Test-time scaling seeks to improve the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by adding computational resources. A prevalent approach within the field is sampling-based test-time scaling methods, which enhance reasoning by generating multiple reasoning paths for a given input during inference. However, despite its practical success, the theoretical foundations remain underexplored. In this paper, we provide the first theoretical framework for analyzing sampling-based test-time scaling methods, grounded in the perspective of confidence estimation. Based on the framework, we analyze two dominant paradigms: self-consistency and perplexity, and reveal key limitations: self-consistency suffers from high estimation error while perplexity exhibits substantial modeling error and possible degradation of the estimation error convergence.

Learning from human involvement aims to incorporate the human subject to monitor and correct agent behavior errors. Although most interactive imitation learning methods focus on correcting the agent's action at the current state, they do not adjust its actions in future states, which may be potentially more hazardous. To address this, we introduce Predictive Preference Learning from Human Interventions (PPL), which leverages the implicit preference signals contained in human interventions to inform predictions of future rollouts. The key idea of PPL is to bootstrap each human intervention into Lfuture time steps, called the preference horizon, with the assumption that the agent follows the same action and the human makes the same intervention in the preference horizon. By applying preference optimization on these future states, expert corrections are propagated into the safety-critical regions where the agent is expected to explore, significantly improving learning efficiency and reducing human demonstrations needed. We evaluate our approach with experiments on both autonomous driving and robotic manipulation benchmarks and demonstrate its efficiency and generality.

Provide a concrete introductory example of the PPL in supplementary material.

Inaddition,each cell has only the object category channel.

Native FP8 support in modern hardware is essential for training large Transformers, but is severely hindered by extreme activation outliers. Existing solutions either rely on complex mixed-precision engineering or invasive architectural modifications. This paper fundamentally challenges the conventional wisdom that outliers are data-driven. We demonstrate that extreme outliers are a data-independent, mechanically-produced artifact of training, originating from specific structural properties of the weight matrices (i.e., colinearity). Based on this insight, we propose TWEO (Transformers Without Extreme Outliers), a novel, non-invasive loss function. TWEO effectively prevents extreme outliers via a very simple loss term, which reduces outliers from 10000+ to less than 20. TWEO then enables full-model FP8 pre-training with neither engineering tricks nor architectural changes for both LLM and ViT. When standard FP8 training catastrophically collapses, TWEO achieves performance comparable to the BF16 baseline while delivering a 36% increase in training throughput. Also, TWEO enables a new quantization paradigm. Hardware-friendly W8A8 per-tensor static quantization of LLMs, previously considered completely unusable due to outliers, achieves SOTA performance for the first time on TWEO-trained models.

Duo-Tok is a source-aware dual-codebook tokenizer for vocal-accompaniment music that targets the growing tension between reconstruction quality and language-model (LM) learnability in modern lyrics-to-song systems. Existing codecs either prioritize high-fidelity reconstruction with difficult-to-model acoustic tokens or compress aggressively into semantic tokens that are LM-friendly but lossy, and they rarely make the tokenizer itself aware of dual-track structure. Duo-Tok follows a four-stage, SSL-centered pipeline: we first pretrain a BEST-RQ-style encoder on large-scale audio, then stabilize and factorize the representation with Gaussian replacement noise and multi-task supervision, before freezing the encoder to learn SimVQ-based dual codebooks with hard routing for vocals and accompaniment, and finally training latent diffusion decoders on top of the discrete tokens. Duo-Tok at 0.75 kbps shifts the empirical reconstruction-generation Pareto frontier, achieving the best music-tagging AP and the lowest vocabulary-normalized LM perplexity among compared codecs while maintaining reconstruction quality comparable to state-of-the-art music tokenizers.

Recent advances in diffusion models have enabled high-quality synthesis of specific subjects, such as identities or objects. This capability, while unlocking new possibilities in content creation, also introduces significant privacy risks, as personalization techniques can be misused by malicious users to generate unauthorized content. Although several studies have attempted to counter this by generating adversarially perturbed samples designed to disrupt personalization, they rely on unrealistic assumptions and become ineffective in the presence of even a few clean images or under simple image transformations. To address these challenges, we shift the protection target from the images to the diffusion model itself to hinder the personalization of specific subjects, through our novel framework called Anti-Personalized Diffusion Models (APDM). We first provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating that a naive approach of existing loss functions to diffusion models is inherently incapable of ensuring convergence for robust anti-personalization. Motivated by this finding, we introduce Direct Protective Optimization (DPO), a novel loss function that effectively disrupts subject personalization in the target model without compromising generative quality. Moreover, we propose a new dual-path optimization strategy, coined Learning to Protect (L2P). By alternating between personalization and protection paths, L2P simulates future personalization trajectories and adaptively reinforces protection at each step. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance in preventing unauthorized personalization. The code is available at https://github.com/KU-VGI/APDM.

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly employ alignment techniques to prevent harmful outputs. Despite these safeguards, attackers can circumvent them by crafting prompts that induce LLMs to generate harmful content. Current methods typically target exact affirmative responses, such as ``Sure, here is...'', suffering from limited convergence, unnatural prompts, and high computational costs. We introduce Semantic Representation Attack, a novel paradigm that fundamentally reconceptualizes adversarial objectives against aligned LLMs. Rather than targeting exact textual patterns, our approach exploits the semantic representation space comprising diverse responses with equivalent harmful meanings. This innovation resolves the inherent trade-off between attack efficacy and prompt naturalness that plagues existing methods. The Semantic Representation Heuristic Search algorithm is proposed to efficiently generate semantically coherent and concise adversarial prompts by maintaining interpretability during incremental expansion. We establish rigorous theoretical guarantees for semantic convergence and demonstrate that our method achieves unprecedented attack success rates (89.41\% averaged across 18 LLMs, including 100\% on 11 models) while maintaining stealthiness and efficiency. Comprehensive experimental results confirm the overall superiority of our Semantic Representation Attack. The code will be publicly available.