Language-guided robotic manipulation is a challenging task that requires an embodied agent to follow abstract user instructions to accomplish various complex manipulation tasks. Previous work generally maps instructions and visual perceptions directly to low-level executable actions, neglecting the modeling of critical waypoints (e.g., key states of "close to/grab/move up" in action trajectories) in manipulation tasks.To address this issue, we propose a PImitive-driVen waypOinT-aware world model for Robotic manipulation (PIVOT-R) that focuses solely on the prediction of task-relevant waypoints. Specifically, PIVOT-R consists of a Waypoint-aware World Model (WAWM) and a lightweight action prediction module. The former performs primitive action parsing and primitive-driven waypoint prediction, while the latter focuses on decoding low-level actions. Additionally, we also design an asynchronous hierarchical executor (AHE) for PIVOT-R, which can use different execution frequencies for different modules of the model, thereby helping the model reduce computational redundancy and improve model execution efficiency. Our PIVOT-R outperforms state-of-the-art (SoTA) open-source models on the SeaWave benchmark, achieving an average relative improvement of 19.45% across four levels of instruction tasks. Moreover, compared to the synchronously executed PIVOT-R, the execution efficiency of PIVOT-R with AHE is increased by 28-fold, with only a 2.9% drop in performance. These results provide compelling evidence that our PIVOT-R can significantly improve both the performance and efficiency of robotic manipulation.

Recent token reduction methods for Vision Transformers (ViTs) incorporate token merging, which measures the similarities between token embeddings and combines the most similar pairs.However, their merging policies are directly dependent on intermediate features in ViTs, which prevents exploiting features tailored for merging and requires end-to-end training to improve token merging.In this paper, we propose Decoupled Token Embedding for Merging (DTEM) that enhances token merging through a decoupled embedding learned via a continuously relaxed token merging process.Our method introduces a lightweight embedding module decoupled from the ViT forward pass to extract dedicated features for token merging, thereby addressing the restriction from using intermediate features.The continuously relaxed token merging, applied during training, enables us to learn the decoupled embeddings in a differentiable manner.Thanks to the decoupled structure, our method can be seamlessly integrated into existing ViT backbones and trained either modularly by learning only the decoupled embeddings or end-to-end by fine-tuning. We demonstrate the applicability of DTEM on various tasks, including classification, captioning, and segmentation, with consistent improvement in token merging.Especially in the ImageNet-1k classification, DTEM achieves a 37.2\% reduction in FLOPs while maintaining a top-1 accuracy of 79.85\% with DeiT-small.

Quantization of diffusion models has attracted considerable attention due to its potential to enable various applications on resource-constrained mobile devices. However, given the cumulative nature of quantization errors in quantized diffusion models, overall performance may still decline even with efforts to minimize quantization error at each sampling step.Recent studies have proposed several methods to address accumulated quantization error, yet these solutions often suffer from limited applicability due to their underlying assumptions or only partially resolve the issue due to an incomplete understanding.In this work, we introduce a novel perspective by conceptualizing quantization error as a stepback in the denoising process. We investigate how the accumulation of quantization error can distort the sampling trajectory, resulting in a notable decrease in model performance. To address this challenge, we introduce StepbaQ, a method that calibrates the sampling trajectory and counteracts the adverse effects of accumulated quantization error through a sampling step correction mechanism. Notably, StepbaQ relies solely on statistics of quantization error derived from a small calibration dataset, highlighting its strong applicability.Our experimental results demonstrate that StepbaQ can serve as a plug-and-play technique to enhance the performance of diffusion models quantized by off-the-shelf tools without modifying the quantization settings. For example, StepbaQ significantly improves the performance of the quantized SD v1.5 model by 7.30 in terms of FID on SDprompts dataset under the common W8A8 setting, and it enhances the performance of the quantized SDXL-Turbo model by 17.31 in terms of FID on SDprompts dataset under the challenging W4A8 setting.

Due to its powerful representational capabilities, Transformers have gradually become the mainstream model in the field of machine vision. However, the vast and complex parameters of Transformers impede researchers from gaining a deep understanding of their internal mechanisms, especially error mechanisms. Existing methods for interpreting Transformers mainly focus on understanding them from the perspectives of the importance of input tokens or internal modules, as well as the formation and meaning of features. In contrast, inspired by research on information integration mechanisms and conjunctive errors in the biological visual system, this paper conducts an in-depth exploration of the internal error mechanisms of Transformers. We first propose an information integration hypothesis for Transformers in the machine vision domain and provide substantial experimental evidence to support this hypothesis. This includes the dynamic integration of information among tokens and the static integration of information within tokens in Transformers, as well as the presence of conjunctive errors therein. Addressing these errors, we further propose heuristic dynamic integration constraint methods and rule-based static integration constraint methods to rectify errors and ultimately improve model performance. The entire methodology framework is termed as Transformer Doctor, designed for diagnosing and treating internal errors within transformers. Through a plethora of quantitative and qualitative experiments, it has been demonstrated that Transformer Doctor can effectively address internal errors in transformers, thereby enhancing model performance.

The explainability of deep neural networks (DNNs) is critical for trust and reliability in AI systems. Path-based attribution methods, such as integrated gradients (IG), aim to explain predictions by accumulating gradients along a path from a baseline to the target image. However, noise accumulated during this process can significantly distort the explanation. While existing methods primarily concentrate on finding alternative paths to circumvent noise, they overlook a critical issue: intermediate-step images frequently diverge from the distribution of training data, further intensifying the impact of noise. This work presents a novel Denoising Diffusion Path (DDPath) to tackle this challenge by harnessing the power of diffusionmodels for denoising. By exploiting the inherent ability of diffusion models to progressively remove noise from an image, DDPath constructs a piece-wise linear path. Each segment of this path ensures that samples drawn from a Gaussian distribution are centered around the target image.

One of the urgent tasks of artificial intelligence is to assess the safety and alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human behavior. Conventional verification only in pure natural language processing benchmarks can be insufficient. Since emotions often influence human decisions, this paper examines LLM alignment in complex strategic and ethical environments, providing an in-depth analysis of the drawbacks of our psychology and the emotional impact on decision-making in humans and LLMs. We introduce the novel EAI framework for integrating emotion modeling into LLMs to examine the emotional impact on ethics and LLM-based decision-making in various strategic games, including bargaining and repeated games. Our experimental study with various LLMs demonstrated that emotions can significantly alter the ethical decision-making landscape of LLMs, highlighting the need for robust mechanisms to ensure consistent ethical standards. Our game-theoretic analysis revealed that LLMs are susceptible to emotional biases influenced by model size, alignment strategies, and primary pretraining language. Notably, these biases often diverge from typical human emotional responses, occasionally leading to unexpected drops in cooperation rates, even under positive emotional influence. Such behavior complicates the alignment of multiagent systems, emphasizing the need for benchmarks that can rigorously evaluate the degree of emotional alignment. Our framework provides a foundational basis for developing such benchmarks.

Diffusion models have garnered widespread attention in Reinforcement Learning (RL) for their powerful expressiveness and multimodality. It has been verified that utilizing diffusion policies can significantly improve the performance of RL algorithms in continuous control tasks by overcoming the limitations of unimodal policies, such as Gaussian policies. Furthermore, the multimodality of diffusion policies also shows the potential of providing the agent with enhanced exploration capabilities. However, existing works mainly focus on applying diffusion policies in offline RL, while their incorporation into online RL has been less investigated. The diffusion model's training objective, known as the variational lower bound, cannot be applied directly in online RL due to the unavailability of'good' samples (actions).

Structure-based drug design (SBDD), which aims to generate 3D ligand molecules binding to target proteins, is a fundamental task in drug discovery. Existing SBDD methods typically treat protein as rigid and neglect protein structural change when binding with ligand molecules, leading to a big gap with real-world scenarios and inferior generation qualities (e.g., many steric clashes). To bridge the gap, we propose FlexSBDD, a deep generative model capable of accurately modeling the flexible protein-ligand complex structure for ligand molecule generation. FlexSBDD adopts an efficient flow matching framework and leverages E(3)-equivariant network with scalar-vector dual representation to model dynamic structural changes. Moreover, novel data augmentation schemes based on structure relaxation/sidechain repacking are adopted to boost performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlexSBDD achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating high-affinity molecules and effectively modeling the protein's conformation change to increase favorable protein-ligand interactions (e.g., Hydrogen bonds) and decrease steric clashes.

We consider the problem of active learning for global sensitivity analysis of expensive black-box functions. Our aim is to efficiently learn the importance of different input variables, e.g., in vehicle safety experimentation, we study the impact of the thickness of various components on safety objectives. Since function evaluations are expensive, we use active learning to prioritize experimental resources where they yield the most value. We propose novel active learning acquisition functions that directly target key quantities of derivative-based global sensitivity measures (DGSMs) under Gaussian process surrogate models.We showcase the first application of active learning directly to DGSMs, and develop tractable uncertainty reduction and information gain acquisition functions for these measures. Through comprehensive evaluation on synthetic and real-world problems, our study demonstrates how these active learning acquisition strategies substantially enhance the sample efficiency of DGSM estimation, particularly with limited evaluation budgets. Our work paves the way for more efficient and accurate sensitivity analysis in various scientific and engineering applications.

We study the problem of learning latent community structure from multiple correlated networks, focusing on edge-correlated stochastic block models with two balanced communities. Recent work of Gaudio, Rácz, and Sridhar (COLT 2022) determined the precise information-theoretic threshold for exact community recovery using two correlated graphs; in particular, this showcased the subtle interplay between community recovery and graph matching. Here we study the natural setting of more than two graphs. The main challenge lies in understanding how to aggregate information across several graphs when none of the pairwise latent vertex correspondences can be exactly recovered. Our main result derives the precise information-theoretic threshold for exact community recovery using any constant number of correlated graphs, answering a question of Gaudio, Rácz, and Sridhar (COLT 2022). In particular, for every $K \geq 3$ we uncover and characterize a region of the parameter space where exact community recovery is possible using $K$ correlated graphs, even though (1) this is information-theoretically impossible using any $K-1$ of them and (2) none of the latent matchings can be exactly recovered.