How blue whales became Earth's largest creature--ever More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Just a blue whale's tongue weighs as much as an adult elephant. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy . Think of the largest elephant you can.

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable generative capabilities, and Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) has improved their inference efficiency by following optimal transport paths. However, CFM-based models still require multiple iterative sampling steps, which makes them unsuitable for real-time or streaming generation scenarios. In this paper, we introduce StreamFlow, a novel streaming generative model designed for real-time audio generation from discrete tokens. StreamFlow leverages a causal noising training framework along the time axis and predicts multi-time vector fields at once on each stream, enabling streaming inference with minimal latency. To further improve generalization, we propose Scale-DiT, a Diffusion Transformer architecture that enhances robustness by modeling, normalizing, and scaling feature differences prior to skip connections. This significantly improves the robustness and performance of DiT without increasing the parameter size.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to plan, reason, and execute tasks across diverse scenarios. In use cases like repeatable workflows and agentic settings, prompts are often reused with minor variations while having a similar structure for recurring tasks. This opens up opportunities for caching. However, exact prompt matching fails on such structurally similar prompts, while semantic caching may produce incorrect responses by ignoring critical differences. To address this, we introduce GenCache, a generative cache that produces variationaware responses for structurally similar prompts. GenCache identifies reusable response patterns across similar prompt structures and synthesizes customized outputs for new requests. We show that GenCache achieves 83% cache hit rate, while having minimal incorrect hits on datasets without prompt repetition. In agentic workflows, it improves cache hit rate by 20% and reduces end-to-end execution latency by 34% compared to standard prompt matching.

Machine unlearning (MU) aims to efficiently remove sensitive or harmful memory from a pre-trained model. The key challenge is to balance the potential tradeoff between unlearning efficacy and utility preservation, which involves forgetting undesirable information as defined while maintaining the model's original performance. One potential way to tackle this problem is to use multi-objective optimization to jointly optimize both the unlearning and utility preservation objectives. However, existing multi-objective methods only guarantee finding a Pareto-optimal solution without fine-grained control, which causes under-optimization of the unlearning objective. To this end, we first model MU as a constrained optimization problem, that is, optimizing the unlearning objective under the constraint of a bounded increase for utility loss.

The study of multimodality has garnered significant interest in fields where the analysis of interactions among multiple information sources can enhance predictive modeling, data fusion, and interpretability. Partial information decomposition (PID) has emerged as a useful information-theoretic framework to quantify the degree to which individual modalities independently, redundantly, or synergistically convey information about a target variable. However, existing PID methods depend on optimizing over a joint distribution constrained by estimated pairwise probability distributions, which are costly and inaccurate for continuous and high-dimensional modalities. Our first key insight is that the problem can be solved efficiently when the pairwise distributions are multivariate Gaussians, and we refer to this problem as Gaussian PID (GPID). We propose a new gradient-based algorithm that substantially improves the computational efficiency of GPID based on an alternative formulation of the underlying optimization problem. To generalize the applicability to non-Gaussian data, we learn information-preserving encoders to transform random variables of arbitrary input distributions into pairwise Gaussian random variables. Along the way, we resolved an open problem regarding the optimality of joint Gaussian solutions for GPID. Empirical validation in diverse synthetic examples demonstrates that our proposed method provides more accurate and efficient PID estimates than existing baselines. We further evaluate a series of large-scale multimodal benchmarks to show its utility in real-world applications of quantifying PID in multimodal datasets and selecting high-performing models.

The remarkable reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs) stems from cognitive behaviors that emerge through reinforcement with verifiable rewards. This work investigates how to transfer this principle to Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) to unlock advanced visual reasoning. We introduce a two-stage paradigm built on Qwen2.5-VL-7B: a massive linguistic cold-start fine-tuning, followed by multimodal reinforcement learning (RL) spanning nearly 1,000 steps--surpassing all previous open-source efforts in scale. This pioneering work reveals three fundamental insights: 1) Behavior transfer emerges surprisingly early in cold start due to linguistic mental imagery.

These twin requirements have naturally led to two widely used techniques: client/server momentum to accelerate progress, and sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) to prefer flat solutions. However, simply combining momentum and SAM leaves two structural issues unresolved in non-IIDFL. We identify and formalize two failure modes: local-global curvature misalignment (local SAM directions need not reflect the global loss geometry) and momentum-echo oscillation (late-stage instability caused by accumulated momentum). To our knowledge, these failure modes have not been jointly articulated and addressed in the FL literature. We propose FedWMSAM to address both failure modes. First, we construct a momentum-guided global perturbation from server-aggregated momentum to align clients' SAM directions with the global descent geometry, enabling a singlebackprop SAM approximation that preserves efficiency.

Reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) has shown great promise in achieving humanlevel reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), and has recently been extended to MLLMs. Nevertheless, reasoning about videos, which is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence, remains a persistent challenge due to the complex logic, temporal and causal structures inherent in video data. To fill this gap, we propose VIDEORFT, a novel approach that extends the RFT paradigm to cultivate human-like video reasoning capabilities in MLLMs. VIDEORFT follows the standard two-stage scheme in RFT: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with chain-of-thought (CoT) annotations, followed by reinforcement learning (RL) to improve generalization. A central challenge to achieve this in the video domain lies in the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality video CoT datasets. We address this by building a multi-expert-driven, cognition-inspired CoT curation pipeline. First, we devise a cognition-inspired prompting strategy to elicit a reasoning LLM to generate preliminary CoTs based solely on rich, structured, and literal representations of video content. Subsequently, these CoTs are revised by a MLLM conditioned on the actual video, ensuring visual consistency and reducing visual hallucinations.

Textual claims are often accompanied by images to enhance their credibility and spread on social media, but this also raises concerns about the spread of misinformation. Existing datasets for automated verification of image-text claims remain limited, as they often consist of synthetic claims and lack evidence annotations to capture the reasoning behind the verdict. In this work, we introduce AVERIMATEC, a dataset consisting of 1,297 real-world image-text claims. Each claim is annotated with question-answer (QA) pairs containing evidence from the web, reflecting a decomposed reasoning regarding the verdict. We mitigate common challenges in fact-checking datasets such as contextual dependence, temporal leakage, and evidence insufficiency, via claim normalization, temporally constrained evidence annotation, and a two-stage sufficiency check. We assess the consistency of the annotation in AVERIMATEC via inter-annotator studies, achieving a κ = 0.742 on verdicts and 74.7% consistency on QA pairs. We also propose a novel evaluation method for evidence retrieval and conduct extensive experiments to establish baselines for verifying image-text claims using open-web evidence.

Large language models (LLMs) suffer from forgetting of upstream knowledge when fine-tuned. Despite efforts on mitigating forgetting, few have investigated how forgotten upstream examples are dependent on newly learned tasks. Insights on such dependencies enable efficient and targeted mitigation of forgetting. In this paper, we empirically analyze forgetting that occurs in N upstream examples of language modeling or instruction-tuning after fine-tuning LLMs on one of M new tasks, visualized in M N matrices. We show that the matrices are often well-approximated with low-rank matrices, indicating the dominance of simple associations between the learned tasks and forgotten upstream examples. Leveraging the analysis, we predict forgetting of upstream examples when fine-tuning LLMs on unseen tasks with matrix completion over the empirical associations. This enables fast identification of most forgotten examples without expensive inference on the entire upstream data. Despite simplicity, the approach outperforms prior approaches that learn semantic relationships of learned tasks and upstream examples with LMs. We demonstrate the practical utility of our analysis by showing statistically significantly reduced forgetting as we upweight predicted examples for replay during fine-tuning.