Modern foundation models often undergo iterative ``bootstrapping'' in their post-training phase: a model generates synthetic data, an external verifier filters out low-quality samples, and the high-quality subset is used for further fine-tuning. Over multiple iterations, the model performance improves, raising a crucial question: How should the total budget for generation and training be allocated across iterations to maximize final performance? In this work, we develop a theoretical framework for analyzing budget allocation strategies. Specifically, we show that constant policies fail to converge with high probability, while increasing policies---particularly exponential growth policies---exhibit significant theoretical advantages. Experiments on image denoising with diffusion probabilistic models and math reasoning with large language models show that both exponential and polynomial growth policies consistently outperform constant policies, with exponential policies often providing more stable performance.

We study the problem of offline imitation learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs), where the goal is to learn a well-performing policy given a dataset of state-action pairs generated by an expert policy. Complementing a recent line of work on this topic that assumes the expert belongs to a tractable class of known policies, we approach this problem from a new angle and leverage a different type of structural assumption about the environment. Specifically, for the class of linear $Q^\pi$-realizable MDPs, we introduce a new algorithm called saddle-point offline imitation learning (\SPOIL), which is guaranteed to match the performance of any expert up to an additive error $\varepsilon$ with access to $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-2})$ samples. Moreover, we extend this result to possibly nonlinear $Q^\pi$-realizable MDPs at the cost of a worse sample complexity of order $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-4})$. Finally, our analysis suggests a new loss function for training critic networks from expert data in deep imitation learning. Empirical evaluations on standard benchmarks demonstrate that the neural net implementation of \SPOIL is superior to behavior cloning and competitive with state-of-the-art algorithms.

Quantum Implicit Neural Representations (QINRs) have emerged as a promising paradigm that leverages parametrised quantum circuits to encode and process classical information. However, significant challenges remain in areas such as ansatz architecture design, the effective utility of quantum-mechanical properties, training efficiency, and the integration with classical modules. This paper advances the field by introducing a novel QINR architecture for 2D image and 3D geometric field learning, which we collectively refer to as Quantum Visual Field (QVF). QVF encodes classical data into quantum statevectors using neural amplitude encoding grounded in a learnable energy manifold, ensuring meaningful Hilbert space embeddings. Our ansatz follows a fully entangled design of learnable parametrised quantum circuits, with quantum (unitary) operations performed in the real Hilbert space, resulting in numerically stable training with fast convergence. QVF does not rely on classical post-processing---in contrast to the previous QINR learning approach---and directly employs measurements to extract learned signals encoded in the ansatz. Experiments on a quantum hardware simulator demonstrate that QVF outperforms existing quantum approach and competes widely used classical foundational baselines in terms of visual representation accuracy across various metrics and model characteristics. We also show applications of QVF in 2D and 3D field completion and 3D shape interpolation, highlighting its practical potential.

Recent advances in text-to-video (T2V) and image-to-video (I2V) models, have enabled the creation of visually compelling and dynamic videos from simple textual descriptions or initial frames. However, these models often fail to provide an explicit representation of motion separate from content, limiting their applicability for content creators. To address this gap, we propose DisMo, a novel paradigm for learning abstract motion representations directly from raw video data via an image-space reconstruction objective. Our representation is generic and independent of static information such as appearance, object identity, or pose. This enables open-world motion transfer, allowing motion to be transferred across semantically unrelated entities without requiring object correspondences, even between vastly different categories. Unlike prior methods, which trade off motion fidelity and prompt adherence, are overfitting to source structure or drifting from the described action, our approach disentangles motion semantics from appearance, enabling accurate transfer and faithful conditioning. Furthermore, our motion representation can be combined with any existing video generator via lightweight adapters, allowing us to effortlessly benefit from future advancements in video models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through a diverse set of motion transfer tasks. Finally, we show that the learned representations are well-suited for downstream motion understanding tasks, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art video representation models such as V-JEPA in zero-shot action classification on benchmarks including Something-Something v2 and Jester.

Diffusion transformers demonstrate significant potential for various generation tasks but are challenged by high computational cost. Recently, feature caching methods have been introduced to improve inference efficiency by storing features at certain timesteps and reusing them at subsequent timesteps. However, their effectiveness is limited as they rely only on choosing between cached features and performing model inference. Motivated by high cosine similarity between features across consecutive timesteps, we propose a cache-based framework that reuses features and selectively adapts them through linear modulation. In our framework, the selection is performed via a modulation gate, and both the gate and modulation parameters are learned. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves similar generation performance to the original sampler while requiring significantly less computation. For example, FLOPs and inference latency are reduced by $2.93\times$ and $2.15\times$ for DiT-XL/2 and by $2.83\times$ and $1.50\times$ for PixArt-$\alpha$, respectively. We find that modulation is effective when applied to as little as 2\% of layers, resulting in negligible computation overhead.

This paper presents a multimodal framework that attempts to unify visual understanding and generation within a shared discrete semantic representation. At its core is the Text-Aligned Tokenizer (TA-Tok), which converts images into discrete tokens using a text-aligned codebook projected from a large language model's (LLM) vocabulary.

Conformal prediction is widely adopted in uncertainty quantification, due to its post-hoc, distribution-free, and model-agnostic properties. In the realm of modern deep learning, researchers have proposed Feature Conformal Prediction (FCP), which deploys conformal prediction in a feature space, yielding reduced band lengths. However, the practical utility of FCP is limited due to the time-consuming non-linear operations required to transform confidence bands from feature space to output space. In this paper, we present Fast Feature Conformal Prediction (FFCP), a method that accelerates FCP by leveraging a first-order Taylor expansion to approximate these non-linear operations. The proposed FFCP introduces a novel non-conformity score that is both effective and efficient for real-world applications. Empirical validations showcase that FFCP performs comparably with FCP (both outperforming the vanilla version) while achieving a significant reduction in computational time by approximately 50x in both regression and classification tasks.

As the field progresses toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), there is a pressing need for more comprehensive and insightful evaluation frameworks that go beyond aggregate performance metrics. This paper introduces a unified rating system that jointly models the difficulty of individual test cases and the competency of AI models (or humans) across vision, language, and action domains. Unlike existing metrics that focus solely on models, our approach allows for fine-grained, difficulty-aware evaluations through competitive interactions between models and tasks, capturing both the long-tail distribution of real-world challenges and the competency gap between current models and full task mastery. We validate the generalizability and robustness of our system through extensive experiments on multiple established datasets and models across distinct AGI domains. The resulting rating distributions offer novel perspectives and interpretable insights into task difficulty, model progression, and the outstanding challenges that remain on the path to achieving full AGI task mastery. We have made our code and results publicly available at https://ss47816.github.io/AGI-Elo/.

Recent multimodal embedding approaches leveraging multimodal large language models (MLLMs) fine-tuned with contrastive learning (CL) have shown promising results, yet the underlying reasons behind their superiority remain underexplored. This work argues that a crucial advantage of MLLM-based approaches stems from implicit cross-modal alignment achieved during generative pretraining, where the language decoder learns to exploit multimodal signals within a shared representation space for generating unimodal outputs. Through analysis of anisotropy and kernel similarity structure, we empirically confirm that latent alignment emerges within MLLM representations, allowing CL to serve as a lightweight refinement stage. Leveraging this insight, we propose a Language-Centric Omnimodal Embedding framework, termed LCO-Embed. Extensive experiments across diverse backbones and benchmarks demonstrate its effectiveness, achieving state-of-the-art performance across modalities. Furthermore, we identify a Generation-Representation Scaling Law (GRSL), showing that the representational capabilities gained through contrastive refinement scale positively with the MLLM's generative capabilities. This suggests that improving generative abilities evolves as an effective paradigm for enhancing representation quality. We provide a theoretical explanation of GRSL, which formally links the MLLM's generative quality to the upper bound on its representation performance, and validate it on a challenging, low-resource visual-document retrieval task, showing that continual generative pretraining before CL can further enhance the potential of a model's embedding capabilities.

Periodicity, as one of the most important basic characteristics, lays the foundation for facilitating structured knowledge acquisition and systematic cognitive processes within human learning paradigms. However, the potential flaws of periodicity modeling in Transformer affect the learning efficiency and establishment of underlying principles from data for large language models (LLMs) built upon it. In this paper, we demonstrate that integrating effective periodicity modeling can improve the learning efficiency and performance of LLMs. We introduce FANformer, which adapts Fourier Analysis Network (FAN) into attention mechanism to achieve efficient periodicity modeling, by modifying the feature projection process of attention mechanism. Extensive experimental results on language modeling show that FANformer consistently outperforms Transformer when scaling up model size and training tokens, underscoring its superior learning efficiency. Our pretrained FANformer-1B exhibits marked improvements on downstream tasks compared to open-source LLMs with similar model parameters or training tokens. Moreover, we reveal that FANformer exhibits superior ability to learn and apply rules for reasoning compared to Transformer.