminates the need for cumbersome primal-dual policy iterations, greatly reducing the computational burden and improving training stability. Our strategy leads to two practical algorithms in model-based and preference-based settings (MoCAN and PeCAN, respectively). A broad range of experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and merits of our algorithms.

The goal of reinforcement learning (RL) is to find a policy that maximizes the expected cumulative return. It has been shown that this objective can be represented as an optimization problem of state-action visitation distribution under linear constraints. The dual problem of this formulation, which we refer to as dual RL, is unconstrained and easier to optimize. In this work, we first cast several state-of-the-art offline RL and offline imitation learning (IL) algorithms as instances of dual RL approaches with shared structures. Such unification allows us to identify the root cause of the shortcomings of prior methods. For offline IL, our analysis shows that prior methods are based on a restrictive coverage assumption that greatly limits their performance in practice. To fix this limitation, we propose a new discriminator-free method ReCOIL that learns to imitate from arbitrary off-policy data to obtain near-expert performance. For offline RL, our analysis frames a recent offline RL method XQL in the dual framework, and we further propose a new method f-DVL that provides alternative choices to the Gumbel regression loss that fixes the known training instability issue of XQL. The performance improvements by both of our proposed methods, ReCOIL and f-DVL, in IL and RL are validated on an extensive suite of simulated robot locomotion and manipulation tasks. Project code and details can be found at this https://hari-sikchi.github.io/dual-rl.

Bidirectional transformers are the foundation of many sequence modeling tasks across natural, biological, and chemical language domains, but they are permutation-invariant without explicit positional embeddings. In contrast, unidirectional attention inherently encodes positional information through its triangular mask, enabling models to operate without positional embeddings altogether. Here, we introduce Dual Triangle Attention, a novel bidirectional attention mechanism that separates the query-key subspace of each attention head into two complementary triangular masks: one that attends to past-and-self positions and one that attends to future-and-self positions. This design provides bidirectional context while maintaining the causal mask's implicit positional inductive bias in both directions. Using PyTorch's flex_attention, Dual Triangle Attention is implemented as a single compiled kernel call with no additional parameters beyond standard multi-head attention. We evaluated Dual Triangle Attention across three settings: (1) a synthetic argmax position probe, (2) masked language modeling (MLM) on natural language, and (3) MLM on protein sequences. In the argmax task, both Dual Triangle Attention and causal attention learn positional information without explicit positional embeddings, whereas standard bidirectional attention cannot. In the MLM experiments, Dual Triangle Attention with Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE) achieved the best context extension performance and strong performance across the board. These findings suggest that Dual Triangle Attention is a viable attention mechanism for bidirectional transformers, with or without positional embeddings.

Recently, advanced large language models (LLMs) have emerged at an increasingly rapid pace. However, when faced with complex problems, most users are often unable to provide accurate and effective prompts to interact with LLMs, thus limiting the performance of LLMs. To address this challenge, we propose Prompt-R1, an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework that uses a small-scale LLM to collaborate with large-scale LLMs, replacing user interaction to solve problems better. This collaboration is cast as a multi-turn prompt interaction, where the small-scale LLM thinks and generates prompts, and the large-scale LLM performs complex reasoning. A dual-constrained reward is designed to optimize for correctness, generation quality, and reasoning accuracy. Prompt-R1 provides a plug-and-play framework that supports both inference and training with various large-scale LLMs. Experiments on multiple public datasets show that Prompt-R1 significantly outperforms baseline models across tasks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/QwenQKing/Prompt-R1.

Critic-free methods like GRPO reduce memory demands by estimating advantages from multiple rollouts but tend to converge slowly, as critical learning signals are diluted by an abundance of uninformative samples and tokens. To tackle this challenge, we propose the Dynamic Dual-Level Down-Sampling (D^3S) framework that prioritizes the most informative samples and tokens across groups to improve the efficient of policy optimization. D^3S operates along two levels: (1) the sample-level, which selects a subset of rollouts to maximize advantage variance (Var(A)). We theoretically proven that this selection is positively correlated with the upper bound of the policy gradient norms, yielding higher policy gradients. (2) the token-level, which prioritizes tokens with a high product of advantage magnitude and policy entropy (|A_{i,t}|times H_{i,t}), focusing updates on tokens where the policy is both uncertain and impactful. Moreover, to prevent overfitting to high-signal data, D^3S employs a dynamic down-sampling schedule inspired by curriculum learning. This schedule starts with aggressive down-sampling to accelerate early learning and gradually relaxes to promote robust generalization. Extensive experiments on Qwen2.5 and Llama3.1 demonstrate that integrating D^3S into advanced RL algorithms achieves state-of-the-art performance and generalization while requiring fewer samples and tokens across diverse reasoning benchmarks. Our code is added in the supplementary materials and will be made publicly available.

Arbitrary Style Transfer (AST) aims to transform images by adopting the style from any selected artwork. Nonetheless, the need to accommodate diverse and subjective user preferences poses a significant challenge. While some users wish to preserve distinct content structures, others might favor a more pronounced stylization. Despite advances in feed-forward AST methods, their limited customizability hinders their practical application. We propose a new approach, ArtFusion, which provides a flexible balance between content and style. In contrast to traditional methods reliant on biased similarity losses, ArtFusion utilizes our innovative Dual Conditional Latent Diffusion Probabilistic Models (Dual-cLDM). This approach mitigates repetitive patterns and enhances subtle artistic aspects like brush strokes and genre-specific features. Despite the promising results of conditional diffusion probabilistic models (cDM) in various generative tasks, their introduction to style transfer is challenging due to the requirement for paired training data. ArtFusion successfully navigates this issue, offering more practical and controllable stylization. A key element of our approach involves using a single image for both content and style during model training, all the while maintaining effective stylization during inference. ArtFusion outperforms existing approaches on outstanding controllability and faithful presentation of artistic details, providing evidence of its superior style transfer capabilities. Furthermore, the Dual-cLDM utilized in ArtFusion carries the potential for a variety of complex multi-condition generative tasks, thus greatly broadening the impact of our research.

This paper introduces an interdisciplinary framework called Machine Psychology, which merges principles from operant learning psychology with a specific Artificial Intelligence model, the Non-Axiomatic Reasoning System (NARS), to enhance Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) research. The core premise of this framework is that adaptation is crucial to both biological and artificial intelligence and can be understood through operant conditioning principles. The study assesses this approach via three operant learning tasks using OpenNARS for Applications (ONA): simple discrimination, changing contingencies, and conditional discrimination tasks. In the simple discrimination task, NARS demonstrated rapid learning, achieving perfect accuracy during both training and testing phases. The changing contingencies task showcased NARS's adaptability, as it successfully adjusted its behavior when task conditions were reversed. In the conditional discrimination task, NARS handled complex learning scenarios effectively, achieving high accuracy by forming and utilizing intricate hypotheses based on conditional cues. These findings support the application of operant conditioning as a framework for creating adaptive AGI systems. NARS's ability to operate under conditions of insufficient knowledge and resources, coupled with its sensorimotor reasoning capabilities, establishes it as a robust model for AGI. The Machine Psychology framework, by incorporating elements of natural intelligence such as continuous learning and goal-driven behavior, offers a scalable and flexible approach for real-world applications. Future research should investigate using enhanced NARS systems, more advanced tasks, and applying this framework to diverse, complex challenges to further progress the development of human-level AI.

The quest for Continual Learning (CL) seeks to empower neural networks with the ability to learn and adapt incrementally. Central to this pursuit is addressing the stability-plasticity dilemma, which involves striking a balance between two conflicting objectives: preserving previously learned knowledge and acquiring new knowledge. While numerous CL methods aim to achieve this trade-off, they often overlook the impact of network architecture on stability and plasticity, restricting the trade-off to the parameter level. In this paper, we delve into the conflict between stability and plasticity at the architectural level. We reveal that under an equal parameter constraint, deeper networks exhibit better plasticity, while wider networks are characterized by superior stability. To address this architectural-level dilemma, we introduce a novel framework denoted Dual-Arch, which serves as a plug-in component for CL. This framework leverages the complementary strengths of two distinct and independent networks: one dedicated to plasticity and the other to stability. Each network is designed with a specialized and lightweight architecture, tailored to its respective objective. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Dual-Arch enhances the performance of existing CL methods while being up to 87% more compact in terms of parameters.

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/.

Image generation abilities of text-to-image diffusion models have significantly advanced, yielding highly photo-realistic images from descriptive text and increasing the viability of leveraging synthetic images to train computer vision models. To serve as effective training data, generated images must be highly realistic while also sufficiently diverse within the support of the target data distribution. Yet, state-of-the-art conditional image generation models have been primarily optimized for creative applications, prioritizing image realism and prompt adherence over conditional diversity. In this paper, we investigate how to improve the diversity of generated images with the goal of increasing their effectiveness to train downstream image classification models, without fine-tuning the image generation model. We find that conditioning the generation process on an augmented real image and text prompt produces generations that serve as effective synthetic datasets for downstream training. Conditioning on real training images contextualizes the generation process to produce images that are in-domain with the real image distribution, while data augmentations introduce visual diversity that improves the performance of the downstream classifier. We validate augmentation-conditioning on a total of five established long-tail and few-shot image classification benchmarks and show that leveraging augmentations to condition the generation process results in consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art on the long-tailed benchmark and remarkable gains in extreme few-shot regimes of the remaining four benchmarks. These results constitute an important step towards effectively leveraging synthetic data for downstream training.

Large language models (LLMs) with enormous pre-training tokens and parameter amounts emerge abilities, including math reasoning, code generation, and instruction following. These abilities are further enhanced by supervised fine-tuning (SFT). The open-source community has studied on ad-hoc SFT for each ability, while proprietary LLMs are versatile for all abilities. It is important to investigate how to unlock them with multiple abilities via SFT. In this study, we specifically focus on the data composition between mathematical reasoning, code generation, and general human-aligning abilities during SFT. From a scaling perspective, we investigate the relationship between model abilities and various factors including data amounts, data composition ratio, model parameters, and SFT strategies. Our experiments reveal that different abilities exhibit different scaling patterns, and larger models generally show superior performance with the same amount of data. Mathematical reasoning and code generation improve as data amounts increase consistently, while the general ability is enhanced with about a thousand samples and improves slowly. We find data composition results in various abilities improvements with low data amounts, while conflicts of abilities with high data amounts. Our experiments further show that composition data amount impacts performance, while the influence of composition ratio is insignificant. Regarding the SFT strategies, we evaluate sequential learning multiple abilities are prone to catastrophic forgetting. Our proposed Dual-stage Mixed Fine-tuning (DMT) strategy learns specialized abilities first and then learns general abilities with a small amount of specialized data to prevent forgetting, offering a promising solution to learn multiple abilities with different scaling patterns.

While reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) significantly enhances LLM reasoning by optimizing the conditional distribution P(y|x), its potential is fundamentally bounded by the base model's existing output distribution. Optimizing the marginal distribution P(y) in the Pre-train Space addresses this bottleneck by encoding reasoning ability and preserving broad exploration capacity. Yet, conventional pre-training relies on static corpora for passive learning, leading to a distribution shift that hinders targeted reasoning enhancement. In this paper, we introduce PreRL (Pre-train Space RL), which applies reward-driven online updates directly to P(y). We theoretically and empirically validate the strong gradient alignment between log P(y) and log P(y|x), establishing PreRL as a viable surrogate for standard RL. Furthermore, we uncover a critical mechanism: Negative Sample Reinforcement (NSR) within PreRL serves as an exceptionally effective driver for reasoning. NSR-PreRL rapidly prunes incorrect reasoning spaces while stimulating endogenous reflective behaviors, increasing transition and reflection thoughts by 14.89x and 6.54x, respectively. Leveraging these insights, we propose Dual Space RL (DSRL), a Policy Reincarnation strategy that initializes models with NSR-PreRL to expand the reasoning horizon before transitioning to standard RL for fine-grained optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DSRL consistently outperforms strong baselines, proving that pre-train space pruning effectively steers the policy toward a refined correct reasoning subspace.

Recent work has shown great progress in integrating spatial conditioning to control large, pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models. Despite these advances, existing methods describe the spatial image content using hand-crafted conditioning inputs, which are either semantically ambiguous (e.g., edges) or require expensive manual annotations (e.g., semantic segmentation). To address these limitations, we propose a new label-free way of conditioning diffusion models to enable fine-grained spatial control. We introduce the concept of neural semantic image synthesis, which uses neural layouts extracted from pre-trained foundation models as conditioning. Neural layouts are advantageous as they provide rich descriptions of the desired image, containing both semantics and detailed geometry of the scene. We experimentally show that images synthesized via neural semantic image synthesis achieve similar or superior pixel-level alignment of semantic classes compared to those created using expensive semantic label maps. At the same time, they capture better semantics, instance separation, and object orientation than other label-free conditioning options, such as edges or depth. Moreover, we show that images generated by neural layout conditioning can effectively augment real data for training various perception tasks.

Machine Unlearning (MU) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to remove unsafe or outdated information. However, existing work assumes that all facts are equally forgettable and largely ignores whether the forgotten knowledge originates from pretraining or supervised fine-tuning (SFT). In this paper, we introduce DUAL (Dual Unlearning Evaluation across Training Stages), a benchmark of 28.6k Wikidata-derived triplets annotated with fact popularity using Wikipedia link counts and LLM-based salience scores. Our experiments show that pretrained and SFT models respond differently to unlearning. An SFT step on the forget data yields smoother forgetting, more stable tuning, and 10-50% higher retention, while direct unlearning on pretrained models remains unstable and prone to relearning or catastrophic forgetting.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have achieved impressive results in various vision-language tasks. However, despite showing promising performance, LVLMs suffer from hallucinations caused by language bias, leading to diminished focus on images and ineffective visual comprehension. We identify two primary reasons for this bias: 1. Different scales of training data between the pretraining stage of LLM and multimodal alignment stage. 2. The learned inference bias due to short-term dependency of text data. Therefore, we propose LACING, a systemic framework designed to address the language bias of LVLMs with muLtimodal duAl-attention meChanIsm (MDA) aNd soft-image Guidance (IFG). Specifically, MDA introduces a parallel dual-attention mechanism that enhances the integration of visual inputs across the model. IFG introduces a learnable soft visual prompt during training and inference to replace visual inputs, designed to compel LVLMs to prioritize text inputs. Then, IFG further proposes a novel decoding strategy using the soft visual prompt to mitigate the model's over-reliance on adjacent text inputs. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method effectively debiases LVLMs from their language bias, enhancing visual comprehension and reducing hallucinations without requiring additional training resources or data. The code and model are available at [lacing-lvlm.github.io](https://lacing-lvlm.github.io).

Recent improvements in conditional generative modeling have made it possible to generate high-quality images from language descriptions alone. We investigate whether these methods can directly address the problem of sequential decision-making. We view decision-making not through the lens of reinforcement learning (RL), but rather through conditional generative modeling. To our surprise, we find that our formulation leads to policies that can outperform existing offline RL approaches across standard benchmarks. By modeling a policy as a return-conditional diffusion model, we illustrate how we may circumvent the need for dynamic programming and subsequently eliminate many of the complexities that come with traditional offline RL. We further demonstrate the advantages of modeling policies as conditional diffusion models by considering two other conditioning variables: constraints and skills. Conditioning on a single constraint or skill during training leads to behaviors at test-time that can satisfy several constraints together or demonstrate a composition of skills. Our results illustrate that conditional generative modeling is a powerful tool for decision-making.

Large language models (LLMs) currently suffer from parameter entanglement, where general reasoning capabilities (logic) and specific factual knowledge (facts) exist in a superposition state within shared weights. This coupling leads to the "memory wall," where computational capacity is squandered on simulating retrieval, often resulting in hallucinations. In this paper, we propose "digital metabolism," a thermodynamic hypothesis suggesting that targeted forgetting is necessary for distilling a pure neural logic core. To validate this hypothesis, we introduce the Regenerative Logic-Core Protocol (RLCP), a dual-stream training framework that renders specific factual dependencies linearly undecodable via deep-layer gradient reversal. Applying RLCP to Qwen2.5-0.5B, we observe a distinct phase transition: the model achieves near-zero retention of targeted factual associations (Accuracy < 7%) while exhibiting changes consistent with an emergent "structural crystallization" effect. Empirical analysis on GSM8K reveals that the "metabolized" model spontaneously adopts chain-of-thought (CoT) scaffolding, which we interpret as compensating for the loss of direct associative recall (shifting from O(1) recall to O(N) reasoning). While the causal mechanism underlying this behavioral shift requires further investigation, our findings provide a dynamic weight-level counterpart to architectural innovations like DeepSeek's Engram, paving the way for modular "Neural CPU + Symbolic RAM" architectures.

Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit remarkable reasoning capabilities on complex multimodal understanding tasks, they still suffer from the notorious hallucination issue: generating outputs misaligned with obvious visual or factual evidence. Currently, training-based solutions, like direct preference optimization (DPO), leverage paired preference data to suppress hallucinations. However, they risk sacrificing general reasoning capabilities due to the likelihood displacement. Meanwhile, training-free solutions, like contrastive decoding, achieve this goal by subtracting the estimated hallucination pattern from a distorted input. Yet, these handcrafted perturbations (e.g., add noise to images) may poorly capture authentic hallucination patterns. To avoid these weaknesses of existing methods, and realize robust hallucination mitigation (i.e., maintaining general reasoning performance), we propose a novel framework: Decoupling Contrastive Decoding (DCD). Specifically, DCD decouples the learning of positive and negative samples in preference datasets, and trains separate positive and negative image projections within the MLLM. The negative projection implicitly models real hallucination patterns, which enables vision-aware negative images in the contrastive decoding inference stage. Our DCD alleviates likelihood displacement by avoiding pairwise optimization and generalizes robustly without handcrafted degradation. Extensive ablations across hallucination benchmarks and general reasoning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of DCD, i.e., it matches DPO's hallucination suppression while preserving general capabilities and outperforms the handcrafted contrastive decoding methods.

Current long chain-of-thought (long-CoT) models excel at mathematical reasoning but rely on slow and error-prone natural language traces. Tool-augmented agents address arithmetic via code execution, but often falter on complex logical tasks. We introduce a fine-tuning framework, DualDistill, that distills complementary reasoning strategies from multiple teachers into a unified student model. Using this approach, we train Agentic-R1, which dynamically selects the optimal strategy for each query, invoking tools for arithmetic and algorithmic problems, and using text-based reasoning for abstract ones. Our method improves accuracy across a range of tasks, including both computation-intensive and standard benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of multi-strategy distillation in achieving robust and efficient reasoning. Our project is available at https://github.com/StigLidu/DualDistill

This work introduces a new task, text-conditioned selective video-to-audio (V2A) generation, which produces only the user-intended sound from a multi-object video. This capability is especially crucial in multimedia production, where audio tracks are handled individually for each sound source for precise editing, mixing, and creative control. However, current approaches generate single source-mixed sounds at once, largely because visual features are entangled, and region cues or prompts often fail to specify the source. We propose SelVA, a novel text-conditioned V2A model that treats the text prompt as an explicit selector of target source and modulates video encoder to distinctly extract prompt-relevant video features. The proposed supplementary tokens promote cross-attention by suppressing text-irrelevant activations with efficient parameter tuning, yielding robust semantic and temporal grounding. SelVA further employs a self-augmentation scheme to overcome the lack of mono audio track supervision. We evaluate SelVA on VGG-MONOAUDIO, a curated benchmark of clean single-source videos for such a task. Extensive experiments and ablations consistently verify its effectiveness across audio quality, semantic alignment, and temporal synchronization. Code and demo are available at https://jnwnlee.github.io/selva-demo/.

The Base-New Trade-off (BNT) problem universally exists during the optimization of CLIP-based prompt tuning, where continuous fine-tuning on base (target) classes leads to a simultaneous decrease of generalization ability on new (unseen) classes. Existing approaches attempt to regulate the prompt tuning process to balance BNT by appending constraints. However, imposed on the same target prompt, these constraints fail to fully avert the mutual exclusivity between the optimization directions for base and new. As a novel solution to this challenge, we propose the plug-and-play Dual-Prompt Collaboration (DPC) framework, the first that decoupling the optimization processes of base and new tasks at the prompt level. Specifically, we clone a learnable parallel prompt based on the backbone prompt, and introduce a variable Weighting-Decoupling framework to independently control the optimization directions of dual prompts specific to base or new tasks, thus avoiding the conflict in generalization. Meanwhile, we propose a Dynamic Hard Negative Optimizer, utilizing dual prompts to construct a more challenging optimization task on base classes for enhancement. For interpretability, we prove the feature channel invariance of the prompt vector during the optimization process, providing theoretical support for the Weighting-Decoupling of DPC. Extensive experiments on multiple backbones demonstrate that DPC can significantly improve base performance without introducing any external knowledge beyond the base classes, while maintaining generalization to new classes. Code is available at: https://github.com/JREion/DPC.

The Machine Learning for Combinatorial Optimization (ML4CO) NeurIPS 2021 competition aims to improve state-of-the-art combinatorial optimization solvers by replacing key heuristic components with machine learning models. On the dual task, we design models to make branching decisions to promote the dual bound increase faster. We propose a knowledge inheritance method to generalize knowledge of different models from the dataset aggregation process, named KIDA. Our improvement overcomes some defects of the baseline graph-neural-networks-based methods. Further, we won the 1st Place on the dual task. We hope this report can provide useful experience for developers and researchers. The code is available at https://github.com/megvii-research/NeurIPS2021-ML4CO-KIDA.

We propose a cross-modal attention distillation framework to train a dual-encoder model for vision-language understanding tasks, such as visual reasoning and visual question answering. Dual-encoder models have a faster inference speed than fusion-encoder models and enable the pre-computation of images and text during inference. However, the shallow interaction module used in dual-encoder models is insufficient to handle complex vision-language understanding tasks. In order to learn deep interactions of images and text, we introduce cross-modal attention distillation, which uses the image-to-text and text-to-image attention distributions of a fusion-encoder model to guide the training of our dual-encoder model. In addition, we show that applying the cross-modal attention distillation for both pre-training and fine-tuning stages achieves further improvements. Experimental results demonstrate that the distilled dual-encoder model achieves competitive performance for visual reasoning, visual entailment and visual question answering tasks while enjoying a much faster inference speed than fusion-encoder models. Our code and models will be publicly available at https://github.com/kugwzk/Distilled-DualEncoder.

Current label-free RLVR approaches for large language models (LLMs), such as TTRL and Self-reward, have demonstrated effectiveness in improving the performance of LLMs on complex reasoning tasks. However, these methods rely heavily on accurate pseudo-label estimation and converge on spurious yet popular answers, thereby trapping in a dominant mode and limiting further improvements. Building on this, we propose Dual Consensus Reinforcement Learning (DCRL), a novel self-supervised training method which is capable of generating more reliable learning signals through a two-stage consensus mechanism. The model initially acts as an anchor, producing dominant responses; then it serves as an explorer, generating diverse auxiliary signals via a temporary unlearning process. The final training target is derived from the harmonic mean of these two signal sets. Notably, the process operates entirely without external models or supervision. Across eight benchmarks and diverse domains, DCRL consistently improves Pass@1 over majority vote while yielding more stable training dynamics. These results demonstrate that DCRL establishes a scalable path toward stronger reasoning without labels.

Reasoning in large language models (LLMs) tends to produce substantially longer token generation sequences than simpler language modeling tasks. This extended generation length reflects the multi-step, compositional nature of reasoning and is often correlated with higher solution accuracy. From an efficiency perspective, longer token generation exacerbates the inherently sequential and memory-bound decoding phase of LLMs. However, not all parts of this expensive reasoning process are equally difficult to generate. We leverage this observation by offloading only the most challenging parts of the reasoning process to a larger, more capable model, while performing most of the generation with a smaller, more efficient model; furthermore, we teach the smaller model to identify these difficult segments and independently trigger offloading when needed. To enable this behavior, we annotate difficult segments across 18k reasoning traces from the OpenR1-Math-220k chain-of-thought (CoT) dataset. We then apply supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning fine-tuning (RLFT) to a 1.5B-parameter reasoning model, training it to learn to offload the most challenging parts of its own reasoning process to a larger model. This approach improves AIME24 reasoning accuracy by 24% and 28.3% while offloading 1.35% and 5% of the generated tokens respectively. We open-source our SplitReason model, data, code and logs.

Predicting and anticipating future outcomes or reasoning about missing information in a sequence are critical skills for agents to be able to make intelligent decisions. This requires strong, temporally coherent generative capabilities. Diffusion models have shown remarkable success in several generative tasks, but have not been extensively explored in the video domain. We present Random-Mask Video Diffusion (RaMViD), which extends image diffusion models to videos using 3D convolutions, and introduces a new conditioning technique during training. By varying the mask we condition on, the model is able to perform video prediction, infilling, and upsampling. Due to our simple conditioning scheme, we can utilize the same architecture as used for unconditional training, which allows us to train the model in a conditional and unconditional fashion at the same time. We evaluate RaMViD on two benchmark datasets for video prediction, on which we achieve state-of-the-art results, and one for video generation. High-resolution videos are provided at https://sites.google.com/view/video-diffusion-prediction.

Interleaved multimodal generation enables capabilities beyond unimodal generation models, such as step-by-step instructional guides, visual planning, and generating visual drafts for reasoning. However, the quality of existing interleaved generation models under general instructions remains limited by insufficient training data and base model capacity. We present DuoGen, a general-purpose interleaved generation framework that systematically addresses data curation, architecture design, and evaluation. On the data side, we build a large-scale, high-quality instruction-tuning dataset by combining multimodal conversations rewritten from curated raw websites, and diverse synthetic examples covering everyday scenarios. Architecturally, DuoGen leverages the strong visual understanding of a pretrained multimodal LLM and the visual generation capabilities of a diffusion transformer (DiT) pretrained on video generation, avoiding costly unimodal pretraining and enabling flexible base model selection. A two-stage decoupled strategy first instruction-tunes the MLLM, then aligns DiT with it using curated interleaved image-text sequences. Across public and newly proposed benchmarks, DuoGen outperforms prior open-source models in text quality, image fidelity, and image-context alignment, and also achieves state-of-the-art performance on text-to-image and image editing among unified generation models. Data and code will be released at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/dir/duogen/.

The teacher-student framework, prevalent in semi-supervised semantic segmentation, mainly employs the exponential moving average (EMA) to update a single teacher's weights based on the student's. However, EMA updates raise a problem in that the weights of the teacher and student are getting coupled, causing a potential performance bottleneck. Furthermore, this problem may become more severe when training with more complicated labels such as segmentation masks but with few annotated data. This paper introduces Dual Teacher, a simple yet effective approach that employs dual temporary teachers aiming to alleviate the coupling problem for the student. The temporary teachers work in shifts and are progressively improved, so consistently prevent the teacher and student from becoming excessively close. Specifically, the temporary teachers periodically take turns generating pseudo-labels to train a student model and maintain the distinct characteristics of the student model for each epoch. Consequently, Dual Teacher achieves competitive performance on the PASCAL VOC, Cityscapes, and ADE20K benchmarks with remarkably shorter training times than state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we demonstrate that our approach is model-agnostic and compatible with both CNN- and Transformer-based models. Code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/dual-teacher.

In the training of neural networks, adaptive moment estimation (Adam) typically converges fast but exhibits suboptimal generalization performance. A widely accepted explanation for its defect in generalization is that it often tends to converge to sharp minima. To enhance its ability to find flat minima, we propose its new variant named inverse Adam (InvAdam). The key improvement of InvAdam lies in its parameter update mechanism, which is opposite to that of Adam. Specifically, it computes element-wise multiplication of the first-order and second-order moments, while Adam computes the element-wise division of these two moments. This modification aims to increase the step size of the parameter update when the elements in the second-order moments are large and vice versa, which helps the parameter escape sharp minima and stay at flat ones. However, InvAdam's update mechanism may face challenges in convergence. To address this challenge, we propose dual Adam (DualAdam), which integrates the update mechanisms of both Adam and InvAdam, ensuring convergence while enhancing generalization performance. Additionally, we introduce the diffusion theory to mathematically demonstrate InvAdam's ability to escape sharp minima. Extensive experiments are conducted on image classification tasks and large language model (LLM) fine-tuning. The results validate that DualAdam outperforms Adam and its state-of-the-art variants in terms of generalization performance. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/LongJin-lab/DualAdam.

In face-to-face conversations, individuals need to switch between speaking and listening roles seamlessly. Existing 3D talking head generation models focus solely on speaking or listening, neglecting the natural dynamics of interactive conversation, which leads to unnatural interactions and awkward transitions. To address this issue, we propose a new task -- multi-round dual-speaker interaction for 3D talking head generation -- which requires models to handle and generate both speaking and listening behaviors in continuous conversation. To solve this task, we introduce DualTalk, a novel unified framework that integrates the dynamic behaviors of speakers and listeners to simulate realistic and coherent dialogue interactions. This framework not only synthesizes lifelike talking heads when speaking but also generates continuous and vivid non-verbal feedback when listening, effectively capturing the interplay between the roles. We also create a new dataset featuring 50 hours of multi-round conversations with over 1,000 characters, where participants continuously switch between speaking and listening roles. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the naturalness and expressiveness of 3D talking heads in dual-speaker conversations. We recommend watching the supplementary video: https://ziqiaopeng.github.io/dualtalk.

LLMs are often trained with RL from human or AI feedback, yet such methods typically compress nuanced feedback into scalar rewards, discarding much of their richness and inducing scale imbalance. We propose treating verbal feedback as a conditioning signal. Inspired by language priors in text-to-image generation, which enable novel outputs from unseen prompts, we introduce the feedback-conditional policy (FCP). FCP learns directly from response-feedback pairs, approximating the feedback-conditional posterior through maximum likelihood training on offline data. We further develop an online bootstrapping stage where the policy generates under positive conditions and receives fresh feedback to refine itself. This reframes feedback-driven learning as conditional generation rather than reward optimization, offering a more expressive way for LLMs to directly learn from verbal feedback. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/feedback-conditional-policy.

Activation compressed training provides a solution towards reducing the memory cost of training deep neural networks~(DNNs). However, state-of-the-art work combines a search of quantization bit-width with the training, which makes the procedure complicated and less transparent. To this end, we propose a simple and effective method to compress DNN training. Our method is motivated by an instructive observation: DNN backward propagation mainly utilizes the low-frequency component (LFC) of the activation maps, while the majority of memory is for caching the high-frequency component (HFC) during the training. This indicates the HFC of activation maps is highly redundant and compressible during DNN training, which inspires our proposed Dual Activation Precision (DIVISION). During the training, DIVISION preserves the high-precision copy of LFC and compresses the HFC into a light-weight copy with low numerical precision. This can significantly reduce the memory cost without negatively affecting the precision of backward propagation such that DIVISION maintains competitive model accuracy. Experiment results show DIVISION has better comprehensive performance than state-of-the-art methods, including over 10x compression of activation maps and competitive training throughput, without loss of model accuracy.

While recent large vision-language models (VLMs) have improved generalization in vision-language navigation (VLN), existing methods typically rely on end-to-end pipelines that map vision-language inputs directly to short-horizon discrete actions. Such designs often produce fragmented motions, incur high latency, and struggle with real-world challenges like dynamic obstacle avoidance. We propose DualVLN, the first dual-system VLN foundation model that synergistically integrates high-level reasoning with low-level action execution. System 2, a VLM-based global planner, "grounds slowly" by predicting mid-term waypoint goals via image-grounded reasoning. System 1, a lightweight, multi-modal conditioning Diffusion Transformer policy, "moves fast" by leveraging both explicit pixel goals and latent features from System 2 to generate smooth and accurate trajectories. The dual-system design enables robust real-time control and adaptive local decision-making in complex, dynamic environments. By decoupling training, the VLM retains its generalization, while System 1 achieves interpretable and effective local navigation. DualVLN outperforms prior methods across all VLN benchmarks and real-world experiments demonstrate robust long-horizon planning and real-time adaptability in dynamic environments.

Learning a transport model that maps a source distribution to a target distribution is a canonical problem in machine learning, but scientific applications increasingly require models that can generalize to source and target distributions unseen during training. We introduce distribution-conditioned transport (DCT), a framework that conditions transport maps on learned embeddings of source and target distributions, enabling generalization to unseen distribution pairs. DCT also allows semi-supervised learning for distributional forecasting problems: because it learns from arbitrary distribution pairs, it can leverage distributions observed at only one condition to improve transport prediction. DCT is agnostic to the underlying transport mechanism, supporting models ranging from flow matching to distributional divergence-based models (e.g. Wasserstein, MMD). We demonstrate the practical performance benefits of DCT on synthetic benchmarks and four applications in biology: batch effect transfer in single-cell genomics, perturbation prediction from mass cytometry data, learning clonal transcriptional dynamics in hematopoiesis, and modeling T-cell receptor sequence evolution.

To enhance the controllability of text-to-image diffusion models, current ControlNet-like models have explored various control signals to dictate image attributes. However, existing methods either handle conditions inefficiently or use a fixed number of conditions, which does not fully address the complexity of multiple conditions and their potential conflicts. This underscores the need for innovative approaches to manage multiple conditions effectively for more reliable and detailed image synthesis. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, DynamicControl, which supports dynamic combinations of diverse control signals, allowing adaptive selection of different numbers and types of conditions. Our approach begins with a double-cycle controller that generates an initial real score sorting for all input conditions by leveraging pre-trained conditional generation models and discriminative models. This controller evaluates the similarity between extracted conditions and input conditions, as well as the pixel-level similarity with the source image. Then, we integrate a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to build an efficient condition evaluator. This evaluator optimizes the ordering of conditions based on the double-cycle controller's score ranking. Our method jointly optimizes MLLMs and diffusion models, utilizing MLLMs' reasoning capabilities to facilitate multi-condition text-to-image (T2I) tasks. The final sorted conditions are fed into a parallel multi-control adapter, which learns feature maps from dynamic visual conditions and integrates them to modulate ControlNet, thereby enhancing control over generated images. Through both quantitative and qualitative comparisons, DynamicControl demonstrates its superiority over existing methods in terms of controllability, generation quality and composability under various conditional controls.

Generating synthetic datasets for training face recognition models is challenging because dataset generation entails more than creating high fidelity images. It involves generating multiple images of same subjects under different factors (e.g., variations in pose, illumination, expression, aging and occlusion) which follows the real image conditional distribution. Previous works have studied the generation of synthetic datasets using GAN or 3D models. In this work, we approach the problem from the aspect of combining subject appearance (ID) and external factor (style) conditions. These two conditions provide a direct way to control the inter-class and intra-class variations. To this end, we propose a Dual Condition Face Generator (DCFace) based on a diffusion model. Our novel Patch-wise style extractor and Time-step dependent ID loss enables DCFace to consistently produce face images of the same subject under different styles with precise control. Face recognition models trained on synthetic images from the proposed DCFace provide higher verification accuracies compared to previous works by 6.11% on average in 4 out of 5 test datasets, LFW, CFP-FP, CPLFW, AgeDB and CALFW. Code is available at https://github.com/mk-minchul/dcface

While reasoning-enhanced Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable advances in complex tasks such as mathematics and coding, their effectiveness across universal multimodal scenarios remains uncertain. The trend of releasing parallel "Instruct" and "Thinking" models by leading developers serves merely as a resource-intensive workaround, stemming from the lack of a criterion for determining when reasoning is truly beneficial. In this paper, we propose Dual Tuning, a framework designed to assess whether reasoning yields positive gains for target tasks under given base models and datasets. By jointly fine-tuning on paired Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Direct-Answer (DA) data under controlled prompts, we systematically quantify and compare the gains of both training modes using the proposed metrics, and establish the "Thinking Boundary" to evaluate the suitability of reasoning training across diverse multimodal tasks, including spatial, mathematical, and multi-disciplinary domains. We further explore the impact of reinforcement training and thinking patterns on reasoning suitability, and validate whether the "Thinking Boundary" can guide data refinement. Our findings challenge the "reasoning-for-all" paradigm, providing practical guidance for identifying appropriate data and training strategies, and motivating the development of resource-efficient, adaptive auto-think systems.

Attention-based Transformer models have been increasingly employed for automatic music generation. To condition the generation process of such a model with a user-specified sequence, a popular approach is to take that conditioning sequence as a priming sequence and ask a Transformer decoder to generate a continuation. However, this prompt-based conditioning cannot guarantee that the conditioning sequence would develop or even simply repeat itself in the generated continuation. In this paper, we propose an alternative conditioning approach, called theme-based conditioning, that explicitly trains the Transformer to treat the conditioning sequence as a thematic material that has to manifest itself multiple times in its generation result. This is achieved with two main technical contributions. First, we propose a deep learning-based approach that uses contrastive representation learning and clustering to automatically retrieve thematic materials from music pieces in the training data. Second, we propose a novel gated parallel attention module to be used in a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) encoder/decoder architecture to more effectively account for a given conditioning thematic material in the generation process of the Transformer decoder. We report on objective and subjective evaluations of variants of the proposed Theme Transformer and the conventional prompt-based baseline, showing that our best model can generate, to some extent, polyphonic pop piano music with repetition and plausible variations of a given condition.

Deep learning-based image generation has seen significant advancements with diffusion models, notably improving the quality of generated images. Despite these developments, generating images with unseen characteristics beneficial for downstream tasks has received limited attention. To bridge this gap, we propose Style-Extracting Diffusion Models, featuring two conditioning mechanisms. Specifically, we utilize 1) a style conditioning mechanism which allows to inject style information of previously unseen images during image generation and 2) a content conditioning which can be targeted to a downstream task, e.g., layout for segmentation. We introduce a trainable style encoder to extract style information from images, and an aggregation block that merges style information from multiple style inputs. This architecture enables the generation of images with unseen styles in a zero-shot manner, by leveraging styles from unseen images, resulting in more diverse generations. In this work, we use the image layout as target condition and first show the capability of our method on a natural image dataset as a proof-of-concept. We further demonstrate its versatility in histopathology, where we combine prior knowledge about tissue composition and unannotated data to create diverse synthetic images with known layouts. This allows us to generate additional synthetic data to train a segmentation network in a semi-supervised fashion. We verify the added value of the generated images by showing improved segmentation results and lower performance variability between patients when synthetic images are included during segmentation training. Our code will be made publicly available at [LINK].

Rehearsal-based approaches are a mainstay of continual learning (CL). They mitigate the catastrophic forgetting problem by maintaining a small fixed-size buffer with a subset of data from past tasks. While most rehearsal-based approaches study how to effectively exploit the knowledge from the buffered past data, little attention is paid to the inter-task relationships with the critical task-specific and task-invariant knowledge. By appropriately leveraging inter-task relationships, we propose a novel CL method named DualHSIC to boost the performance of existing rehearsal-based methods in a simple yet effective way. DualHSIC consists of two complementary components that stem from the so-called Hilbert Schmidt independence criterion (HSIC): HSIC-Bottleneck for Rehearsal (HBR) lessens the inter-task interference and HSIC Alignment (HA) promotes task-invariant knowledge sharing. Extensive experiments show that DualHSIC can be seamlessly plugged into existing rehearsal-based methods for consistent performance improvements, and also outperforms recent state-of-the-art regularization-enhanced rehearsal methods. Source code will be released.

In this paper, we introduce OneReward, a unified reinforcement learning framework that enhances the model's generative capabilities across multiple tasks under different evaluation criteria using only One Reward model. By employing a single vision-language model (VLM) as the generative reward model, which can distinguish the winner and loser for a given task and a given evaluation criterion, it can be effectively applied to multi-task generation models, particularly in contexts with varied data and diverse task objectives. We utilize OneReward for mask-guided image generation, which can be further divided into several sub-tasks such as image fill, image extend, object removal, and text rendering, involving a binary mask as the edit area. Although these domain-specific tasks share same conditioning paradigm, they differ significantly in underlying data distributions and evaluation metrics. Existing methods often rely on task-specific supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which limits generalization and training efficiency. Building on OneReward, we develop Seedream 3.0 Fill, a mask-guided generation model trained via multi-task reinforcement learning directly on a pre-trained base model, eliminating the need for task-specific SFT. Experimental results demonstrate that our unified edit model consistently outperforms both commercial and open-source competitors, such as Ideogram, Adobe Photoshop, and FLUX Fill [Pro], across multiple evaluation dimensions. Code and model are available at: https://one-reward.github.io

This paper presents a way of enhancing the reliability of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in addressing hallucination effects, where models generate incorrect or unrelated responses. Without additional instruction tuning paradigm, we introduce Counterfactual Inception, a novel method that implants counterfactual thoughts into LMMs using carefully chosen, misaligned counterfactual keywords. This method is grounded in the concept of counterfactual thinking, a cognitive process where humans consider alternative realities and outcomes. By applying this human-like reasoning mechanism to LMMs, we aim to reduce hallucination effects and improve the models' trustworthiness. We also propose Dual-modality Verification Process (DVP), a rigorous framework for selecting optimal counterfactual keywords to trigger counterfactual thinking into LMMs, concurrently considering visual and linguistic context. Our extensive experiments across various LMMs, including both open-source and proprietary models, corroborate that our method significantly mitigates hallucination phenomena across different datasets.

Recent advancements in controllable human image generation have led to zero-shot generation using structural signals (e.g., pose, depth) or facial appearance. Yet, generating human images conditioned on multiple parts of human appearance remains challenging. Addressing this, we introduce Parts2Whole, a novel framework designed for generating customized portraits from multiple reference images, including pose images and various aspects of human appearance. To achieve this, we first develop a semantic-aware appearance encoder to retain details of different human parts, which processes each image based on its textual label to a series of multi-scale feature maps rather than one image token, preserving the image dimension. Second, our framework supports multi-image conditioned generation through a shared self-attention mechanism that operates across reference and target features during the diffusion process. We enhance the vanilla attention mechanism by incorporating mask information from the reference human images, allowing for the precise selection of any part. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing alternatives, offering advanced capabilities for multi-part controllable human image customization. See our project page at https://huanngzh.github.io/Parts2Whole/.

Existing concept customization methods have achieved remarkable outcomes in high-fidelity and multi-concept customization. However, they often neglect the influence on the original model's behavior and capabilities when learning new personalized concepts. To address this issue, we propose PureCC. PureCC introduces a novel decoupled learning objective for concept customization, which combines the implicit guidance of the target concept with the original conditional prediction. This separated form enables PureCC to substantially focus on the original model during training. Moreover, based on this objective, PureCC designs a dual-branch training pipeline that includes a frozen extractor providing purified target concept representations as implicit guidance and a trainable flow model producing the original conditional prediction, jointly achieving pure learning for personalized concepts. Furthermore, PureCC introduces a novel adaptive guidance scale λ^star to dynamically adjust the guidance strength of the target concept, balancing customization fidelity and model preservation. Extensive experiments show that PureCC achieves state-of-the-art performance in preserving the original behavior and capabilities while enabling high-fidelity concept customization. The code is available at https://github.com/lzc-sg/PureCC.

We present a new robotic foundation model, called π_{0.7}, that can enable strong out-of-the-box performance in a wide range of scenarios. π_{0.7} can follow diverse language instructions in unseen environments, including multi-stage tasks with various kitchen appliances, provide zero-shot cross-embodiment generalization, for example enabling a robot to fold laundry without seeing the task before, and perform challenging tasks such as operating an espresso machine out of the box at a level of performance that matches much more specialized RL-finetuned models. The main idea behind π_{0.7} is to use diverse context conditioning during training. This conditioning information, contained in the prompt, makes it possible to steer the model precisely to perform many tasks with different strategies. It is conditioned not just on a language command that describes what it should do, but on additional multimodal information that also describes the manner or strategy in which it should do it, including metadata about task performance and subgoal images. This enables π_{0.7} to use very diverse data, including demonstrations, potentially suboptimal (autonomous) data including failures, and data from non-robot sources. Our experiments evaluate π_{0.7} across numerous tasks with multiple robot platforms, on tasks that require speed and dexterity, language following, and compositional task generalization.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback has emerged as a standard for aligning diffusion models. However, we identify a fundamental limitation in the standard DPO formulation because it relies on the Bradley-Terry model to aggregate diverse evaluation axes like aesthetic quality and semantic alignment into a single scalar reward. This aggregation creates a reward conflict where the model is forced to unlearn desirable features of a specific dimension if they appear in a globally non-preferred sample. To address this issue, we propose Multi Reward Conditional DPO (MCDPO). This method resolves reward conflicts by introducing a disentangled Bradley-Terry objective. MCDPO explicitly injects a preference outcome vector as a condition during training, which allows the model to learn the correct optimization direction for each reward axis independently within a single network. We further introduce dimensional reward dropout to ensure balanced optimization across dimensions. Extensive experiments on Stable Diffusion 1.5 and SDXL demonstrate that MCDPO achieves superior performance on benchmarks. Notably, our conditional framework enables dynamic and multiple-axis control at inference time using Classifier Free Guidance to amplify specific reward dimensions without additional training or external reward models.

Knowledge-dependent tasks typically use two sources of knowledge: parametric, learned at training time, and contextual, given as a passage at inference time. To understand how models use these sources together, we formalize the problem of knowledge conflicts, where the contextual information contradicts the learned information. Analyzing the behaviour of popular models, we measure their over-reliance on memorized information (the cause of hallucinations), and uncover important factors that exacerbate this behaviour. Lastly, we propose a simple method to mitigate over-reliance on parametric knowledge, which minimizes hallucination, and improves out-of-distribution generalization by 4%-7%. Our findings demonstrate the importance for practitioners to evaluate model tendency to hallucinate rather than read, and show that our mitigation strategy encourages generalization to evolving information (i.e., time-dependent queries). To encourage these practices, we have released our framework for generating knowledge conflicts.

While most music generation models use textual or parametric conditioning (e.g. tempo, harmony, musical genre), we propose to condition a language model based music generation system with audio input. Our exploration involves two distinct strategies. The first strategy, termed textual inversion, leverages a pre-trained text-to-music model to map audio input to corresponding "pseudowords" in the textual embedding space. For the second model we train a music language model from scratch jointly with a text conditioner and a quantized audio feature extractor. At inference time, we can mix textual and audio conditioning and balance them thanks to a novel double classifier free guidance method. We conduct automatic and human studies that validates our approach. We will release the code and we provide music samples on https://musicgenstyle.github.io in order to show the quality of our model.

We propose an extension of the decoder Transformer that conditions its generative process on random latent variables which are learned without supervision thanks to a variational procedure. Experimental evaluations show that allowing such a conditioning translates into substantial improvements on downstream tasks.

Many commonsense reasoning NLP tasks involve choosing between one or more possible answers to a question or prompt based on knowledge that is often implicit. Large pretrained language models (PLMs) can achieve near-human performance on such tasks, while providing little human-interpretable evidence of the underlying reasoning they use. In this work, we show how to use these same models to generate such evidence: inspired by the contrastive nature of human explanations, we use PLMs to complete explanation prompts which contrast alternatives according to the key attribute(s) required to justify the correct answer (for example, peanuts are usually salty while raisins are sweet). Conditioning model decisions on these explanations improves performance on two commonsense reasoning benchmarks, as compared to previous non-contrastive alternatives. These explanations are also judged by humans to be more relevant for solving the task, and facilitate a novel method to evaluate explanation faithfulfness.

Traditional knowledge distillation focuses on aligning the student's predicted probabilities with both ground-truth labels and the teacher's predicted probabilities. However, the transition to predicted probabilities from logits would obscure certain indispensable information. To address this issue, it is intuitive to additionally introduce a logit-level loss function as a supplement to the widely used probability-level loss function, for exploiting the latent information of logits. Unfortunately, we empirically find that the amalgamation of the newly introduced logit-level loss and the previous probability-level loss will lead to performance degeneration, even trailing behind the performance of employing either loss in isolation. We attribute this phenomenon to the collapse of the classification head, which is verified by our theoretical analysis based on the neural collapse theory. Specifically, the gradients of the two loss functions exhibit contradictions in the linear classifier yet display no such conflict within the backbone. Drawing from the theoretical analysis, we propose a novel method called dual-head knowledge distillation, which partitions the linear classifier into two classification heads responsible for different losses, thereby preserving the beneficial effects of both losses on the backbone while eliminating adverse influences on the classification head. Extensive experiments validate that our method can effectively exploit the information inside the logits and achieve superior performance against state-of-the-art counterparts.

Transfer learning has become a central paradigm in modern machine learning, yet it suffers from the long-standing problem of negative transfer, where leveraging source representations can harm rather than help performance on the target task. Although empirical remedies have been proposed, there remains little theoretical understanding of how to reliably avoid negative transfer. In this paper, we investigate a simple yet remarkably effective strategy: augmenting frozen, pretrained source-side features with a trainable target-side encoder that adapts target features to capture residual signals overlooked by models pretrained on the source data. We show this residual feature integration strategy is sufficient to provably prevent negative transfer, by establishing theoretical guarantees that it has no worse convergence rate than training from scratch under the informative class of target distributions up to logarithmic factors, and that the convergence rate can transition seamlessly from nonparametric to near-parametric when source representations are informative. To our knowledge, this is the first theoretical work that ensures protection against negative transfer. We carry out extensive numerical experiments across image, text and tabular benchmarks, and empirically verify that the method consistently safeguards performance under distribution shift, label noise, semantic perturbation, and class imbalance. We additionally demonstrate that this residual integration mechanism uniquely supports adapt-time multimodality extension, enabling a pretrained single-cell foundation model to incorporate spatial signals for lymph-node anatomical classification despite the source model being trained without them. Our study thus advances the theory of safe transfer learning, and provides a principled approach that is simple, robust, architecture-agnostic, and broadly applicable.

While conditional diffusion models are known to have good coverage of the data distribution, they still face limitations in output diversity, particularly when sampled with a high classifier-free guidance scale for optimal image quality or when trained on small datasets. We attribute this problem to the role of the conditioning signal in inference and offer an improved sampling strategy for diffusion models that can increase generation diversity, especially at high guidance scales, with minimal loss of sample quality. Our sampling strategy anneals the conditioning signal by adding scheduled, monotonically decreasing Gaussian noise to the conditioning vector during inference to balance diversity and condition alignment. Our Condition-Annealed Diffusion Sampler (CADS) can be used with any pretrained model and sampling algorithm, and we show that it boosts the diversity of diffusion models in various conditional generation tasks. Further, using an existing pretrained diffusion model, CADS achieves a new state-of-the-art FID of 1.70 and 2.31 for class-conditional ImageNet generation at 256times256 and 512times512 respectively.

In this work, we present EchoGen, a unified framework for layout-to-image generation and image grounding, capable of generating images with accurate layouts and high fidelity to text descriptions (e.g., spatial relationships), while grounding the image robustly at the same time. We believe that image grounding possesses strong text and layout understanding abilities, which can compensate for the corresponding limitations in layout-to-image generation. At the same time, images generated from layouts exhibit high diversity in content, thereby enhancing the robustness of image grounding. Jointly training both tasks within a unified model can promote performance improvements for each. However, we identify that this joint training paradigm encounters several optimization challenges and results in restricted performance. To address these issues, we propose progressive training strategies. First, the Parallel Multi-Task Pre-training (PMTP) stage equips the model with basic abilities for both tasks, leveraging shared tokens to accelerate training. Next, the Dual Joint Optimization (DJO) stage exploits task duality to sequentially integrate the two tasks, enabling unified optimization. Finally, the Cycle RL stage eliminates reliance on visual supervision by using consistency constraints as rewards, significantly enhancing the model's unified capabilities via the GRPO strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art results on both layout-to-image generation and image grounding benchmarks, and reveal clear synergistic gains from optimizing the two tasks together.

Speech-to-speech models handle turn-taking naturally but offer limited support for tool-calling or complex reasoning, while production ASR-LLM-TTS voice pipelines offer these capabilities but rely on silence timeouts, which lead to unnatural turn-taking. We present DualTurn, which narrows this gap through generative pretraining on dual-channel conversational audio. The model generates both speakers' future audio autoregressively, implicitly learning conversational dynamics without any labels, and is then fine-tuned to predict interpretable turn-taking signals that map directly to agent actions. DualTurn monitors both channels continuously, anticipating turn boundaries and producing five agent actions. On standard benchmarks, DualTurn (0.5B) outperforms both VAP on agent action prediction (wF1 0.633 vs. 0.389) and a 3.1B audio-text model on word-level turn prediction (AUC 0.930 vs. 0.880), while anticipating turn boundaries earlier with fewer interruptions.

Recent advances in large vision-language models (LVLMs) have shown promise for embodied task planning, yet they struggle with fundamental challenges like dependency constraints and efficiency. Existing approaches either solely optimize action selection or leverage world models during inference, overlooking the benefits of learning to model the world as a way to enhance planning capabilities. We propose Dual Preference Optimization (D^2PO), a new learning framework that jointly optimizes state prediction and action selection through preference learning, enabling LVLMs to understand environment dynamics for better planning. To automatically collect trajectories and stepwise preference data without human annotation, we introduce a tree search mechanism for extensive exploration via trial-and-error. Extensive experiments on VoTa-Bench demonstrate that our D^2PO-based method significantly outperforms existing methods and GPT-4o when applied to Qwen2-VL (7B), LLaVA-1.6 (7B), and LLaMA-3.2 (11B), achieving superior task success rates with more efficient execution paths.

The differing representation spaces required for visual understanding and generation pose a challenge in unifying them within the autoregressive paradigm of large language models. A vision tokenizer trained for reconstruction excels at capturing low-level perceptual details, making it well-suited for visual generation but lacking high-level semantic representations for understanding tasks. Conversely, a vision encoder trained via contrastive learning aligns well with language but struggles to decode back into the pixel space for generation tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose DualToken, a method that unifies representations for both understanding and generation within a single tokenizer. However, directly integrating reconstruction and semantic objectives in a single tokenizer creates conflicts, leading to degraded performance in both reconstruction quality and semantic performance. Instead of forcing a single codebook to handle both semantic and perceptual information, DualToken disentangles them by introducing separate codebooks for high and low-level features, effectively transforming their inherent conflict into a synergistic relationship. As a result, DualToken achieves state-of-the-art performance in both reconstruction and semantic tasks while demonstrating remarkable effectiveness in downstream MLLM understanding and generation tasks. Notably, we also show that DualToken, as a unified tokenizer, surpasses the naive combination of two distinct types vision encoders, providing superior performance within a unified MLLM.

The use of deep neural networks in real-world applications require well-calibrated networks with confidence scores that accurately reflect the actual probability. However, it has been found that these networks often provide over-confident predictions, which leads to poor calibration. Recent efforts have sought to address this issue by focal loss to reduce over-confidence, but this approach can also lead to under-confident predictions. While different variants of focal loss have been explored, it is difficult to find a balance between over-confidence and under-confidence. In our work, we propose a new loss function by focusing on dual logits. Our method not only considers the ground truth logit, but also take into account the highest logit ranked after the ground truth logit. By maximizing the gap between these two logits, our proposed dual focal loss can achieve a better balance between over-confidence and under-confidence. We provide theoretical evidence to support our approach and demonstrate its effectiveness through evaluations on multiple models and datasets, where it achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/Linwei94/DualFocalLoss

Activation steering methods were shown to be effective in conditioning language model generation by additively intervening over models' intermediate representations. However, the evaluation of these techniques has so far been limited to single conditioning properties and synthetic settings. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of various activation steering strategies, highlighting the property-dependent nature of optimal parameters to ensure a robust effect throughout generation. To address this issue, we propose Dynamic Activation Composition, an information-theoretic approach to modulate the steering intensity of one or more properties throughout generation. Our experiments on multi-property steering show that our method successfully maintains high conditioning while minimizing the impact of conditioning on generation fluency.

Recent vision-language models (VLMs) achieve remarkable reasoning through reinforcement learning (RL), which provides a feasible solution for realizing continuous self-evolving large vision-language models (LVLMs) in the era of experience. However, RL for VLMs requires abundant high-quality multimodal data, especially challenging in specialized domains like chemistry, earth sciences, and multimodal mathematics. Existing strategies such as synthetic data and self-rewarding mechanisms suffer from limited distributions and alignment difficulties, ultimately causing reward hacking: models exploit high-reward patterns, collapsing policy entropy and destabilizing training. We propose DoGe (Decouple to Generalize), a dual-decoupling framework that guides models to first learn from context rather than problem solving by refocusing on the problem context scenarios overlooked by synthetic data methods. By decoupling learning process into dual components (Thinker and Solver), we reasonably quantify the reward signals of this process and propose a two-stage RL post-training approach from freely exploring context to practically solving tasks. Second, to increase the diversity of training data, DoGe constructs an evolving curriculum learning pipeline: an expanded native domain knowledge corpus and an iteratively evolving seed problems pool. Experiments show that our method consistently outperforms the baseline across various benchmarks, providing a scalable pathway for realizing self-evolving LVLMs.

We study the optimisation problem associated with Gaussian process regression using squared loss. The most common approach to this problem is to apply an exact solver, such as conjugate gradient descent, either directly, or to a reduced-order version of the problem. Recently, driven by successes in deep learning, stochastic gradient descent has gained traction as an alternative. In this paper, we show that when done rightx2014by which we mean using specific insights from the optimisation and kernel communitiesx2014this approach is highly effective. We thus introduce a particular stochastic dual gradient descent algorithm, that may be implemented with a few lines of code using any deep learning framework. We explain our design decisions by illustrating their advantage against alternatives with ablation studies and show that the new method is highly competitive. Our evaluations on standard regression benchmarks and a Bayesian optimisation task set our approach apart from preconditioned conjugate gradients, variational Gaussian process approximations, and a previous version of stochastic gradient descent for Gaussian processes. On a molecular binding affinity prediction task, our method places Gaussian process regression on par in terms of performance with state-of-the-art graph neural networks.

Large language model-based deep research agents have been increasingly popular for addressing long-horizon information-seeking tasks, but they often incur high end-to-end latency due to extensive reasoning and frequent tool use. Speculation frameworks aim to reduce latency by overlapping action execution with reasoning; however, existing approaches typically rely on uniform speculation strategies and strict action matching, which limits inference speedups and robustness. In this work, we revisit the speculate-verify paradigm for deep research agents through the lens of action heterogeneity. We show that Search and Visit actions exhibit fundamentally different reasoning and model capacity requirements: entropy-based analysis reveals that Search decisions have higher uncertainty and benefit significantly from explicit reasoning, whereas Visit decisions have lower entropy and depend primarily on model capacity. Motivated by this dual-process characteristic, we propose DualSpec, a heterogeneous speculation framework equipped with a lightweight, confidence-based semantic verifier. Experiments across multiple models and benchmarks demonstrate that DualSpec achieves up to 3.28times end-to-end speedup while maintaining accuracy comparable to fully reasoning agents.

Object detection in poor-illumination environments is a challenging task as objects are usually not clearly visible in RGB images. As infrared images provide additional clear edge information that complements RGB images, fusing RGB and infrared images has potential to enhance the detection ability in poor-illumination environments. However, existing works involving both visible and infrared images only focus on image fusion, instead of object detection. Moreover, they directly fuse the two kinds of image modalities, which ignores the mutual interference between them. To fuse the two modalities to maximize the advantages of cross-modality, we design a dual-enhancement-based cross-modality object detection network DEYOLO, in which semantic-spatial cross modality and novel bi-directional decoupled focus modules are designed to achieve the detection-centered mutual enhancement of RGB-infrared (RGB-IR). Specifically, a dual semantic enhancing channel weight assignment module (DECA) and a dual spatial enhancing pixel weight assignment module (DEPA) are firstly proposed to aggregate cross-modality information in the feature space to improve the feature representation ability, such that feature fusion can aim at the object detection task. Meanwhile, a dual-enhancement mechanism, including enhancements for two-modality fusion and single modality, is designed in both DECAand DEPAto reduce interference between the two kinds of image modalities. Then, a novel bi-directional decoupled focus is developed to enlarge the receptive field of the backbone network in different directions, which improves the representation quality of DEYOLO. Extensive experiments on M3FD and LLVIP show that our approach outperforms SOTA object detection algorithms by a clear margin. Our code is available at https://github.com/chips96/DEYOLO.

"Search for" or "Navigate to"? When finding an object, the two choices always come up in our subconscious mind. Before seeing the target, we search for the target based on experience. After seeing the target, we remember the target location and navigate to. However, recently methods in object navigation field almost only consider using object association to enhance "search for" phase while neglect the importance of "navigate to" phase. Therefore, this paper proposes the dual adaptive thinking (DAT) method to flexibly adjust the different thinking strategies at different navigation stages. Dual thinking includes search thinking with the object association ability and navigation thinking with the target location ability. To make the navigation thinking more effective, we design the target-oriented memory graph (TOMG) to store historical target information and the target-aware multi-scale aggregator (TAMSA) to encode the relative target position. We assess our methods on the AI2-Thor dataset. Compared with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) method, our method reports 10.8%, 21.5% and 15.7% increase in success rate (SR), success weighted by path length (SPL) and success weighted by navigation efficiency (SNE), respectively.

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a paradigm for post-training large language models, boosting their reasoning capabilities. Such approaches compute an advantage value for each sample, reflecting better or worse performance than expected, thereby yielding both positive and negative signals for training. However, the indiscriminate mixing of the two signals in existing methods, especially from the early stages, may lead to ambiguous guidance and limited gains. To address this issue, we propose **CAPO** (**C**urriculum **A**dvantage **P**olicy **O**ptimization), an adaptive curriculum mechanism based on advantage signals. The proposed mechanism bootstraps imitation learning with positive-only advantage samples to establish robust foundations, and subsequently introduces negative signals to cultivate discriminative capabilities, thereby improving generalization across complex scenarios. Compatible with diverse optimization methods including GRPO, PPO, RLOO, and Reinforce++, our method consistently achieves stable and significant improvements in mathematical reasoning tasks, and further generalizes effectively to multimodal Graphical User Interface (GUI) reasoning scenarios, establishing itself as a versatile and robust optimization framework.

Alignment techniques enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate outputs that align with human preferences and play a crucial role in their effectiveness. However, their impact often diminishes when applied to Small Language Models (SLMs), likely due to the limited capacity of these models. Instead of directly applying existing alignment techniques to SLMs, we propose to utilize a well-aligned teacher LLM to guide the alignment process for these models, thereby facilitating the transfer of the teacher's knowledge of human preferences to the student model. To achieve this, we first explore a straightforward approach, Dual-Constrained Knowledge Distillation (DCKD), that employs knowledge distillation with two KL-divergence constraints from the aligned teacher to the unaligned student. To further enhance the student's ability to distinguish between preferred and dispreferred responses, we then propose Advantage-Guided Distillation for Preference Alignment (ADPA), which leverages an advantage function from the aligned teacher to deliver more nuanced, distribution-level reward signals for the student's alignment. Our experimental results show that these two approaches appreciably improve the alignment of SLMs and narrow the performance gap with larger counterparts. Among them, ADPA demonstrates superior performance and achieves even greater effectiveness when integrated with DCKD. Our code is available at https://github.com/SLIT-AI/ADPA.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) post-training has become the standard for aligning generative models with human preferences, yet most methods rely on a single scalar reward. When multiple criteria matter, the prevailing practice of ``early scalarization'' collapses rewards into a fixed weighted sum. This commits the model to a single trade-off point at training time, providing no inference-time control over inherently conflicting goals -- such as prompt adherence versus source fidelity in image editing. We introduce ParetoSlider, a multi-objective RL (MORL) framework that trains a single diffusion model to approximate the entire Pareto front. By training the model with continuously varying preference weights as a conditioning signal, we enable users to navigate optimal trade-offs at inference time without retraining or maintaining multiple checkpoints. We evaluate ParetoSlider across three state-of-the-art flow-matching backbones: SD3.5, FluxKontext, and LTX-2. Our single preference-conditioned model matches or exceeds the performance of baselines trained separately for fixed reward trade-offs, while uniquely providing fine-grained control over competing generative goals.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), yet training often stalls as problems become saturated. We identify the core challenge as the poor accessibility of informative failures: learning signals exist but are rarely encountered during standard rollouts. To address this, we propose failure-prefix conditioning, a simple and effective method for learning from saturated problems. Rather than starting from the original question, our approach reallocates exploration by conditioning training on prefixes derived from rare incorrect reasoning trajectories, thereby exposing the model to failure-prone states. We observe that failure-prefix conditioning yields performance gains matching those of training on medium-difficulty problems, while preserving token efficiency. Furthermore, we analyze the model's robustness, finding that our method reduces performance degradation under misleading failure prefixes, albeit with a mild trade-off in adherence to correct early reasoning. Finally, we demonstrate that an iterative approach, which refreshes failure prefixes during training, unlocks additional gains after performance plateaus. Overall, our results suggest that failure-prefix conditioning offers an effective pathway to extend RLVR training on saturated problems.

Foundation models have brought changes to the landscape of machine learning, demonstrating sparks of human-level intelligence across a diverse array of tasks. However, a gap persists in complex tasks such as causal inference, primarily due to challenges associated with intricate reasoning steps and high numerical precision requirements. In this work, we take a first step towards building causally-aware foundation models for treatment effect estimations. We propose a novel, theoretically justified method called Causal Inference with Attention (CInA), which utilizes multiple unlabeled datasets to perform self-supervised causal learning, and subsequently enables zero-shot causal inference on unseen tasks with new data. This is based on our theoretical results that demonstrate the primal-dual connection between optimal covariate balancing and self-attention, facilitating zero-shot causal inference through the final layer of a trained transformer-type architecture. We demonstrate empirically that CInA effectively generalizes to out-of-distribution datasets and various real-world datasets, matching or even surpassing traditional per-dataset methodologies. These results provide compelling evidence that our method has the potential to serve as a stepping stone for the development of causal foundation models.

We propose causal isotonic calibration, a novel nonparametric method for calibrating predictors of heterogeneous treatment effects. Furthermore, we introduce cross-calibration, a data-efficient variant of calibration that eliminates the need for hold-out calibration sets. Cross-calibration leverages cross-fitted predictors and generates a single calibrated predictor using all available data. Under weak conditions that do not assume monotonicity, we establish that both causal isotonic calibration and cross-calibration achieve fast doubly-robust calibration rates, as long as either the propensity score or outcome regression is estimated accurately in a suitable sense. The proposed causal isotonic calibrator can be wrapped around any black-box learning algorithm, providing robust and distribution-free calibration guarantees while preserving predictive performance.

Many training data attribution (TDA) methods aim to estimate how a model's behavior would change if one or more data points were removed from the training set. Methods based on implicit differentiation, such as influence functions, can be made computationally efficient, but fail to account for underspecification, the implicit bias of the optimization algorithm, or multi-stage training pipelines. By contrast, methods based on unrolling address these issues but face scalability challenges. In this work, we connect the implicit-differentiation-based and unrolling-based approaches and combine their benefits by introducing Source, an approximate unrolling-based TDA method that is computed using an influence-function-like formula. While being computationally efficient compared to unrolling-based approaches, Source is suitable in cases where implicit-differentiation-based approaches struggle, such as in non-converged models and multi-stage training pipelines. Empirically, Source outperforms existing TDA techniques in counterfactual prediction, especially in settings where implicit-differentiation-based approaches fall short.

Stochastic differential equation (SDE)-based generative models have achieved substantial progress in conditional generation via training-free differentiable loss-guided approaches. However, existing methodologies utilizing posterior sam- pling typically confront a substantial estimation error, which results in inaccu- rate gradients for guidance and leading to inconsistent generation results. To mitigate this issue, we propose that performing an additional backward denois- ing step and Monte-Carlo sampling (ABMS) can achieve better guided diffu- sion, which is a plug-and-play adjustment strategy. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we provide theoretical analysis and propose the adoption of a dual-focus evaluation framework, which further serves to highlight the critical problem of cross-condition interference prevalent in existing approaches. We conduct experiments across various task settings and data types, mainly includ- ing conditional online handwritten trajectory generation, image inverse problems (inpainting, super resolution and gaussian deblurring) molecular inverse design and so on. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can be effec- tively used with higher order samplers and consistently improves the quality of generation samples across all the different scenarios.

Detoxifying multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) has become crucial due to their increasing global use. In this work, we explore zero-shot cross-lingual generalization of preference tuning in detoxifying LLMs. Unlike previous studies that show limited cross-lingual generalization for other safety tasks, we demonstrate that Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) training with only English data can significantly reduce toxicity in multilingual open-ended generations. For example, the probability of mGPT-1.3B generating toxic continuations drops from 46.8% to 3.9% across 17 different languages after training. Our results also extend to other multilingual LLMs, such as BLOOM, Llama3, and Aya-23. Using mechanistic interpretability tools like causal intervention and activation analysis, we identified the dual multilinguality property of MLP layers in LLMs, which explains the cross-lingual generalization of DPO. Finally, we show that bilingual sentence retrieval can predict the cross-lingual transferability of DPO preference tuning.

Stochastic dual dynamic programming (SDDP) is a state-of-the-art method for solving multi-stage stochastic optimization, widely used for modeling real-world process optimization tasks. Unfortunately, SDDP has a worst-case complexity that scales exponentially in the number of decision variables, which severely limits applicability to only low dimensional problems. To overcome this limitation, we extend SDDP by introducing a trainable neural model that learns to map problem instances to a piece-wise linear value function within intrinsic low-dimension space, which is architected specifically to interact with a base SDDP solver, so that can accelerate optimization performance on new instances. The proposed Neural Stochastic Dual Dynamic Programming (nu-SDDP) continually self-improves by solving successive problems. An empirical investigation demonstrates that nu-SDDP can significantly reduce problem solving cost without sacrificing solution quality over competitors such as SDDP and reinforcement learning algorithms, across a range of synthetic and real-world process optimization problems.

When using a diffusion model for image editing, there are times when the modified image can differ greatly from the source. To address this, we apply a dual-guidance approach to maintain high fidelity to the original in areas that are not altered. First, we employ text-guided optimization, using text embeddings to direct latent space and classifier-free guidance. Second, we use perceptual similarity guidance, optimizing latent vectors with posterior sampling via Tweedie formula during the reverse process. This method ensures the realistic rendering of both the edited elements and the preservation of the unedited parts of the original image.