Technology
Disentangled Representation Learning via Modular Compositional Bias
Recent disentangled representation learning (DRL) methods heavily rely on factor-specific strategies--either learning objectives for attributes or model architectures for objects--to embed inductive biases. Such divergent approaches result in significant overhead when novel factors of variation do not align with prior assumptions, such as statistical independence or spatial exclusivity, or when multiple factors coexist, as practitioners must redesign architectures or objectives. To address this, we propose a compositional bias, a modular inductive bias decoupled from both objectives and architectures. Our key insight is that different factors obey distinct recombination rules in the data distribution: global attributes are mutually exclusive, a face has one nose, while objects share a common support (any subset of objects can co-exist). We therefore randomly remix latents according to factor-specific rules, a mixing strategy, and force the encoder to discover whichever factor structure the mixing strategy reflects through two complementary objectives: (i) a prior loss that ensures every remix decodes into a realistic image, and (ii) the compositional consistency loss introduced by Wiedemer et al., which aligns each composite image with its corresponding composite latent. Under this general framework, simply adjusting the mixing strategy enables disentanglement of attributes, objects, and even both, without modifying the objectives or architectures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method shows competitive performance in both attribute and object disentanglement, and uniquely achieves joint disentanglement of global style and objects.
Recurrent Memory for Online Interdomain Gaussian Processes
We propose a novel online Gaussian process (GP) model that is capable of capturing long-term memory in sequential data in an online learning setting. Our model, Online HiPPO Sparse Variational Gaussian Process (OHSVGP), leverages the HiPPO (High-order Polynomial Projection Operators) framework, which is popularized in the RNN domain due to its long-range memory modeling capabilities. We interpret the HiPPO time-varying orthogonal projections as inducing variables with time-dependent orthogonal polynomial basis functions, which allows the SVGP inducing points to memorize the process history. We show that the HiPPO framework fits naturally into the interdomain GP framework and demonstrate that the kernel matrices can also be updated online in a recurrence form based on the ODE evolution of HiPPO. We evaluate OHSVGP with online prediction for 1D time series, continual learning in discriminative GP model for data with multidimensional inputs, and deep generative modeling with sparse Gaussian process variational autoencoder, showing that it outperforms existing online GP methods in terms of predictive performance, long-term memory preservation, and computational efficiency.
Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning As Neural Manifold Packing
Contrastive self-supervised learning based on point-wise comparisons has been widely studied for vision tasks. In the visual cortex of the brain, neuronal responses to distinct stimulus classes are organized into geometric structures known as neural manifolds. Accurate classification of stimuli can be achieved by effectively separating these manifolds, akin to solving a packing problem. We introduce Contrastive Learning As Manifold Packing (CLAMP), a self-supervised framework that recasts representation learning as a manifold packing problem. CLAMP introduces a loss function inspired by the potential energy of short-range repulsive particle systems, such as those encountered in the physics of simple liquids and jammed packings.
ReCon-GS: Continuum-Preserved Gaussian Streaming for Fast and Compact Reconstruction of Dynamic Scenes
To address these challenges, we propose the Reconfigurable Continuum Gaussian Stream, dubbed ReCon-GS, a novel storage-aware framework that enables high-fidelity online dynamic scene reconstruction and real-time rendering. Specifically, we dynamically allocate multi-level Anchor Gaussians in a density-adaptive fashion to capture inter-frame geometric deformations, thereby decomposing scene motion into compact coarse-to-fine representations. Then, we design a dynamic hierarchy reconfiguration strategy that preserves localized motion expressiveness through on-demand anchor re-hierarchization, while ensuring temporal consistency through intra-hierarchical deformation inheritance that confines transformation priors to their respective hierarchy levels. Furthermore, we introduce a storage-aware optimization mechanism that flexibly adjusts the density of Anchor Gaussians at different hierarchy levels, enabling a controllable trade-off between reconstruction fidelity and memory usage. Extensive experiments on three widely used datasets demonstrate that, compared to state of the art methods, ReCon-GS improves training efficiency by approximately 15% and achieves superior FVV synthesis quality with enhanced robustness and stability. Moreover, at equivalent rendering quality, ReCon-GS slashes memory requirements by over 50% compared to leading state of the art methods.
Rethinking Tokenized Graph Transformers for Node Classification
Node tokenized graph Transformers (GTs) have shown promising performance in node classification. The generation of token sequences is the key module in existing tokenized GTs which transforms the input graph into token sequences, facilitating the node representation learning via Transformer. In this paper, we observe that the generations of token sequences in existing GTs only focus on the first-order neighbors on the constructed similarity graphs, which leads to the limited usage of nodes to generate diverse token sequences, further restricting the potential of tokenized GTs for node classification. To this end, we propose a new method termed SwapGT. SwapGT first introduces a novel token swapping operation based on the characteristics of token sequences that fully leverages the semantic relevance of nodes to generate more informative token sequences. Then, SwapGT leverages a Transformer-based backbone to learn node representations from the generated token sequences. Moreover, SwapGT develops a center alignment loss to constrain the representation learning from multiple token sequences, further enhancing the model performance.
Distances for Markov chains from sample streams
Bisimulation metrics are powerful tools for measuring similarities between stochastic processes, and specifically Markov chains. Recent advances have uncovered that bisimulation metrics are, in fact, optimal-transport distances, which has enabled the development of fast algorithms for computing such metrics with provable accuracy and runtime guarantees. However, these recent methods, as well as all previously known methods, assume full knowledge of the transition dynamics. This is often an impractical assumption in most real-world scenarios, where typically only sample trajectories are available. In this work, we propose a stochastic optimization method that addresses this limitation and estimates bisimulation metrics based on sample access, without requiring explicit transition models. Our approach is derived from a new linear programming (LP) formulation of bisimulation metrics, which we solve using a stochastic primal-dual optimization method. We provide theoretical guarantees on the sample complexity of the algorithm and validate its effectiveness through a series of empirical evaluations.
From Forecasting to Planning: Policy World Model for Collaborative State-Action Prediction
Despite remarkable progress in driving world models, their potential for autonomous systems remains largely untapped: the world models are mostly learned for world simulation and decoupled from trajectory planning. While recent efforts aim to unify world modeling and planning in a single framework, the synergistic facilitation mechanism of world modeling for planning still requires further exploration. In this work, we introduce a new driving paradigm named Policy World Model (PWM), which not only integrates world modeling and trajectory planning within a unified architecture, but is also able to benefit planning using the learned world knowledge through the proposed action-free future state forecasting scheme. Through collaborative state-action prediction, PWM can mimic the human-like anticipatory perception, yielding more reliable planning performance. To facilitate the efficiency of video forecasting, we further introduce a parallel token generation mechanism, equipped with a context-guided tokenizer and an adaptive dynamic focal loss. Despite utilizing only front camera input, our method matches or exceeds state-of-the-art approaches that rely on multi-view and multi-modal inputs.
Image Super-Resolution with Guarantees via Conformalized Generative Models
We address this need by presenting a novel approach based on conformal prediction techniques to create a `confidence mask' capable of reliably and intuitively communicating where the generated image can be trusted. Our method is adaptable to any black-box generative model, including those locked behind an opaque API, requires only easily attainable data for calibration, and is highly customizable via the choice of a local image similarity metric. We prove strong theoretical guarantees for our method that span fidelity error control (according to our local image similarity metric), reconstruction quality, and robustness in the face of data leakage. Finally, we empirically evaluate these results and establish our method's solid performance.
Omnidirectional 3D Scene Reconstruction from Single Image
Reconstruction of 3D scenes from a single image is a crucial step towards enabling next-generation AI-powered immersive experiences. However, existing diffusion-based methods often struggle with reconstructing omnidirectional scenes due to geometric distortions and inconsistencies across the generated novel views, hindering accurate 3D recovery. To overcome this challenge, we propose Omni3D, an approach designed to enhance the geometric fidelity of diffusion-generated views for robust omnidirectional reconstruction. Our method leverages priors from pose estimation techniques, such as MASt3R, to iteratively refine both the generated novel views and their estimated camera poses. Specifically, we minimize the 3D reprojection errors between paired views to optimize the generated images, and simultaneously, correct the pose estimation based on the refined views. This synergistic optimization process yields geometrically consistent views and accurate poses, which are then used to build an explicit 3D Gaussian Splatting representation capable of omnidirectional rendering. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of Omni3D, demonstrating significantly advanced 3D reconstruction quality in the omnidirectional space, compared to previous state-of-the-art methods.
VL-SAM-V2: Open-World Object Detection with General and Specific Query Fusion
Current perception models have achieved remarkable success by leveraging large-scale labeled datasets, but still face challenges in open-world environments with novel objects. To address this limitation, researchers introduce open-set perception models to detect or segment arbitrary test-time user-input categories. However, open-set models rely on human involvement to provide predefined object categories as input during inference. More recently, researchers have framed a more realistic and challenging task known as open-ended perception that aims to discover unseen objects without requiring any category-level input from humans at inference time. Nevertheless, open-ended models suffer from low performance compared to open-set models.