Unsupervised domain adaptive hashing has emerged as a promising approach for efficient and memory-friendly cross-domain retrieval. It leverages the model learned on labeled source domains to generate compact binary codes for unlabeled target domain samples, ensuring that semantically similar samples are mapped to nearby points in the Hamming space. Existing methods typically apply domain adaptation techniques to the feature space or the Hamming space, especially pseudo-labeling and feature alignment. However, the inherent noise of pseudo-labels and the insufficient exploration of complementary knowledge across spaces hinder the ability of the adapted model. To address these challenges, we propose a Vision-language model assisted Pseudo-labeling and Dual Space adaptation (VPDS) method.

To accelerate diffusion model inference, numerical solvers perform poorly at extremely small steps, while distillation techniques often introduce complexity and instability. This work presents an intermediate strategy, balancing performance and cost, by learning ODE integration using loss functions derived from the derivative-integral relationship, inspired by Monte Carlo integration and Picard iteration. From a geometric perspective, the losses operate by gradually extending the tangent to the secant, thus are named as secant losses. The target of secant losses is the same as that of diffusion models, or the diffusion model itself, leading to great training stability.

We describe KVLink, an approach for efficient key-value (KV) cache reuse in large language models (LLMs). In many LLM applications, different inputs can share overlapping context, such as the same retrieved document appearing in multiple queries. However, the LLMs still need to encode the entire context for each query, leading to redundant computation. In this paper, we investigate a new strategy to eliminate such inefficiency, where the KV cache of each document is precomputed independently. During inference, the KV caches of retrieved documents are concatenated, allowing the model to reuse cached representations instead of recomputing them. To mitigate the performance degradation when using KV caches computed independently for each document, KVLink introduces two key techniques: adjusting positional embeddings of the KV cache at inference to match the global position after concatenation, and using trainable special tokens to restore self-attention across independently encoded documents. Experiments across 7 datasets demonstrate that KVLink improves question answering accuracy by an average of 4% over state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, by leveraging precomputed KV caches, our approach reduces time-to-first-token by up to 96% compared to standard LLM inference, making it a scalable and efficient solution for context reuse. Additionally, KVLink can be combined with KV cache compression to further save cache loading and storage overhead while outperforming the baselines.

Dark matter makes up approximately 85\% of total matter in our universe, yet it has never been directly observed in any laboratory on Earth. The origin of dark matter is one of the most important questions in contemporary physics, and a convincing detection of dark matter would be a Nobel-Prize-level breakthrough in fundamental science. The ABRACADABRA experiment was specifically designed to search for dark matter. Although it has not yet made a discovery, ABRACADABRA has produced several dark matter search results widely endorsed by the physics community. The experiment generates ultra-long time-series data at a rate of 10 million samples per second, where the dark matter signal would manifest itself as a sinusoidal oscillation mode within the ultra-long time series. In this paper, we present the TIDMAD --- a comprehensive data release from the ABRACADABRA experiment including three key components: an ultra-long time series dataset divided into training, validation, and science subsets; a carefully-designed denoising score for direct model benchmarking; and a complete analysis framework which produces a physics community-standard dark matter search result suitable for publication as a physics paper. This data release enables core AI algorithms to extract the dark matter signal and produce real physics results thereby advancing fundamental science.

Garment manipulation is a critical challenge due to the diversity in garment categories, geometries, and deformations. Despite this, humans can effortlessly handle garments, thanks to the dexterity of our hands. However, existing research in the field has struggled to replicate this level of dexterity, primarily hindered by the lack of realistic simulations of dexterous garment manipulation. Therefore, we propose DexGarmentLab, the first environment specifically designed for dexterous (especially bimanual) garment manipulation, which features large-scale high-quality 3D assets for 15 task scenarios, and refines simulation techniques tailored for garment modeling to reduce the sim-to-real gap. Previous data collection typically relies on teleoperation or training expert reinforcement learning (RL) policies, which are labor-intensive and inefficient. In this paper, we leverage garment structural correspondence to automatically generate a dataset with diverse trajectories using only a single expert demonstration, significantly reducing manual intervention.

Modeling and reconstructing multidimensional physical dynamics from sparse and off-grid observations presents a fundamental challenge in scientific research. Recently, diffusion-based generative modeling shows promising potential for physical simulation. However, current approaches typically operate on on-grid data with preset spatiotemporal resolution, but struggle with the sparsely observed and continuous nature of real-world physical dynamics. To fill the gaps, we present SDIFT, Sequential DIffusion in Functional Tucker space, a novel framework that generates full-field evolution of physical dynamics from irregular sparse observations. SDIFT leverages the functional Tucker model as the latent space representer with proven universal approximation property, and represents sparse observations as latent functions and Tucker core sequences. We then construct a sequential diffusion model with temporally augmented UNet in the functional Tucker space, denoising noise drawn from a Gaussian process to generate the sequence of core tensors. At the posterior sampling stage, we propose a Message-Passing Posterior Sampling mechanism, enabling conditional generation of the entire sequence guided by observations at limited time steps. We validate SDIFT on three physical systems spanning astronomical (supernova explosions, light-year scale), environmental (ocean sound speed fields, kilometer scale), and molecular (organic liquid, millimeter scale) domains, demonstrating significant improvements in both reconstruction accuracy and computational efficiency compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

Modern Text-to-Image (T2I) models deploy multi-layered defenses to block Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content generation. These defenses typically include sequential layers such as prompt filters, concept erasers and image filters. While existing adversarial attacks have demonstrated vulnerabilities in isolated defense layers, they prove largely ineffective against multi-layered defenses deployed in real-world T2I systems. In this paper, we demonstrate that exploiting overlapping vulnerabilities across these distinct defense layers enables adversaries to systematically bypass the entire safeguard of T2I systems. We propose Transstratal Adversarial Attack (TAA), a novel black-box framework to compromise T2I models with multi-layered protection. It generates transstratal adversarial prompts to evade all defense layers simultaneously. This is accomplished through transstratal adversarial candidate generation using LLMs to fulfill implicit and subjective adversarial requirements against different defense layers, combined with adversarial genetic optimization for efficient black-box search to maximize the bypass rates and generated image harmfulness. Evaluated across 14 T2I models (e.g., Stable Diffusion, DALL E, and Midjourney) and 17 safety modules, our attack achieves an average attack success rate of 85.6\%, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by 73.5\%. Our findings challenge the isolated design of safety mechanisms and establish the first benchmark for holistic robustness evaluation in multi-layered safeguarded T2I models.

Model merging has emerged as a promising technique for enhancing large language models, though its application in large-scale pre-training remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, we present a comprehensive investigation of model merging techniques during the pre-training process. Through extensive experiments with both dense and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures ranging from millions to over 100 billion parameters, we demonstrate that merging checkpoints trained with constant learning rates not only achieves significant performance improvements but also enables accurate prediction of annealing behavior. These improvements lead to both more efficient model development and significantly lower training costs. Our detailed ablation studies on merging strategies and hyperparameters provide new insights into the underlying mechanisms while uncovering novel applications. Through comprehensive experimental analysis, we offer the open-source community practical pre-training guidelines for effective model merging.

Parameter-efficient training, based on low-rank optimization, has become a highly successful tool for fine-tuning large deep-learning models. However, these methods fail at low-rank pre-training tasks where maintaining the low-rank structure and the objective remains a challenging task. We propose the Quadratic Reweighted Rank Regularizer dubbed Q3R, which leads to a novel low-rank inducing training strategy inspired by the iteratively reweighted least squares (IRLS) framework. Q3R is based on a quadratic regularizer term which majorizes a smoothed log determinant serving as rank surrogate objective. Unlike other low-rank training techniques, Q3R is able to train weight matrices with prescribed, low target ranks of models that achieve comparable predictive performance as dense models, with small computational overhead, while remaining fully compatible with existing architectures. In experiments, we are able to truncate 60% of the parameters of a ViT-Tiny parameters with marginal loss in CIFAR-10 performance and up to 80% with only 4% accuracy drop. The efficacy of Q3R is confirmed on Transformers across both image and language tasks, including for low-rank fine-tuning.

In strategic classification, the standard supervised learning setting is extended to support the notion of strategic user behavior in the form of costly feature manipulations made in response to a classifier. While standard learning supports a broad range of model classes, the study of strategic classification has, so far, been dedicated mostly to linear classifiers. This work aims to expand the horizon by exploring how strategic behavior manifests under non-linear classifiers and what this implies for learning. We take a bottom-up approach showing how non-linearity affects decision boundary points, classifier expressivity, and model class complexity. Our results show how, unlike the linear case, strategic behavior may either increase or decrease effective class complexity, and that the complexity decrease may be arbitrarily large. Another key finding is that universal approximators (e.g., neural nets) are no longer universal once the environment is strategic. We demonstrate empirically how this can create performance gaps even on an unrestricted model class.