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PhysDiff-VTON: Cross-Domain Physics Modeling and Trajectory Optimization for Virtual Try-On

Neural Information Processing Systems

We present PhysDiff-VTON, a diffusion-based framework for image-based virtual try-on that systematically addresses the dual challenges of garment deformation modeling and high-frequency detail preservation. The core innovation lies in integrating physics-inspired mechanisms into the diffusion process: a pose-guided deformable warping module simulates fabric dynamics by predicting spatial offsets conditioned on human pose semantics, while wavelet-enhanced feature decomposition explicitly preserves texture fidelity through frequency-aware attention.


Face-Human-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Face and Human Understanding for Multi-modal Assistants

Neural Information Processing Systems

Faces and humans are crucial elements in social interaction and are widely included in everyday photos and videos. Therefore, a deep understanding of faces and humans will enable multi-modal assistants to achieve improved response quality and broadened application scope. Currently, the multi-modal assistant community lacks a comprehensive and scientific evaluation of face and human understanding abilities. In this paper, we first propose a hierarchical ability taxonomy that includes three levels of abilities. Then, based on this taxonomy, we collect images and annotations from publicly available datasets in the face and human community and build a semi-automatic data pipeline to produce problems for the new benchmark. Finally, the obtained Face-Human-Bench includes a development set and a test set, each with 1800 problems, supporting both English and Chinese. We conduct evaluations over 25 mainstream multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) with our Face-Human-Bench, focusing on the correlation between abilities, the impact of the relative position of targets on performance, and the impact of Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting on performance. We also explore which abilities of MLLMs need to be supplemented by specialist models. The dataset and evaluation code have been made publicly available at https://face-human-bench.github.io.


Ukrainian drones strike Sevastopol museum and key Russian oil refineries

Al Jazeera

Ukrainian drones have struck a historic museum in Russia-annexed Sevastopol in Crimea, igniting a roof fire, as Russian authorities slashed nighttime train schedules amid intensifying air attacks across the peninsula and deep into Russia. Sevastopol's Russian-installed governor, Mikhail Razvozhayev, announced the damage on Telegram early on Wednesday. "This building is not just a museum, it is a symbol of resilience, which has repeatedly taken the blows of the enemy." Razvozhayev said that during World War II's Siege of Sevastopol, "the Panorama building was subjected to massed bombing by German aviation". He declared: "The enemy will pay for this sacrilege!"


Dense Metric Depth Estimation via Event-based Differential Focus Volume Prompting

Neural Information Processing Systems

Dense metric depth estimation has witnessed great developments in recent years. While single-image-based methods have demonstrated commendable performance in certain circumstances, they may encounter challenges regarding scale ambiguities and visual illusions in real world. Traditional depth-from-focus methods are constrained by low sampling rates during data acquisition. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to enhance dense metric depth estimation by fusing events with image foundation models via a prompting approach. Specifically, we build Event-based Differential Focus Volumes (EDFV) using events triggered through focus sweeping, which are subsequently transformed into sparse metric depth maps. These maps are then utilized for prompting dense depth estimation via our proposed Event-based Depth Prompting Network. We further construct synthetic and real-captured datasets to facilitate the training and evaluation of both frame-based and event-based methods. Quantitative and qualitative results, including both in-domain and zero-shot experiments, demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to existing approaches. Code and data will be available at https://github.com/liboyu02/EDFV/.


AI-Researcher: Autonomous Scientific Innovation

Neural Information Processing Systems

The powerful reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in mathematics and coding, combined with their ability to automate complex tasks through agentic frameworks, present unprecedented opportunities for accelerating scientific innovation. In this paper, we introduce AI-Researcher, a fully autonomous research system that transforms how AI-driven scientific discovery is conducted and evaluated.


Computational Algebra with Attention: Transformer Oracles for Border Basis Algorithms

Neural Information Processing Systems

Solving systems of polynomial equations, particularly those with finitely many solutions, is a crucial challenge across many scientific fields. Traditional methods like Gröbner and Border bases are fundamental but suffer from high computational costs, which have motivated recent Deep Learning approaches to improve efficiency, albeit at the expense of output correctness. In this work, we introduce the Oracle Border Basis Algorithm, the first Deep Learning approach that accelerates Border basis computation while maintaining output guarantees. To this end, we design and train a Transformer-based oracle that identifies and eliminates computationally expensive reduction steps, which we find to dominate the algorithm's runtime. By selectively invoking this oracle during critical phases of computation, we achieve substantial speedup factors of up to 3.5x compared to the base algorithm, without compromising the correctness of results. To generate the training data, we develop a sampling method and provide the first sampling theorem for border bases. We construct a tokenization and embedding scheme tailored to monomial-centered algebraic computations, resulting in a compact and expressive input representation, which reduces the number of tokens to encode an $n$-variate polynomial by a factor of $O(n)$. Our learning approach is data efficient, stable, and a practical enhancement to traditional computer algebra algorithms and symbolic computation.


Efficient Policy Optimization in Robust Constrained MDPs with Iteration Complexity Guarantees

Neural Information Processing Systems

Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the cumulative reward while satisfying a constraint, even when there is a mismatch between the real model and an accessible simulator/nominal model. In particular, we consider the robust constrained Markov decision problem (RCMDP) where an agent needs to maximize the reward and satisfy the constraint against the worst possible stochastic model under the uncertainty set centered around an unknown nominal model. Primal-dual methods, effective for standard constrained MDP (CMDP), are not applicable here because of the lack of the strong duality property. Further, one cannot apply the standard robust value-iteration based approach on the composite value function, either, as the worst-case models may be different for the reward value function and the constraint value function. We propose a novel technique that effectively minimizes the constraint value function--to satisfy the constraints; on the other hand, when all the constraints are satisfied, it can simply maximize the robust reward value function. We prove that such an algorithm finds a policy with at most $\epsilon$ sub-optimality and a feasible policy after $O(\epsilon^{-2})$ iterations. In contrast to the state-of-the-art method, we do not need to employ a binary search; thus, we reduce the computation time and achieve a better performance, especially for continuous state-space.


pLSTM: parallelizable Linear Source Transition Mark networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

Modern recurrent architectures, such as xLSTM and Mamba, have recently challenged the Transformer in language modeling. However, their structure constrains their applicability to sequences only or requires processing multi-dimensional data structures, such as images or molecular graphs, in a pre-defined sequential order. In contrast, Multi-Dimensional RNNs (MDRNNs) are well suited for data with a higher level structure, like 2D grids, trees, and directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). In this work, we extend the notion of multi-dimensionality to linear RNNs. We introduce parallelizable Linear Source Transition Mark networks (pLSTMs) using Source, Transition, and Mark gates that act on the linegraph of a general DAG. This enables parallelization in analogy to parallel associative scans and the chunkwise-recurrent form of sequential linear RNNs, but for DAGs. For regular grids (1D and 2D), like images, this scheme can be efficiently implemented using einsum operations, concatenations, and padding in logarithmic time.


FraPPE: Fast and Efficient Preference-Based Pure Exploration

Neural Information Processing Systems

Preference-based Pure Exploration (PrePEx) aims to identify with a given confidence level the set of Pareto optimal arms in a vector-valued (aka multi-objective) bandit, where the reward vectors are ordered via a (given) preference cone $\mathcal C$. Though PrePEx and its variants are well-studied, there does not exist a *computationally efficient* algorithm that can *optimally* track the existing lower bound (Shukla and Basu, 2024) for arbitrary preference cones. We successfully fill this gap by efficiently solving the minimisation and maximisation problems in the lower bound. First, we derive three structural properties of the lower bound that yield a computationally tractable reduction of the minimisation problem. Then, we deploy a Frank-Wolfe optimiser to accelerate the maximisation problem in the lower bound. Together, these techniques solve the maxmin optimisation problem in $\mathcal O(KL^{2})$ time for a bandit instance with $K$ arms and $L$ dimensional reward, which is a significant acceleration over the literature. We further prove that our proposed PrePEx algorithm, **FraPPE**, asymptotically achieves the optimal sample complexity. Finally, we perform numerical experiments across synthetic and real datasets demonstrating that **FraPPE** achieves the lowest sample complexities to identify the exact Pareto set among the existing algorithms.


Generalization Bound of Gradient Flow through Training Trajectory and Data-dependent Kernel

Neural Information Processing Systems

Gradient-based optimization methods have shown remarkable empirical success, yet their theoretical generalization properties remain only partially understood. In this paper, we establish a generalization bound for gradient flow that aligns with the classical Rademacher complexity bounds for kernel methods--specifically those based on the RKHS norm and kernel trace--through a data-dependent kernel called the loss path kernel (LPK).