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Science Journals

Peer-reviewade publikationer — 56229 artiklar

Mediator: Memory-efficient LLM Merging with Less Parameter Conflicts and Uncertainty Based Routing
arXiv:2502.04411v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Model merging aggregates Large Language Models (LLMs) finetuned on different tasks into a stronger one. However, parameter conflicts between models leads to performance degradation in averaging. While model routing addresses this issue by selecting individual models during inference, it imposes excessive storage and compute costs, and fails to leverage the common knowledge from different models. In this work, we observe that different layers exhibit varying levels of parameter conflicts. Building on this insight, we average layers with minimal parameter conflicts and use a novel task-level expert routing for layers with significant conflicts. To further reduce storage costs, inspired by task arithmetic sparsity, we decouple multiple fine-tuned experts into a dense expert and several sparse experts. Considering the out-of-distribution samples, we select and merge appropriate experts based on the task uncertainty of the input data. We conduct extensive experiments on both LLaMA and Qwen with varying parameter scales, and evaluate on real-world reasoning tasks. Results demonstrate that our method consistently achieves significant performance improvements while requiring less system cost.
A Geometric Perspective on Stabilizing Value Conflict Resolution
arXiv:2607.17946v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle to navigate value conflicts when trained with the compressed scalar rewards of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). To address this challenge, we investigate how chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning can help improve performance in this domain. Geometrically, we show that CoT correlates with further smoothing the model's loss landscape in its sharpest direction, helping resolve the optimization instability of traditional scalar rewards. We also demonstrate via relevant downstream benchmarks that value conflict-focused CoT may generalize to different kinds of moral reasoning, demonstrating that this CoT has the potential to be an effective mechanism for better moral reasoning. To capitalize on this potential, we create a new value conflict-focused CoT design that further smooths the sharpest direction of the loss landscape and increases moral reasoning performance. This finding shows that explicitly modifying and improving the design of reasoning dynamics offers a promising avenue for improving model performance on user requests with complex value conflicts, advancing pluralistic alignment in LLMs.
ExMAG: Learning of Maximally Ancestral Graphs
arXiv:2503.08245v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In mixed graphs, there are both directed and bidirected edges. An extension of acyclicity to this mixed-graph setting is known as maximally ancestral graphs. This extension is of considerable interest in causal learning in the presence of confounders. There, directed edges represent a clear direction of causality, while bidirected edges represent confounding. We propose a branch-and-cut algorithm for learning maximally ancestral graphs using a formulation as a mixed-integer quadratic program. Empirically, our method achieves comparable or improved reconstruction quality while requiring an order of magnitude fewer samples than state-of-the-art approaches.
LogicIF: Towards Complex Logic Instruction Following
arXiv:2508.09125v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Instruction following has catalyzed the recent era of Large Language Models (LLMs) and is the foundational skill underpinning more advanced capabilities such as reasoning and agentic behaviors. As tasks grow more challenging, the logic structures embedded in natural language instructions becomes increasingly intricate. However, how well LLMs perform on such logic-rich instructions remains under-explored. We propose LogicIFGen and LogicIFEval. LogicIFGen is a scalable, automated framework for generating verifiable instructions from code functions, which can naturally express rich logic such as conditions, loops, and function calls. We further curate a collection of complex code functions and use LogicIFGen to construct LogicIFEval, a benchmark comprising 426 verifiable logic-rich instructions. Our experiments demonstrate that current state-of-the-art LLMs still struggle to correctly follow the instructions in LogicIFEval. Most LLMs can only follow fewer than 60% of the instructions, revealing significant deficiencies in the instruction-following ability. Code and Benchmark: https://github.com/mianzhang/LogicIF
Breaking the Block: Preserving Data Continuity to Train Superior SAEs for Instruct Models
arXiv:2506.07691v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are a cornerstone of mechanistic interpretability. Existing training methods inherit the Block Training paradigm from LLM pre-training, which introduces destructive gradient noise in instruct models due to attention leakage from unrelated contexts. Using GSNR analysis, we theoretically characterize this issue and propose Finetuning-aligned Sequential Training (FAST), a sequential training paradigm specifically designed for instruct models. FAST aligns SAE training with the data distribution and activation patterns of instruct models, substantially improving both reconstruction fidelity and feature interpretability. Experimental results show that FAST achieves higher GSNR, a significantly lower log-scaled MSE of 0.6468 compared to the baseline's 5.1985, and a near-zero Delta Loss (-0.51\% to 0.37\%). Moreover, on Llama-3.2-3B-it, FAST produces 21.1\% high-quality features, substantially outperforming baseline methods that achieve 7.0\% and 10.2\%. We further find that intervening on special token activations through SAEs can improve generation quality, revealing new opportunities for fine-grained control. Our codes are available as open source at https://github.com/Geaming2002/FAST.
FADPNet: Frequency-Aware Dual-Path Network for Face Super-Resolution
arXiv:2506.14121v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Face super-resolution (FSR) under limited computational budgets remains challenging. Existing methods often treat all facial pixels equally, leading to suboptimal resource allocation and degraded performance. CNNs are sensitive to high-frequency facial features such as contours and outlines, while Mamba excels at capturing low-frequency attributes like facial color and texture with lower complexity than Transformers. Motivated by this, we propose FADPNet, a Frequency-Aware Dual-Path Network that decomposes facial features into low- and high-frequency components for dedicated processing. The low-frequency branch employs a Mamba-based Low-Frequency Enhancement Block (LFEB) that integrates state-space attention with squeeze-and-excitation to restore global interactions and emphasize informative channels. The high-frequency branch uses a CNN-based Depthwise Position-aware Attention (DPA) module to refine structural details, followed by a lightweight High-Frequency Refinement (HFR) module for further frequency-specific refinement. These designs enable FADPNet to achieve a strong balance between FSR quality and efficiency, outperforming existing methods. Codes will be available at https://github.com/IVIPLab/FADPNet.
Predictive Model for the Dissipation Dilution of Soft-Clamped Modes in Polygon Resonators
arXiv:2506.18109v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Polygon resonators are promising candidates for nanomechanical applications due to their compact architecture and high force sensitivity. Here, we develop a polygon-specific analytical model for perimeter modes by coupling the flexural motion of the polygon sides to tether torsion governed by a stress-modified Timoshenko-Gere (TG) equation. The model captures finite-wavelength torsional phase accumulation beyond the conventional short-tether approximation, revealing tether-length-dependent resonances and bending-torsion hybridization. Comparisons with finite-element-method (FEM) simulations show good agreement in the quasi-one-dimensional regime, while identifying the onset of deviations associated with neglected torsional deformation of the polygon sides. The model therefore provides a useful analytical tool for interpreting and optimizing high quality factor (Q) polygon resonators for cavity optomechanics and precision sensing.
HE-LRM: Encrypted Deep Learning Recommendation Models using Fully Homomorphic Encryption
arXiv:2506.18150v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) enables computation directly on encrypted data and privacy-preserving neural inference in the cloud. Existing solutions focus on models with dense inputs (e.g., CNNs and MLPs). Recommendation models (e.g., DLRM) pose a different challenge: sparse categorical inputs require private lookups into large embedding tables, which must be implemented using FHE's restrictive operators. Naive lookups incur significant communication and memory costs; prior work proposes compressing embedding tables at the expense of introducing large server-side compute costs (i.e., indicator function) and revealing embedding-table structure. We present HE-LRM, a performance optimized solution for executing recommendation with FHE. First, we develop an embedding compression technique using client-side digit decomposition that achieves 56$\times$ speedup over the state-of-the-art. Next, we propose a multi-embedding packing strategy that enables ciphertext SIMD-parallel lookups across multiple tables. We integrate HE-LRM into the open-source Orion FHE framework to demonstrate end-to-end encrypted DLRM inference. We evaluate HE-LRM on UCI (health prediction) and Criteo (click prediction), achieving inference latencies of 24 seconds on UCI and 228 to 489 seconds, respectively, on a single-threaded CPU. Finally, we show how GPU and ASIC FHE acceleration can reduce end-to-end latencies to seconds and even sub-seconds. Our code can be found at https://github.com/baahl-nyu/orion/tree/criteo-helrm.
Decoding Desarguesian spread codes beyond half minimum distance
arXiv:2607.16890v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spread codes are a well-known family of constant-dimension subspace-metric codes. For constant dimension $k$ and ambient space dimension $n$ being a multiple of $k$, these codes have minimum distance $2k$ and a rich geometric structure. In this paper, we study the decoding capabilities of the Nearest Neighbor Decoder for Desarguesian spread codes, establishing that unique decoding is still achievable beyond half the minimum distance. Motivated by this, we develop a new decoding algorithm to uniquely decode Desarguesian spread codes in the presence of both insertions and deletions, which increase and decrease, respectively, the dimension of the transmitted codeword. Even when the sum of the dimensions of insertions and deletions exceeds half the minimum distance, provided that deletions are of dimension at most $k-2$, the algorithm succeeds with a small decoding failure. We also propose two refinements to this algorithm that, empirically, can handle nearly as many insertions as the Nearest Neighbor Decoder.
Absolute charge calibration of DRZ phosphor screens for relativistic electron bunches
arXiv:2607.17059v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Laser-plasma accelerators have been the subject of extensive research in recent years. The electron beams they generate exhibit a broad energy spread. To conveniently characterize beams from laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA), electron spectrometers employing scintillating screens coupled with CCD cameras are typically used. In this work, we calibrate a series of DRZ phosphor screens and measure the spectra of the light they emit. The calibration was performed using the radio-frequency linear electron accelerator at Tsinghua University, which provided monoenergetic electron beams with peak energy of approximately 30 MeV.
Quantum-Centric Geometry Optimization with Wave-Function-Based Embedding
arXiv:2607.16410v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The EWF-(FCI,SQD) method, a wave-function-based embedding approach combining full configuration interaction (FCI) and sample-based quantum diagonalization (SQD), is a promising new tool for the simulation of molecular systems. However, applications of EWF-(FCI,SQD) have so far been limited to single-point calculations, whereas the study of complex chemical processes requires the ability to explore potential energy surfaces. In this work, we demonstrate geometry optimization with EWF-(FCI,SQD), scaling our simulations to molecules as large as menthone and benzidine within the STO-3G basis set. Without fragmentation, these systems comprise 73 and 82 molecular orbitals respectively, presenting an intractable Hilbert space for conventional exact or high-level subspace solvers and establishing a clear necessity for fragmentation-based methodologies. The underlying fragment SQD simulations in the EWF-(FCI,SQD) geometry optimizations use up to 70 qubits. The resulting geometries show exceptional accuracy relative to the classical reference, with deviations below 4 picometers.
FusionNet: Physics-Aware Representation Learning for Multi-Spectral and Thermal Data via Trainable Signal-Processing Priors
arXiv:2512.19504v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cement production underpins global infrastructure but contributes approximately 7% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, making accurate monitoring of production facilities essential for sustainable development. Existing remote sensing approaches rely predominantly on thermal signatures from kiln operations, which can be confounded by background heat sources and fail to capture persistent environmental alterations. This study introduces a physics-informed methodology that exploits multi-spectral features, particularly a geological Short Wave Infrared (SWIR) ratio, to detect soil property changes induced by sustained industrial heat emissions. This work proposes FusionNet, an intermediate multi-spectral data fusion framework that integrates Thermal Infrared (TIR) and SWIR inputs through a specialised backbone, embedding differential signal processing priors within a convolutional layer, mixed pooling, and wider receptive field. Systematic ablation studies confirm that each architectural component contributes to performance gains, with DGCNN achieving a 4.1-6.8% accuracy improvement over conventional CNNs. On the SWIR ratio dataset, FusionNet attains a maximum of 90.6%, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines across five spectral configurations and exceeding the strongest unimodal model by 1.1%. Transfer learning experiments reveal that ImageNet pretraining degrades TIR and SWIR performance, underscoring the importance of modality-aware training for cross-spectral applications. Overall, the results demonstrate that combining physics-aware feature selection with principled deep learning architectures enables robust, high-accuracy detection of cement production facilities, offering a reliable framework for industrial infrastructure monitoring
HarmoHOI: Harmonizing Appearance and 3D Motion for Multi-view Hand-Object Interaction Synthesis
arXiv:2607.17097v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hand-Object Interaction (HOI) synthesis is a cornerstone for animation production and embodied AI. Despite the strong priors of video foundation models, multi-view consistent HOI synthesis remains challenging due to complex hand motions and occlusions. We present HarmoHOI, a unified diffusion framework that jointly and harmoniously generates synchronized multi-view HOI videos and globally aligned 3D point tracks. Our core insight is that robust multi-view consistency fundamentally requires globally aligned 3D geometry and motion. To this end, we propose a Mixture of Multi-view Diffusion Transformer that co-models RGB videos and 3D point tracks. By representing point tracks as pseudo-videos, we align 3D geometric signals with the 2D latent space of foundation models, thereby minimizing the domain gap and easing adaptation of priors. To further ensure geometry consistency, we introduce Global Motion Aligning Diffusion, which refines coarse point tracks into metric-scale, globally aligned 3D trajectories. HarmoHOI enables on-the-fly co-evolution of 2D appearance and 3D motion during denoising. To overcome the scarcity of multi-view HOI data, we employ a hybrid data curriculum learning strategy that successfully transfers generic priors from single-view data to synchronized multi-view generation. Experimental results show that HarmoHOI achieves state-of-the-art performance in visual quality, motion plausibility, and multi-view geometric consistency. Project page available at https://droliven.github.io/HarmoHOI_project.
Degeneracy-Guided List Compression for Greedy Graph Coloring
arXiv:2607.17029v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study degeneracy guided list compression for greedy graph coloring when graph structure is available before colors are sampled. Our exposure calibrated ordering framework assigns each vertex an independent uniform list according to its backward neighborhood in a color independent order. Its certified instantiation, Profiled Structure Aware Asymmetric Palette Sparsification, or P-SAPST, reverses a minimum degree removal sequence and obtains every backward exposure from the removal profile. For each fixed profile, we characterize the exact local budget required by independent uniform lists under history robust greedy recovery. The profile yields linear list volume on high degree forests and on a core fringe family where reciprocal rank allocation requires Theta(n log^2 n) sampled colors. Exact conflict expectation, concentration, and a dense exposure barrier complete the theoretical description. The evaluation contains 40,320 runs over SAPBench and two SNAP networks. At the theorem scale, P-SAPST reduces mean list size by 47.6 percent relative to calibrated APST while attaining 99.8 percent observed greedy success. P-SAPST Lite replaces peeling with a degree order and provides a lower latency order choice within the same framework. On stress graphs with 250,000 vertices and up to 1,251,868 edges, Lite obtains a payload ratio of 0.865, while calibrated APST obtains 7.886. On email Enron, the corresponding ratios are 0.193 and 5.814. Compression is strongest on hub dominated and power law graphs and disappears near the dense exposure barrier. The method complements edge oblivious streaming APST by addressing an offline regime in which structural plans can be reused.
Faster and simpler traversal of 0/1-polytopes
arXiv:2607.17590v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recently, Merino and M\"utze (FOCS'23+SICOMP'24) presented an algorithm for computing a Hamilton path on the skeleton of any 0/1-polytope ${\rm conv}(X)$, where $X\subseteq\{0,1\}^n$. The algorithm uses as a black box an algorithm for solving the classical linear optimization problem $\min\{w\cdot x\mid x\in X\}$ for some weight vector $w\in\mathbb{R}^n$. The resulting delay per visited vertex on the Hamilton path is only by a $\log n$ factor larger than the time to solve one instance of the optimization algorithm. In this paper, we make the Hamilton path algorithm simpler and faster. Namely, we obtain an amortized delay that is only by a constant factor larger than the running time of the optimization algorithm, thus removing the $\log n$ factor. As concrete results, this yields improved algorithms for generating bases and independent sets in a matroid, spanning trees, forests, matchings and maximum matchings in a graph, vertex covers, minimum vertex covers, independent sets and maximum independent sets in a bipartite graph, and antichains, maximum antichains and ideals in a poset. All of these listings correspond to Hamilton paths on the corresponding polytopes. Furthermore, we obtain an $\mathcal{O}(t_{\rm LP})$ amortized delay algorithm for the vertex enumeration problem on 0/1-polytopes $\{x\in\mathbb{R}^n\mid Ax\leq b\}$, where $A\in \mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$ and $b\in\mathbb{R}^m$, and $t_{\rm LP}$ is the time needed to solve the linear program $\min\{w\cdot x\mid Ax\leq b\}$. This improves upon the $\mathcal{O}(t_{\rm LP} \log n)$ delay algorithm of Merino and M\"utze, and the previous $\mathcal{O}(t_{\rm LP}\,n)$ delay algorithm of Bussieck and L\"ubbecke from 1998.
Theory of superlensing with complex frequency illuminations
arXiv:2508.10742v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent experiments have demonstrated that the resolution of superlensing slabs can be significantly enhanced with complex frequency illuminations. In this study, we introduce a novel theoretical framework for analyzing superlensing. The framework offers new and transparent insights. It helps clarify what resolution can be expected with complex frequency, or more generally pulse illuminations, but it also highlights inherent limitations and tempers high expectations raised by the recent electromagnetic experiments. [accepted Optica]
ConsiSpace: Learning Geometric Consistency Matters for Video Spatial Reasoning
arXiv:2607.17599v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Video spatial reasoning is essential for navigation-oriented perception and long-video question answering, where models must infer spatial relations across long horizons under changing viewpoints. However, existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) remain largely semantic-centric, and often fail to reliably aggregate consistent spatial evidence from redundant video observations, leading to inefficient or unstable reasoning. To address these issues, we propose ConsiSpace, a geometry-consistency-aware framework for geometry-sensitive video spatial reasoning that turns spatial consistency into both an evidence organization principle and an explicit post-SFT learning signal. We build a geometry-consistent memory (GCM) including implicit evidence tokens and explicit geometric cues, and leverage efficient organization strategies to compactly preserve task-related spatial evidence. Furthermore, we utilize unified consistency self-supervised reinforcement learning (UC-SSRL) after supervised fine-tuning to improve cross-view stability, with answer-, metric-, and topology-consistency rewards. Extensive experiments on three spatial-reasoning benchmarks, VSI-Bench, OSI-Bench, and MMSI-Video-Bench, show consistent gains, improving the average score by 12.6 points over the strongest baselines.
TaskArtisan: Designing Composable Generative Widgets for LLM-Assisted Analysis
arXiv:2607.17394v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: People increasingly use chatbots such as ChatGPT for everyday analysis tasks. While chatbots unify many analysis functions (e.g., scripts, visualizations, summaries), long conversations become hard to navigate, making it difficult to revisit prior steps or reuse successful workflows. LLMs now generate high-fidelity GUI code that enables people to create customized analysis tools beyond text. Yet, what new opportunities generative UIs bring to analysis work remain unclear. We interviewed six professionals about analysis with chatbots, analyzed publicly shared LLM-generated GUI tools, and conducted a comparison study (N=12) between a chatbot and TaskArtisan, a technology probe that enables people to create and assemble generative analysis UI widgets for sequential and fan-out composition. We find that GUI improved clarity and visual presentation but also introduced rigidity and additional prompting challenges. We summarize the trade-offs into a provisional design framework (malleability, specification, interoperability) to inform future generative UI in LLM-assisted analysis workflows.
Black Box Recognition of the Suzuki groups
arXiv:2607.17350v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a black box algorithm that constructs standard generators for the Suzuki groups $Sz(q)$, where $q = 2^{2m+1}$ for some $m > 0$. The algorithm is one-sided Monte Carlo, with no false positives. We also present a black box algorithm that performs constructive membership testing in $Sz(q)$, and writes an element as a straight line program in the standard generators. Finally, we give a presentation for $Sz(q)$ that is efficient to verify. The algorithms have been implemented in the computer algebra system Magma.
Scanless quantum Fourier-transform mid-infrared spectroscopy for rapid high-sensitivity hyperspectral mapping
arXiv:2607.17964v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy is a well-established technique for qualitative and quantitative chemical analysis. Classical FTIR systems rely, however, on direct mid-infrared (mid-IR) scan-based time-domain measurements of coherence functions; thus, the signal-to-noise ratio and measurement speed are constrained by design. In this paper, we demonstrate a scanless quantum FTIR (sQFTIR) technique that exploits principles of metrology with entangled photons to circumvent the limitations inherent to classical FTIR systems. The approach exploits the interferometric nature of the sensing paradigm and relies on frequency-domain measurements performed with a static, low-gain nonlinear interferometer. A robust reconstruction algorithm is used to retrieve time-domain signals and reconstruct respective mid-infrared (mid-IR) spectra (3000$~$cm$^{-1}$ to 2380$~$cm$^{-1}$) from near-IR measurements (approx. 780$~$nm to 820$~$nm). The suggested sQFTIR protocol eliminates the need for optical delay scanning and leverages inherent mapping between the related domains. In the theoretical section, we evaluate the intrinsic signal-to-noise advantage of the proposed method over conventional scan-based time-domain measurements; a difference of 26.8 dB (factor of 21.8) is demonstrated. Building on the enhanced sensitivity of the scheme, we demonstrate rapid sQFTIR-based hyperspectral imaging with a spatial resolution of 12.3$~\mu$m and a spectral resolution down to 8$~$cm$^{-1}$. Hyperspectral mapping of human colon tissue, microplastics, and multilayer polymer samples composed of polypropylene and ethylene vinyl alcohol yield high-quality single-pixel spectra with acquisition times down to 10$~$ms.
What Do They See? Interpreting Complex Road Scenarios Through the Eyes of Vision-Language-Action Models for Safe and Trustworthy Autonomous Vehicle Learning
arXiv:2607.16938v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: End-to-end autonomous driving models are now able to navigate complex road scenarios, mapping raw sensor observations directly to observed paths for open-loop evaluation and often effective driving in closed-loop evaluation. Yet the internal logic of these safety-critical systems remains largely opaque, due to the complexity of traffic scenes. We propose a counterfactual ablation framework called Counterfactual Vision Action Analysis (CVAA) that systematically removes individual detected objects from front-camera images using photorealistic generative inpainting to prepare counterfactual sets to evaluate the difference in the model's response. This isolates the causal effect of each object's presence on the model's planning behaviour. Applied to the Alpamayo 1 trajectory predictor across 210 nuScenes driving scenes, we create a dataset Counter -nuScenes, using which we see that vehicles and pedestrians within the model's 'path' dominate causal influence as expected, while traffic lights, as expected, exert disproportionate effect relative to their image footprint. However, we also find cases where the model responds strongly to objects a human driver would consider irrelevant. This brings forth a deeper question: does the model itself view the scene as a sum of individual objects influencing the outcome, or does it encode an entirely different set of internal features that do not correspond to human-legible scene elements? To further understand this, we compare intermediate representations of original and inpainted image pairs using mechanistic interpretability techniques and examine the effect of the removal through the various model layers. Together, these two stages offer a path from behavioral auditing to representational understanding, creating explainable driving systems and solidifying human-AI trust.
Twisted Schr\"odinger Bridge Matching
arXiv:2607.16987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Over the past few years, diffusion-based Schr\"odinger bridge models have been proposed to approximate optimal transport dynamics between two prescribed boundary distributions, with successful applications to generative modeling. More precisely, these methods aim to estimate a path measure whose initial and terminal marginals match the two boundary distributions, while minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence with respect to a reference Markov process. In this work, we consider the generalized Schr\"odinger bridge problem, in which the reference process is a twisted Brownian motion, that is, a Feynman-Kac transform of a Brownian motion induced by a time-dependent differentiable potential. Building on the Iterative Markovian Fitting (IMF) paradigm, and in particular on its special case Diffusion Schr\"odinger Bridge Matching (DSBM), which corresponds to the zero potential case, we introduce Twisted Schr\"odinger Bridge Matching (TSBM), a diffusion-based method designed to handle both continuous- and discrete-time potentials. Unlike previous approaches, TSBM provides a rigorous extension of the IMF scheme to the generalized Schr\"odinger bridge problem. This derivation leads to a new bridge-matching loss that depends explicitly on the gradient of the potential and recovers the DSBM objective when the potential vanishes, yielding improved performance. We further introduce trajectory-based variance-reduction techniques that substantially stabilize optimization and may be useful beyond the present setting. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the benefits of TSBM for trajectory inference across increasingly high-dimensional settings, including crowd navigation and single-cell data. Code available at https://github.com/maxencenoble/twisted-sb-matching.
Bridging the Information Gap: Semantic Densification and Hindsight Distillation for Cold-Start Prediction
arXiv:2607.17070v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: New-user cold-start is a critical bottleneck for e-commerce platforms: predicting user lifetime value (LTV) and conversion rate (CVR) for users with sparse interaction history. Two prior directions -- LLM-based semantic augmentation and learning using privileged information (LUPI) -- each face a key limitation. First, LLM augmentation produces unstructured rationales that are noisy and hard to operationalize in production. Second, naive student-teacher distillation can be brittle due to an information gap between the privileged teacher and the sparse student; moreover, this gap is heterogeneous across users. We propose SemRaD, a Semantic Reasoning-aware Distillation framework addressing both limitations. First, a Structured Semantic Reasoning Pipeline replaces free-form rationales with a structured schema built via a discover-curate-audit workflow, producing per user a Densified Semantic Profile (consumed by the deployed student via a Semantic-Gated Encoder that focuses on the most informative dimensions) and a Hindsight Distillation Target reconciled from pre- and post-conversion reasoning (used only at training). Second, to bridge this gap and handle its heterogeneity, a Hindsight-Aware Distillation Network transfers privileged knowledge via the hindsight target, with Distillation Experts improving transfer under per-user variability. On a large-scale industrial dataset, SemRaD lifts +1.9% LTV (Gini) and +1.0% CVR (AUROC) over a production-grade base; a four-week online A/B at Keeta confirms +1.0% LTV / +0.43% CVR. SemRaD also matches the production system's LTV using only 9% of the training data while improving CVR by 0.8%.
DRNOISE: Benchmarking Deep Research Agents in Misleading Evidence Environments
arXiv:2607.17291v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research agents increasingly operate over the open web, where relevant records coexist with redundant summaries, outdated reports, and misleading documents. Existing evaluations offer limited insight into whether agents preserve sound evidential standards when an ordinary-looking false document is deliberately seeded into a searchable environment and offers a direct shortcut to a conflicting answer. We introduce DRNOISE, a 100-task benchmark for answer recovery under misleading evidence. Each task has a unique gold answer supported by two corroborating indirect record chains; the paired noisy condition adds one plausible document that states a conflicting answer directly. The benchmark spans ten families of evidence operations. Across agents with strong clean-task performance, this single intervention causes 66-88 percentage-point accuracy drops. Trace analyses identify verification inertia as the dominant failure mode: agents often retrieve truthful records but stop before completing and reconciling the evidence chain, instead deferring to the answer-like document. Generic verification prompts reduce but do not close this gap. The setting is especially relevant to open-web deployment, where plausible falsehoods arrive through ordinary-looking pages rather than explicit attacks. Reliable deep research therefore requires more than retrieval and citation; it requires active reconciliation of direct claims with record-level evidence.
Feature-Guided Diffusion for Non-Differentiable Inverse Rendering
arXiv:2607.17411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inverse rendering is traditionally solved via differentiable renderers and gradient descent, which requires substantial problem-specific engineering and is prone to getting stuck in local minima due to ambiguities. Derivative-free approaches alleviate engineering requirements, but often heavily depend on a good problem initialization. In this work, we propose Feature-Informed Diffusion Evolution (FIDE), a fully black-box framework that requires no gradients or specific initialization: the renderer is treated as an opaque function whose only requirement is to produce images. Our key insight is feature guiding: rather than reducing each candidate rendering to a scalar loss value, we use a Vision Transformer (ViT) to extract dense visual features from it. We subsequently use these features to train a diffusion-based candidate proposal model, allowing the network to use visual cues to predict parameters that would match the target image. The candidate solutions proposed by this diffusion model are then refined in a closed loop with a CMA evolution strategy, continuously narrowing the proposal region as optimization progresses. We validate across diverse inverse problems from path tracing, vector splines, Voronoi shaders, and robotics, and demonstrate that feature-guiding substantially improves convergence over scalar-loss baselines and reliably escapes local minima where gradient-based methods stall.