Although recent methods have made progress toward unified solutions, their reliance on post hoc processing introduces considerable application inconvenience and compromises forensic reliability.

Understanding how knowledge is distributed across the layers of generative models is crucial for improving interpretability, controllability, and adaptation. While prior work has explored knowledge localization in UNet-based architectures, Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based models remain underexplored in this context. In this paper, we propose a model-and knowledge-agnostic method to localize where specific types of knowledge are encoded within the DiT blocks. We evaluate our method on state-of-the-art DiT-based models, including PixArt-α, FLUX, and SANA, across six diverse knowledge categories. We show that the identified blocks are both interpretable and causally linked to the expression of knowledge in generated outputs. Building on these insights, we apply our localization framework to two key applications: model personalization and knowledge unlearning. In both settings, our localized fine-tuning approach enables efficient and targeted updates, reducing computational cost, improving task-specific performance, and better preserving general model behavior with minimal interference to unrelated or surrounding content. Overall, our findings offer new insights into the internal structure of DiTs and introduce a practical pathway for more interpretable, efficient, and controllable model editing. 1

Sample-wise learning curves plot performance versus training set size. They are useful for studying scaling laws and speeding up hyperparameter tuning and model selection. Learning curves are often assumed to be well-behaved: monotone (i.e.

ALimitations777 As described in Sections 4 and 6, users would tailor attacks to image clusters. In the case of beige778 box, we outright provided these clusters by disclosing which image indices corresponded to which779 general watermark type. For the black-box track, several winning teams clustered images into groups780 by artifact varieties and did so by hand. For the latter, this was made possible because (1) our data set781 was relatively small, enabling this type of manual data labeling, and (2) they were made aware that782 the dataset contained mixtures of several watermarks. A database owner who uses only one type of783 watermark will unlikely produce such variation in artifacts.784 Additionally, we use the watermark models and setting provided in the original papers and do not785 calibrate the strength of watermarks.

AI-generated images have become pervasive, raising critical concerns around content authenticity, intellectual property, and the spread of misinformation. Invisible watermarks offer a promising solution for identifying AI-generated images, preserving content provenance without degrading visual quality. However, their real-world robustness remains uncertain due to the lack of standardized evaluation protocols and large-scale stress testing. To bridge this gap, we organized "Erasing the Invisible," a NeurIPS 2024 competition and newly established benchmark designed to systematically stress testing the resilience of watermarking techniques. The competition introduced two attack tracks--Black-box and Beige-box--that simulate practical scenarios with varying levels of attacker knowledge on watermarks, providing a comprehensive assessment of watermark robustness.

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Autoregressive language models dominate modern text generation, yet their sequential nature introduces fundamental limitations: decoding is slow, and maintaining global coherence remains challenging. Diffusion models offer a promising alternative by enabling parallel generation and flexible control; however, their application to text generation is hindered by the high dimensionality of token-level representations. We introduce COSMOS, a novel approach to text generation that operates entirely in a compressed, smooth latent space tailored specifically for diffusion. This space is learned using an autoencoder trained simultaneously for token-level reconstruction and alignment with frozen activations from a pretrained language encoder, providing robust semantic grounding and enabling effective perturbation-based augmentations. Empirically, we demonstrate that text representations can be compressed up to 8 while maintaining generation quality comparable to token-level diffusion models. Furthermore, increasing the latent sequence length allows COSMOS to surpass both diffusion-based and autoregressive baselines. We evaluate COSMOS on four diverse generative tasks including story generation, question generation, summarization, and detoxification and compare it with various generative paradigms. COSMOS achieves comparable or superior generation quality while offering more than 2 faster inference. Code is released at GitHub.

Contrastive learning has proven to be highly efficient and adaptable in shaping representation spaces across diverse modalities by pulling similar samples together and pushing dissimilar ones apart. However, two key limitations persist: (1) Without explicit regulation of the embedding distribution, semantically related instances can inadvertently be pushed apart unless complementary signals guide pair selection, and (2) excessive reliance on large in-batch negatives and tailored augmentations hinders generalization. To address these limitations, we propose Variational Supervised Contrastive Learning (VarCon), which reformulates supervised contrastive learning as variational inference over latent class variables and maximizes a posterior-weighted evidence lower bound (ELBO) that replaces exhaustive pair-wise comparisons for efficient class-aware matching and grants fine-grained control over intra-class dispersion in the embedding space. Trained exclusively on image data, our experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet100, and ImageNet-1K show that VarCon (1) achieves state-of-the-art performance for contrastive learning frameworks, reaching 79.36% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet1K and 78.29% on CIFAR-100 with a ResNet-50 encoder while converging in just 200 epochs; (2) yields substantially clearer decision boundaries and semantic organization in the embedding space, as evidenced by KNN classification, hierarchical clustering results, and transfer-learning assessments; and (3) demonstrates superior performance in few-shot learning than supervised baseline and superior robustness across various augmentation strategies.

Recent research shows that large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to hijacking attacks under the scenario of in-context learning (ICL) where LLMs demonstrate impressive capabilities in performing tasks by conditioning on a sequence of in-context examples (ICEs) (i.e., prompts with task-specific input-output pairs). Adversaries can manipulate the provided ICEs to steer the model toward attackerspecified outputs, effectively "hijacking" the model's decision-making process. Unlike traditional adversarial attacks targeting single inputs, hijacking attacks in LLMs aim to subtly manipulate the initial few examples to influence the model's behavior across a range of subsequent inputs, which requires distributed and stealthy perturbations. However, existing approaches overlook how to effectively allocate the perturbation budget across ICEs. We argue that fixed budgets miss the potential of dynamic reallocation to improve attack success while maintaining high stealthiness and text quality.

In this paper, we study the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) points of the associated maximum-margin problem in homogeneous neural networks, including fullyconnected and convolutional neural networks. In particular, We investigates the relationship between such KKT points across networks of different widths generated. We introduce and formalize the KKT point embedding principle, establishing that KKT points of a homogeneous network's max-margin problem (PΦ) can be embedded into the KKT points of a larger network's problem (P Φ) via specific linear isometric transformations. We rigorously prove this principle holds for neuron splitting in fully-connected networks and channel splitting in convolutional neural networks. Furthermore, we connect this static embedding to the dynamics of gradient flow training with smooth losses. We demonstrate that trajectories initiated from appropriately mapped points remain mapped throughout training and that the resulting ω-limit sets of directions are correspondingly mapped, thereby preserving the alignment with KKT directions dynamically when directional convergence occurs. We conduct several experiments to justify that trajectories are preserved. Our findings offer insights into the effects of network width, parameter redundancy, and the structural connections between solutions found via optimization in homogeneous networks of varying sizes.