Daily Papers

Generative processes that involve solving differential equations, such as diffusion models, frequently necessitate balancing speed and quality. ODE-based samplers are fast but plateau in performance while SDE-based samplers deliver higher sample quality at the cost of increased sampling time. We attribute this difference to sampling errors: ODE-samplers involve smaller discretization errors while stochasticity in SDE contracts accumulated errors. Based on these findings, we propose a novel sampling algorithm called Restart in order to better balance discretization errors and contraction. The sampling method alternates between adding substantial noise in additional forward steps and strictly following a backward ODE. Empirically, Restart sampler surpasses previous SDE and ODE samplers in both speed and accuracy. Restart not only outperforms the previous best SDE results, but also accelerates the sampling speed by 10-fold / 2-fold on CIFAR-10 / ImageNet 64 times 64. In addition, it attains significantly better sample quality than ODE samplers within comparable sampling times. Moreover, Restart better balances text-image alignment/visual quality versus diversity than previous samplers in the large-scale text-to-image Stable Diffusion model pre-trained on LAION 512 times 512. Code is available at https://github.com/Newbeeer/diffusion_restart_sampling

With the success of image generation, generative diffusion models are increasingly adopted for discriminative tasks, as pixel generation provides a unified perception interface. However, directly repurposing the generative denoising process for discriminative objectives reveals critical gaps rarely addressed previously. Generative models tolerate intermediate sampling errors if the final distribution remains plausible, but discriminative tasks require rigorous accuracy throughout, as evidenced in challenging multi-modal tasks like referring image segmentation. Motivated by this gap, we analyze and enhance alignment between generative diffusion processes and perception tasks, focusing on how perception quality evolves during denoising. We find: (1) earlier denoising steps contribute disproportionately to perception quality, prompting us to propose tailored learning objectives reflecting varying timestep contributions; (2) later denoising steps show unexpected perception degradation, highlighting sensitivity to training-denoising distribution shifts, addressed by our diffusion-tailored data augmentation; and (3) generative processes uniquely enable interactivity, serving as controllable user interfaces adaptable to correctional prompts in multi-round interactions. Our insights significantly improve diffusion-based perception models without architectural changes, achieving state-of-the-art performance on depth estimation, referring image segmentation, and generalist perception tasks. Code available at https://github.com/ziqipang/ADDP.

Diffusion models are the standard toolkit for generative modelling of 3D atomic systems. However, for different types of atomic systems - such as molecules and materials - the generative processes are usually highly specific to the target system despite the underlying physics being the same. We introduce the All-atom Diffusion Transformer (ADiT), a unified latent diffusion framework for jointly generating both periodic materials and non-periodic molecular systems using the same model: (1) An autoencoder maps a unified, all-atom representations of molecules and materials to a shared latent embedding space; and (2) A diffusion model is trained to generate new latent embeddings that the autoencoder can decode to sample new molecules or materials. Experiments on QM9 and MP20 datasets demonstrate that jointly trained ADiT generates realistic and valid molecules as well as materials, exceeding state-of-the-art results from molecule and crystal-specific models. ADiT uses standard Transformers for both the autoencoder and diffusion model, resulting in significant speedups during training and inference compared to equivariant diffusion models. Scaling ADiT up to half a billion parameters predictably improves performance, representing a step towards broadly generalizable foundation models for generative chemistry. Open source code: https://github.com/facebookresearch/all-atom-diffusion-transformer

We introduce SymbolicAI, a versatile and modular framework employing a logic-based approach to concept learning and flow management in generative processes. SymbolicAI enables the seamless integration of generative models with a diverse range of solvers by treating large language models (LLMs) as semantic parsers that execute tasks based on both natural and formal language instructions, thus bridging the gap between symbolic reasoning and generative AI. We leverage probabilistic programming principles to tackle complex tasks, and utilize differentiable and classical programming paradigms with their respective strengths. The framework introduces a set of polymorphic, compositional, and self-referential operations for data stream manipulation, aligning LLM outputs with user objectives. As a result, we can transition between the capabilities of various foundation models endowed with zero- and few-shot learning capabilities and specialized, fine-tuned models or solvers proficient in addressing specific problems. In turn, the framework facilitates the creation and evaluation of explainable computational graphs. We conclude by introducing a quality measure and its empirical score for evaluating these computational graphs, and propose a benchmark that compares various state-of-the-art LLMs across a set of complex workflows. We refer to the empirical score as the "Vector Embedding for Relational Trajectory Evaluation through Cross-similarity", or VERTEX score for short. The framework codebase and benchmark are linked below.

Language models have demonstrated the ability to generate highly fluent text; however, it remains unclear whether their output retains coherent high-level structure (e.g., story progression). Here, we propose to apply a statistical tool, model criticism in latent space, to evaluate the high-level structure of the generated text. Model criticism compares the distributions between real and generated data in a latent space obtained according to an assumptive generative process. Different generative processes identify specific failure modes of the underlying model. We perform experiments on three representative aspects of high-level discourse -- coherence, coreference, and topicality -- and find that transformer-based language models are able to capture topical structures but have a harder time maintaining structural coherence or modeling coreference.

In this paper, we show that useful video representations can be learned from synthetic videos and natural images, without incorporating natural videos in the training. We propose a progression of video datasets synthesized by simple generative processes, that model a growing set of natural video properties (e.g. motion, acceleration, and shape transformations). The downstream performance of video models pre-trained on these generated datasets gradually increases with the dataset progression. A VideoMAE model pre-trained on our synthetic videos closes 97.2% of the performance gap on UCF101 action classification between training from scratch and self-supervised pre-training from natural videos, and outperforms the pre-trained model on HMDB51. Introducing crops of static images to the pre-training stage results in similar performance to UCF101 pre-training and outperforms the UCF101 pre-trained model on 11 out of 14 out-of-distribution datasets of UCF101-P. Analyzing the low-level properties of the datasets, we identify correlations between frame diversity, frame similarity to natural data, and downstream performance. Our approach provides a more controllable and transparent alternative to video data curation processes for pre-training.

Learning image representations using synthetic data allows training neural networks without some of the concerns associated with real images, such as privacy and bias. Existing work focuses on a handful of curated generative processes which require expert knowledge to design, making it hard to scale up. To overcome this, we propose training with a large dataset of twenty-one thousand programs, each one generating a diverse set of synthetic images. These programs are short code snippets, which are easy to modify and fast to execute using OpenGL. The proposed dataset can be used for both supervised and unsupervised representation learning, and reduces the gap between pre-training with real and procedurally generated images by 38%.

We propose a novel hierarchical Bayesian model for learning with a large (possibly infinite) number of tasks/episodes, which suits well the few-shot meta learning problem. We consider episode-wise random variables to model episode-specific target generative processes, where these local random variables are governed by a higher-level global random variate. The global variable helps memorize the important information from historic episodes while controlling how much the model needs to be adapted to new episodes in a principled Bayesian manner. Within our model framework, the prediction on a novel episode/task can be seen as a Bayesian inference problem. However, a main obstacle in learning with a large/infinite number of local random variables in online nature, is that one is not allowed to store the posterior distribution of the current local random variable for frequent future updates, typical in conventional variational inference. We need to be able to treat each local variable as a one-time iterate in the optimization. We propose a Normal-Inverse-Wishart model, for which we show that this one-time iterate optimization becomes feasible due to the approximate closed-form solutions for the local posterior distributions. The resulting algorithm is more attractive than the MAML in that it is not required to maintain computational graphs for the whole gradient optimization steps per episode. Our approach is also different from existing Bayesian meta learning methods in that unlike dealing with a single random variable for the whole episodes, our approach has a hierarchical structure that allows one-time episodic optimization, desirable for principled Bayesian learning with many/infinite tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/minyoungkim21/niwmeta.

The principle of independent causal mechanisms (ICM) states that generative processes of real world data consist of independent modules which do not influence or inform each other. While this idea has led to fruitful developments in the field of causal inference, it is not widely-known in the NLP community. In this work, we argue that the causal direction of the data collection process bears nontrivial implications that can explain a number of published NLP findings, such as differences in semi-supervised learning (SSL) and domain adaptation (DA) performance across different settings. We categorize common NLP tasks according to their causal direction and empirically assay the validity of the ICM principle for text data using minimum description length. We conduct an extensive meta-analysis of over 100 published SSL and 30 DA studies, and find that the results are consistent with our expectations based on causal insights. This work presents the first attempt to analyze the ICM principle in NLP, and provides constructive suggestions for future modeling choices. Code available at https://github.com/zhijing-jin/icm4nlp

Minority samples are underrepresented instances located in low-density regions of a data manifold, and are valuable in many generative AI applications, such as data augmentation, creative content generation, etc. Unfortunately, existing diffusion-based minority generators often rely on computationally expensive guidance dedicated for minority generation. To address this, here we present a simple yet powerful guidance-free approach called Boost-and-Skip for generating minority samples using diffusion models. The key advantage of our framework requires only two minimal changes to standard generative processes: (i) variance-boosted initialization and (ii) timestep skipping. We highlight that these seemingly-trivial modifications are supported by solid theoretical and empirical evidence, thereby effectively promoting emergence of underrepresented minority features. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Boost-and-Skip greatly enhances the capability of generating minority samples, even rivaling guidance-based state-of-the-art approaches while requiring significantly fewer computations. Code is available at https://github.com/soobin-um/BnS.

Learning from human feedback (LHF) -- and in particular learning from pairwise preferences -- has recently become a crucial ingredient in training large language models (LLMs), and has been the subject of much research. Most recent works frame it as a reinforcement learning problem, where a reward function is learned from pairwise preference data and the LLM is treated as a policy which is adapted to maximize the rewards, often under additional regularization constraints. We propose an alternative interpretation which centers on the generative process for pairwise preferences and treats LHF as a density estimation problem. We provide theoretical and empirical results showing that for a family of generative processes defined via preference behavior distribution equations, training a reward function on pairwise preferences effectively models an annotator's implicit preference distribution. Finally, we discuss and present findings on "annotator misspecification" -- failure cases where wrong modeling assumptions are made about annotator behavior, resulting in poorly-adapted models -- suggesting that approaches that learn from pairwise human preferences could have trouble learning from a population of annotators with diverse viewpoints.

We present WUKONG, a novel training-free framework for high-fidelity textured 3D morphing that takes a pair of source and target prompts (image or text) as input. Unlike conventional methods -- which rely on manual correspondence matching and deformation trajectory estimation (limiting generalization and requiring costly preprocessing) -- WUKONG leverages the generative prior of flow-based transformers to produce high-fidelity 3D transitions with rich texture details. To ensure smooth shape transitions, we exploit the inherent continuity of flow-based generative processes and formulate morphing as an optimal transport barycenter problem. We further introduce a sequential initialization strategy to prevent abrupt geometric distortions and preserve identity coherence. For faithful texture preservation, we propose a similarity-guided semantic consistency mechanism that selectively retains high-frequency details and enables precise control over blending dynamics. This avoids common artifacts like oversmoothing while maintaining semantic fidelity. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that WUKONG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior results across diverse geometry and texture variations.

Natural language has long enabled human cooperation, but its lossy, ambiguous, and indirect nature limits the potential of collective intelligence. While machines are not subject to these constraints, most LLM-based multi-agent systems still rely solely on natural language, exchanging tokens or their embeddings. To go beyond language, we introduce a new paradigm, thought communication, which enables agents to interact directly mind-to-mind, akin to telepathy. To uncover these latent thoughts in a principled way, we formalize the process as a general latent variable model, where agent states are generated by an unknown function of underlying thoughts. We prove that, in a nonparametric setting without auxiliary information, both shared and private latent thoughts between any pair of agents can be identified. Moreover, the global structure of thought sharing, including which agents share which thoughts and how these relationships are structured, can also be recovered with theoretical guarantees. Guided by the established theory, we develop a framework that extracts latent thoughts from all agents prior to communication and assigns each agent the relevant thoughts, along with their sharing patterns. This paradigm naturally extends beyond LLMs to all modalities, as most observational data arise from hidden generative processes. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks validate the theory and demonstrate the collaborative advantages of thought communication. We hope this work illuminates the potential of leveraging the hidden world, as many challenges remain unsolvable through surface-level observation alone, regardless of compute or data scale.

Video outpainting is a challenging task, aiming at generating video content outside the viewport of the input video while maintaining inter-frame and intra-frame consistency. Existing methods fall short in either generation quality or flexibility. We introduce MOTIA Mastering Video Outpainting Through Input-Specific Adaptation, a diffusion-based pipeline that leverages both the intrinsic data-specific patterns of the source video and the image/video generative prior for effective outpainting. MOTIA comprises two main phases: input-specific adaptation and pattern-aware outpainting. The input-specific adaptation phase involves conducting efficient and effective pseudo outpainting learning on the single-shot source video. This process encourages the model to identify and learn patterns within the source video, as well as bridging the gap between standard generative processes and outpainting. The subsequent phase, pattern-aware outpainting, is dedicated to the generalization of these learned patterns to generate outpainting outcomes. Additional strategies including spatial-aware insertion and noise travel are proposed to better leverage the diffusion model's generative prior and the acquired video patterns from source videos. Extensive evaluations underscore MOTIA's superiority, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods in widely recognized benchmarks. Notably, these advancements are achieved without necessitating extensive, task-specific tuning.

Denoising diffusion bridge models (DDBMs) are a powerful variant of diffusion models for interpolating between two arbitrary paired distributions given as endpoints. Despite their promising performance in tasks like image translation, DDBMs require a computationally intensive sampling process that involves the simulation of a (stochastic) differential equation through hundreds of network evaluations. In this work, we take the first step in fast sampling of DDBMs without extra training, motivated by the well-established recipes in diffusion models. We generalize DDBMs via a class of non-Markovian diffusion bridges defined on the discretized timesteps concerning sampling, which share the same marginal distributions and training objectives, give rise to generative processes ranging from stochastic to deterministic, and result in diffusion bridge implicit models (DBIMs). DBIMs are not only up to 25times faster than the vanilla sampler of DDBMs but also induce a novel, simple, and insightful form of ordinary differential equation (ODE) which inspires high-order numerical solvers. Moreover, DBIMs maintain the generation diversity in a distinguished way, by using a booting noise in the initial sampling step, which enables faithful encoding, reconstruction, and semantic interpolation in image translation tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/thu-ml/DiffusionBridge.

Diffusion models have achieved great success in a range of tasks, such as image synthesis and molecule design. As such successes hinge on large-scale training data collected from diverse sources, the trustworthiness of these collected data is hard to control or audit. In this work, we aim to explore the vulnerabilities of diffusion models under potential training data manipulations and try to answer: How hard is it to perform Trojan attacks on well-trained diffusion models? What are the adversarial targets that such Trojan attacks can achieve? To answer these questions, we propose an effective Trojan attack against diffusion models, TrojDiff, which optimizes the Trojan diffusion and generative processes during training. In particular, we design novel transitions during the Trojan diffusion process to diffuse adversarial targets into a biased Gaussian distribution and propose a new parameterization of the Trojan generative process that leads to an effective training objective for the attack. In addition, we consider three types of adversarial targets: the Trojaned diffusion models will always output instances belonging to a certain class from the in-domain distribution (In-D2D attack), out-of-domain distribution (Out-D2D-attack), and one specific instance (D2I attack). We evaluate TrojDiff on CIFAR-10 and CelebA datasets against both DDPM and DDIM diffusion models. We show that TrojDiff always achieves high attack performance under different adversarial targets using different types of triggers, while the performance in benign environments is preserved. The code is available at https://github.com/chenweixin107/TrojDiff.

Score-based diffusion models learn to reverse a stochastic differential equation that maps data to noise. However, for complex tasks, numerical error can compound and result in highly unnatural samples. Previous work mitigates this drift with thresholding, which projects to the natural data domain (such as pixel space for images) after each diffusion step, but this leads to a mismatch between the training and generative processes. To incorporate data constraints in a principled manner, we present Reflected Diffusion Models, which instead reverse a reflected stochastic differential equation evolving on the support of the data. Our approach learns the perturbed score function through a generalized score matching loss and extends key components of standard diffusion models including diffusion guidance, likelihood-based training, and ODE sampling. We also bridge the theoretical gap with thresholding: such schemes are just discretizations of reflected SDEs. On standard image benchmarks, our method is competitive with or surpasses the state of the art without architectural modifications and, for classifier-free guidance, our approach enables fast exact sampling with ODEs and produces more faithful samples under high guidance weight.

Recent sequential recommendation models rely increasingly on consecutive short-term user-item interaction sequences to model user interests. These approaches have, however, raised concerns about both short- and long-term interests. (1) {\it short-term}: interaction sequences may not result from a monolithic interest, but rather from several intertwined interests, even within a short period of time, resulting in their failures to model skip behaviors; (2) {\it long-term}: interaction sequences are primarily observed sparsely at discrete intervals, other than consecutively over the long run. This renders difficulty in inferring long-term interests, since only discrete interest representations can be derived, without taking into account interest dynamics across sequences. In this study, we address these concerns by learning (1) multi-scale representations of short-term interests; and (2) dynamics-aware representations of long-term interests. To this end, we present an Interest Dynamics modeling framework using generative Neural Processes, coined IDNP, to model user interests from a functional perspective. IDNP learns a global interest function family to define each user's long-term interest as a function instantiation, manifesting interest dynamics through function continuity. Specifically, IDNP first encodes each user's short-term interactions into multi-scale representations, which are then summarized as user context. By combining latent global interest with user context, IDNP then reconstructs long-term user interest functions and predicts interactions at upcoming query timestep. Moreover, IDNP can model such interest functions even when interaction sequences are limited and non-consecutive. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-arts on various evaluation metrics.

This paper introduces an approach to endow generative diffusion processes the ability to satisfy and certify compliance with constraints and physical principles. The proposed method recast the traditional sampling process of generative diffusion models as a constrained optimization problem, steering the generated data distribution to remain within a specified region to ensure adherence to the given constraints. These capabilities are validated on applications featuring both convex and challenging, non-convex, constraints as well as ordinary differential equations, in domains spanning from synthesizing new materials with precise morphometric properties, generating physics-informed motion, optimizing paths in planning scenarios, and human motion synthesis.

Learning the distribution of data on Riemannian manifolds is crucial for modeling data from non-Euclidean space, which is required by many applications in diverse scientific fields. Yet, existing generative models on manifolds suffer from expensive divergence computation or rely on approximations of heat kernel. These limitations restrict their applicability to simple geometries and hinder scalability to high dimensions. In this work, we introduce the Riemannian Diffusion Mixture, a principled framework for building a generative diffusion process on manifolds. Instead of following the denoising approach of previous diffusion models, we construct a diffusion process using a mixture of bridge processes derived on general manifolds without requiring heat kernel estimations. We develop a geometric understanding of the mixture process, deriving the drift as a weighted mean of tangent directions to the data points that guides the process toward the data distribution. We further propose a scalable training objective for learning the mixture process that readily applies to general manifolds. Our method achieves superior performance on diverse manifolds with dramatically reduced number of in-training simulation steps for general manifolds.

Recent advancements in generative modeling have made it possible to generate high-quality content from context information, but a key question remains: how to teach models to know when to generate content? To answer this question, this study proposes a novel event generative model that draws its statistical intuition from marked temporal point processes, and offers a clean, flexible, and computationally efficient solution for a wide range of applications involving multi-dimensional marks. We aim to capture the distribution of the point process without explicitly specifying the conditional intensity or probability density. Instead, we use a conditional generator that takes the history of events as input and generates the high-quality subsequent event that is likely to occur given the prior observations. The proposed framework offers a host of benefits, including exceptional efficiency in learning the model and generating samples, as well as considerable representational power to capture intricate dynamics in multi- or even high-dimensional event space. Our numerical results demonstrate superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art baselines.

Unlike cloud-based deep learning models that are often large and uniform, edge-deployed models usually demand customization for domain-specific tasks and resource-limited environments. Such customization processes can be costly and time-consuming due to the diversity of edge scenarios and the training load for each scenario. Although various approaches have been proposed for rapid resource-oriented customization and task-oriented customization respectively, achieving both of them at the same time is challenging. Drawing inspiration from the generative AI and the modular composability of neural networks, we introduce NN-Factory, an one-for-all framework to generate customized lightweight models for diverse edge scenarios. The key idea is to use a generative model to directly produce the customized models, instead of training them. The main components of NN-Factory include a modular supernet with pretrained modules that can be conditionally activated to accomplish different tasks and a generative module assembler that manipulate the modules according to task and sparsity requirements. Given an edge scenario, NN-Factory can efficiently customize a compact model specialized in the edge task while satisfying the edge resource constraints by searching for the optimal strategy to assemble the modules. Based on experiments on image classification and object detection tasks with different edge devices, NN-Factory is able to generate high-quality task- and resource-specific models within few seconds, faster than conventional model customization approaches by orders of magnitude.

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) hold immense potential for advancing healthcare, offering rich, longitudinal data that combines structured information with valuable insights from unstructured clinical notes. However, the unstructured nature of clinical text poses significant challenges for secondary applications. Traditional methods for structuring EHR free-text data, such as rule-based systems and multi-stage pipelines, are often limited by their time-consuming configurations and inability to adapt across clinical notes from diverse healthcare settings. Few systems provide a comprehensive attribute extraction for terminologies. While giant large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and LLaMA 405B excel at structuring tasks, they are slow, costly, and impractical for large-scale use. To overcome these limitations, we introduce GENIE, a Generative Note Information Extraction system that leverages LLMs to streamline the structuring of unstructured clinical text into usable data with standardized format. GENIE processes entire paragraphs in a single pass, extracting entities, assertion statuses, locations, modifiers, values, and purposes with high accuracy. Its unified, end-to-end approach simplifies workflows, reduces errors, and eliminates the need for extensive manual intervention. Using a robust data preparation pipeline and fine-tuned small scale LLMs, GENIE achieves competitive performance across multiple information extraction tasks, outperforming traditional tools like cTAKES and MetaMap and can handle extra attributes to be extracted. GENIE strongly enhances real-world applicability and scalability in healthcare systems. By open-sourcing the model and test data, we aim to encourage collaboration and drive further advancements in EHR structurization.

Biological processes, functions, and properties are intricately linked to the ensemble of protein conformations, rather than being solely determined by a single stable conformation. In this study, we have developed P2DFlow, a generative model based on SE(3) flow matching, to predict the structural ensembles of proteins. We specifically designed a valuable prior for the flow process and enhanced the model's ability to distinguish each intermediate state by incorporating an additional dimension to describe the ensemble data, which can reflect the physical laws governing the distribution of ensembles, so that the prior knowledge can effectively guide the generation process. When trained and evaluated on the MD datasets of ATLAS, P2DFlow outperforms other baseline models on extensive experiments, successfully capturing the observable dynamic fluctuations as evidenced in crystal structure and MD simulations. As a potential proxy agent for protein molecular simulation, the high-quality ensembles generated by P2DFlow could significantly aid in understanding protein functions across various scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/BLEACH366/P2DFlow

Generalist robot policies can now perform a wide range of manipulation skills, but evaluating and improving their ability with unfamiliar objects and instructions remains a significant challenge. Rigorous evaluation requires a large number of real-world rollouts, while systematic improvement demands additional corrective data with expert labels. Both of these processes are slow, costly, and difficult to scale. World models offer a promising, scalable alternative by enabling policies to rollout within imagination space. However, a key challenge is building a controllable world model that can handle multi-step interactions with generalist robot policies. This requires a world model compatible with modern generalist policies by supporting multi-view prediction, fine-grained action control, and consistent long-horizon interactions, which is not achieved by previous works. In this paper, we make a step forward by introducing a controllable multi-view world model that can be used to evaluate and improve the instruction-following ability of generalist robot policies. Our model maintains long-horizon consistency with a pose-conditioned memory retrieval mechanism and achieves precise action control through frame-level action conditioning. Trained on the DROID dataset (95k trajectories, 564 scenes), our model generates spatially and temporally consistent trajectories under novel scenarios and new camera placements for over 20 seconds. We show that our method can accurately rank policy performance without real-world robot rollouts. Moreover, by synthesizing successful trajectories in imagination and using them for supervised fine-tuning, our approach can improve policy success by 44.7\%.

Community consultations are integral to urban planning processes intended to incorporate diverse stakeholder perspectives. However, limited resources, visual and spoken language barriers, and uneven power dynamics frequently constrain inclusive decision-making. This paper examines how generative text-to-image methods, specifically Stable Diffusion XL integrated into a custom platform (WeDesign), may support equitable consultations. A half-day workshop in Montreal involved five focus groups, each consisting of architects, urban designers, AI specialists, and residents from varied demographic groups. Additional data was gathered through semi-structured interviews with six urban planning professionals. Participants indicated that immediate visual outputs facilitated creativity and dialogue, yet noted issues in visualizing specific needs of marginalized groups, such as participants with reduced mobility, accurately depicting local architectural elements, and accommodating bilingual prompts. Participants recommended the development of an open-source platform incorporating in-painting tools, multilingual support, image voting functionalities, and preference indicators. The results indicate that generative AI can broaden participation and enable iterative interactions but requires structured facilitation approaches. The findings contribute to discussions on generative AI's role and limitations in participatory urban design.

Automated Short Answer Scoring (ASAS) is a critical component in educational assessment. While traditional ASAS systems relied on rule-based algorithms or complex deep learning methods, recent advancements in Generative Language Models (GLMs) offer new opportunities for improvement. This study explores the application of GLMs to ASAS, leveraging their off-the-shelf capabilities and performance in various domains. We propose a novel pipeline that combines vector databases, transformer-based encoders, and GLMs to enhance short answer scoring accuracy. Our approach stores training responses in a vector database, retrieves semantically similar responses during inference, and employs a GLM to analyze these responses and determine appropriate scores. We further optimize the system through fine-tuned retrieval processes and prompt engineering. Evaluation on the SemEval 2013 dataset demonstrates a significant improvement on the SCIENTSBANK 3-way and 2-way tasks compared to existing methods, highlighting the potential of GLMs in advancing ASAS technology.

The mathematical study of voting, social choice theory, has traditionally only been applicable to choices among a few predetermined alternatives, but not to open-ended decisions such as collectively selecting a textual statement. We introduce generative social choice, a design methodology for open-ended democratic processes that combines the rigor of social choice theory with the capability of large language models to generate text and extrapolate preferences. Our framework divides the design of AI-augmented democratic processes into two components: first, proving that the process satisfies representation guarantees when given access to oracle queries; second, empirically validating that these queries can be approximately implemented using a large language model. We apply this framework to the problem of summarizing free-form opinions into a proportionally representative slate of opinion statements; specifically, we develop a democratic process with representation guarantees and use this process to portray the opinions of participants in a survey about abortion policy. In a trial with 100 representative US residents, we find that 84 out of 100 participants feel "excellently" or "exceptionally" represented by the slate of five statements we extracted.

Typical generative diffusion models rely on a Gaussian diffusion process for training the backward transformations, which can then be used to generate samples from Gaussian noise. However, real world data often takes place in discrete-state spaces, including many scientific applications. Here, we develop a theoretical formulation for arbitrary discrete-state Markov processes in the forward diffusion process using exact (as opposed to variational) analysis. We relate the theory to the existing continuous-state Gaussian diffusion as well as other approaches to discrete diffusion, and identify the corresponding reverse-time stochastic process and score function in the continuous-time setting, and the reverse-time mapping in the discrete-time setting. As an example of this framework, we introduce ``Blackout Diffusion'', which learns to produce samples from an empty image instead of from noise. Numerical experiments on the CIFAR-10, Binarized MNIST, and CelebA datasets confirm the feasibility of our approach. Generalizing from specific (Gaussian) forward processes to discrete-state processes without a variational approximation sheds light on how to interpret diffusion models, which we discuss.

Temporal Point Processes (TPP) are probabilistic generative frameworks. They model discrete event sequences localized in continuous time. Generally, real-life events reveal descriptive information, known as marks. Marked TPPs model time and marks of the event together for practical relevance. Conditioned on past events, marked TPPs aim to learn the joint distribution of the time and the mark of the next event. For simplicity, conditionally independent TPP models assume time and marks are independent given event history. They factorize the conditional joint distribution of time and mark into the product of individual conditional distributions. This structural limitation in the design of TPP models hurt the predictive performance on entangled time and mark interactions. In this work, we model the conditional inter-dependence of time and mark to overcome the limitations of conditionally independent models. We construct a multivariate TPP conditioning the time distribution on the current event mark in addition to past events. Besides the conventional intensity-based models for conditional joint distribution, we also draw on flexible intensity-free TPP models from the literature. The proposed TPP models outperform conditionally independent and dependent models in standard prediction tasks. Our experimentation on various datasets with multiple evaluation metrics highlights the merit of the proposed approach.

Domain-general semantic parsing is a long-standing goal in natural language processing, where the semantic parser is capable of robustly parsing sentences from domains outside of which it was trained. Current approaches largely rely on additional supervision from new domains in order to generalize to those domains. We present a generative model of natural language utterances and logical forms and demonstrate its application to semantic parsing. Our approach relies on domain-independent supervision to generalize to new domains. We derive and implement efficient algorithms for training, parsing, and sentence generation. The work relies on a novel application of hierarchical Dirichlet processes (HDPs) for structured prediction, which we also present in this manuscript. This manuscript is an excerpt of chapter 4 from the Ph.D. thesis of Saparov (2022), where the model plays a central role in a larger natural language understanding system. This manuscript provides a new simplified and more complete presentation of the work first introduced in Saparov, Saraswat, and Mitchell (2017). The description and proofs of correctness of the training algorithm, parsing algorithm, and sentence generation algorithm are much simplified in this new presentation. We also describe the novel application of hierarchical Dirichlet processes for structured prediction. In addition, we extend the earlier work with a new model of word morphology, which utilizes the comprehensive morphological data from Wiktionary.

We tackle the problem of sampling from intractable high-dimensional density functions, a fundamental task that often appears in machine learning and statistics. We extend recent sampling-based approaches that leverage controlled stochastic processes to model approximate samples from these target densities. The main drawback of these approaches is that the training objective requires full trajectories to compute, resulting in sluggish credit assignment issues due to use of entire trajectories and a learning signal present only at the terminal time. In this work, we present Diffusion Generative Flow Samplers (DGFS), a sampling-based framework where the learning process can be tractably broken down into short partial trajectory segments, via parameterizing an additional "flow function". Our method takes inspiration from the theory developed for generative flow networks (GFlowNets), allowing us to make use of intermediate learning signals. Through various challenging experiments, we demonstrate that DGFS achieves more accurate estimates of the normalization constant than closely-related prior methods.

There is a growing gap between the impressive results of deep image generative models and classical algorithms that offer theoretical guarantees. The former suffer from mode collapse or memorization issues, limiting their application to scientific data. The latter require restrictive assumptions such as log-concavity to escape the curse of dimensionality. We partially bridge this gap by introducing conditionally strongly log-concave (CSLC) models, which factorize the data distribution into a product of conditional probability distributions that are strongly log-concave. This factorization is obtained with orthogonal projectors adapted to the data distribution. It leads to efficient parameter estimation and sampling algorithms, with theoretical guarantees, although the data distribution is not globally log-concave. We show that several challenging multiscale processes are conditionally log-concave using wavelet packet orthogonal projectors. Numerical results are shown for physical fields such as the varphi^4 model and weak lensing convergence maps with higher resolution than in previous works.

Neural network approaches for meta-learning distributions over functions have desirable properties such as increased flexibility and a reduced complexity of inference. Building on the successes of denoising diffusion models for generative modelling, we propose Neural Diffusion Processes (NDPs), a novel approach that learns to sample from a rich distribution over functions through its finite marginals. By introducing a custom attention block we are able to incorporate properties of stochastic processes, such as exchangeability, directly into the NDP's architecture. We empirically show that NDPs can capture functional distributions close to the true Bayesian posterior, demonstrating that they can successfully emulate the behaviour of Gaussian processes and surpass the performance of neural processes. NDPs enable a variety of downstream tasks, including regression, implicit hyperparameter marginalisation, non-Gaussian posterior prediction and global optimisation.

We incorporate discrete and continuous time Markov processes as building blocks into probabilistic graphical models with latent and observed variables. We introduce the automatic Backward Filtering Forward Guiding (BFFG) paradigm (Mider et al., 2021) for programmable inference on latent states and model parameters. Our starting point is a generative model, a forward description of the probabilistic process dynamics. We backpropagate the information provided by observations through the model to transform the generative (forward) model into a pre-conditional model guided by the data. It approximates the actual conditional model with known likelihood-ratio between the two. The backward filter and the forward change of measure are suitable to be incorporated into a probabilistic programming context because they can be formulated as a set of transformation rules. The guided generative model can be incorporated in different approaches to efficiently sample latent states and parameters conditional on observations. We show applicability in a variety of settings, including Markov chains with discrete state space, interacting particle systems, state space models, branching diffusions and Gamma processes.

Photo-realistic and controllable 3D avatars are crucial for various applications such as virtual and mixed reality (VR/MR), telepresence, gaming, and film production. Traditional methods for avatar creation often involve time-consuming scanning and reconstruction processes for each avatar, which limits their scalability. Furthermore, these methods do not offer the flexibility to sample new identities or modify existing ones. On the other hand, by learning a strong prior from data, generative models provide a promising alternative to traditional reconstruction methods, easing the time constraints for both data capture and processing. Additionally, generative methods enable downstream applications beyond reconstruction, such as editing and stylization. Nonetheless, the research on generative 3D avatars is still in its infancy, and therefore current methods still have limitations such as creating static avatars, lacking photo-realism, having incomplete facial details, or having limited drivability. To address this, we propose a text-conditioned generative model that can generate photo-realistic facial avatars of diverse identities, with more complete details like hair, eyes and mouth interior, and which can be driven through a powerful non-parametric latent expression space. Specifically, we integrate the generative and editing capabilities of latent diffusion models with a strong prior model for avatar expression driving. Our model can generate and control high-fidelity avatars, even those out-of-distribution. We also highlight its potential for downstream applications, including avatar editing and single-shot avatar reconstruction.

We introduce a general framework for generating diverse visual content, including ambiguous images, panorama images, mesh textures, and Gaussian splat textures, by synchronizing multiple diffusion processes. We present exhaustive investigation into all possible scenarios for synchronizing multiple diffusion processes through a canonical space and analyze their characteristics across applications. In doing so, we reveal a previously unexplored case: averaging the outputs of Tweedie's formula while conducting denoising in multiple instance spaces. This case also provides the best quality with the widest applicability to downstream tasks. We name this case SyncTweedies. In our experiments generating visual content aforementioned, we demonstrate the superior quality of generation by SyncTweedies compared to other synchronization methods, optimization-based and iterative-update-based methods.

We introduce Functional Diffusion Processes (FDPs), which generalize score-based diffusion models to infinite-dimensional function spaces. FDPs require a new mathematical framework to describe the forward and backward dynamics, and several extensions to derive practical training objectives. These include infinite-dimensional versions of Girsanov theorem, in order to be able to compute an ELBO, and of the sampling theorem, in order to guarantee that functional evaluations in a countable set of points are equivalent to infinite-dimensional functions. We use FDPs to build a new breed of generative models in function spaces, which do not require specialized network architectures, and that can work with any kind of continuous data. Our results on real data show that FDPs achieve high-quality image generation, using a simple MLP architecture with orders of magnitude fewer parameters than existing diffusion models.

Given recent advances in generative AI technology, a key question is how large language models (LLMs) can enhance acoustic modeling tasks using text decoding results from a frozen, pretrained automatic speech recognition (ASR) model. To explore new capabilities in language modeling for speech processing, we introduce the generative speech transcription error correction (GenSEC) challenge. This challenge comprises three post-ASR language modeling tasks: (i) post-ASR transcription correction, (ii) speaker tagging, and (iii) emotion recognition. These tasks aim to emulate future LLM-based agents handling voice-based interfaces while remaining accessible to a broad audience by utilizing open pretrained language models or agent-based APIs. We also discuss insights from baseline evaluations, as well as lessons learned for designing future evaluations.

Requirements Engineering (RE) is a critical phase in software development including the elicitation, analysis, specification, and validation of software requirements. Despite the importance of RE, it remains a challenging process due to the complexities of communication, uncertainty in the early stages and inadequate automation support. In recent years, large-language models (LLMs) have shown significant promise in diverse domains, including natural language processing, code generation, and program understanding. This chapter explores the potential of LLMs in driving RE processes, aiming to improve the efficiency and accuracy of requirements-related tasks. We propose key directions and SWOT analysis for research and development in using LLMs for RE, focusing on the potential for requirements elicitation, analysis, specification, and validation. We further present the results from a preliminary evaluation, in this context.

Recent ODE/SDE-based generative models, such as diffusion models, rectified flows, and flow matching, define a generative process as a time reversal of a fixed forward process. Even though these models show impressive performance on large-scale datasets, numerical simulation requires multiple evaluations of a neural network, leading to a slow sampling speed. We attribute the reason to the high curvature of the learned generative trajectories, as it is directly related to the truncation error of a numerical solver. Based on the relationship between the forward process and the curvature, here we present an efficient method of training the forward process to minimize the curvature of generative trajectories without any ODE/SDE simulation. Experiments show that our method achieves a lower curvature than previous models and, therefore, decreased sampling costs while maintaining competitive performance. Code is available at https://github.com/sangyun884/fast-ode.

Diffusion models are powerful generative models that simulate the reverse of diffusion processes using score functions to synthesize data from noise. The sampling process of diffusion models can be interpreted as solving the reverse stochastic differential equation (SDE) or the ordinary differential equation (ODE) of the diffusion process, which often requires up to thousands of discretization steps to generate a single image. This has sparked a great interest in developing efficient integration techniques for reverse-S/ODEs. Here, we propose an orthogonal approach to accelerating score-based sampling: Denoising MCMC (DMCMC). DMCMC first uses MCMC to produce samples in the product space of data and variance (or diffusion time). Then, a reverse-S/ODE integrator is used to denoise the MCMC samples. Since MCMC traverses close to the data manifold, the computation cost of producing a clean sample for DMCMC is much less than that of producing a clean sample from noise. To verify the proposed concept, we show that Denoising Langevin Gibbs (DLG), an instance of DMCMC, successfully accelerates all six reverse-S/ODE integrators considered in this work on the tasks of CIFAR10 and CelebA-HQ-256 image generation. Notably, combined with integrators of Karras et al. (2022) and pre-trained score models of Song et al. (2021b), DLG achieves SOTA results. In the limited number of score function evaluation (NFE) settings on CIFAR10, we have 3.86 FID with approx 10 NFE and 2.63 FID with approx 20 NFE. On CelebA-HQ-256, we have 6.99 FID with approx 160 NFE, which beats the current best record of Kim et al. (2022) among score-based models, 7.16 FID with 4000 NFE. Code: https://github.com/1202kbs/DMCMC

Modern language models can generate high-quality short texts. However, they often meander or are incoherent when generating longer texts. These issues arise from the next-token-only language modeling objective. Recent work in self-supervised learning suggests that models can learn good latent representations via contrastive learning, which can be effective for discriminative tasks. Our work analyzes the application of contrastive representations for generative tasks, like long text generation. We propose one approach for leveraging constrastive representations, which we call Time Control (TC). TC first learns a contrastive representation of the target text domain, then generates text by decoding from these representations. Compared to domain-specific methods and fine-tuning GPT2 across a variety of text domains, TC performs competitively to methods specific for learning sentence representations on discourse coherence. On long text generation settings, TC preserves the text structure both in terms of ordering (up to +15% better) and text length consistency (up to +90% better).

Generating graph-structured data requires learning the underlying distribution of graphs. Yet, this is a challenging problem, and the previous graph generative methods either fail to capture the permutation-invariance property of graphs or cannot sufficiently model the complex dependency between nodes and edges, which is crucial for generating real-world graphs such as molecules. To overcome such limitations, we propose a novel score-based generative model for graphs with a continuous-time framework. Specifically, we propose a new graph diffusion process that models the joint distribution of the nodes and edges through a system of stochastic differential equations (SDEs). Then, we derive novel score matching objectives tailored for the proposed diffusion process to estimate the gradient of the joint log-density with respect to each component, and introduce a new solver for the system of SDEs to efficiently sample from the reverse diffusion process. We validate our graph generation method on diverse datasets, on which it either achieves significantly superior or competitive performance to the baselines. Further analysis shows that our method is able to generate molecules that lie close to the training distribution yet do not violate the chemical valency rule, demonstrating the effectiveness of the system of SDEs in modeling the node-edge relationships. Our code is available at https://github.com/harryjo97/GDSS.

We argue that the theory and practice of diffusion-based generative models are currently unnecessarily convoluted and seek to remedy the situation by presenting a design space that clearly separates the concrete design choices. This lets us identify several changes to both the sampling and training processes, as well as preconditioning of the score networks. Together, our improvements yield new state-of-the-art FID of 1.79 for CIFAR-10 in a class-conditional setting and 1.97 in an unconditional setting, with much faster sampling (35 network evaluations per image) than prior designs. To further demonstrate their modular nature, we show that our design changes dramatically improve both the efficiency and quality obtainable with pre-trained score networks from previous work, including improving the FID of a previously trained ImageNet-64 model from 2.07 to near-SOTA 1.55, and after re-training with our proposed improvements to a new SOTA of 1.36.

In this paper, we propose Image Downscaling Assessment by Rate-Distortion (IDA-RD), a novel measure to quantitatively evaluate image downscaling algorithms. In contrast to image-based methods that measure the quality of downscaled images, ours is process-based that draws ideas from rate-distortion theory to measure the distortion incurred during downscaling. Our main idea is that downscaling and super-resolution (SR) can be viewed as the encoding and decoding processes in the rate-distortion model, respectively, and that a downscaling algorithm that preserves more details in the resulting low-resolution (LR) images should lead to less distorted high-resolution (HR) images in SR. In other words, the distortion should increase as the downscaling algorithm deteriorates. However, it is non-trivial to measure this distortion as it requires the SR algorithm to be blind and stochastic. Our key insight is that such requirements can be met by recent SR algorithms based on deep generative models that can find all matching HR images for a given LR image on their learned image manifolds. Extensive experimental results show the effectiveness of our IDA-RD measure.

While generative AI is now widespread and useful in society, there are potential risks of misuse, e.g., unconsciously influencing cognitive processes or decision-making. Although this causes a security problem in the cognitive domain, there has been no research about neural and computational mechanisms counteracting the impact of malicious generative AI in humans. We propose DecNefGAN, a novel framework that combines a generative adversarial system and a neural reinforcement model. More specifically, DecNefGAN bridges human and generative AI in a closed-loop system, with the AI creating stimuli that induce specific mental states, thus exerting external control over neural activity. The objective of the human is the opposite, to compete and reach an orthogonal mental state. This framework can contribute to elucidating how the human brain responds to and counteracts the potential influence of generative AI.

Recent works have made notable advancements in enhancing unified models for text-to-image generation through the Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, these reasoning methods separate the processes of understanding and generation, which limits their ability to guide the reasoning of unified models in addressing the deficiencies of their generative capabilities. To this end, we propose a novel reasoning framework for unified models, Understanding-in-Generation (UiG), which harnesses the robust understanding capabilities of unified models to reinforce their performance in image generation. The core insight of our UiG is to integrate generative guidance by the strong understanding capabilities during the reasoning process, thereby mitigating the limitations of generative abilities. To achieve this, we introduce "Image Editing" as a bridge to infuse understanding into the generation process. Initially, we verify the generated image and incorporate the understanding of unified models into the editing instructions. Subsequently, we enhance the generated image step by step, gradually infusing the understanding into the generation process. Our UiG framework demonstrates a significant performance improvement in text-to-image generation over existing text-to-image reasoning methods, e.g., a 3.92% gain on the long prompt setting of the TIIF benchmark. The project code: https://github.com/QC-LY/UiG

Sea ice is governed by highly complex, scale-invariant, and anisotropic processes that are challenging to represent in Earth system models. While advanced numerical models have improved our understanding of the sea-ice dynamics, their computational costs often limit their application in ensemble forecasting and climate simulations. Here, we introduce GenSIM, the first generative AI-based pan-Arctic model that predicts the evolution of all relevant key properties, including concentration, thickness, and drift, in a 12-hour window with improved accuracy over deterministic predictions and high computational efficiency, while remaining physically consistent. Trained on a long simulation from a state-of-the-art sea-ice--ocean system, GenSIM robustly reproduces statistics as observed in numerical models and observations, exhibiting brittle-like short-term dynamics while also depicting the long-term sea-ice decline. Driven solely by atmospheric forcings, we attribute GenSIM's emergent extrapolation capabilities to patterns that reflect the long-term impact of the ocean: it seemingly has learned an internal ocean emulator. This ability to infer slowly evolving climate-relevant dynamics from short-term predictions underlines the large potential of generative models to generalise for unseen climates and to encode hidden physics.

Markov jump processes are continuous-time stochastic processes with a wide range of applications in both natural and social sciences. Despite their widespread use, inference in these models is highly non-trivial and typically proceeds via either Monte Carlo or expectation-maximization methods. In this work we introduce an alternative, variational inference algorithm for Markov jump processes which relies on neural ordinary differential equations, and is trainable via back-propagation. Our methodology learns neural, continuous-time representations of the observed data, that are used to approximate the initial distribution and time-dependent transition probability rates of the posterior Markov jump process. The time-independent rates of the prior process are in contrast trained akin to generative adversarial networks. We test our approach on synthetic data sampled from ground-truth Markov jump processes, experimental switching ion channel data and molecular dynamics simulations. Source code to reproduce our experiments is available online.

Score-based Generative Models (SGMs) have achieved state-of-the-art synthesis results on diverse tasks. However, the current design space of the forward diffusion process is largely unexplored and often relies on physical intuition or simplifying assumptions. Leveraging results from the design of scalable Bayesian posterior samplers, we present a complete recipe for constructing forward processes in SGMs, all of which are guaranteed to converge to the target distribution of interest. We show that several existing SGMs can be cast as specific instantiations of this parameterization. Furthermore, building on this recipe, we construct a novel SGM: Phase Space Langevin Diffusion (PSLD), which performs score-based modeling in a space augmented with auxiliary variables akin to a physical phase space. We show that PSLD outperforms competing baselines in terms of sample quality and the speed-vs-quality tradeoff across different samplers on various standard image synthesis benchmarks. Moreover, we show that PSLD achieves sample quality comparable to state-of-the-art SGMs (FID: 2.10 on unconditional CIFAR-10 generation), providing an attractive alternative as an SGM backbone for further development. We will publish our code and model checkpoints for reproducibility at https://github.com/mandt-lab/PSLD.

Denoising diffusion models (DDMs) have recently attracted increasing attention by showing impressive synthesis quality. DDMs are built on a diffusion process that pushes data to the noise distribution and the models learn to denoise. In this paper, we establish the interpretation of DDMs in terms of image restoration (IR). Integrating IR literature allows us to use an alternative objective and diverse forward processes, not confining to the diffusion process. By imposing prior knowledge on the loss function grounded on MAP-based estimation, we eliminate the need for the expensive sampling of DDMs. Also, we propose a multi-scale training, which improves the performance compared to the diffusion process, by taking advantage of the flexibility of the forward process. Experimental results demonstrate that our model improves the quality and efficiency of both training and inference. Furthermore, we show the applicability of our model to inverse problems. We believe that our framework paves the way for designing a new type of flexible general generative model.

Autoencoders and their variants are among the most widely used models in representation learning and generative modeling. However, autoencoder-based models usually assume that the learned representations are i.i.d. and fail to capture the correlations between the data samples. To address this issue, we propose a novel Sparse Gaussian Process Bayesian Autoencoder (SGPBAE) model in which we impose fully Bayesian sparse Gaussian Process priors on the latent space of a Bayesian Autoencoder. We perform posterior estimation for this model via stochastic gradient Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. We evaluate our approach qualitatively and quantitatively on a wide range of representation learning and generative modeling tasks and show that our approach consistently outperforms multiple alternatives relying on Variational Autoencoders.

Knowledge about the hidden factors that determine particular system dynamics is crucial for both explaining them and pursuing goal-directed interventions. Inferring these factors from time series data without supervision remains an open challenge. Here, we focus on spatiotemporal processes, including wave propagation and weather dynamics, for which we assume that universal causes (e.g. physics) apply throughout space and time. A recently introduced DIstributed SpatioTemporal graph Artificial Neural network Architecture (DISTANA) is used and enhanced to learn such processes, requiring fewer parameters and achieving significantly more accurate predictions compared to temporal convolutional neural networks and other related approaches. We show that DISTANA, when combined with a retrospective latent state inference principle called active tuning, can reliably derive location-respective hidden causal factors. In a current weather prediction benchmark, DISTANA infers our planet's land-sea mask solely by observing temperature dynamics and, meanwhile, uses the self inferred information to improve its own future temperature predictions.

The first generation of Large Language Models - what might be called "Act I" of generative AI (2020-2023) - achieved remarkable success through massive parameter and data scaling, yet exhibited fundamental limitations in knowledge latency, shallow reasoning, and constrained cognitive processes. During this era, prompt engineering emerged as our primary interface with AI, enabling dialogue-level communication through natural language. We now witness the emergence of "Act II" (2024-present), where models are transitioning from knowledge-retrieval systems (in latent space) to thought-construction engines through test-time scaling techniques. This new paradigm establishes a mind-level connection with AI through language-based thoughts. In this paper, we clarify the conceptual foundations of cognition engineering and explain why this moment is critical for its development. We systematically break down these advanced approaches through comprehensive tutorials and optimized implementations, democratizing access to cognition engineering and enabling every practitioner to participate in AI's second act. We provide a regularly updated collection of papers on test-time scaling in the GitHub Repository: https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/cognition-engineering

The advent of Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) signals a paradigm shift in artificial intelligence, moving from passive perception to active, cross-modal generation. Despite their unprecedented ability to synthesize information, a critical gap persists in evaluation: existing benchmarks primarily assess discriminative understanding or unconstrained image generation separately, failing to measure the integrated cognitive process of generative reasoning. To bridge this gap, we propose that geometric construction provides an ideal testbed as it inherently demands a fusion of language comprehension and precise visual generation. We introduce GGBench, a benchmark designed specifically to evaluate geometric generative reasoning. It provides a comprehensive framework for systematically diagnosing a model's ability to not only understand and reason but to actively construct a solution, thereby setting a more rigorous standard for the next generation of intelligent systems. Project website: https://opendatalab-raiser.github.io/GGBench/.

Recent advancements in generative models have significantly improved novel view synthesis (NVS) from multi-view data. However, existing methods depend on external multi-view alignment processes, such as explicit pose estimation or pre-reconstruction, which limits their flexibility and accessibility, especially when alignment is unstable due to insufficient overlap or occlusions between views. In this paper, we propose NVComposer, a novel approach that eliminates the need for explicit external alignment. NVComposer enables the generative model to implicitly infer spatial and geometric relationships between multiple conditional views by introducing two key components: 1) an image-pose dual-stream diffusion model that simultaneously generates target novel views and condition camera poses, and 2) a geometry-aware feature alignment module that distills geometric priors from dense stereo models during training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NVComposer achieves state-of-the-art performance in generative multi-view NVS tasks, removing the reliance on external alignment and thus improving model accessibility. Our approach shows substantial improvements in synthesis quality as the number of unposed input views increases, highlighting its potential for more flexible and accessible generative NVS systems.

Diffusion models excel at generating high-dimensional data but fall short in training efficiency and representation quality compared to self-supervised methods. We identify a key bottleneck: the underutilization of high-quality, semantically rich representations during training notably slows down convergence. Our systematic analysis reveals a critical representation processing region -- primarily in the early layers -- where semantic and structural pattern learning takes place before generation can occur. To address this, we propose Embedded Representation Warmup (ERW), a plug-and-play framework where in the first stage we get the ERW module serves as a warmup that initializes the early layers of the diffusion model with high-quality, pretrained representations. This warmup minimizes the burden of learning representations from scratch, thereby accelerating convergence and boosting performance. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that ERW's efficacy depends on its precise integration into specific neural network layers -- termed the representation processing region -- where the model primarily processes and transforms feature representations for later generation. We further establish that ERW not only accelerates training convergence but also enhances representation quality: empirically, our method achieves a 40times acceleration in training speed compared to REPA, the current state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/LINs-lab/ERW.

Discovering novel drug candidate molecules is one of the most fundamental and critical steps in drug development. Generative deep learning models, which create synthetic data given a probability distribution, offer a high potential for designing de novo molecules. However, to be utilisable in real life drug development pipelines, these models should be able to design drug like and target centric molecules. In this study, we propose an end to end generative system, DrugGEN, for the de novo design of drug candidate molecules that interact with intended target proteins. The proposed method represents molecules as graphs and processes them via a generative adversarial network comprising graph transformer layers. The system is trained using a large dataset of drug like compounds and target specific bioactive molecules to design effective inhibitory molecules against the AKT1 protein, which is critically important in developing treatments for various types of cancer. We conducted molecular docking and dynamics to assess the target centric generation performance of the model, as well as attention score visualisation to examine model interpretability. In parallel, selected compounds were chemically synthesised and evaluated in the context of in vitro enzymatic assays, which identified two bioactive molecules that inhibited AKT1 at low micromolar concentrations. These results indicate that DrugGEN's de novo molecules have a high potential for interacting with the AKT1 protein at the level of its native ligands. Using the open access DrugGEN codebase, it is possible to easily train models for other druggable proteins, given a dataset of experimentally known bioactive molecules.

We introduce AnyEnhance, a unified generative model for voice enhancement that processes both speech and singing voices. Based on a masked generative model, AnyEnhance is capable of handling both speech and singing voices, supporting a wide range of enhancement tasks including denoising, dereverberation, declipping, super-resolution, and target speaker extraction, all simultaneously and without fine-tuning. AnyEnhance introduces a prompt-guidance mechanism for in-context learning, which allows the model to natively accept a reference speaker's timbre. In this way, it could boost enhancement performance when a reference audio is available and enable the target speaker extraction task without altering the underlying architecture. Moreover, we also introduce a self-critic mechanism into the generative process for masked generative models, yielding higher-quality outputs through iterative self-assessment and refinement. Extensive experiments on various enhancement tasks demonstrate AnyEnhance outperforms existing methods in terms of both objective metrics and subjective listening tests. Demo audios are publicly available at https://amphionspace.github.io/anyenhance/.

Recent advances in video generation techniques have given rise to an emerging paradigm of generative video coding for Ultra-Low Bitrate (ULB) scenarios by leveraging powerful generative priors. However, most existing methods are limited by domain specificity (e.g., facial or human videos) or excessive dependence on high-level text guidance, which tend to inadequately capture fine-grained motion details, leading to unrealistic or incoherent reconstructions. To address these challenges, we propose Trajectory-Guided Generative Video Coding (dubbed T-GVC), a novel framework that bridges low-level motion tracking with high-level semantic understanding. T-GVC features a semantic-aware sparse motion sampling pipeline that extracts pixel-wise motion as sparse trajectory points based on their semantic importance, significantly reducing the bitrate while preserving critical temporal semantic information. In addition, by integrating trajectory-aligned loss constraints into diffusion processes, we introduce a training-free guidance mechanism in latent space to ensure physically plausible motion patterns without sacrificing the inherent capabilities of generative models. Experimental results demonstrate that T-GVC outperforms both traditional and neural video codecs under ULB conditions. Furthermore, additional experiments confirm that our framework achieves more precise motion control than existing text-guided methods, paving the way for a novel direction of generative video coding guided by geometric motion modeling.

Architectural design is a highly complex practice that involves a wide diversity of disciplines, technologies, proprietary design software, expertise, and an almost infinite number of constraints, across a vast array of design tasks. Enabling intuitive, accessible, and scalable design processes is an important step towards performance-driven and sustainable design for all. To that end, we introduce Architext, a novel semantic generation assistive tool. Architext enables design generation with only natural language prompts, given to large-scale Language Models, as input. We conduct a thorough quantitative evaluation of Architext's downstream task performance, focusing on semantic accuracy and diversity for a number of pre-trained language models ranging from 120 million to 6 billion parameters. Architext models are able to learn the specific design task, generating valid residential layouts at a near 100% rate. Accuracy shows great improvement when scaling the models, with the largest model (GPT-J) yielding impressive accuracy ranging between 25% to over 80% for different prompt categories. We open source the finetuned Architext models and our synthetic dataset, hoping to inspire experimentation in this exciting area of design research.

Contemporary generative recommendation systems face significant challenges in handling multimodal data, eliminating algorithmic biases, and providing transparent decision-making processes. This paper introduces an enhanced generative recommendation framework that addresses these limitations through five key innovations: multimodal fusion architecture, retrieval-augmented generation mechanisms, causal inference-based debiasing, explainable recommendation generation, and real-time adaptive learning capabilities. Our framework leverages advanced large language models as the backbone while incorporating specialized modules for cross-modal understanding, contextual knowledge integration, bias mitigation, explanation synthesis, and continuous model adaptation. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (MovieLens-25M, Amazon-Electronics, Yelp-2023) demonstrate consistent improvements in recommendation accuracy, fairness, and diversity compared to existing approaches. The proposed framework achieves up to 2.3% improvement in NDCG@10 and 1.4% enhancement in diversity metrics while maintaining computational efficiency through optimized inference strategies.

A generative adversarial network (GAN) has been a representative backbone model in generative artificial intelligence (AI) because of its powerful performance in capturing intricate data-generating processes. However, the GAN training is well-known for its notorious training instability, usually characterized by the occurrence of mode collapse. Through the lens of gradients' variance, this work particularly analyzes the training instability and inefficiency in the presence of mode collapse by linking it to multimodality in the target distribution. To ease the raised training issues from severe multimodality, we introduce a novel GAN training framework that leverages a series of tempered distributions produced via convex interpolation. With our newly developed GAN objective function, the generator can learn all the tempered distributions simultaneously, conceptually resonating with the parallel tempering in Statistics. Our simulation studies demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing popular training strategies in both image and tabular data synthesis. We theoretically analyze that such significant improvement can arise from reducing the variance of gradient estimates by using the tempered distributions. Finally, we further develop a variant of the proposed framework aimed at generating fair synthetic data which is one of the growing interests in the field of trustworthy AI.

As advances in large language models (LLMs) and multimodal techniques continue to mature, the development of general-purpose multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has surged, offering significant applications in interpreting natural images. However, the field of pathology has largely remained untapped, particularly in gathering high-quality data and designing comprehensive model frameworks. To bridge the gap in pathology MLLMs, we present PathAsst, a multimodal generative foundation AI assistant to revolutionize diagnostic and predictive analytics in pathology. The development of PathAsst involves three pivotal steps: data acquisition, CLIP model adaptation, and the training of PathAsst's multimodal generative capabilities. Firstly, we collect over 207K high-quality pathology image-text pairs from authoritative sources. Leveraging the advanced power of ChatGPT, we generate over 180K instruction-following samples. Furthermore, we devise additional instruction-following data specifically tailored for invoking eight pathology-specific sub-models we prepared, allowing the PathAsst to effectively collaborate with these models, enhancing its diagnostic ability. Secondly, by leveraging the collected data, we construct PathCLIP, a pathology-dedicated CLIP, to enhance PathAsst's capabilities in interpreting pathology images. Finally, we integrate PathCLIP with the Vicuna-13b and utilize pathology-specific instruction-tuning data to enhance the multimodal generation capacity of PathAsst and bolster its synergistic interactions with sub-models. The experimental results of PathAsst show the potential of harnessing AI-powered generative foundation model to improve pathology diagnosis and treatment processes.

In this work, we introduce Vision-Language Generative Pre-trained Transformer (VL-GPT), a transformer model proficient at concurrently perceiving and generating visual and linguistic data. VL-GPT achieves a unified pre-training approach for both image and text modalities by employing a straightforward auto-regressive objective, thereby enabling the model to process image and text as seamlessly as a language model processes text. To accomplish this, we initially propose a novel image tokenizer-detokenizer framework for visual data, specifically designed to transform raw images into a sequence of continuous embeddings and reconstruct them accordingly. In combination with the existing text tokenizer and detokenizer, this framework allows for the encoding of interleaved image-text data into a multimodal sequence, which can subsequently be fed into the transformer model. Consequently, VL-GPT can perform large-scale pre-training on multimodal corpora utilizing a unified auto-regressive objective (i.e., next-token prediction). Upon completion of pre-training, VL-GPT exhibits remarkable zero-shot and few-shot performance across a diverse range of vision and language understanding and generation tasks, including image captioning, visual question answering, text-to-image generation, and more. Additionally, the pre-trained model retrains in-context learning capabilities when provided with multimodal prompts. We further conduct instruction tuning on our VL-GPT, highlighting its exceptional potential for multimodal assistance. The source code and model weights shall be released.

As a fundamental task in machine learning, text classification plays a crucial role in many areas. With the rapid scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly through reinforcement learning (RL), there is a growing need for more capable discriminators. Consequently, advances in classification are becoming increasingly vital for enhancing the overall capabilities of LLMs. Traditional discriminative methods map text to labels but overlook LLMs' intrinsic generative strengths. Generative classification addresses this by prompting the model to directly output labels. However, existing studies still rely on simple SFT alone, seldom probing the interplay between training and inference prompts, and no work has systematically leveraged RL for generative text classifiers and unified SFT, RL, and inference-time prompting in one framework. We bridge this gap with GenCLS++, a framework that jointly optimizes SFT and RL while systematically exploring five high-level strategy dimensions-in-context learning variants, category definitions, explicit uncertainty labels, semantically irrelevant numeric labels, and perplexity-based decoding-during both training and inference. After an SFT "policy warm-up," we apply RL with a simple rule-based reward, yielding sizable extra gains. Across seven datasets, GenCLS++ achieves an average accuracy improvement of 3.46% relative to the naive SFT baseline; on public datasets, this improvement rises to 4.00%. Notably, unlike reasoning-intensive tasks that benefit from explicit thinking processes, we find that classification tasks perform better without such reasoning steps. These insights into the role of explicit reasoning provide valuable guidance for future LLM applications.

We resolve the open question regarding the sample complexity of policy learning for maximizing the long-run average reward associated with a uniformly ergodic Markov decision process (MDP), assuming a generative model. In this context, the existing literature provides a sample complexity upper bound of widetilde O(|S||A|t_{mix}^2 epsilon^{-2}) and a lower bound of Omega(|S||A|t_{mix} epsilon^{-2}). In these expressions, |S| and |A| denote the cardinalities of the state and action spaces respectively, t_{mix} serves as a uniform upper limit for the total variation mixing times, and epsilon signifies the error tolerance. Therefore, a notable gap of t_{mix} still remains to be bridged. Our primary contribution is the development of an estimator for the optimal policy of average reward MDPs with a sample complexity of widetilde O(|S||A|t_{mix}epsilon^{-2}). This marks the first algorithm and analysis to reach the literature's lower bound. Our new algorithm draws inspiration from ideas in Li et al. (2020), Jin and Sidford (2021), and Wang et al. (2023). Additionally, we conduct numerical experiments to validate our theoretical findings.

Most existing sequence generation models produce outputs in one pass, usually left-to-right. However, this is in contrast with a more natural approach that humans use in generating content; iterative refinement and editing. Recent work has introduced edit-based models for various tasks (such as neural machine translation and text style transfer), but these generally model a single edit step. In this work, we propose modeling editing processes, modeling the whole process of iteratively generating sequences. We form a conceptual framework to describe the likelihood of multi-step edits, and describe neural models that can learn a generative model of sequences based on these multistep edits. We introduce baseline results and metrics on this task, finding that modeling editing processes improves performance on a variety of axes on both our proposed task and related downstream tasks compared to previous single-step models of edits.

We introduce SwiftSage, a novel agent framework inspired by the dual-process theory of human cognition, designed to excel in action planning for complex interactive reasoning tasks. SwiftSage integrates the strengths of behavior cloning and prompting large language models (LLMs) to enhance task completion performance. The framework comprises two primary modules: the Swift module, representing fast and intuitive thinking, and the Sage module, emulating deliberate thought processes. The Swift module is a small encoder-decoder LM fine-tuned on the oracle agent's action trajectories, while the Sage module employs LLMs such as GPT-4 for subgoal planning and grounding. We develop a heuristic method to harmoniously integrate the two modules, resulting in a more efficient and robust problem-solving process. In 30 tasks from the ScienceWorld benchmark, SwiftSage significantly outperforms other methods such as SayCan, ReAct, and Reflexion, demonstrating its effectiveness in solving complex real-world tasks.

Technical standards, or simply standards, are established documented guidelines and rules that facilitate the interoperability, quality, and accuracy of systems and processes. In recent years, we have witnessed an emerging paradigm shift where the adoption of generative AI (GenAI) models has increased tremendously, spreading implementation interests across standard-driven industries, including engineering, legal, healthcare, and education. In this paper, we assess the criticality levels of different standards across domains and sectors and complement them by grading the current compliance capabilities of state-of-the-art GenAI models. To support the discussion, we outline possible challenges and opportunities with integrating GenAI for standard compliance tasks while also providing actionable recommendations for entities involved with developing and using standards. Overall, we argue that aligning GenAI with standards through computational methods can help strengthen regulatory and operational compliance. We anticipate this area of research will play a central role in the management, oversight, and trustworthiness of larger, more powerful GenAI-based systems in the near future.

Researchers and developers increasingly rely on toxicity scoring to moderate generative language model outputs, in settings such as customer service, information retrieval, and content generation. However, toxicity scoring may render pertinent information inaccessible, rigidify or "value-lock" cultural norms, and prevent language reclamation processes, particularly for marginalized people. In this work, we extend the concept of algorithmic recourse to generative language models: we provide users a novel mechanism to achieve their desired prediction by dynamically setting thresholds for toxicity filtering. Users thereby exercise increased agency relative to interactions with the baseline system. A pilot study (n = 30) supports the potential of our proposed recourse mechanism, indicating improvements in usability compared to fixed-threshold toxicity-filtering of model outputs. Future work should explore the intersection of toxicity scoring, model controllability, user agency, and language reclamation processes -- particularly with regard to the bias that many communities encounter when interacting with generative language models.

AI-driven content creation has shown potential in film production. However, existing film generation systems struggle to implement cinematic principles and thus fail to generate professional-quality films, particularly lacking diverse camera language and cinematic rhythm. This results in templated visuals and unengaging narratives. To address this, we introduce FilMaster, an end-to-end AI system that integrates real-world cinematic principles for professional-grade film generation, yielding editable, industry-standard outputs. FilMaster is built on two key principles: (1) learning cinematography from extensive real-world film data and (2) emulating professional, audience-centric post-production workflows. Inspired by these principles, FilMaster incorporates two stages: a Reference-Guided Generation Stage which transforms user input to video clips, and a Generative Post-Production Stage which transforms raw footage into audiovisual outputs by orchestrating visual and auditory elements for cinematic rhythm. Our generation stage highlights a Multi-shot Synergized RAG Camera Language Design module to guide the AI in generating professional camera language by retrieving reference clips from a vast corpus of 440,000 film clips. Our post-production stage emulates professional workflows by designing an Audience-Centric Cinematic Rhythm Control module, including Rough Cut and Fine Cut processes informed by simulated audience feedback, for effective integration of audiovisual elements to achieve engaging content. The system is empowered by generative AI models like (M)LLMs and video generation models. Furthermore, we introduce FilmEval, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating AI-generated films. Extensive experiments show FilMaster's superior performance in camera language design and cinematic rhythm control, advancing generative AI in professional filmmaking.

Diffusion and flow matching models have significantly advanced media generation, yet their design space is well-explored, somewhat limiting further improvements. Concurrently, autoregressive (AR) models, particularly those generating continuous tokens, have emerged as a promising direction for unifying text and media generation. This paper introduces Transition Matching (TM), a novel discrete-time, continuous-state generative paradigm that unifies and advances both diffusion/flow models and continuous AR generation. TM decomposes complex generation tasks into simpler Markov transitions, allowing for expressive non-deterministic probability transition kernels and arbitrary non-continuous supervision processes, thereby unlocking new flexible design avenues. We explore these choices through three TM variants: (i) Difference Transition Matching (DTM), which generalizes flow matching to discrete-time by directly learning transition probabilities, yielding state-of-the-art image quality and text adherence as well as improved sampling efficiency. (ii) Autoregressive Transition Matching (ARTM) and (iii) Full History Transition Matching (FHTM) are partially and fully causal models, respectively, that generalize continuous AR methods. They achieve continuous causal AR generation quality comparable to non-causal approaches and potentially enable seamless integration with existing AR text generation techniques. Notably, FHTM is the first fully causal model to match or surpass the performance of flow-based methods on text-to-image task in continuous domains. We demonstrate these contributions through a rigorous large-scale comparison of TM variants and relevant baselines, maintaining a fixed architecture, training data, and hyperparameters.

Diffusion models have established themselves as state-of-the-art generative models across various data modalities, including images and videos, due to their ability to accurately approximate complex data distributions. Unlike traditional generative approaches such as VAEs and GANs, diffusion models employ a progressive denoising process that transforms noise into meaningful data over multiple iterative steps. This gradual approach enhances their expressiveness and generation quality. Not only that, diffusion models have also been shown to extract meaningful representations from data while learning to generate samples. Despite their success, the application of diffusion models to graph-structured data remains relatively unexplored, primarily due to the discrete nature of graphs, which necessitates discrete diffusion processes distinct from the continuous methods used in other domains. In this work, we leverage the representational capabilities of diffusion models to learn meaningful embeddings for graph data. By training a discrete diffusion model within an autoencoder framework, we enable both effective autoencoding and representation learning tailored to the unique characteristics of graph-structured data. We only need the encoder at the end to extract representations. Our approach demonstrates the potential of discrete diffusion models to be used for graph representation learning.

Existing Score-Based Models (SBMs) can be categorized into constrained SBMs (CSBMs) or unconstrained SBMs (USBMs) according to their parameterization approaches. CSBMs model probability density functions as Boltzmann distributions, and assign their predictions as the negative gradients of some scalar-valued energy functions. On the other hand, USBMs employ flexible architectures capable of directly estimating scores without the need to explicitly model energy functions. In this paper, we demonstrate that the architectural constraints of CSBMs may limit their modeling ability. In addition, we show that USBMs' inability to preserve the property of conservativeness may lead to degraded performance in practice. To address the above issues, we propose Quasi-Conservative Score-Based Models (QCSBMs) for keeping the advantages of both CSBMs and USBMs. Our theoretical derivations demonstrate that the training objective of QCSBMs can be efficiently integrated into the training processes by leveraging the Hutchinson's trace estimator. In addition, our experimental results on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet, and SVHN datasets validate the effectiveness of QCSBMs. Finally, we justify the advantage of QCSBMs using an example of a one-layered autoencoder.

Based on powerful Large Language Models (LLMs), recent generative Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have gained prominence as a pivotal research area, exhibiting remarkable capability for both comprehension and generation. In this work, we address the evaluation of generative comprehension in MLLMs as a preliminary step towards a comprehensive assessment of generative models, by introducing a benchmark named SEED-Bench. SEED-Bench consists of 19K multiple choice questions with accurate human annotations (x 6 larger than existing benchmarks), which spans 12 evaluation dimensions including the comprehension of both the image and video modality. We develop an advanced pipeline for generating multiple-choice questions that target specific evaluation dimensions, integrating both automatic filtering and manual verification processes. Multiple-choice questions with groundtruth options derived from human annotation enables an objective and efficient assessment of model performance, eliminating the need for human or GPT intervention during evaluation. We further evaluate the performance of 18 models across all 12 dimensions, covering both the spatial and temporal understanding. By revealing the limitations of existing MLLMs through evaluation results, we aim for SEED-Bench to provide insights for motivating future research. We will launch and consistently maintain a leaderboard to provide a platform for the community to assess and investigate model capability.

Reconstructing medical images from partial measurements is an important inverse problem in Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Existing solutions based on machine learning typically train a model to directly map measurements to medical images, leveraging a training dataset of paired images and measurements. These measurements are typically synthesized from images using a fixed physical model of the measurement process, which hinders the generalization capability of models to unknown measurement processes. To address this issue, we propose a fully unsupervised technique for inverse problem solving, leveraging the recently introduced score-based generative models. Specifically, we first train a score-based generative model on medical images to capture their prior distribution. Given measurements and a physical model of the measurement process at test time, we introduce a sampling method to reconstruct an image consistent with both the prior and the observed measurements. Our method does not assume a fixed measurement process during training, and can thus be flexibly adapted to different measurement processes at test time. Empirically, we observe comparable or better performance to supervised learning techniques in several medical imaging tasks in CT and MRI, while demonstrating significantly better generalization to unknown measurement processes.

While large language models (LLMs) show great potential in temporal reasoning, most existing work focuses heavily on enhancing performance, often neglecting the explainable reasoning processes underlying the results. To address this gap, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark covering a wide range of temporal granularities, designed to systematically evaluate LLMs' capabilities in explainable temporal reasoning. Furthermore, our findings reveal that LLMs struggle to deliver convincing explanations when relying solely on textual information. To address challenge, we propose GETER, a novel structure-aware generative framework that integrates Graph structures with text for Explainable TEmporal Reasoning. Specifically, we first leverage temporal knowledge graphs to develop a temporal encoder that captures structural information for the query. Subsequently, we introduce a structure-text prefix adapter to map graph structure features into the text embedding space. Finally, LLMs generate explanation text by seamlessly integrating the soft graph token with instruction-tuning prompt tokens. Experimental results indicate that GETER achieves state-of-the-art performance while also demonstrating its effectiveness as well as strong generalization capabilities. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/carryTatum/GETER.

Target Speech Extraction (TSE) aims to isolate a target speaker's voice from a mixture of multiple speakers by leveraging speaker-specific cues, typically provided as auxiliary audio (a.k.a. cue audio). Although recent advancements in TSE have primarily employed discriminative models that offer high perceptual quality, these models often introduce unwanted artifacts, reduce naturalness, and are sensitive to discrepancies between training and testing environments. On the other hand, generative models for TSE lag in perceptual quality and intelligibility. To address these challenges, we present SoloSpeech, a novel cascaded generative pipeline that integrates compression, extraction, reconstruction, and correction processes. SoloSpeech features a speaker-embedding-free target extractor that utilizes conditional information from the cue audio's latent space, aligning it with the mixture audio's latent space to prevent mismatches. Evaluated on the widely-used Libri2Mix dataset, SoloSpeech achieves the new state-of-the-art intelligibility and quality in target speech extraction and speech separation tasks while demonstrating exceptional generalization on out-of-domain data and real-world scenarios.

Recent advances in generative modeling with diffusion processes (DPs) enabled breakthroughs in image synthesis. Despite impressive image quality, these models have various prompt compliance problems, including low recall in generating multiple objects, difficulty in generating text in images, and meeting constraints like object locations and pose. For fine-grained editing and manipulation, they also require fine-grained semantic or instance maps that are tedious to produce manually. While prompt compliance can be enhanced by addition of loss functions at inference, this is time consuming and does not scale to complex scenes. To overcome these limitations, this work introduces a new family of Factor Graph Diffusion Models (FG-DMs) that models the joint distribution of images and conditioning variables, such as semantic, sketch, depth or normal maps via a factor graph decomposition. This joint structure has several advantages, including support for efficient sampling based prompt compliance schemes, which produce images of high object recall, semi-automated fine-grained editing, text-based editing of conditions with noise inversion, explainability at intermediate levels, ability to produce labeled datasets for the training of downstream models such as segmentation or depth, training with missing data, and continual learning where new conditioning variables can be added with minimal or no modifications to the existing structure. We propose an implementation of FG-DMs by adapting a pre-trained Stable Diffusion (SD) model to implement all FG-DM factors, using only COCO dataset, and show that it is effective in generating images with 15\% higher recall than SD while retaining its generalization ability. We introduce an attention distillation loss that encourages consistency among the attention maps of all factors, improving the fidelity of the generated conditions and image.

Layout generation aims to synthesize realistic graphic scenes consisting of elements with different attributes including category, size, position, and between-element relation. It is a crucial task for reducing the burden on heavy-duty graphic design works for formatted scenes, e.g., publications, documents, and user interfaces (UIs). Diverse application scenarios impose a big challenge in unifying various layout generation subtasks, including conditional and unconditional generation. In this paper, we propose a Layout Diffusion Generative Model (LDGM) to achieve such unification with a single decoupled diffusion model. LDGM views a layout of arbitrary missing or coarse element attributes as an intermediate diffusion status from a completed layout. Since different attributes have their individual semantics and characteristics, we propose to decouple the diffusion processes for them to improve the diversity of training samples and learn the reverse process jointly to exploit global-scope contexts for facilitating generation. As a result, our LDGM can generate layouts either from scratch or conditional on arbitrary available attributes. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate our proposed LDGM outperforms existing layout generation models in both functionality and performance.

Generation of graphs is a major challenge for real-world tasks that require understanding the complex nature of their non-Euclidean structures. Although diffusion models have achieved notable success in graph generation recently, they are ill-suited for modeling the topological properties of graphs since learning to denoise the noisy samples does not explicitly learn the graph structures to be generated. To tackle this limitation, we propose a generative framework that models the topology of graphs by explicitly learning the final graph structures of the diffusion process. Specifically, we design the generative process as a mixture of endpoint-conditioned diffusion processes which is driven toward the predicted graph that results in rapid convergence. We further introduce a simple parameterization of the mixture process and develop an objective for learning the final graph structure, which enables maximum likelihood training. Through extensive experimental validation on general graph and 2D/3D molecule generation tasks, we show that our method outperforms previous generative models, generating graphs with correct topology with both continuous (e.g. 3D coordinates) and discrete (e.g. atom types) features. Our code is available at https://github.com/harryjo97/GruM.

Diffusion models are powerful generative models that map noise to data using stochastic processes. However, for many applications such as image editing, the model input comes from a distribution that is not random noise. As such, diffusion models must rely on cumbersome methods like guidance or projected sampling to incorporate this information in the generative process. In our work, we propose Denoising Diffusion Bridge Models (DDBMs), a natural alternative to this paradigm based on diffusion bridges, a family of processes that interpolate between two paired distributions given as endpoints. Our method learns the score of the diffusion bridge from data and maps from one endpoint distribution to the other by solving a (stochastic) differential equation based on the learned score. Our method naturally unifies several classes of generative models, such as score-based diffusion models and OT-Flow-Matching, allowing us to adapt existing design and architectural choices to our more general problem. Empirically, we apply DDBMs to challenging image datasets in both pixel and latent space. On standard image translation problems, DDBMs achieve significant improvement over baseline methods, and, when we reduce the problem to image generation by setting the source distribution to random noise, DDBMs achieve comparable FID scores to state-of-the-art methods despite being built for a more general task.

We introduce Interleaved Gibbs Diffusion (IGD), a novel generative modeling framework for mixed continuous-discrete data, focusing on constrained generation problems. Prior works on discrete and continuous-discrete diffusion models assume factorized denoising distribution for fast generation, which can hinder the modeling of strong dependencies between random variables encountered in constrained generation. IGD moves beyond this by interleaving continuous and discrete denoising algorithms via a discrete time Gibbs sampling type Markov chain. IGD provides flexibility in the choice of denoisers, allows conditional generation via state-space doubling and inference time scaling via the ReDeNoise method. Empirical evaluations on three challenging tasks-solving 3-SAT, generating molecule structures, and generating layouts-demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Notably, IGD achieves a 7% improvement on 3-SAT out of the box and achieves state-of-the-art results in molecule generation without relying on equivariant diffusion or domain-specific architectures. We explore a wide range of modeling, and interleaving strategies along with hyperparameters in each of these problems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently become proficient in addressing complex tasks by utilizing their rich internal knowledge and reasoning ability. Consequently, this complexity hinders traditional input-focused explanation algorithms for explaining the complex decision-making processes of LLMs. Recent advancements have thus emerged for self-explaining their predictions through a single feed-forward inference in a natural language format. However, natural language explanations are often criticized for lack of faithfulness since these explanations may not accurately reflect the decision-making behaviors of the LLMs. In this work, we introduce a generative explanation framework, xLLM, to improve the faithfulness of the explanations provided in natural language formats for LLMs. Specifically, we propose an evaluator to quantify the faithfulness of natural language explanation and enhance the faithfulness by an iterative optimization process of xLLM, with the goal of maximizing the faithfulness scores. Experiments conducted on three NLU datasets demonstrate that xLLM can significantly improve the faithfulness of generated explanations, which are in alignment with the behaviors of LLMs.

Recent generative reasoning breakthroughs have transformed how large language models (LLMs) tackle complex problems by dynamically retrieving and refining information while generating coherent, multi-step thought processes. Techniques such as inference-time scaling, reinforcement learning, supervised fine-tuning, and distillation have been successfully applied to models like DeepSeek-R1, OpenAI's o1 & o3, GPT-4o, Qwen-32B, and various Llama variants, resulting in enhanced reasoning capabilities. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the top 27 LLM models released between 2023 and 2025 (including models such as Mistral AI Small 3 24B, DeepSeek-R1, Search-o1, QwQ-32B, and phi-4). Then, we present an extensive overview of training methodologies that spans general training approaches, mixture-of-experts (MoE) and architectural innovations, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), chain-of-thought and self-improvement techniques, as well as test-time compute scaling, distillation, and reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Finally, we discuss the key challenges in advancing LLM capabilities, including improving multi-step reasoning without human supervision, overcoming limitations in chained tasks, balancing structured prompts with flexibility, and enhancing long-context retrieval and external tool integration.

As the prevalence of mental health challenges, social media has emerged as a key platform for individuals to express their emotions.Deep learning tends to be a promising solution for analyzing mental health on social media. However, black box models are often inflexible when switching between tasks, and their results typically lack explanations. With the rise of large language models (LLMs), their flexibility has introduced new approaches to the field. Also due to the generative nature, they can be prompted to explain decision-making processes. However, their performance on complex psychological analysis still lags behind deep learning. In this paper, we introduce the first multi-task Chinese Social Media Interpretable Mental Health Instructions (C-IMHI) dataset, consisting of 9K samples, which has been quality-controlled and manually validated. We also propose MentalGLM series models, the first open-source LLMs designed for explainable mental health analysis targeting Chinese social media, trained on a corpus of 50K instructions. The proposed models were evaluated on three downstream tasks and achieved better or comparable performance compared to deep learning models, generalized LLMs, and task fine-tuned LLMs. We validated a portion of the generated decision explanations with experts, showing promising results. We also evaluated the proposed models on a clinical dataset, where they outperformed other LLMs, indicating their potential applicability in the clinical field. Our models show strong performance, validated across tasks and perspectives. The decision explanations enhance usability and facilitate better understanding and practical application of the models. Both the constructed dataset and the models are publicly available via: https://github.com/zwzzzQAQ/MentalGLM.

The development of AI-driven generative audio mirrors broader AI trends, often prioritizing immediate accessibility at the expense of explainability. Consequently, integrating such tools into sustained artistic practice remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we explore several paths to improve explainability, drawing primarily from our research-creation practice in training and implementing generative audio models. As practical provisions for improved explainability, we highlight human agency over training materials, the viability of small-scale datasets, the facilitation of the iterative creative process, and the integration of interactive machine learning as a mapping tool. Importantly, these steps aim to enhance human agency over generative AI systems not only during model inference, but also when curating and preprocessing training data as well as during the training phase of models.

Current vision systems are trained on huge datasets, and these datasets come with costs: curation is expensive, they inherit human biases, and there are concerns over privacy and usage rights. To counter these costs, interest has surged in learning from cheaper data sources, such as unlabeled images. In this paper we go a step further and ask if we can do away with real image datasets entirely, instead learning from noise processes. We investigate a suite of image generation models that produce images from simple random processes. These are then used as training data for a visual representation learner with a contrastive loss. We study two types of noise processes, statistical image models and deep generative models under different random initializations. Our findings show that it is important for the noise to capture certain structural properties of real data but that good performance can be achieved even with processes that are far from realistic. We also find that diversity is a key property to learn good representations. Datasets, models, and code are available at https://mbaradad.github.io/learning_with_noise.

The increasing use of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in modern software engineering, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) for code generation, has transformed professional software development by boosting productivity and automating development processes. This adoption, however, has highlighted a significant issue: the introduction of security vulnerabilities into the code. These vulnerabilities result, e.g., from flaws in the training data that propagate into the generated code, creating challenges in disclosing them. Traditional vulnerability handling processes often involve extensive manual review. Applying such traditional processes to AI-generated code is challenging. AI-generated code may include several vulnerabilities, possibly in slightly different forms as developers might not build on already implemented code but prompt similar tasks. In this work, we explore the current state of LLM-based approaches for vulnerability handling, focusing on approaches for vulnerability detection, localization, and repair. We provide an overview of recent progress in this area and highlight open challenges that must be addressed in order to establish a reliable and scalable vulnerability handling process of AI-generated code.

Existing informal language-based (e.g., human language) Large Language Models (LLMs) trained with Reinforcement Learning (RL) face a significant challenge: their verification processes, which provide crucial training signals, are neither reliable nor scalable. In fact, the prevalent large proprietary models could hardly generate verifiable programs. A promising yet largely uncharted alternative is formal language-based reasoning. Grounding LLMs in rigorous formal systems where generative models operate in formal language spaces (e.g., Dafny) enables the automatic and mathematically provable verification of their reasoning processes and outcomes. This capability is pivotal for achieving large-scale, reliable formal software verification. It is a common practice to employ human-annotated chain-of-thought and other human priors to induce the reasoning and coding capabilities of LLMs. Unfortunately, it becomes unacceptably all-consuming to provide such priors for supervising complex programming tasks. In this work, we systematically explore ways to reduce human priors with the formal language, Dafny, as the main environment for our pilot study. Our pipeline mainly relies on introducing an automatic and scalable data curation pipeline, and careful RL designs integrated with feedback from the formal language verifier. We introduce DafnyComp, a benchmark of compositional formal programs with auto-formalized specifications for specification reasoning. Our supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage enables even small models (e.g., 0.5B) to generate syntactically valid and verifiable Dafny code, surpassing proprietary models. RL with regularization further improves performance, achieving stronger generalization to out-of-domain tasks and outperforming all strong baselines on the challenging DafnyComp benchmark.

A central problem in machine learning involves modeling complex data-sets using highly flexible families of probability distributions in which learning, sampling, inference, and evaluation are still analytically or computationally tractable. Here, we develop an approach that simultaneously achieves both flexibility and tractability. The essential idea, inspired by non-equilibrium statistical physics, is to systematically and slowly destroy structure in a data distribution through an iterative forward diffusion process. We then learn a reverse diffusion process that restores structure in data, yielding a highly flexible and tractable generative model of the data. This approach allows us to rapidly learn, sample from, and evaluate probabilities in deep generative models with thousands of layers or time steps, as well as to compute conditional and posterior probabilities under the learned model. We additionally release an open source reference implementation of the algorithm.

Conventional diffusion models typically relies on a fixed forward process, which implicitly defines complex marginal distributions over latent variables. This can often complicate the reverse process' task in learning generative trajectories, and results in costly inference for diffusion models. To address these limitations, we introduce Neural Flow Diffusion Models (NFDM), a novel framework that enhances diffusion models by supporting a broader range of forward processes beyond the fixed linear Gaussian. We also propose a novel parameterization technique for learning the forward process. Our framework provides an end-to-end, simulation-free optimization objective, effectively minimizing a variational upper bound on the negative log-likelihood. Experimental results demonstrate NFDM's strong performance, evidenced by state-of-the-art likelihood estimation. Furthermore, we investigate NFDM's capacity for learning generative dynamics with specific characteristics, such as deterministic straight lines trajectories. This exploration underscores NFDM's versatility and its potential for a wide range of applications.

The multifaceted nature of human perception and comprehension indicates that, when we think, our body can naturally take any combination of senses, a.k.a., modalities and form a beautiful picture in our brain. For example, when we see a cattery and simultaneously perceive the cat's purring sound, our brain can construct a picture of a cat in the cattery. Intuitively, generative AI models should hold the versatility of humans and be capable of generating images from any combination of modalities efficiently and collaboratively. This paper presents ImgAny, a novel end-to-end multi-modal generative model that can mimic human reasoning and generate high-quality images. Our method serves as the first attempt in its capacity of efficiently and flexibly taking any combination of seven modalities, ranging from language, audio to vision modalities, including image, point cloud, thermal, depth, and event data. Our key idea is inspired by human-level cognitive processes and involves the integration and harmonization of multiple input modalities at both the entity and attribute levels without specific tuning across modalities. Accordingly, our method brings two novel training-free technical branches: 1) Entity Fusion Branch ensures the coherence between inputs and outputs. It extracts entity features from the multi-modal representations powered by our specially constructed entity knowledge graph; 2) Attribute Fusion Branch adeptly preserves and processes the attributes. It efficiently amalgamates distinct attributes from diverse input modalities via our proposed attribute knowledge graph. Lastly, the entity and attribute features are adaptively fused as the conditional inputs to the pre-trained Stable Diffusion model for image generation. Extensive experiments under diverse modality combinations demonstrate its exceptional capability for visual content creation.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become a fundamental paradigm for addressing the challenges faced by large language models in handling real-time information and domain-specific problems. Traditional RAG systems primarily rely on the in-context learning (ICL) capabilities of the large language model itself. Still, in-depth research on the specific capabilities needed by the RAG generation model is lacking, leading to challenges with inconsistent document quality and retrieval system imperfections. Even the limited studies that fine-tune RAG generative models often lack a granular focus on RAG task or a deeper utilization of chain-of-thought processes. To address this, we propose that RAG models should possess three progressively hierarchical abilities (1) Filtering: the ability to select relevant information; (2) Combination: the ability to combine semantic information across paragraphs; and (3) RAG-specific reasoning: the ability to further process external knowledge using internal knowledge. Thus, we introduce our new RAG instruction fine-tuning method, Hierarchical-Thought Instruction-Tuning Retrieval-Augmented Generation (HIRAG) incorporates a "think before answering" strategy. This method enhances the model's open-book examination capability by utilizing multi-level progressive chain-of-thought. Experiments show that the HIRAG training strategy significantly improves the model's performance on datasets such as RGB, PopQA, MuSiQue, HotpotQA, and PubmedQA.

Central to long-form text generation in vertical domains is the "impossible trinity" confronting current large language models (LLMs): the simultaneous achievement of low hallucination, deep logical coherence, and personalized expression. This study establishes that this bottleneck arises from existing generative paradigms succumbing to the Statistical Smoothing Trap, a phenomenon that overlooks the high-entropy information acquisition and structured cognitive processes integral to expert-level writing. To address this limitation, we propose the DeepNews Framework, an agentic workflow that explicitly models the implicit cognitive processes of seasoned financial journalists. The framework integrates three core modules: first, a dual-granularity retrieval mechanism grounded in information foraging theory, which enforces a 10:1 saturated information input ratio to mitigate hallucinatory outputs; second, schema-guided strategic planning, a process leveraging domain expert knowledge bases (narrative schemas) and Atomic Blocks to forge a robust logical skeleton; third, adversarial constraint prompting, a technique deploying tactics including Rhythm Break and Logic Fog to disrupt the probabilistic smoothness inherent in model-generated text. Experiments delineate a salient Knowledge Cliff in deep financial reporting: content truthfulness collapses when retrieved context falls below 15,000 characters, while a high-redundancy input exceeding 30,000 characters stabilizes the Hallucination-Free Rate (HFR) above 85%. In an ecological validity blind test conducted with a top-tier Chinese technology media outlet, the DeepNews system--built on a previous-generation model (DeepSeek-V3-0324)-achieved a 25% submission acceptance rate, significantly outperforming the 0% acceptance rate of zero-shot generation by a state-of-the-art (SOTA) model (GPT-5).

Generating human motion guided by conditions such as textual descriptions is challenging due to the need for datasets with pairs of high-quality motion and their corresponding conditions. The difficulty increases when aiming for finer control in the generation. To that end, prior works have proposed to combine several motion diffusion models pre-trained on datasets with different types of conditions, thus allowing control with multiple conditions. However, the proposed merging strategies overlook that the optimal way to combine the generation processes might depend on the particularities of each pre-trained generative model and also the specific textual descriptions. In this context, we introduce MixerMDM, the first learnable model composition technique for combining pre-trained text-conditioned human motion diffusion models. Unlike previous approaches, MixerMDM provides a dynamic mixing strategy that is trained in an adversarial fashion to learn to combine the denoising process of each model depending on the set of conditions driving the generation. By using MixerMDM to combine single- and multi-person motion diffusion models, we achieve fine-grained control on the dynamics of every person individually, and also on the overall interaction. Furthermore, we propose a new evaluation technique that, for the first time in this task, measures the interaction and individual quality by computing the alignment between the mixed generated motions and their conditions as well as the capabilities of MixerMDM to adapt the mixing throughout the denoising process depending on the motions to mix.

Content-aware visual-textual presentation layout aims at arranging spatial space on the given canvas for pre-defined elements, including text, logo, and underlay, which is a key to automatic template-free creative graphic design. In practical applications, e.g., poster designs, the canvas is originally non-empty, and both inter-element relationships as well as inter-layer relationships should be concerned when generating a proper layout. A few recent works deal with them simultaneously, but they still suffer from poor graphic performance, such as a lack of layout variety or spatial non-alignment. Since content-aware visual-textual presentation layout is a novel task, we first construct a new dataset named PosterLayout, which consists of 9,974 poster-layout pairs and 905 images, i.e., non-empty canvases. It is more challenging and useful for greater layout variety, domain diversity, and content diversity. Then, we propose design sequence formation (DSF) that reorganizes elements in layouts to imitate the design processes of human designers, and a novel CNN-LSTM-based conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) is presented to generate proper layouts. Specifically, the discriminator is design-sequence-aware and will supervise the "design" process of the generator. Experimental results verify the usefulness of the new benchmark and the effectiveness of the proposed approach, which achieves the best performance by generating suitable layouts for diverse canvases.

The Test and Measurement domain, known for its strict requirements for accuracy and efficiency, is increasingly adopting Generative AI technologies to enhance the performance of data analysis, automation, and decision-making processes. Among these, Large Language Models (LLMs) show significant promise for advancing automation and precision in testing. However, the evaluation of LLMs in this specialized area remains insufficiently explored. To address this gap, we introduce the Test and Measurement Intelligence Quotient (TMIQ), a benchmark designed to quantitatively assess LLMs across a wide range of electronic engineering tasks. TMIQ offers a comprehensive set of scenarios and metrics for detailed evaluation, including SCPI command matching accuracy, ranked response evaluation, Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (CoT), and the impact of output formatting variations required by LLMs on performance. In testing various LLMs, our findings indicate varying levels of proficiency, with exact SCPI command match accuracy ranging from around 56% to 73%, and ranked matching first-position scores achieving around 33% for the best-performing model. We also assess token usage, cost-efficiency, and response times, identifying trade-offs between accuracy and operational efficiency. Additionally, we present a command-line interface (CLI) tool that enables users to generate datasets using the same methodology, allowing for tailored assessments of LLMs. TMIQ and the CLI tool provide a rigorous, reproducible means of evaluating LLMs for production environments, facilitating continuous monitoring and identifying strengths and areas for improvement, and driving innovation in their selections for applications within the Test and Measurement industry.

This review gives an overview of the development of machine learning in geoscience. A thorough analysis of the co-developments of machine learning applications throughout the last 70 years relates the recent enthusiasm for machine learning to developments in geoscience. I explore the shift of kriging towards a mainstream machine learning method and the historic application of neural networks in geoscience, following the general trend of machine learning enthusiasm through the decades. Furthermore, this chapter explores the shift from mathematical fundamentals and knowledge in software development towards skills in model validation, applied statistics, and integrated subject matter expertise. The review is interspersed with code examples to complement the theoretical foundations and illustrate model validation and machine learning explainability for science. The scope of this review includes various shallow machine learning methods, e.g. Decision Trees, Random Forests, Support-Vector Machines, and Gaussian Processes, as well as, deep neural networks, including feed-forward neural networks, convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks and generative adversarial networks. Regarding geoscience, the review has a bias towards geophysics but aims to strike a balance with geochemistry, geostatistics, and geology, however excludes remote sensing, as this would exceed the scope. In general, I aim to provide context for the recent enthusiasm surrounding deep learning with respect to research, hardware, and software developments that enable successful application of shallow and deep machine learning in all disciplines of Earth science.

The term "generative AI" refers to computational techniques that are capable of generating seemingly new, meaningful content such as text, images, or audio from training data. The widespread diffusion of this technology with examples such as Dall-E 2, GPT-4, and Copilot is currently revolutionizing the way we work and communicate with each other. In this article, we provide a conceptualization of generative AI as an entity in socio-technical systems and provide examples of models, systems, and applications. Based on that, we introduce limitations of current generative AI and provide an agenda for Business & Information Systems Engineering (BISE) research. Different from previous works, we focus on generative AI in the context of information systems, and, to this end, we discuss several opportunities and challenges that are unique to the BISE community and make suggestions for impactful directions for BISE research.

Deep generative models produce data according to a learned representation, e.g. diffusion models, through a process of approximation computing possible samples. Approximation can be understood as reconstruction and the large datasets used to train models as sets of records in which we represent the physical world with some data structure (photographs, audio recordings, manuscripts). During the process of reconstruction, e.g., image frames develop each timestep towards a textual input description. While moving forward in time, frame sets are shaped according to learned bias and their production, we argue here, can be considered as going back in time; not by inspiration on the backward diffusion process but acknowledging culture is specifically marked in the records. Futures of generative modelling, namely in film and audiovisual arts, can benefit by dealing with diffusion systems as a process to compute the future by inevitably being tied to the past, if acknowledging the records as to capture fields of view at a specific time, and to correlate with our own finite memory ideals. Models generating new data distributions can target video production as signal processors and by developing sequences through timelines we ourselves also go back to decade-old algorithmic and multi-track methodologies revealing the actual predictive failure of contemporary approaches to synthesis in moving image, both as relevant to composition and not explanatory.

Large monolithic generative models trained on massive amounts of data have become an increasingly dominant approach in AI research. In this paper, we argue that we should instead construct large generative systems by composing smaller generative models together. We show how such a compositional generative approach enables us to learn distributions in a more data-efficient manner, enabling generalization to parts of the data distribution unseen at training time. We further show how this enables us to program and construct new generative models for tasks completely unseen at training. Finally, we show that in many cases, we can discover separate compositional components from data.

In recent years, quantum computing has emerged as a promising technology for solving complex computational problems. Generative modeling is a technique that allows us to learn and generate new data samples similar to the original dataset. In this paper, we propose a generative modeling approach using quantum gates to generate new samples from a given dataset. We start with a brief introduction to quantum computing and generative modeling. Then, we describe our proposed approach, which involves encoding the dataset into quantum states and using quantum gates to manipulate these states to generate new samples. We also provide mathematical details of our approach and demonstrate its effectiveness through experimental results on various datasets.

Deep generative models are a class of techniques that train deep neural networks to model the distribution of training samples. Research has fragmented into various interconnected approaches, each of which make trade-offs including run-time, diversity, and architectural restrictions. In particular, this compendium covers energy-based models, variational autoencoders, generative adversarial networks, autoregressive models, normalizing flows, in addition to numerous hybrid approaches. These techniques are compared and contrasted, explaining the premises behind each and how they are interrelated, while reviewing current state-of-the-art advances and implementations.

Beginning with text and images, generative AI has expanded to audio, video, computer code, and molecules. Yet, if generative AI is the answer, what is the question? We explore the foundations of generation as a distinct machine learning task with connections to prediction, compression, and decision-making. We survey five major generative model families: autoregressive models, variational autoencoders, normalizing flows, generative adversarial networks, and diffusion models. We then introduce a probabilistic framework that emphasizes the distinction between density estimation and generation. We review a game-theoretic framework with a two-player adversary-learner setup to study generation. We discuss post-training modifications that prepare generative models for deployment. We end by highlighting some important topics in socially responsible generation such as privacy, detection of AI-generated content, and copyright and IP. We adopt a task-first framing of generation, focusing on what generation is as a machine learning problem, rather than only on how models implement it.

The astonishing growth of generative tools in recent years has empowered many exciting applications in text-to-image generation and text-to-video generation. The underlying principle behind these generative tools is the concept of diffusion, a particular sampling mechanism that has overcome some shortcomings that were deemed difficult in the previous approaches. The goal of this tutorial is to discuss the essential ideas underlying the diffusion models. The target audience of this tutorial includes undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in doing research on diffusion models or applying these models to solve other problems.

Self-supervised learning excels at learning representations from large amounts of data. At the same time, generative models offer the complementary property of learning information about the underlying data generation process. In this study, we aim at establishing a principled connection between these two paradigms and highlight the benefits of their complementarity. In particular, we perform an analysis of self-supervised learning objectives, elucidating the underlying probabilistic graphical models and presenting a standardized methodology for their derivation from first principles. The analysis suggests a natural means of integrating self-supervised learning with likelihood-based generative models. We instantiate this concept within the realm of cluster-based self-supervised learning and energy models, introducing a lower bound proven to reliably penalize the most important failure modes and unlocking full unification. Our theoretical findings are substantiated through experiments on synthetic and real-world data, including SVHN, CIFAR10, and CIFAR100, demonstrating that our objective function allows to jointly train a backbone network in a discriminative and generative fashion, consequently outperforming existing self-supervised learning strategies in terms of clustering, generation and out-of-distribution detection performance by a wide margin. We also demonstrate that the solution can be integrated into a neuro-symbolic framework to tackle a simple yet non-trivial instantiation of the symbol grounding problem. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/emsansone/GEDI.

In image generation, Multiple Latent Variable Generative Models (MLVGMs) employ multiple latent variables to gradually shape the final images, from global characteristics to finer and local details (e.g., StyleGAN, NVAE), emerging as powerful tools for diverse applications. Yet their generative dynamics remain only empirically observed, without a systematic understanding of each latent variable's impact. In this work, we propose a novel framework that quantifies the contribution of each latent variable using Mutual Information (MI) as a metric. Our analysis reveals that current MLVGMs often underutilize some latent variables, and provides actionable insights for their use in downstream applications. With this foundation, we introduce a method for generating synthetic data for Self-Supervised Contrastive Representation Learning (SSCRL). By leveraging the hierarchical and disentangled variables of MLVGMs, our approach produces diverse and semantically meaningful views without the need for real image data. Additionally, we introduce a Continuous Sampling (CS) strategy, where the generator dynamically creates new samples during SSCRL training, greatly increasing data variability. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of these contributions, showing that MLVGMs' generated views compete on par with or even surpass views generated from real data. This work establishes a principled approach to understanding and exploiting MLVGMs, advancing both generative modeling and self-supervised learning. Code and pre-trained models at: https://github.com/SerezD/mi_ml_gen.

Data of sequential nature arise in many application domains in forms of, e.g. textual data, DNA sequences, and software execution traces. Different research disciplines have developed methods to learn sequence models from such datasets: (i) in the machine learning field methods such as (hidden) Markov models and recurrent neural networks have been developed and successfully applied to a wide-range of tasks, (ii) in process mining process discovery techniques aim to generate human-interpretable descriptive models, and (iii) in the grammar inference field the focus is on finding descriptive models in the form of formal grammars. Despite their different focuses, these fields share a common goal - learning a model that accurately describes the behavior in the underlying data. Those sequence models are generative, i.e, they can predict what elements are likely to occur after a given unfinished sequence. So far, these fields have developed mainly in isolation from each other and no comparison exists. This paper presents an interdisciplinary experimental evaluation that compares sequence modeling techniques on the task of next-element prediction on four real-life sequence datasets. The results indicate that machine learning techniques that generally have no aim at interpretability in terms of accuracy outperform techniques from the process mining and grammar inference fields that aim to yield interpretable models.

Deep generative models are routinely used in generating samples from complex, high-dimensional distributions. Despite their apparent successes, their statistical properties are not well understood. A common assumption is that with enough training data and sufficiently large neural networks, deep generative model samples will have arbitrarily small errors in sampling from any continuous target distribution. We set up a unifying framework that debunks this belief. We demonstrate that broad classes of deep generative models, including variational autoencoders and generative adversarial networks, are not universal generators. Under the predominant case of Gaussian latent variables, these models can only generate concentrated samples that exhibit light tails. Using tools from concentration of measure and convex geometry, we give analogous results for more general log-concave and strongly log-concave latent variable distributions. We extend our results to diffusion models via a reduction argument. We use the Gromov--Levy inequality to give similar guarantees when the latent variables lie on manifolds with positive Ricci curvature. These results shed light on the limited capacity of common deep generative models to handle heavy tails. We illustrate the empirical relevance of our work with simulations and financial data.

Generative Artificial Intelligence is emerging as an important technology, promising to be transformative in many areas. At the same time, generative AI techniques are based on sampling from probabilistic models, and by default, they come with no guarantees about correctness, safety, fairness, or other properties. Statistical methods offer a promising potential approach to improve the reliability of generative AI techniques. In addition, statistical methods are also promising for improving the quality and efficiency of AI evaluation, as well as for designing interventions and experiments in AI. In this paper, we review some of the existing work on these topics, explaining both the general statistical techniques used, as well as their applications to generative AI. We also discuss limitations and potential future directions.

Generative models aim to simulate realistic effects of various actions across different contexts, from text generation to visual effects. Despite significant efforts to build real-world simulators, the application of generative models to virtual worlds, like financial markets, remains under-explored. In financial markets, generative models can simulate complex market effects of participants with various behaviors, enabling interaction under different market conditions, and training strategies without financial risk. This simulation relies on the finest structured data in financial market like orders thus building the finest realistic simulation. We propose Large Market Model (LMM), an order-level generative foundation model, for financial market simulation, akin to language modeling in the digital world. Our financial Market Simulation engine (MarS), powered by LMM, addresses the domain-specific need for realistic, interactive and controllable order generation. Key observations include LMM's strong scalability across data size and model complexity, and MarS's robust and practicable realism in controlled generation with market impact. We showcase MarS as a forecast tool, detection system, analysis platform, and agent training environment, thus demonstrating MarS's "paradigm shift" potential for a variety of financial applications. We release the code of MarS at https://github.com/microsoft/MarS/.

With the growing availability of data within various scientific domains, generative models hold enormous potential to accelerate scientific discovery. They harness powerful representations learned from datasets to speed up the formulation of novel hypotheses with the potential to impact material discovery broadly. We present the Generative Toolkit for Scientific Discovery (GT4SD). This extensible open-source library enables scientists, developers, and researchers to train and use state-of-the-art generative models to accelerate scientific discovery focused on material design.

Generative models are a class of machine learning models that aim to learn the underlying probability distribution of data. Unlike discriminative models, generative models focus on capturing the data's inherent structure, allowing them to generate new samples that resemble the original data. To fully exploit the potential of modeling probability distributions using quantum physics, a quantum-inspired generative model known as the Born machines have shown great advancements in learning classical and quantum data over matrix product state(MPS) framework. The Born machines support tractable log-likelihood, autoregressive and mask sampling, and have shown outstanding performance in various unsupervised learning tasks. However, much of the current research has been centered on improving the expressive power of MPS, predominantly embedding each token directly by a corresponding tensor index. In this study, we generalize the embedding method into trainable quantum measurement operators that can be simultaneously honed with MPS. Our study indicated that combined with trainable embedding, Born machines can exhibit better performance and learn deeper correlations from the dataset.

In machine learning, generative modeling aims to learn to generate new data statistically similar to the training data distribution. In this paper, we survey learning generative models under limited data, few shots and zero shot, referred to as Generative Modeling under Data Constraint (GM-DC). This is an important topic when data acquisition is challenging, e.g. healthcare applications. We discuss background, challenges, and propose two taxonomies: one on GM-DC tasks and another on GM-DC approaches. Importantly, we study interactions between different GM-DC tasks and approaches. Furthermore, we highlight research gaps, research trends, and potential avenues for future exploration. Project website: https://gmdc-survey.github.io.

Generating synthetic data through generative models is gaining interest in the ML community and beyond, promising a future where datasets can be tailored to individual needs. Unfortunately, synthetic data is usually not perfect, resulting in potential errors in downstream tasks. In this work we explore how the generative process affects the downstream ML task. We show that the naive synthetic data approach -- using synthetic data as if it is real -- leads to downstream models and analyses that do not generalize well to real data. As a first step towards better ML in the synthetic data regime, we introduce Deep Generative Ensemble (DGE) -- a framework inspired by Deep Ensembles that aims to implicitly approximate the posterior distribution over the generative process model parameters. DGE improves downstream model training, evaluation, and uncertainty quantification, vastly outperforming the naive approach on average. The largest improvements are achieved for minority classes and low-density regions of the original data, for which the generative uncertainty is largest.

Graph generation with Machine Learning is an open problem with applications in various research fields. In this work, we propose to cast the generative process of a graph into a sequential one, relying on a node ordering procedure. We use this sequential process to design a novel generative model composed of two recurrent neural networks that learn to predict the edges of graphs: the first network generates one endpoint of each edge, while the second network generates the other endpoint conditioned on the state of the first. We test our approach extensively on five different datasets, comparing with two well-known baselines coming from graph literature, and two recurrent approaches, one of which holds state of the art performances. Evaluation is conducted considering quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the generated samples. Results show that our approach is able to yield novel, and unique graphs originating from very different distributions, while retaining structural properties very similar to those in the training sample. Under the proposed evaluation framework, our approach is able to reach performances comparable to the current state of the art on the graph generation task.

We propose an extension of the decoder Transformer that conditions its generative process on random latent variables which are learned without supervision thanks to a variational procedure. Experimental evaluations show that allowing such a conditioning translates into substantial improvements on downstream tasks.