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Assessing the quality of denoising diffusion models in Wasserstein distance: noisy score and optimal bounds

Neural Information Processing Systems

Generative modeling aims to produce new random examples from an unknown target distribution, given access to a finite collection of examples. Among the leading approaches, denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) construct such examples by mapping a Brownian motion via a diffusion process driven by an estimated score function. In this work, we first provide empirical evidence that DDPMs are robust to constant-variance noise in the score evaluations. We then establish finite-sample guarantees in Wasserstein-2 distance that exhibit two key features: (i) they characterize and quantify the robustness of DDPMs to noisy score estimates, and (ii) they achieve faster convergence rates than previously known results. Furthermore, we observe that the obtained rates match those known in the Gaussian case, implying their optimality.


Gatekeeper: Improving Model Cascades Through Confidence Tuning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large-scale machine learning models deliver strong performance across a wide range of tasks but come with significant computational and resource constraints. To mitigate these challenges, local smaller models are often deployed alongside larger models, relying on routing and deferral mechanisms to offload complex tasks.


ReplaceMe: Network Simplification via Depth Pruning and Transformer Block Linearization

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce ReplaceMe, a generalized training-free depth pruning method that effectively replaces transformer blocks with a linear operation, while maintaining high performance for low compression ratios. In contrast to conventional pruning approaches that require additional training or fine-tuning, our approach requires only a small calibration dataset that is used to estimate a linear transformation, which approximates the pruned blocks. The estimated linear mapping can be seam-lessly merged with the remaining transformer blocks, eliminating the need for any additional network parameters. Our experiments show that ReplaceMe consistently outperforms other training-free approaches and remains highly competitive with state-of-the-art pruning methods that involve extensive retraining/fine-tuning and architectural modifications. Applied to several large language models (LLMs), ReplaceMe achieves up to 25% pruning while retaining approximately 90% of the original model's performance on open benchmarks--without any training or healing steps, resulting in minimal computational overhead.


Mamba Modulation: On the Length Generalization of Mamba Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

The quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism in Transformer models has motivated the development of alternative architectures with sub-quadratic scaling, such as state-space models. Among these, Mamba has emerged as a leading architecture, achieving state-of-the-art results across a range of language modeling tasks. However, Mamba's performance significantly deteriorates when applied to contexts longer than those seen during pre-training, revealing a sharp sensitivity to context length extension. Through detailed analysis, we attribute this limitation to the out-of-distribution behavior of its state-space dynamics, particularly within the parameterization of the state transition matrix $A$. Unlike recent works which attribute this sensitivity to the vanished accumulation of discretization time steps, $\exp(-\sum_{t=1}^N{\Delta}_t)$, we establish a connection between state convergence behavior as the input length approaches infinity and the spectrum of the transition matrix $A$, offering a well-founded explanation of its role in length extension. Next, to overcome this challenge, we propose an approach that applies spectrum scaling to pre-trained Mamba models to enable robust long-context generalization by selectively modulating the spectrum of $A$ matrices in each layer. We show that this can significantly improve performance in settings where simply modulating ${\Delta}_t$ fails, validating our insights and providing avenues for better length generalization of state-space models with structured transition matrices.


Scaling Diffusion Transformers Efficiently via \mu P

Neural Information Processing Systems

Diffusion Transformers have emerged as the foundation for vision generative models, but their scalability is limited by the high cost of hyperparameter (HP) tuning at large scales. Recently, Maximal Update Parametrization ($\mu$P) was proposed for vanilla Transformers, which enables stable HP transfer from small to large language models, and dramatically reduces tuning costs. However, it remains unclear whether $\mu$P of vanilla Transformers extends to diffusion Transformers, which differ architecturally and objectively. In this work, we generalize $\mu$P to diffusion Transformers and validate its effectiveness through large-scale experiments. First, we rigorously prove that $\mu$P of mainstream diffusion Transformers, including DiT, U-ViT, PixArt-$\alpha$, and MMDiT, aligns with that of the vanilla Transformer, enabling the direct application of existing $\mu$P methodologies. Leveraging this result, we systematically demonstrate that DiT-$\mu$P enjoys robust HP transferability. Notably, DiT-XL-2-$\mu$P with transferred learning rate achieves 2.9$\times$ faster convergence than the original DiT-XL-2.


AOR: Anatomical Ontology-Guided Reasoning for Medical Large Multimodal Model in Chest X-Ray Interpretation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Chest X-rays (CXRs) are the most frequently performed imaging examinations in clinical settings. Recent advancements in Medical Large Multimodal Models (MLMMs) have enabled automated CXR interpretation, improving diagnostic accuracy and efficiency.


More effort is needed to protect pedestrian privacy in the era of AI

Neural Information Processing Systems

In the era of artificial intelligence (AI), pedestrian privacy is increasingly at risk. In research areas such as autonomous driving, computer vision, and surveillance, large datasets are often collected in public spaces, capturing pedestrians without consent or anonymization. These datasets are used to train systems that can identify, track, and analyze individuals, often without their knowledge. Although various technical methods and regional regulations have been proposed to address this issue, existing solutions are either insufficient to protect privacy or compromise data utility, thereby limiting their effectiveness for research. In this paper, we argue that more effort is needed to protect pedestrian privacy in the era of AI while maintaining data utility. We call on the AI and computer vision communities to take pedestrian privacy seriously and to rethink how pedestrian data are collected and anonymized. Collaboration with experts in law and ethics will also be essential for the responsible development of AI. Without stronger action, it will become increasingly difficult for individuals to protect their privacy, and public trust in AI may decline.


Fairness-Regularized Online Optimization with Switching Costs

Neural Information Processing Systems

Fairness and action smoothness are two crucial considerations in many online optimization problems, but they have yet to be addressed simultaneously. In this paper, we study a new and challenging setting of fairness-regularized smoothed online convex optimization with switching costs. First, to highlight the fundamental challenges introduced by the long-term fairness regularizer evaluated based on the entire sequence of actions, we prove that even without switching costs, no online algorithms can possibly achieve a sublinear regret or finite competitive ratio compared to the offline optimal algorithm as the problem episode length $T$ increases. Then, we propose **FairOBD** (Fairness-regularized Online Balanced Descent), which reconciles the tension between minimizing the hitting cost, switching cost, and fairness cost.


FuncGenFoil: Airfoil Generation and Editing Model in Function Space

Neural Information Processing Systems

Aircraft manufacturing is the jewel in the crown of industry, in which generating high-fidelity airfoil geometries with controllable and editable representations remains a fundamental challenge. Existing deep learning methods, which typically rely on predefined parametric representations (e.g., Bézier curves) or discrete point sets, face an inherent trade-off between expressive power and resolution adaptability. To tackle this challenge, we introduce FuncGenFoil, a novel function-space generative model that directly reconstructs airfoil geometries as function curves. Our method inherits the advantages of arbitrary-resolution sampling and smoothness from parametric functions, as well as the strong expressiveness of discrete point-based representations. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that FuncGenFoil improves upon state-of-the-art methods in airfoil generation, achieving a relative 74.4% reduction in label error and a 23.2% increase in diversity on the AF-200K dataset. Our results highlight the advantages of function-space modeling for aerodynamic shape optimization, offering a powerful and flexible framework for high-fidelity airfoil design.


TalkCuts: A Large-Scale Dataset for Multi-Shot Human Speech Video Generation

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this work, we present TalkCuts, a large-scale dataset designed to facilitate the study of multi-shot human speech video generation. Unlike existing datasets that focus on single-shot, static viewpoints, TalkCuts offers 164k clips totaling over 500 hours of high-quality 1080P human speech videos with diverse camera shots, including close-up, half-body, and full-body views. The dataset includes detailed textual descriptions, 2D keypoints and 3D SMPL-X motion annotations, covering over 10k identities, enabling multimodal learning and evaluation.