Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at code-related tasks but often struggle in realistic software repositories, where project-specific APIs and cross-file dependencies are crucial. Retrieval-augmented methods mitigate this by injecting repository context at inference time. The low inference-time latency budget affects either retrieval quality or the added latency adversely impacts user experience. We address this limitation with SpecAgent, an agent that improves both latency and code-generation quality by proactively exploring repository files during indexing and constructing speculative context that anticipates future edits in each file. This indexing-time asynchrony allows thorough context computation, masking latency, and the speculative nature of the context improves code-generation quality. Additionally, we identify the problem of future context leakage in existing benchmarks, which can inflate reported performance. To address this, we construct a synthetic, leakage-free benchmark that enables a more realistic evaluation of our agent against baselines. Experiments show that SpecAgent consistently achieves absolute gains of 9-11% (48-58% relative) compared to the best-performing baselines, while significantly reducing inference latency.

Abstract-- As global efforts to explore the Moon intensify, the need for high-quality 3D lunar maps becomes increasingly critical--particularly for long-distance missions such as NASA's Endurance mission concept, in which a rover aims to traverse 2,000 km across the South Pole-Aitken basin. Kaguya TC (T errain Camera) images, though globally available at 10 m/pixel, suffer from altitude inaccuracies caused by stereo matching errors and JPEG-based compression artifacts. This paper presents a method to improve the quality of 3D maps generated from Kaguya TC images, focusing on mitigating the effects of compression-induced noise in disparity maps. We analyze the compression behavior of Kaguya TC imagery, and identify systematic disparity noise patterns, especially in darker regions. In this paper, we propose an approach to enhance 3D map quality by reducing residual noise in disparity images derived from compressed images. Our experimental results show that the proposed approach effectively reduces elevation noise, enhancing the safety and reliability of terrain data for future lunar missions.

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are emerging as an efficient alternative to autoregressive models due to their ability to decode multiple tokens in parallel. However, aligning dLLMs with human preferences or task-specific rewards via reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging because their intractable log-likelihood precludes the direct application of standard policy gradient methods. While prior work uses surrogates like the evidence lower bound (ELBO), these one-sided approximations can introduce significant policy gradient bias. To address this, we propose the Sandwiched Policy Gradient (SPG) that leverages both an upper and a lower bound of the true log-likelihood. Experiments show that SPG significantly outperforms baselines based on ELBO or one-step estimation. Specifically, SPG improves the accuracy over state-of-the-art RL methods for dLLMs by 3.6% in GSM8K, 2.6% in MATH500, 18.4% in Countdown and 27.0% in Sudoku.

The rapid integration of agentic AI into high-stakes real-world applications requires robust oversight mechanisms. The emerging field of AI Control (AIC) aims to provide such an oversight mechanism, but practical adoption depends heavily on implementation overhead. To study this problem better, we introduce the notion of Control tax -- the operational and financial cost of integrating control measures into AI pipelines. Our work makes three key contributions to the field of AIC: (1) we introduce a theoretical framework that quantifies the Control Tax and maps classifier performance to safety assurances; (2) we conduct comprehensive evaluations of state-of-the-art language models in adversarial settings, where attacker models insert subtle backdoors into code while monitoring models attempt to detect these vulnerabilities; and (3) we provide empirical financial cost estimates for control protocols and develop optimized monitoring strategies that balance safety and cost-effectiveness while accounting for practical constraints like auditing budgets. Our framework enables practitioners to make informed decisions by systematically connecting safety guarantees with their costs, advancing AIC through principled economic feasibility assessment across different deployment contexts.

Recent advancements in large language models have revolutionized text generation with their remarkable capabilities. These models can produce controlled texts that closely adhere to specific requirements when prompted appropriately. However, designing an optimal prompt to control multiple attributes simultaneously can be challenging. A common approach is to linearly combine single-attribute models, but this strategy often overlooks attribute overlaps and can lead to conflicts. Therefore, we propose a novel combination strategy inspired by the Law of Total Probability and Conditional Mutual Information Minimization on generative language models. This method has been adapted for single-attribute control scenario and is termed the Palette of Language Models due to its theoretical linkage between attribute strength and generation style, akin to blending colors on an artist's palette. Moreover, positive correlation and attribute enhancement are advanced as theoretical properties to guide a rational combination strategy design. We conduct experiments on both single control and multiple control settings, and achieve surpassing results.

Ensuring that generative AI systems align with human values is essential but challenging, especially when considering multiple human values and their potential trade-offs. Since human values can be personalized and dynamically change over time, the desirable levels of value alignment vary across different ethnic groups, industry sectors, and user cohorts. Within existing frameworks, it is hard to define human values and align AI systems accordingly across different directions simultaneously, such as harmlessness, helpfulness, and positiveness. To address this, we develop a novel, first-principle approach called Multi-Human-Value Alignment Palette (MAP), which navigates the alignment across multiple human values in a structured and reliable way. MAP formulates the alignment problem as an optimization task with user-defined constraints, which define human value targets. It can be efficiently solved via a primal-dual approach, which determines whether a user-defined alignment target is achievable and how to achieve it. We conduct a detailed theoretical analysis of MAP by quantifying the trade-offs between values, the sensitivity to constraints, the fundamental connection between multi-value alignment and sequential alignment, and proving that linear weighted rewards are sufficient for multi-value alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate MAP's ability to align multiple values in a principled manner while delivering strong empirical performance across various tasks. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have highlighted the critical need for aligning AI systems with human values, a concept known as human value alignment (Griffith et al., 2013; Arumugam et al., 2019; Gabriel, 2020). The alignment can serve the purpose of generating outcomes that are better suited for human ethics (Griffith et al., 2013), personalized needs (Kirk et al., 2024), or reduced harmful content (Bai et al., 2022). This alignment has traditionally been pursued by adjusting AI behavior to adhere to specific attributes via preference datasets or reward functions. This formulation has deep conceptual roots in the Bayesian decision theoretic framework (Bissiri et al., 2016).

Art objects can evoke certain emotions. Color is a fundamental element of visual art and plays a significant role in how art is perceived. This paper introduces a novel approach to classifying emotions in art using Fuzzy Sets. We employ a fuzzy approach because it aligns well with human judgments' imprecise and subjective nature. Extensive fuzzy colors (n=120) and a broad emotional spectrum (n=10) allow for a more human-consistent and context-aware exploration of emotions inherent in paintings. First, we introduce the fuzzy color representation model. Then, at the fuzzification stage, we process the Wiki Art Dataset of paintings tagged with emotions, extracting fuzzy dominant colors linked to specific emotions. This results in fuzzy color distributions for ten emotions. Finally, we convert them back to a crisp domain, obtaining a knowledge base of color-emotion associations in primary colors. Our findings reveal strong associations between specific emotions and colors; for instance, gratitude strongly correlates with green, brown, and orange. Other noteworthy associations include brown and anger, orange with shame, yellow with happiness, and gray with fear. Using these associations and Jaccard similarity, we can find the emotions in the arbitrary untagged image. We conducted a 2AFC experiment involving human subjects to evaluate the proposed method. The average hit rate of 0.77 indicates a significant correlation between the method's predictions and human perception. The proposed method is simple to adapt to art painting retrieval systems. The study contributes to the theoretical understanding of color-emotion associations in art, offering valuable insights for various practical applications besides art, like marketing, design, and psychology.

In this work we present DREAM, an fMRI-to-image method for reconstructing viewed images from brain activities, grounded on fundamental knowledge of the human visual system. We craft reverse pathways that emulate the hierarchical and parallel nature of how humans perceive the visual world. These tailored pathways are specialized to decipher semantics, color, and depth cues from fMRI data, mirroring the forward pathways from visual stimuli to fMRI recordings. To do so, two components mimic the inverse processes within the human visual system: the Reverse Visual Association Cortex (R-VAC) which reverses pathways of this brain region, extracting semantics from fMRI data; the Reverse Parallel PKM (R-PKM) component simultaneously predicting color and depth from fMRI signals. The experiments indicate that our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art models in terms of the consistency of appearance, structure, and semantics. Code will be made publicly available to facilitate further research in this field.

Harmony level prediction is receiving increasing attention nowadays. Color plays a crucial role in affecting human aesthetic responses. In this paper, we explore color harmony using a fuzzy-based color model and address the question of its universality. For our experiments, we utilize a dataset containing attractive images from five different domains: fashion, art, nature, interior design, and brand logos. We aim to identify harmony patterns and dominant color palettes within these images using a fuzzy approach. It is well-suited for this task because it can handle the inherent subjectivity and contextual variability associated with aesthetics and color harmony evaluation. Our experimental results suggest that color harmony is largely universal. Additionally, our findings reveal that color harmony is not solely influenced by hue relationships on the color wheel but also by the saturation and intensity of colors. In palettes with high harmony levels, we observed a prevalent adherence to color wheel principles while maintaining moderate levels of saturation and intensity. These findings contribute to ongoing research on color harmony and its underlying principles, offering valuable insights for designers, artists, and researchers in the field of aesthetics.

We propose Image-to-Image Schr\"odinger Bridge (I$^2$SB), a new class of conditional diffusion models that directly learn the nonlinear diffusion processes between two given distributions. These diffusion bridges are particularly useful for image restoration, as the degraded images are structurally informative priors for reconstructing the clean images. I$^2$SB belongs to a tractable class of Schr\"odinger bridge, the nonlinear extension to score-based models, whose marginal distributions can be computed analytically given boundary pairs. This results in a simulation-free framework for nonlinear diffusions, where the I$^2$SB training becomes scalable by adopting practical techniques used in standard diffusion models. We validate I$^2$SB in solving various image restoration tasks, including inpainting, super-resolution, deblurring, and JPEG restoration on ImageNet 256x256 and show that I$^2$SB surpasses standard conditional diffusion models with more interpretable generative processes. Moreover, I$^2$SB matches the performance of inverse methods that additionally require the knowledge of the corruption operators. Our work opens up new algorithmic opportunities for developing efficient nonlinear diffusion models on a large scale. scale. Project page and codes: https://i2sb.github.io/