Deep Learning
Boosting Generative Image Modeling via Joint Image-Feature Synthesis
Latent diffusion models (LDMs) dominate high-quality image generation, yet integrating representation learning with generative modeling remains a challenge. We introduce a novel generative image modeling framework that seamlessly bridges this gap by leveraging a diffusion model to jointly model low-level image latents (from a variational autoencoder) and high-level semantic features (from a pretrained self-supervised encoder like DINO). Our latent-semantic diffusion approach learns to generate coherent image-feature pairs from pure noise, significantly enhancing both generative quality and training efficiency, all while requiring only minimal modifications to standard Diffusion Transformer architectures. By eliminating the need for complex distillation objectives, our unified design simplifies training and unlocks a powerful new inference strategy: Representation Guidance, which leverages learned semantics to steer and refine image generation. Evaluated in both conditional and unconditional settings, our method delivers substantial improvements in image quality and training convergence speed, establishing a new direction for representation-aware generative modeling.
Scientists ' First Exam: Probing Cognitive Abilities of MLLM via Perception, Understanding, and Reasoning
Scientific discoveries increasingly rely on complex multimodal reasoning that integrates information-intensive scientific data and domain-specific expertise. Empowered by expert-level scientific benchmarks, scientific Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) hold the potential to significantly enhance this discovery process in realistic workflows. However, current scientific benchmarks mostly focus on evaluating the knowledge understanding capabilities of MLLMs, leading to an inadequate assessment of their perception and reasoning abilities. To address this gap, we present the Scientists First Exam (SFE) benchmark, designed to evaluate the scientific cognitive capacities of MLLMs through three cognitive levels: scientific signal perception, scientific attribute understanding, scientific comparative reasoning. Specifically, SFE comprises 830 expert-verified VQA pairs across three question types, spanning 66 multimodal tasks across five high-value disciplines. Extensive experiments reveal that current state-of-the-art GPT-o3 and InternVL-3 achieve only 34.08% and 26.52% on SFE, highlighting significant room for MLLMs to improve in scientific realms. We hope the insights obtained in SFE will facilitate further developments in AI-enhanced scientific discoveries.
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Inspired by the remarkable success of foundation models in language and vision, Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) hold significant promise for broad applicability across diverse graph tasks and domains. However, existing GFMs struggle with unstable few-shot fine-tuning, where both performance and adaptation efficiency exhibit significant fluctuations caused by the randomness in the support sample selection and structural discrepancies between the pre-trained and target graphs. How to fine-tune GFMs robustly and efficiently to enable trustworthy knowledge transfer across domains and tasks is the major challenge. In this paper, we propose GRAVER, a novel Generative gRAph VocabulariEs for Robust GFM fine-tuning framework that tackles the aforementioned instability via generative augmentations. Specifically, to identify transferable units, we analyze and extract key class-specific subgraph patterns by ego-graph disentanglement and validate their transferability both theoretically and empirically. To enable effective pre-training across diverse domains, we leverage a universal task template based on ego-graph similarity and construct graph vocabularies via graphon-based generative experts. To facilitate robust and efficient prompt fine-tuning, we grave the support samples with in-context vocabularies, where the lightweight MoE-CoE network attentively routes knowledge from source domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of GRAVER over effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency on downstream few-shot node and graph classification tasks compared with 15 state-of-the-art baselines.
Measuring Fingerprints of Web-filtered Text Datasets and Fingerprint Propagation Through Training
We investigate fingerprints in pretraining datasets for large language models (LLMs) through dataset classification experiments. Building on prior work demonstrating the existence of fingerprints or biases in popular computer vision datasets, we analyze popular open-source pretraining datasets for LLMs derived from CommonCrawl including C4, RefinedWeb, DolmaCC, RedPajama-V2, FineWeb, and DCLM-Baseline. Despite those datasets being obtained with similar curation steps, neural networks can classify surprisingly well which dataset a single text sequence belongs to, significantly better than a human can. This indicates that small differences in filtering and processing pipelines induce fingerprints, that we find are evident in formatting, vocabulary, and content distributions. Such fingerprints can negatively impact cross-dataset generalization. Additionally, we show that these fingerprints propagate through training: sequences generated by models trained on those datasets can be accurately classified by a classifier trained on the original datasets. This can offer insights into data characteristics that are typically undisclosed by LLM developers, including pretraining mixture proportions and finetuning data sources.
Tree-Sliced Entropy Partial Transport
Optimal Transport (OT) has emerged as a fundamental tool in machine learning for comparing probability distributions in a geometrically meaningful manner. However, a key limitation of classical OT is its requirement that the source and target distributions have equal total mass, limiting its use in real-world settings involving imbalanced data, noise, outliers, or structural inconsistencies. Partial Transport (PT) addresses this limitation by allowing only a fraction of the mass to be transported, offering greater flexibility and robustness. Nonetheless, similar to OT, PT remains computationally expensive, as it typically involves solving large-scale linear programs-especially in high-dimensional spaces. To alleviate this computational burden, several emerging works have introduced the TreeSliced Wasserstein (TSW) distance, which projects distributions onto tree-metric spaces where OT problems admit closed-form solutions. Building on this line of research, we propose a novel framework that extends the tree-sliced approach to the PT setting, introducing the Partial Tree-Sliced Wasserstein (PartialTSW) distance. Our method is based on the key observation that, within tree-metric space, the PT problem can be equivalently reformulated as a standard balanced OT problem between suitably modified measures. This reformulation enables efficient computation while preserving the adaptability and robustness of partial transport. Our method proves effective across challenging tasks such as outlier removal and addressing class imbalance in image-to-image translation.
DeepDiver: Adaptive Web-Search Intensity Scaling via Reinforcement Learning
Existing prompting and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods remain fixed by prompt rules or training corpora, and are usually benchmarked only on wellstructured wiki sources, limiting real-world adaptability. We introduce WebPuzzle, a 24k-sample training and 275-sample test benchmark that evaluates information seeking on the live internet, across both wiki and open-domain queries. Leveraging 7k WebPuzzle instances, we develop DeepDiver, a reinforcement-learning (RL) framework that cultivates Search Intensity Scaling (SIS)--an emergent ability to escalate search frequency and depth instead of settling on overconfident, underevidenced answers. With SIS, Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and Pangu-7B-Reasoner attain performance on real-web tasks comparable to the 671B-parameter DeepSeek-R1. We detail DeepDiver's curriculum from cold-start SFT to a well designed RL procedure, and show that its seeking policy generalized from closed-ended queries to open-ended generation such as long-form writing. Our results advance adaptive information seeking in LLMs and provide a rigorous benchmark for future work.
ResponseRank: Data-Efficient Reward Modeling through Preference Strength Learning
Binary choices, as often used for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), convey only the direction of a preference. A person may choose apples over oranges and bananas over grapes, but which preference is stronger? Strength is crucial for decision-making under uncertainty and generalization of preference models, but hard to measure reliably. Metadata such as response times and interannotator agreement can serve as proxies for strength, but are often noisy and confounded. We propose ResponseRank to address the challenge of learning from noisy strength signals. Our method uses relative differences in proxy signals to rank responses to pairwise comparisons by their inferred preference strength. To control for systemic variation, we compare signals only locally within carefully constructed strata. This enables robust learning of utility differences consistent with strengthderived rankings while making minimal assumptions about the strength signal. Our contributions are threefold: (1) ResponseRank, a novel method that robustly learns preference strength by leveraging locally valid relative strength signals; (2) empirical evidence of improved sample efficiency and robustness across diverse tasks: synthetic preference learning (with simulated response times), language modeling (with annotator agreement), and RL control tasks (with simulated episode returns); and (3) the Pearson Distance Correlation (PDC), a novel metric that isolates cardinal utility learning from ordinal accuracy.
Incremental Sequence Classification with Temporal Consistency
We address the problem of incremental sequence classification, where predictions are updated as new elements in the sequence are revealed. Drawing on temporaldifference learning from reinforcement learning, we identify a temporal-consistency condition that successive predictions should satisfy. We leverage this condition to develop a novel loss function for training incremental sequence classifiers. Through a concrete example, we demonstrate that optimizing this loss can offer substantial gains in data efficiency. We apply our method to text classification tasks and show that it improves predictive accuracy over competing approaches on several benchmark datasets. We further evaluate our approach on the task of verifying large language model generations for correctness in grade-school math problems. Our results show that models trained with our method are better able to distinguish promising generations from unpromising ones after observing only a few tokens.
Cameras as Relative Positional Encoding
Transformers are increasingly prevalent for multiview computer vision tasks, where geometric relationships between viewpoints are critical for 3D perception. To leverage these relationships, multiview transformers must use camera geometry to ground visual tokens in 3D space. In this work, we compare techniques for conditioning transformers on cameras: token-level raymap encodings, attentionlevel relative pose encodings, and a new relative encoding--Projective Positional Encoding (PRoPE)--that captures complete camera frustums, both intrinsics and extrinsics, as a relative positional encoding. Our experiments begin by showing how relative conditioning methods improve performance in feedforward novel view synthesis, with further gains from PRoPE. This holds across settings: scenes with both shared and varying intrinsics, when combining token-and attention-level conditioning, and for generalization to inputs with out-of-distribution sequence lengths and camera intrinsics. We then verify that these benefits persist for different tasks, stereo depth estimation and discriminative spatial cognition, as well as larger model sizes. Code is available on our project webpage2.
Pseudo-Riemannian Graph Transformer
Many real-world graphs exhibit diverse and complex topological structures that are not well captured by geometric manifolds with uniform global curvature, such as hyperbolic or spherical spaces. Recently, there has been growing interest in embedding graphs into pseudo-Riemannian manifolds, which generalize both hyperbolic and spherical geometries. However, existing approaches face three significant limitations, including the ineffective pseudo-Riemannain framework, the shallow architectures, and the absence of clear guideline for selecting suitable pseudo-Riemannian manifolds. To address these issues, we introduce a novel diffeomorphic framework for graph embedding that aligns with the nature of pseudo-Riemannian manifolds. Subsequently, we propose the pseudo-Riemannian Graph Transformer for learning representations of complex graph structures. Our diffeomorphic framework in pseudo-Riemannian geometry enables the principled definitions of core transformer components, including linear attention, residual connection, and layer normalization. Finally, we develop a lightweight space searching algorithm to automatically identify the most suitable pseudo-Riemannian manifold for an input graph. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world graphs demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms other baselines in both node classification and link prediction tasks.