Personalized models have demonstrated remarkable success in understanding and generating concepts provided by users. However, existing methods use separate concept tokens for understanding and generation, treating these tasks in isolation. This may result in limitations for generating images with complex prompts. For example, given the concept $\langle bo\rangle$, generating $\langle bo\rangle$ wearing its hat without additional textual descriptions of its hat. We call this kind of generation \textit{\textbf{personalized attribute-reasoning generation}}.

However, these methods often suffer from a significant one-step bias, which may lead to convergence towards local optima and poor performance in complex or high-dimensional tasks. Recently, Black-Box Optimization (BBO) has achieved success across various scientific and engineering domains, particularly when function evaluations are costly and gradients are unavailable. Motivated by this, we propose the Reinforced Energy-Based Model for Bayesian Optimization (REBMBO), which integrates Gaussian Processes (GP) for local guidance with an Energy-Based Model (EBM) to capture global structural information. Notably, we define each Bayesian Optimization iteration as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and use Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) for adaptive multi-step lookahead, dynamically adjusting the depth and direction of exploration to effectively overcome the limitations of traditional BO methods. We conduct extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks, confirming the superior performance of REBMBO.

Variational inference seeks the best approximation of a target distribution within a chosen family, where best means minimizing Kullback-Leibler divergence. When the approximation family is exponential, the optimal approximation satisfies a fixed-point equation. We introduce LSVI (Least Squares Variational Inference), a gradient-free, Monte Carlo-based scheme for the fixed-point recursion, where each iteration boils down to performing ordinary least squares regression on tempered log-target evaluations under the variational approximation. We show that LSVI is equivalent to biased stochastic natural gradient descent and use this to derive convergence rates with respect to the numbers of samples and iterations. When the approximation family is Gaussian, LSVI involves inverting the Fisher information matrix, whose size grows quadratically with dimension $d$. We exploit the regression formulation to eliminate the need for this inversion, yielding $O(d^3)$ complexity in the full-covariance case and $O(d)$ in the mean-field case. Finally, we numerically demonstrate LSVI's performance on various tasks, including logistic regression, discrete variable selection, and Bayesian synthetic likelihood, showing competitive results with state-of-the-art methods, even when gradients are unavailable.

Dynamic GNNs, which integrate temporal and spatial features in Electroencephalography (EEG) data, have shown great potential in automating seizure detection. However, fully capturing the underlying dynamics necessary to represent brain states, such as seizure and non-seizure, remains a non-trivial task and presents two fundamental challenges. First, most existing dynamic GNN methods are built on temporally fixed static graphs, which fail to reflect the evolving nature of brain connectivity during seizure progression. Second, current efforts to jointly model temporal signals and graph structures and, more importantly, their interactions remain nascent, often resulting in inconsistent performance. To address these challenges, we present the first theoretical analysis of these two problems, demonstrating the effectiveness and necessity of explicit dynamic modeling and time-then-graph dynamic GNN method. Building on these insights, we propose EvoBrain, a novel seizure detection model that integrates a two-stream Mamba architecture with a GCN enhanced by Laplacian Positional Encoding, following neurological insights. Moreover, EvoBrain incorporates explicitly dynamic graph structures, allowing both nodes and edges to evolve over time. Our contributions include (a) a theoretical analysis proving the expressivity advantage of explicit dynamic modeling and time-then-graph over other approaches, (b) a novel and efficient model that significantly improves AUROC by 23\% and F1 score by 30\%, compared with the dynamic GNN baseline, and (c) broad evaluation of our method on the challenging early seizure prediction task.

Multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) are an integral part of large language models, yet their dense representations render them difficult to understand, edit, and steer. Recent methods learn interpretable approximations via neuron-level sparsity, yet fail to faithfully reconstruct the original mapping--significantly increasing model's next-token cross-entropy loss. In this paper, we advocate for moving to layer-level sparsity to overcome the accuracy trade-off in sparse layer approximation. Under this paradigm, we introduce Mixture of Decoders (MxDs). MxDs generalize MLPs and Gated Linear Units, expanding pre-trained dense layers into tens of thousands of specialized sublayers. Through a flexible form of tensor factorization, each sparsely activating MxD sublayer implements a linear transformation with full-rank weights--preserving the original decoders' expressive capacity even under heavy sparsity. Experimentally, we show that MxDs significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods (e.g., Transcoders) on the sparsity-accuracy frontier in language models with up to 3B parameters. Further evaluations on sparse probing and feature steering demonstrate that MxDs learn similarly specialized features of natural language--opening up a promising new avenue for designing interpretable yet faithful decompositions.

Recent works have highlighted the optimization difficulties encountered by gradient descent in training the first and last layer of transformer-based language models, which are overcome by optimizers such as Adam. The problem appears linked to the heavy-tailed distribution of words in text data, where the frequency of the $k$th most frequent word $\pi_k$ is proportional to $1/k$, following Zipf's law. To better understand the impact of the data distribution on training performance, we study a linear bigram model for next-token prediction when the tokens follow a power-law $\pi_k \propto 1/k^\alpha$ parameterized by the exponent $\alpha$. We derive optimization scaling laws for deterministic gradient descent and sign descent as a proxy for Adam as a function of the power $\alpha \geq 0$. This setting differs from existing theoretical investigations in scaling laws which assume that the eigenvalues of the data decay as a power with power $\alpha > 1$. This assumption effectively makes the problem finite dimensional as most of the loss comes from a few of the largest eigencomponents. In comparison, we show that the problem is more difficult when the data have heavier tails. The case $\alpha = 1$ as found in text is ``worst-case'' for gradient descent, in that the number of iterations required to reach a small relative error scales almost linearly with dimension. While the performance of sign descent also depends on the dimension, for Zipf-distributed data the number of iterations scales only with the square-root of the dimension, leading to a large improvement over gradient descent for large vocabularies.

Continual Structured Knowledge Reasoning (CSKR) focuses on training models to handle sequential tasks, where each task involves translating natural language questions into structured queries grounded in structured knowledge. Existing general continual learning approaches face significant challenges when applied to this task, including poor generalization to heterogeneous structured knowledge and inefficient reasoning due to parameter growth as tasks increase. To address these limitations, we propose a novel CSKR framework, \textsc{K-DeCore}, which operates with a fixed number of tunable parameters. Unlike prior methods, \textsc{K-DeCore} introduces a knowledge decoupling mechanism that disentangles the reasoning process into task-specific and task-agnostic stages, effectively bridging the gaps across diverse tasks. Building on this foundation, \textsc{K-DeCore} integrates a dual-perspective memory consolidation mechanism for distinct stages and introduces a structure-guided pseudo-data synthesis strategy to further enhance the model's generalization capabilities. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of \textsc{K-DeCore} over existing continual learning methods across multiple metrics, leveraging various backbone large language models.

Old-photo face restoration poses significant challenges due to compounded degradations such as breakage, fading, and severe blur. Existing pre-trained diffusion-guided methods either rely on explicit degradation priors or global statistical guidance, which struggle with localized artifacts or face color. We propose Self-Supervised Selective-Guided Diffusion (SSDiff), which leverages pseudo-reference faces generated by a pre-trained diffusion model under weak guidance. These pseudo-labels exhibit structurally aligned contours and natural colors, enabling region-specific restoration via staged supervision: structural guidance applied throughout the denoising process and color refinement in later steps, aligned with the coarse-to-fine nature of diffusion.

Equivariant neural networks are designed to respect symmetries through their architecture, boosting generalization and sample efficiency when those symmetries are present in the data distribution.

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion/flow models have drawn considerable attention recently due to their remarkable ability to deliver flexible visual creations. Still, high-resolution image synthesis presents formidable challenges due to the scarcity and complexity of high-resolution content. Recent approaches have investigated training-free strategies to enable high-resolution image synthesis with pre-trained models. However, these techniques often struggle with generating high-quality visuals and tend to exhibit artifacts or low-fidelity details, as they typically rely solely on the endpoint of the low-resolution sampling trajectory while neglecting intermediate states that are critical for preserving structure and synthesizing finer detail. To this end, we present HiFlow, a training-free and model-agnostic framework to unlock the resolution potential of pre-trained flow models. Specifically, HiFlow establishes a virtual reference flow within the high-resolution space that effectively captures the characteristics of low-resolution flow information, offering guidance for high-resolution generation through three key aspects: initialization alignment for low-frequency consistency, direction alignment for structure preservation, and acceleration alignment for detail fidelity. By leveraging such flow-aligned guidance, HiFlow substantially elevates the quality of high-resolution image synthesis of T2I models and demonstrates versatility across their personalized variants.