Speculative decoding accelerates inference in large language models (LLMs) by generating multiple draft tokens simultaneously.

Speculative decoding accelerates inference in large language models (LLMs) by generating multiple draft tokens simultaneously.

Aerial-Ground person re-identification (AG-ReID) is an emerging yet challenging task that aims to match pedestrian images captured from drastically different viewpoints, typically from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and ground-based surveillance cameras. The task poses significant challenges due to extreme viewpoint discrepancies, occlusions, and domain gaps between aerial and ground imagery. While prior works have made progress by learning cross-view representations, they remain limited in handling severe pose variations and spatial misalignment. To address these issues, we propose a Geometric and Semantic Alignment Network (GSAlign) tailored for AG-ReID. GSAlign introduces two key components to jointly tackle geometric distortion and semantic misalignment in aerial-ground matching: a Learnable Thin Plate Spline (LTPS) Transformation Module and a Dynamic Alignment Module (DAM). The LTPS module adaptively warps pedestrian features based on a set of learned keypoints, effectively compensating for geometric variations caused by extreme viewpoint changes.

Contrastive learning is a powerful framework for learning discriminative representations from image-text pairs. Despite its success, its theoretical foundations, especially when the image-text pair exhibits misalignment, remain underexplored. This paper provides the first theoretical analysis of contrastive learning under data misalignment, proving how the ground-truth modality-paired features are amplified while spurious features are suppressed through the training dynamics analysis. Specifically, we study two nonlinear encoders trained jointly with a contrastive loss and demonstrate that noisy (or misaligned) data pairs result in mixed representations and degrade the model's generalization ability. In contrast, recaptioning and filtering improve the data alignment, which in turn purifies the features learned by neurons and subsequently enhances generalization. Our analysis identifies feature purity as a key factor in the success of contrastive learning and offers insights into how data quality and training procedures impact representation learning and downstream generalization. Theoretical insights are supported by experiments on standard benchmarks.

Heterogeneous federated learning enables collaborative training across clients under dual heterogeneity of models and data, posing challenges for effective knowledge transfer. Federated mutual learning employs proxy models to bridge cross-model knowledge exchange; however, existing methods remain limited to direct alignment between the outputs of private and proxy models, ignoring the deep discrepancies in representation and decision spaces between them. Such cognitive biases cause knowledge to be transferred only at shallow levels and trigger performance bottlenecks. To address this, this paper proposes FedKWAZ to identify and exploit Knowledge Weak-Aware Zones (KWAZ)--spatial zones of deep knowledge misalignment between private and proxy models, further refined into Semantic Weak-Aware Zones and Decision Weak-Aware Zones, which characterize cognitive misalignments in representation and decision spaces as focal targets for enhanced bidirectional distillation. FedKWAZ designs a Hierarchical Adaptive Patch Mixing (HAPM) mechanism to generate multiple mixed samples and employs a Knowledge Discrepancy Perceptron (KDP) to select the samples exhibiting the largest representation and decision discrepancies, thereby mining critical KWAZ. These modules are integrated into a two-stage mutual learning framework, achieving global class-level representation-decision consistency alignment and local KWAZ-guided refinement, structurally bridging cognitive biases across heterogeneous mutual learning models. Experimental results on multiple datasets and model configurations demonstrate the superior performance of FedKWAZ.

Vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP demonstrate strong generalization in zero-shot classification but remain highly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations. Existing methods primarily focus on adversarial fine-tuning or prompt optimization, they often overlook the gaps in CLIP's encoded features, which is shown as the text and image features lie far apart from each other. This misalignment is significantly amplified under adversarial perturbations, leading to severe degradation in classification performance.

Fine-tuning a pretrained language model on a curated dataset can produce spurious correlations between the fine-tuning task and unintended latent factors -- such as misaligned personas or political slant -- that the curation procedure has entangled with the task. The model can latch onto these spurious correlations, leading to bias and reduced out-of-distribution generalisation. We prove that under reasonable assumptions on task complexity and the spurious correlation, such latent factors can be identified, without supervision, from the weights of a naive LoRA fine-tune. Existing approaches to removing bias, such as activation steering, remove identified factors from residual-stream activations, either at inference or during training. We argue, however, that the goal should be to remove the spurious correlation, not the latent factor itself, as the pretrained model may rely on it for genuine task signal. To enable this, we propose GRASP, GRadient projection of Associated Spurious Patterns, which prevents the model from acquiring new reliance on the identified latent factor while preserving any pretrained content along it. We validate on three fine-tuning tasks. The first two involve emergent misalignment, where fine-tuning on a narrow task -- in our case, writing insecure code and giving bad medical advice -- leads to misaligned responses on unrelated topics. Here our method completely removes misalignment in the insecure code case and reduces them by ~5x in the bad medical advice case, beating all baselines in the trade-off between misalignment-reduction and task-preservation. The last is a novel political-bias experiment, where fine-tuning on right-skewed Reddit financial-advice data causes political-lean drift on unrelated topics. Here our method reduces drift by more than half, while improving financial task performance, beating all baselines.

Foundational Vision-Language models such as CLIP have exhibited impressive generalization in downstream tasks. However, CLIP suffers from a two-level misalignment issue, i.e., task misalignment and data misalignment, when adapting to specific tasks. Soft prompt tuning has mitigated the task misalignment, yet the data misalignment remains a challenge. To analyze the impacts of the data misalignment, we revisit the pre-training and adaptation processes of CLIP and develop a structural causal model. We discover that while we expect to capture task-relevant information for downstream tasks accurately, the task-irrelevant knowledge impacts the prediction results and hampers the modeling of the true relationships between the images and the predicted classes. As task-irrelevant knowledge is unobservable, we leverage the front-door adjustment and propose Causality-Guided Semantic Decoupling and Classification (CDC) to mitigate the interference of task-irrelevant knowledge. Specifically, we decouple semantics contained in the data of downstream tasks and perform classification based on each semantic. Furthermore, we employ the Dempster-Shafer evidence theory to evaluate the uncertainty of each prediction generated by diverse semantics. Experiments conducted in multiple different settings have consistently demonstrated the effectiveness of CDC.