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Jul 31

STEM: Scaling Transformers with Embedding Modules

Fine-grained sparsity promises higher parametric capacity without proportional per-token compute, but often suffers from training instability, load balancing, and communication overhead. We introduce STEM (Scaling Transformers with Embedding Modules), a static, token-indexed approach that replaces the FFN up-projection with a layer-local embedding lookup while keeping the gate and down-projection dense. This removes runtime routing, enables CPU offload with asynchronous prefetch, and decouples capacity from both per-token FLOPs and cross-device communication. Empirically, STEM trains stably despite extreme sparsity. It improves downstream performance over dense baselines while reducing per-token FLOPs and parameter accesses (eliminating roughly one-third of FFN parameters). STEM learns embedding spaces with large angular spread which enhances its knowledge storage capacity. More interestingly, this enhanced knowledge capacity comes with better interpretability. The token-indexed nature of STEM embeddings allows simple ways to perform knowledge editing and knowledge injection in an interpretable manner without any intervention in the input text or additional computation. In addition, STEM strengthens long-context performance: as sequence length grows, more distinct parameters are activated, yielding practical test-time capacity scaling. Across 350M and 1B model scales, STEM delivers up to ~3--4% accuracy improvements overall, with notable gains on knowledge and reasoning-heavy benchmarks (ARC-Challenge, OpenBookQA, GSM8K, MMLU). Overall, STEM is an effective way of scaling parametric memory while providing better interpretability, better training stability and improved efficiency.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 15 1

Unsupervised Deep Learning for Limited-Angle STEM-EDX Tomography -- Application to 3D Chemical Analysis of Phase-Change Memory Devices

Energy Dispersive X-ray (EDX) tomography in Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy (STEM) enables 3D compositional and elemental mapping at the nanoscale, but its use is limited by restricted tilt ranges and low-dose conditions required to avoid beam damage. Limited-angle acquisition introduces missing-wedge artefacts such as elongation and anisotropic resolution, while noisy low-dose data further degrade reconstruction quality and quantitative reliability. Here, we introduce an unsupervised deep learning framework based on Deep Image Prior with total variation regularization (DIP-TV) for limited-angle STEM-EDX tomography. We extend it to a multi-channel formulation (DIPm-TV) that jointly reconstructs multiple elemental maps by exploiting spatial correlations. Using a synthetic 3-channel phantom, we show that the method compensates for severe missing-wedge artefacts corresponding to approximately 100^circ of missing angular range under moderate noise, outperforming simultaneous iterative reconstruction technique and compressed sensing approaches. We apply the method to 3D chemical analysis of Ge-Sb-Te (GST) memory devices in virgin (as-fabricated) and SET (crystalline) operational states. Samples were prepared as cross-sectional focused ion beam lamellae and acquired under a limited-angle tilt range from -40^circ to +40^circ with 5^circ steps and a dose of 2.0times10^5 e^-/Ang^2. The multi-channel approach enables voxel-by-voxel elemental reconstruction using only EDX signals without external structural priors such as high-angle annular dark-field imaging. The reconstructed volumes show near-isotropic spatial resolution and reveal compositional heterogeneities associated with device operation. This approach enables 3D chemical characterization in experimentally accessible sample geometries where conventional methods fail due to severe angular limitations.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 8

MedSteer: Counterfactual Endoscopic Synthesis via Training-Free Activation Steering

Generative diffusion models are increasingly used for medical imaging data augmentation, but text prompting cannot produce causal training data. Re-prompting rerolls the entire generation trajectory, altering anatomy, texture, and background. Inversion-based editing methods introduce reconstruction error that causes structural drift. We propose MedSteer, a training-free activation-steering framework for endoscopic synthesis. MedSteer identifies a pathology vector for each contrastive prompt pair in the cross-attention layers of a diffusion transformer. At inference time, it steers image activations along this vector, generating counterfactual pairs from scratch where the only difference is the steered concept. All other structure is preserved by construction. We evaluate MedSteer across three experiments on Kvasir v3 and HyperKvasir. On counterfactual generation across three clinical concept pairs, MedSteer achieves flip rates of 0.800, 0.925, and 0.950, outperforming the best inversion-based baseline in both concept flip rate and structural preservation. On dye disentanglement, MedSteer achieves 75% dye removal against 20% (PnP) and 10% (h-Edit). On downstream polyp detection, augmenting with MedSteer counterfactual pairs achieves ViT AUC of 0.9755 versus 0.9083 for quantity-matched re-prompting, confirming that counterfactual structure drives the gain. Code is at link https://github.com/phamtrongthang123/medsteer

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 7 3

DCI: Dual-Conditional Inversion for Boosting Diffusion-Based Image Editing

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in image generation and editing tasks. Inversion within these models aims to recover the latent noise representation for a real or generated image, enabling reconstruction, editing, and other downstream tasks. However, to date, most inversion approaches suffer from an intrinsic trade-off between reconstruction accuracy and editing flexibility. This limitation arises from the difficulty of maintaining both semantic alignment and structural consistency during the inversion process. In this work, we introduce Dual-Conditional Inversion (DCI), a novel framework that jointly conditions on the source prompt and reference image to guide the inversion process. Specifically, DCI formulates the inversion process as a dual-condition fixed-point optimization problem, minimizing both the latent noise gap and the reconstruction error under the joint guidance. This design anchors the inversion trajectory in both semantic and visual space, leading to more accurate and editable latent representations. Our novel setup brings new understanding to the inversion process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DCI achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple editing tasks, significantly improving both reconstruction quality and editing precision. Furthermore, we also demonstrate that our method achieves strong results in reconstruction tasks, implying a degree of robustness and generalizability approaching the ultimate goal of the inversion process.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 3, 2025