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One Stone with Two Birds: ANull-Text-Null Frequency-Aware Diffusion Models for Text-Guided Image Inpainting
Text-guided image inpainting aims at reconstructing the masked regions as per text prompts, where the longstanding challenges lie in the preservation for unmasked regions, while achieving the semantics consistency between unmasked and inpainted masked regions. Previous arts failed to address both of them, always with either of them to be remedied. Such facts, as we observed, stem from the entanglement of the hybrid (e.g., mid-and-low) frequency bands that encode varied image properties, which exhibit different robustness to text prompts during the denoising process. In this paper, we propose a null-text-null frequency-aware diffusion models, dubbed NTN-Diff, for text-guided image inpainting, by decomposing the semantics consistency across masked and unmasked regions into the consistencies as per each frequency band, while preserving the unmasked regions, to circumvent two challenges in a row. Based on the diffusion process, we further divide the denoising process into early (high-level noise) and late (low-level noise) stages, where the mid-and-low frequency bands are disentangled during the denoising process. As observed, the stable mid-frequency band is progressively denoised to be semantically aligned during text-guided denoising process, which, meanwhile, serves as the guidance to the null-text denoising process to denoise low-frequency band for the masked regions, followed by a subsequent text-guided denoising process at late stage, to achieve the semantics consistency for mid-and-low frequency bands across masked and unmasked regions, while preserve the unmasked regions.
11 skydivers and pilot killed in plane crash
Eleven skydivers and one pilot have been killed in a plane crash in the US state of Missouri, officials said. The airplane, which was leased by a skydiving company, took off around 11:20 local time on Sunday, according to a Bates County Emergency Management spokesperson. After failing to gain altitude, it made a sharp left turn and crashed about 200 yards away from Butler Memorial Airport, the spokesperson told the BBC. All 12 people on board died, he said. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said a Pacific Aerospace P750 crashed while departing the airport.
Trained Mamba Emulates Online Gradient Descent in In-Context Linear Regression
State-space models (SSMs), particularly Mamba, emerge as an efficient Transformer alternative with linear complexity for long-sequence modeling. Recent empirical works demonstrate Mamba's in-context learning (ICL) capabilities competitive with Transformers, a critical capacity for large foundation models. However, theoretical understanding of Mamba's ICL remains limited, restricting deeper insights into its underlying mechanisms. Even fundamental tasks such as linear regression ICL, widely studied as a standard theoretical benchmark for Transformers, have not been thoroughly analyzed in the context of Mamba. To address this gap, we study the training dynamics of Mamba on the linear regression ICL task. By developing novel techniques tackling non-convex optimization with gradient descent related to Mamba's structure, we establish an exponential convergence rate to ICL solution, and derive a loss bound that is comparable to Transformer's. Importantly, our results reveal that Mamba can perform a variant of online gradient descent to learn the latent function in context. This mechanism is different from that of Transformer, which is typically understood to achieve ICL through gradient descent emulation. The theoretical results are verified by experimental simulation.
Beyond Prediction: Managing the Repercussions of Machine Learning Applications
Machine learning models are often designed to maximize a primary goal, such as accuracy. However, as these models are increasingly used to inform decisions that affect people's lives or well-being, it is often unclear what the real-world repercussions of their deployment might be--making it crucial to understand and manage such repercussions effectively. Models maximizing user engagement on social media platforms, e.g., may inadvertently contribute to the spread of misinformation and content that deepens political polarization. This issue is not limited to social media--it extends to other applications where machine learning-informed decisions can have real-world repercussions, such as education, employment, and lending. Existing methods addressing this issue require prior knowledge or estimates of analytical models describing the relationship between a classifier's predictions and their corresponding repercussions. We introduce THEIA, a novel classification algorithm capable of optimizing a primary objective, such as accuracy, while providing high-confidence guarantees about its potential repercussions. Importantly, THEIA solves the open problem of providing such guarantees based solely on existing data with observations of previous repercussions. We prove that it satisfies constraints on a model's repercussions with high confidence and that it is guaranteed to identify a solution, if one exists, given sufficient data. We empirically demonstrate, using real-life data, that THEIA can identify models that achieve high accuracy while ensuring, with high confidence, that constraints on their repercussions are satisfied.
Deep Value Benchmark: Measuring Whether Models Generalize Deep Values or Shallow Preferences
We introduce the Deep Value Benchmark (DVB), an evaluation framework that directly tests whether large language models (LLMs) learn fundamental human values or merely surface-level preferences. This distinction is critical for AI alignment: Systems that capture deeper values are likely to generalize human intentions robustly, while those that capture only superficial patterns in preference data risk producing misaligned behavior. The DVB uses a novel experimental design with controlled confounding between deep values (e.g., moral principles) and shallow features (e.g., superficial attributes). In the training phase, we expose LLMs to human preference data with deliberately correlated deep and shallow features--for instance, where a user consistently prefers (non-maleficence, formal language) options over (justice, informal language) alternatives. The testing phase then breaks these correlations, presenting choices between (justice, formal language) and (non-maleficence, informal language) options.
Synthetic Series-Symbol Data Generation for Time Series Foundation Models
Foundation models for time series analysis (TSA) have attracted significant attention. However, challenges such as training data scarcity and imbalance continue to hinder their development. Inspired by complex dynamic system theories, we design a series-symbol data generation mechanism, enabling the unrestricted creation of high-quality time series data paired with corresponding symbolic expressions. To leverage series-symbol data pairs with strong correlations, we develop SymTime, a pre-trained foundation model for enhancing time series representation using symbolic information. SymTime demonstrates competitive performance across five major TSA tasks when fine-tunes with downstream tasks, rivaling foundation models pre-trained on real-world datasets. This approach underscores the potential of series-symbol data generation and pretraining mechanisms in overcoming data scarcity and enhancing task performance.
LLM-Driven Treatment Effect Estimation Under Inference Time Text Confounding
Estimating treatment effects is crucial for personalized decision-making in medicine, but this task faces unique challenges in clinical practice. At training time, models for estimating treatment effects are typically trained on well-structured medical datasets that contain detailed patient information. However, at inference time, predictions are often made using textual descriptions (e.g., descriptions with self-reported symptoms), which are incomplete representations of the original patient information. In this work, we make three contributions.
Efficient k-Sparse Band-Limited Interpolation with Improved Approximation Ratio
We consider the task of interpolating a k-sparse band-limited signal from a small collection of noisy time-domain samples. Exploiting a new analytic framework for hierarchical frequency decomposition that performs systematic noise cancellation, we give the first polynomial-time algorithm with a provable (3+ 2+ε)approximation guarantee for continuous interpolation. Our method breaks the long-standing C > 100 barrier set by the best previous algorithms, sharply reducing the gap to optimal recovery and establishing a new state of the art for high-accuracy band-limited interpolation. We also give a refined "shrinking-range" variant that achieves a ( 2+ε+c)-approximation on any sub-interval (1 c)T for some c (0,1), which gives even higher interpolation accuracy.
Geometric Algebra-Enhanced Bayesian Flow Network for RNAInverse Design
With the development of biotechnology, RNA therapies have shown great potential. However, different from proteins, the sequences corresponding to a single RNA three-dimensional structure are more abundant. Most of the existing RNA design methods merely take into account the secondary structure of RNA, or are only capable of generating a limited number of candidate sequences. To address these limitations, we propose a geometric-algebra-enhanced Bayesian Flow Network for the inverse design of RNA, called RBFN. RBFN uses a Bayesian Flow Network to model the distribution of nucleotide sequences in RNA, enabling the generation of more reasonable RNA sequences. Meanwhile, considering the more flexible characteristics of RNA conformations, we utilize geometric algebra to enhance the modeling ability of the RNA three-dimensional structure, facilitating a better understanding of RNA structural properties. In addition, due to the scarcity of RNA structures and the limitation that there are only four types of nucleic acids, we propose a new time-step distribution sampling to address the scarcity of RNA structure data and the relatively small number of nucleic acid types. Evaluation on the single-state fixed-backbone re-design benchmark and multi-state fixedbackbone benchmark indicates that RBFN can outperform existing RNA design methods in various RNA design tasks, enabling effective RNA sequence design.