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Jul 30

MedDG: An Entity-Centric Medical Consultation Dataset for Entity-Aware Medical Dialogue Generation

Developing conversational agents to interact with patients and provide primary clinical advice has attracted increasing attention due to its huge application potential, especially in the time of COVID-19 Pandemic. However, the training of end-to-end neural-based medical dialogue system is restricted by an insufficient quantity of medical dialogue corpus. In this work, we make the first attempt to build and release a large-scale high-quality Medical Dialogue dataset related to 12 types of common Gastrointestinal diseases named MedDG, with more than 17K conversations collected from the online health consultation community. Five different categories of entities, including diseases, symptoms, attributes, tests, and medicines, are annotated in each conversation of MedDG as additional labels. To push forward the future research on building expert-sensitive medical dialogue system, we proposes two kinds of medical dialogue tasks based on MedDG dataset. One is the next entity prediction and the other is the doctor response generation. To acquire a clear comprehension on these two medical dialogue tasks, we implement several state-of-the-art benchmarks, as well as design two dialogue models with a further consideration on the predicted entities. Experimental results show that the pre-train language models and other baselines struggle on both tasks with poor performance in our dataset, and the response quality can be enhanced with the help of auxiliary entity information. From human evaluation, the simple retrieval model outperforms several state-of-the-art generative models, indicating that there still remains a large room for improvement on generating medically meaningful responses.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 30, 2022

RARE: Retrieval-Aware Robustness Evaluation for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances recency and factuality in answers. However, existing evaluations rarely test how well these systems cope with real-world noise, conflicting between internal and external retrieved contexts, or fast-changing facts. We introduce Retrieval-Aware Robustness Evaluation (RARE), a unified framework and large-scale benchmark that jointly stress-tests query and document perturbations over dynamic, time-sensitive corpora. One of the central features of RARE is a knowledge-graph-driven synthesis pipeline (RARE-Get) that automatically extracts single and multi-hop relations from the customized corpus and generates multi-level question sets without manual intervention. Leveraging this pipeline, we construct a dataset (RARE-Set) spanning 400 expert-level time-sensitive finance, economics, and policy documents and 48,322 questions whose distribution evolves as the underlying sources change. To quantify resilience, we formalize retrieval-conditioned robustness metrics (RARE-Met) that capture a model's ability to remain correct or recover when queries, documents, or real-world retrieval results are systematically altered. Our results show that RAG systems exhibit surprising vulnerability to perturbations, with document robustness consistently being the weakest point regardless of generator size or architecture. RAG systems consistently show lower robustness on multi-hop queries than single-hop queries across all domains.

  • 8 authors
·
May 31, 2025 2

Tackling the Challenges in Scene Graph Generation with Local-to-Global Interactions

In this work, we seek new insights into the underlying challenges of the Scene Graph Generation (SGG) task. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Visual Genome dataset implies -- 1) Ambiguity: even if inter-object relationship contains the same object (or predicate), they may not be visually or semantically similar, 2) Asymmetry: despite the nature of the relationship that embodied the direction, it was not well addressed in previous studies, and 3) Higher-order contexts: leveraging the identities of certain graph elements can help to generate accurate scene graphs. Motivated by the analysis, we design a novel SGG framework, Local-to-Global Interaction Networks (LOGIN). Locally, interactions extract the essence between three instances of subject, object, and background, while baking direction awareness into the network by explicitly constraining the input order of subject and object. Globally, interactions encode the contexts between every graph component (i.e., nodes and edges). Finally, Attract & Repel loss is utilized to fine-tune the distribution of predicate embeddings. By design, our framework enables predicting the scene graph in a bottom-up manner, leveraging the possible complementariness. To quantify how much LOGIN is aware of relational direction, a new diagnostic task called Bidirectional Relationship Classification (BRC) is also proposed. Experimental results demonstrate that LOGIN can successfully distinguish relational direction than existing methods (in BRC task), while showing state-of-the-art results on the Visual Genome benchmark (in SGG task).

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 15, 2021

Enhancing Domain-Specific Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Synthetic Data Generation and Evaluation using Reasoning Models

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems face significant performance gaps when applied to technical domains requiring precise information extraction from complex documents. Current evaluation methodologies relying on document-level metrics inadequately capture token-resolution retrieval accuracy that is critical for domain-related documents. We propose a framework combining granular evaluation metrics with synthetic data generation to optimize domain-specific RAG performance. First, we introduce token-aware metrics Precision Omega and Intersection-over-Union (IoU) that quantify context preservation versus information density trade-offs inherent in technical texts. Second, we develop a reasoning model-driven pipeline using instruction-tuned LLMs (DeepSeek-R1, DeepSeek-R1 distilled variants, and Phi-4) to generate context-anchored QA pairs with discontinuous reference spans across three specialized corpora: SEC 10-K filings (finance), biomedical abstracts (PubMed), and APT threat reports (cybersecurity). Our empirical analysis reveals critical insights: smaller chunks (less than 10 tokens) improve precision by 31-42% (IoU = 0.071 vs. baseline 0.053) at recall costs (-18%), while domain-specific embedding strategies yield 22% variance in optimal chunk sizing (5-20 tokens). The DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B model demonstrates superior concept alignment (+14% mean IoU over alternatives), though no configuration universally dominates. Financial texts favor larger chunks for risk factor coverage (Recall = 0.81 at size = 20), whereas cybersecurity content benefits from atomic segmentation, Precision Omega = 0.28 at size = 5. Our code is available on https://github.com/aryan-jadon/Synthetic-Data-Generation-and-Evaluation-using-Reasoning-Model

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 21, 2025

Balancing Label Quantity and Quality for Scalable Elicitation

Scalable oversight studies methods of training and evaluating AI systems in domains where human judgment is unreliable or expensive, such as scientific research and software engineering in complex codebases. Most work in this area has focused on methods of improving the quality of labels. Recent work by Burns et al. (2023) considers the complementary problem of training models with low-quality labels, finding that large pretrained models often have an inductive bias towards producing correct answers. In practice, however, neither label quantity nor quality is fixed: practitioners face a quantity-quality tradeoff. In this paper, we explore the microeconomics of the quantity-quality tradeoff on binary NLP classification tasks used in Burns et al. (2023). While sample-efficient learning has been studied extensively, little public research has focused on scalable elicitation: eliciting capabilities from pretrained models subject to labeling cost constraints. We find that this setting has novel dynamics caused by the tradeoff between label quantity and quality, as well as the model's existing latent capabilities. We observe three regimes of eliciting classification knowledge from pretrained models using supervised finetuning: quantity-dominant, quality-dominant, and a mixed regime involving the use of low- and high-quality data together to attain higher accuracy at a lower cost than using either alone. We explore sample-efficient elicitation methods that make use of two datasets of differing qualities, and establish a Pareto frontier of scalable elicitation methods that optimally trade off labeling cost and classifier performance. We find that the accuracy of supervised fine-tuning can be improved by up to 5 percentage points at a fixed labeling budget by adding a few-shot prompt to make use of the model's existing knowledge of the task.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 17, 2024

Length Value Model: Scalable Value Pretraining for Token-Level Length Modeling

Token serves as the fundamental unit of computation in modern autoregressive models, and generation length directly influences both inference cost and reasoning performance. Despite its importance, existing approaches lack fine-grained length modeling, operating primarily at the coarse-grained sequence level. We introduce the Length Value Model (LenVM), a token-level framework that models the remaining generation length. By formulating length modeling as a value estimation problem and assigning a constant negative reward to each generated token, LenVM predicts a bounded, discounted return that serves as a monotone proxy for the remaining generation horizon. This formulation yields supervision that is annotation-free, dense, unbiased, and scalable. Experiments on LLMs and VLMs demonstrate LenVM provides a highly effective signal at inference time. On the LIFEBench exact length matching task, applying LenVM to a 7B model improves the length score from 30.9 to 64.8, significantly outperforming frontier closed-source models. Furthermore, LenVM enables continuous control over the trade off between performance and efficiency. On GSM8K at a budget of 200 tokens, LenVM maintains 63% accuracy compared to 6 percent for token budget baseline. It also accurately predicts total generation length from the prompt boundary. Finally, LenVM's token-level values offer an interpretable view of generation dynamics, revealing how specific tokens shift reasoning toward shorter or longer regimes. Results demonstrate that LenVM supports a broad range of applications and token length can be effectively modeled as a token-level value signal, highlighting the potential of LenVM as a general framework for length modeling and as a length-specific value signal that could support future RL training. Code is available at https://github.com/eric-ai-lab/Length-Value-Model.

ucsbai UCSB AI Group
·
Apr 28 2

TTS-VAR: A Test-Time Scaling Framework for Visual Auto-Regressive Generation

Scaling visual generation models is essential for real-world content creation, yet requires substantial training and computational expenses. Alternatively, test-time scaling has garnered growing attention due to resource efficiency and promising performance. In this work, we present TTS-VAR, the first general test-time scaling framework for visual auto-regressive (VAR) models, modeling the generation process as a path searching problem. To dynamically balance computational efficiency with exploration capacity, we first introduce an adaptive descending batch size schedule throughout the causal generation process. Besides, inspired by VAR's hierarchical coarse-to-fine multi-scale generation, our framework integrates two key components: (i) At coarse scales, we observe that generated tokens are hard for evaluation, possibly leading to erroneous acceptance of inferior samples or rejection of superior samples. Noticing that the coarse scales contain sufficient structural information, we propose clustering-based diversity search. It preserves structural variety through semantic feature clustering, enabling later selection on samples with higher potential. (ii) In fine scales, resampling-based potential selection prioritizes promising candidates using potential scores, which are defined as reward functions incorporating multi-scale generation history. Experiments on the powerful VAR model Infinity show a notable 8.7% GenEval score improvement (from 0.69 to 0.75). Key insights reveal that early-stage structural features effectively influence final quality, and resampling efficacy varies across generation scales. Code is available at https://github.com/ali-vilab/TTS-VAR.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 24, 2025 2

InterleaveThinker: Reinforcing Agentic Interleaved Generation

Recent image generators have demonstrated impressive photorealism and instruction-following capabilities in single-image generation and editing. However, constrained by their architectures, they cannot achieve interleaved generation (text-image sequence), which has crucial applications in visual narratives, guidance, and embodied manipulation. Even the latest open-source Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) exhibit limited performance in this regard. In this paper, we introduce InterleaveThinker, the first multi-agent pipeline designed to endow any existing image generator with interleaved generation capabilities. Specifically, we employ a planner agent to organize the image-text input sequence, instructing the image generator on the required execution at each step. Subsequently, we introduce a critic agent to evaluate the generator's outputs, identify samples that deviate from the planned instructions, and refine the instructions for regeneration. To implement this pipeline, we construct the Interleave-Planner-SFT-80k and Interleave-Critic-SFT-112k to perform a format cold-start. Then we develop Interleave-Critic-RL-13k to reinforce the step-wise instruction correction capability within a generation trajectory using GRPO. Since a single interleaved generation trajectory may involve over 25 generator calls, optimizing the entire trajectory is computationally impractical. Therefore, we propose accuracy reward and step-wise reward, allowing single-step RL to effectively guide the entire generation trajectory. The results show that InterleaveThinker improves performance across various image generators. On interleaved generation benchmarks, it achieves performance comparable to Nano Banana and GPT-5. Surprisingly, it also significantly enhances the base model on reasoning-based benchmarks; for example, on 4-step FLUX.2-klein, we observe substantial gains on WISE and RISE.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 10 3

CORAG: A Cost-Constrained Retrieval Optimization System for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generation capabilities but often struggle to access up-to-date information, which can lead to hallucinations. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses this issue by incorporating knowledge from external databases, enabling more accurate and relevant responses. Due to the context window constraints of LLMs, it is impractical to input the entire external database context directly into the model. Instead, only the most relevant information, referred to as chunks, is selectively retrieved. However, current RAG research faces three key challenges. First, existing solutions often select each chunk independently, overlooking potential correlations among them. Second, in practice the utility of chunks is non-monotonic, meaning that adding more chunks can decrease overall utility. Traditional methods emphasize maximizing the number of included chunks, which can inadvertently compromise performance. Third, each type of user query possesses unique characteristics that require tailored handling, an aspect that current approaches do not fully consider. To overcome these challenges, we propose a cost constrained retrieval optimization system CORAG for retrieval-augmented generation. We employ a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) based policy framework to find optimal chunk combinations sequentially, allowing for a comprehensive consideration of correlations among chunks. Additionally, rather than viewing budget exhaustion as a termination condition, we integrate budget constraints into the optimization of chunk combinations, effectively addressing the non-monotonicity of chunk utility.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 1, 2024

GEO: Generative Engine Optimization

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has ushered in a new paradigm of search engines that use generative models to gather and summarize information to answer user queries. This emerging technology, which we formalize under the unified framework of generative engines (GEs), can generate accurate and personalized responses, rapidly replacing traditional search engines like Google and Bing. Generative Engines typically satisfy queries by synthesizing information from multiple sources and summarizing them using LLMs. While this shift significantly improves user utility and generative search engine traffic, it poses a huge challenge for the third stakeholder - website and content creators. Given the black-box and fast-moving nature of generative engines, content creators have little to no control over when and how their content is displayed. With generative engines here to stay, we must ensure the creator economy is not disadvantaged. To address this, we introduce Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), the first novel paradigm to aid content creators in improving their content visibility in GE responses through a flexible black-box optimization framework for optimizing and defining visibility metrics. We facilitate systematic evaluation by introducing GEO-bench, a large-scale benchmark of diverse user queries across multiple domains, along with relevant web sources to answer these queries. Through rigorous evaluation, we demonstrate that GEO can boost visibility by up to 40\% in GE responses. Moreover, we show the efficacy of these strategies varies across domains, underscoring the need for domain-specific optimization methods. Our work opens a new frontier in information discovery systems, with profound implications for both developers of GEs and content creators.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 16, 2023

Rewards Are Enough for Fast Photo-Realistic Text-to-image Generation

Aligning generated images to complicated text prompts and human preferences is a central challenge in Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC). With reward-enhanced diffusion distillation emerging as a promising approach that boosts controllability and fidelity of text-to-image models, we identify a fundamental paradigm shift: as conditions become more specific and reward signals stronger, the rewards themselves become the dominant force in generation. In contrast, the diffusion losses serve as an overly expensive form of regularization. To thoroughly validate our hypothesis, we introduce R0, a novel conditional generation approach via regularized reward maximization. Instead of relying on tricky diffusion distillation losses, R0 proposes a new perspective that treats image generations as an optimization problem in data space which aims to search for valid images that have high compositional rewards. By innovative designs of the generator parameterization and proper regularization techniques, we train state-of-the-art few-step text-to-image generative models with R0 at scales. Our results challenge the conventional wisdom of diffusion post-training and conditional generation by demonstrating that rewards play a dominant role in scenarios with complex conditions. We hope our findings can contribute to further research into human-centric and reward-centric generation paradigms across the broader field of AIGC. Code is available at https://github.com/Luo-Yihong/R0.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 17, 2025 2

DataClaw0: Agentic Tailoring Multimodal Data from Raw Streams

Massive unstructured multimodal streams suffer from high "data entropy," impeding both efficient human knowledge acquisition and high-quality AI post-training. Existing passive annotation paradigms, heavily reliant on heuristic rules or general VLMs, are costly, monotonous, and fail to unlock the deep procedural logic embedded in raw data. We elevate data processing to a learnable capability, proposing a paradigm shift towards Agentic Data Tailoring, which actively refining and structuring data to align with diverse user and downstream intents. To overcome the data scarcity bottleneck in training such high-order capabilities, we design a two-stage pipeline grounding generative semantic synthesis in deterministic Factual Anchors, yielding a large-scale dataset spanning five core physical and digital domains. Building upon this, DataClaw_0-9B model synergizes Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), achieving robust alignment with complex refinement and tailoring intents. To systematically quantify this capability, we construct DataClaw_0-val, the first benchmark dedicated to data refinement. Crucially, we adopt downstream post-training as the ultimate validation touchstone. Evaluations on video generation, real-world VQA, and GUI navigation confirm that DataClaw_0 delivers high-information-density tailored data, facilitating efficient model adaptation to new tasks under limited training data regimes. Project page: https://czjdsg.github.io/MakeAnyData

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 18 1

Generative Physical AI in Vision: A Survey

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rapidly advanced the field of computer vision by enabling machines to create and interpret visual data with unprecedented sophistication. This transformation builds upon a foundation of generative models to produce realistic images, videos, and 3D/4D content. Conventional generative models primarily focus on visual fidelity while often neglecting the physical plausibility of the generated content. This gap limits their effectiveness in applications that require adherence to real-world physical laws, such as robotics, autonomous systems, and scientific simulations. As generative models evolve to increasingly integrate physical realism and dynamic simulation, their potential to function as "world simulators" expands. Therefore, the field of physics-aware generation in computer vision is rapidly growing, calling for a comprehensive survey to provide a structured analysis of current efforts. To serve this purpose, the survey presents a systematic review, categorizing methods based on how they incorporate physical knowledge, either through explicit simulation or implicit learning. It also analyzes key paradigms, discusses evaluation protocols, and identifies future research directions. By offering a comprehensive overview, this survey aims to help future developments in physically grounded generation for computer vision. The reviewed papers are summarized at https://tinyurl.com/Physics-Aware-Generation.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 18, 2025

Iterative Object Count Optimization for Text-to-image Diffusion Models

We address a persistent challenge in text-to-image models: accurately generating a specified number of objects. Current models, which learn from image-text pairs, inherently struggle with counting, as training data cannot depict every possible number of objects for any given object. To solve this, we propose optimizing the generated image based on a counting loss derived from a counting model that aggregates an object\'s potential. Employing an out-of-the-box counting model is challenging for two reasons: first, the model requires a scaling hyperparameter for the potential aggregation that varies depending on the viewpoint of the objects, and second, classifier guidance techniques require modified models that operate on noisy intermediate diffusion steps. To address these challenges, we propose an iterated online training mode that improves the accuracy of inferred images while altering the text conditioning embedding and dynamically adjusting hyperparameters. Our method offers three key advantages: (i) it can consider non-derivable counting techniques based on detection models, (ii) it is a zero-shot plug-and-play solution facilitating rapid changes to the counting techniques and image generation methods, and (iii) the optimized counting token can be reused to generate accurate images without additional optimization. We evaluate the generation of various objects and show significant improvements in accuracy. The project page is available at https://ozzafar.github.io/count_token.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 21, 2024 2

GEMS: Agent-Native Multimodal Generation with Memory and Skills

Recent multimodal generation models have achieved remarkable progress on general-purpose generation tasks, yet continue to struggle with complex instructions and specialized downstream tasks. Inspired by the success of advanced agent frameworks such as Claude Code, we propose GEMS (Agent-Native Multimodal GEneration with Memory and Skills), a framework that pushes beyond the inherent limitations of foundational models on both general and downstream tasks. GEMS is built upon three core components. Agent Loop introduces a structured multi-agent framework that iteratively improves generation quality through closed-loop optimization. Agent Memory provides a persistent, trajectory-level memory that hierarchically stores both factual states and compressed experiential summaries, enabling a global view of the optimization process while reducing redundancy. Agent Skill offers an extensible collection of domain-specific expertise with on-demand loading, allowing the system to effectively handle diverse downstream applications. Across five mainstream tasks and four downstream tasks, evaluated on multiple generative backends, GEMS consistently achieves significant performance gains. Most notably, it enables the lightweight 6B model Z-Image-Turbo to surpass the state-of-the-art Nano Banana 2 on GenEval2, demonstrating the effectiveness of agent harness in extending model capabilities beyond their original limits.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 30 4

IB-Flow: Information Bottleneck-Guided CFG Distillation for Few-Step Text-to-Image Generation

While large-scale text-to-image generative models have achieved unprecedented visual performance, their inherent reliance on multi-step iterative solvers incurs severe inference latency. Few-step distillation targeting the Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) trajectory has emerged as the prevalent dual-dimensional compression paradigm. However, existing frameworks remain subjugated by a coarse-grained blind injection paradigm that perpetually enforces a globally static guidance strength while indiscriminately sampling the supervisor timestep. This state-agnostic design completely disregards the intrinsic nature of image generation as a dynamic evolutionary process characterized by progressive entropy reduction, which not only restricts the performance boundary of few-step compression but also precipitates severe CFG over-conditioning artifacts. To transcend these limitations, we re-examine the distillation procedure through the theoretical lens of Information Theory, formally modeling it as a dynamic mutual information game constrained by the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle. Specifically, we dismantle traditional blind assumptions via a dual-track adaptive framework. To determine the injection target, we propose an instance-aware selection mechanism that transmutes the intractable KL divergence constraint into a zero-overhead closed-form solution predicated on the local vector field norm. To regulate the injection strength, we introduce an entropy-aware schedule that dynamically decays alongside the SNR, applying maximal thrust for initial structural anchoring before smoothly reverting to the natural manifold to refine micro-details. Extensive empirical evaluations corroborate that our framework fundamentally eradicates over-conditioning artifacts, shattering the performance ceiling to achieve SOTA generative fidelity under extremely stringent 2-step configurations.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 9

LucidDreaming: Controllable Object-Centric 3D Generation

With the recent development of generative models, Text-to-3D generations have also seen significant growth. Nonetheless, achieving precise control over 3D generation continues to be an arduous task, as using text to control often leads to missing objects and imprecise locations. Contemporary strategies for enhancing controllability in 3D generation often entail the introduction of additional parameters, such as customized diffusion models. This often induces hardness in adapting to different diffusion models or creating distinct objects. In this paper, we present LucidDreaming as an effective pipeline capable of fine-grained control over 3D generation. It requires only minimal input of 3D bounding boxes, which can be deduced from a simple text prompt using a Large Language Model. Specifically, we propose clipped ray sampling to separately render and optimize objects with user specifications. We also introduce object-centric density blob bias, fostering the separation of generated objects. With individual rendering and optimizing of objects, our method excels not only in controlled content generation from scratch but also within the pre-trained NeRF scenes. In such scenarios, existing generative approaches often disrupt the integrity of the original scene, and current editing methods struggle to synthesize new content in empty spaces. We show that our method exhibits remarkable adaptability across a spectrum of mainstream Score Distillation Sampling-based 3D generation frameworks, and achieves superior alignment of 3D content when compared to baseline approaches. We also provide a dataset of prompts with 3D bounding boxes, benchmarking 3D spatial controllability.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 30, 2023

Noise Consistency Training: A Native Approach for One-Step Generator in Learning Additional Controls

The pursuit of efficient and controllable high-quality content generation remains a central challenge in artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC). While one-step generators, enabled by diffusion distillation techniques, offer excellent generation quality and computational efficiency, adapting them to new control conditions--such as structural constraints, semantic guidelines, or external inputs--poses a significant challenge. Conventional approaches often necessitate computationally expensive modifications to the base model and subsequent diffusion distillation. This paper introduces Noise Consistency Training (NCT), a novel and lightweight approach to directly integrate new control signals into pre-trained one-step generators without requiring access to original training images or retraining the base diffusion model. NCT operates by introducing an adapter module and employs a noise consistency loss in the noise space of the generator. This loss aligns the adapted model's generation behavior across noises that are conditionally dependent to varying degrees, implicitly guiding it to adhere to the new control. Theoretically, this training objective can be understood as minimizing the distributional distance between the adapted generator and the conditional distribution induced by the new conditions. NCT is modular, data-efficient, and easily deployable, relying only on the pre-trained one-step generator and a control signal model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NCT achieves state-of-the-art controllable generation in a single forward pass, surpassing existing multi-step and distillation-based methods in both generation quality and computational efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/Luo-Yihong/NCT

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 24, 2025 1

Bellman Optimal Step-size Straightening of Flow-Matching Models

Flow matching is a powerful framework for generating high-quality samples in various applications, especially image synthesis. However, the intensive computational demands of these models, especially during the fine-tuning process and sampling processes, pose significant challenges for low-resource scenarios. This paper introduces Bellman Optimal Step-size Straightening (BOSS) technique for distilling flow-matching generative models: it aims specifically for a few-step efficient image sampling while adhering to a computational budget constraint. First, this technique involves a dynamic programming algorithm that optimizes the step sizes of the pretrained network. Then, it refines the velocity network to match the optimal step sizes, aiming to straighten the generation paths. Extensive experimental evaluations across image generation tasks demonstrate the efficacy of BOSS in terms of both resource utilization and image quality. Our results reveal that BOSS achieves substantial gains in efficiency while maintaining competitive sample quality, effectively bridging the gap between low-resource constraints and the demanding requirements of flow-matching generative models. Our paper also fortifies the responsible development of artificial intelligence, offering a more sustainable generative model that reduces computational costs and environmental footprints. Our code can be found at https://github.com/nguyenngocbaocmt02/BOSS.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 27, 2023

Sparse VideoGen2: Accelerate Video Generation with Sparse Attention via Semantic-Aware Permutation

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) are essential for video generation but suffer from significant latency due to the quadratic complexity of attention. By computing only critical tokens, sparse attention reduces computational costs and offers a promising acceleration approach. However, we identify that existing methods fail to approach optimal generation quality under the same computation budget for two reasons: (1) Inaccurate critical token identification: current methods cluster tokens based on position rather than semantics, leading to imprecise aggregated representations. (2) Excessive computation waste: critical tokens are scattered among non-critical ones, leading to wasted computation on GPUs, which are optimized for processing contiguous tokens. In this paper, we propose SVG2, a training-free framework that maximizes identification accuracy and minimizes computation waste, achieving a Pareto frontier trade-off between generation quality and efficiency. The core of SVG2 is semantic-aware permutation, which clusters and reorders tokens based on semantic similarity using k-means. This approach ensures both a precise cluster representation, improving identification accuracy, and a densified layout of critical tokens, enabling efficient computation without padding. Additionally, SVG2 integrates top-p dynamic budget control and customized kernel implementations, achieving up to 2.30x and 1.89x speedup while maintaining a PSNR of up to 30 and 26 on HunyuanVideo and Wan 2.1, respectively.

  • 14 authors
·
May 24, 2025 2

Text-to-Image Diffusion Models Cannot Count, and Prompt Refinement Cannot Help

Generative modeling is widely regarded as one of the most essential problems in today's AI community, with text-to-image generation having gained unprecedented real-world impacts. Among various approaches, diffusion models have achieved remarkable success and have become the de facto solution for text-to-image generation. However, despite their impressive performance, these models exhibit fundamental limitations in adhering to numerical constraints in user instructions, frequently generating images with an incorrect number of objects. While several prior works have mentioned this issue, a comprehensive and rigorous evaluation of this limitation remains lacking. To address this gap, we introduce T2ICountBench, a novel benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate the counting ability of state-of-the-art text-to-image diffusion models. Our benchmark encompasses a diverse set of generative models, including both open-source and private systems. It explicitly isolates counting performance from other capabilities, provides structured difficulty levels, and incorporates human evaluations to ensure high reliability. Extensive evaluations with T2ICountBench reveal that all state-of-the-art diffusion models fail to generate the correct number of objects, with accuracy dropping significantly as the number of objects increases. Additionally, an exploratory study on prompt refinement demonstrates that such simple interventions generally do not improve counting accuracy. Our findings highlight the inherent challenges in numerical understanding within diffusion models and point to promising directions for future improvements.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 9, 2025

Generative Hierarchical Materials Search

Generative models trained at scale can now produce text, video, and more recently, scientific data such as crystal structures. In applications of generative approaches to materials science, and in particular to crystal structures, the guidance from the domain expert in the form of high-level instructions can be essential for an automated system to output candidate crystals that are viable for downstream research. In this work, we formulate end-to-end language-to-structure generation as a multi-objective optimization problem, and propose Generative Hierarchical Materials Search (GenMS) for controllable generation of crystal structures. GenMS consists of (1) a language model that takes high-level natural language as input and generates intermediate textual information about a crystal (e.g., chemical formulae), and (2) a diffusion model that takes intermediate information as input and generates low-level continuous value crystal structures. GenMS additionally uses a graph neural network to predict properties (e.g., formation energy) from the generated crystal structures. During inference, GenMS leverages all three components to conduct a forward tree search over the space of possible structures. Experiments show that GenMS outperforms other alternatives of directly using language models to generate structures both in satisfying user request and in generating low-energy structures. We confirm that GenMS is able to generate common crystal structures such as double perovskites, or spinels, solely from natural language input, and hence can form the foundation for more complex structure generation in near future.

  • 10 authors
·
Sep 10, 2024 4

Generative Model for Models: Rapid DNN Customization for Diverse Tasks and Resource Constraints

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.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 28, 2023

EnerVerse: Envisioning Embodied Future Space for Robotics Manipulation

We introduce EnerVerse, a comprehensive framework for embodied future space generation specifically designed for robotic manipulation tasks. EnerVerse seamlessly integrates convolutional and bidirectional attention mechanisms for inner-chunk space modeling, ensuring low-level consistency and continuity. Recognizing the inherent redundancy in video data, we propose a sparse memory context combined with a chunkwise unidirectional generative paradigm to enable the generation of infinitely long sequences. To further augment robotic capabilities, we introduce the Free Anchor View (FAV) space, which provides flexible perspectives to enhance observation and analysis. The FAV space mitigates motion modeling ambiguity, removes physical constraints in confined environments, and significantly improves the robot's generalization and adaptability across various tasks and settings. To address the prohibitive costs and labor intensity of acquiring multi-camera observations, we present a data engine pipeline that integrates a generative model with 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS). This pipeline leverages the generative model's robust generalization capabilities and the spatial constraints provided by 4DGS, enabling an iterative enhancement of data quality and diversity, thus creating a data flywheel effect that effectively narrows the sim-to-real gap. Finally, our experiments demonstrate that the embodied future space generation prior substantially enhances policy predictive capabilities, resulting in improved overall performance, particularly in long-range robotic manipulation tasks.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 3, 2025 3

Fine-Tuning Visual Autoregressive Models for Subject-Driven Generation

Recent advances in text-to-image generative models have enabled numerous practical applications, including subject-driven generation, which fine-tunes pretrained models to capture subject semantics from only a few examples. While diffusion-based models produce high-quality images, their extensive denoising steps result in significant computational overhead, limiting real-world applicability. Visual autoregressive~(VAR) models, which predict next-scale tokens rather than spatially adjacent ones, offer significantly faster inference suitable for practical deployment. In this paper, we propose the first VAR-based approach for subject-driven generation. However, na\"{\i}ve fine-tuning VAR leads to computational overhead, language drift, and reduced diversity. To address these challenges, we introduce selective layer tuning to reduce complexity and prior distillation to mitigate language drift. Additionally, we found that the early stages have a greater influence on the generation of subject than the latter stages, which merely synthesize local details. Based on this finding, we propose scale-wise weighted tuning, which prioritizes coarser resolutions for promoting the model to focus on the subject-relevant information instead of local details. Extensive experiments validate that our method significantly outperforms diffusion-based baselines across various metrics and demonstrates its practical usage.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 3, 2025

MemoGen: Can Past Experience Improve Future Text-to-Image Generation?

Modern text-to-image models have achieved strong visual synthesis, yet remain unreliable when prompts require implicit visual constraints, relational reasoning, or external knowledge. Existing retrieval-augmented and agentic generation methods mitigate this issue by acquiring external knowledge, references, or refined prompts for the current request, yet they typically treat each generation as an isolated episode and do not systematically preserve past successes or failures for future use. In this work, we ask whether a text-to-image system can continually improve from its own generation experience without updating the underlying generator. We propose MemoGen, a training-free framework that augments existing image generators with an agentic evolution layer. For each task, MemoGen explicitly infers visual requirements, retrieves external evidence and references when necessary, translates them into executable generation constraints, evaluates the generated result, and stores task understanding, reference choices, visual feedback, successful strategies, and failure lessons as reusable experience memory. Across evolution rounds, the agent retrieves relevant experience to improve similar future generations, selectively repairing previously failed cases while preserving successful ones, thereby enabling test-time self-evolution without parameter updates. Extensive experiments on knowledge-intensive and reasoning-oriented benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of this paradigm: after only two evolution rounds, MemoGen built upon the open-source Qwen-Image backbone surpasses strong proprietary systems such as Nano Banana Pro and GPT-Image-1 on WISE and Mind-Bench, showing that explicit experience memory can serve as a powerful continual learning signal for reliable text-to-image generation.

  • 13 authors
·
Jun 1

Flow Network based Generative Models for Non-Iterative Diverse Candidate Generation

This paper is about the problem of learning a stochastic policy for generating an object (like a molecular graph) from a sequence of actions, such that the probability of generating an object is proportional to a given positive reward for that object. Whereas standard return maximization tends to converge to a single return-maximizing sequence, there are cases where we would like to sample a diverse set of high-return solutions. These arise, for example, in black-box function optimization when few rounds are possible, each with large batches of queries, where the batches should be diverse, e.g., in the design of new molecules. One can also see this as a problem of approximately converting an energy function to a generative distribution. While MCMC methods can achieve that, they are expensive and generally only perform local exploration. Instead, training a generative policy amortizes the cost of search during training and yields to fast generation. Using insights from Temporal Difference learning, we propose GFlowNet, based on a view of the generative process as a flow network, making it possible to handle the tricky case where different trajectories can yield the same final state, e.g., there are many ways to sequentially add atoms to generate some molecular graph. We cast the set of trajectories as a flow and convert the flow consistency equations into a learning objective, akin to the casting of the Bellman equations into Temporal Difference methods. We prove that any global minimum of the proposed objectives yields a policy which samples from the desired distribution, and demonstrate the improved performance and diversity of GFlowNet on a simple domain where there are many modes to the reward function, and on a molecule synthesis task.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 8, 2021

User-Oriented Multi-Turn Dialogue Generation with Tool Use at scale

The recent paradigm shift toward large reasoning models (LRMs) as autonomous agents has intensified the demand for sophisticated, multi-turn tool-use capabilities. Yet, existing datasets and data-generation approaches are limited by static, predefined toolsets that cannot scale to the complexity of open-ended human-agent collaboration. To address this, we initially developed a framework for automated task-oriented multi-turn dialogue generation at scale, utilizing an LRM-based simulator to dynamically generate high-value, domain-specific tools to solve specified tasks. However, we observe that a purely task-oriented design often results in "solely task-solving" trajectories, where the agent completes the objective with minimal interaction, failing to generate the high turn-count conversations seen in realistic scenarios. To bridge this gap, we shift toward a user-oriented simulation paradigm. By decoupling task generation from a dedicated user simulator that mimics human behavioral rules - such as incremental request-making and turn-by-turn feedback - we facilitate more authentic, extended multi-turn dialogues that reflect the iterative nature of real-world problem solving. Our generation pipeline operates as a versatile, plug-and-play module capable of initiating generation from any state, ensuring high scalability in producing extended tool-use data. Furthermore, by facilitating multiple task completions within a single trajectory, it yields a high-density dataset that reflects the multifaceted demands of real-world human-agent interaction.

upstage upstage
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Jan 13 3

OneRec: Unifying Retrieve and Rank with Generative Recommender and Iterative Preference Alignment

Recently, generative retrieval-based recommendation systems have emerged as a promising paradigm. However, most modern recommender systems adopt a retrieve-and-rank strategy, where the generative model functions only as a selector during the retrieval stage. In this paper, we propose OneRec, which replaces the cascaded learning framework with a unified generative model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end generative model that significantly surpasses current complex and well-designed recommender systems in real-world scenarios. Specifically, OneRec includes: 1) an encoder-decoder structure, which encodes the user's historical behavior sequences and gradually decodes the videos that the user may be interested in. We adopt sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to scale model capacity without proportionally increasing computational FLOPs. 2) a session-wise generation approach. In contrast to traditional next-item prediction, we propose a session-wise generation, which is more elegant and contextually coherent than point-by-point generation that relies on hand-crafted rules to properly combine the generated results. 3) an Iterative Preference Alignment module combined with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to enhance the quality of the generated results. Unlike DPO in NLP, a recommendation system typically has only one opportunity to display results for each user's browsing request, making it impossible to obtain positive and negative samples simultaneously. To address this limitation, We design a reward model to simulate user generation and customize the sampling strategy. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that a limited number of DPO samples can align user interest preferences and significantly improve the quality of generated results. We deployed OneRec in the main scene of Kuaishou, achieving a 1.6\% increase in watch-time, which is a substantial improvement.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 26, 2025 3

Gen-Searcher: Reinforcing Agentic Search for Image Generation

Recent image generation models have shown strong capabilities in generating high-fidelity and photorealistic images. However, they are fundamentally constrained by frozen internal knowledge, thus often failing on real-world scenarios that are knowledge-intensive or require up-to-date information. In this paper, we present Gen-Searcher, as the first attempt to train a search-augmented image generation agent, which performs multi-hop reasoning and search to collect the textual knowledge and reference images needed for grounded generation. To achieve this, we construct a tailored data pipeline and curate two high-quality datasets, Gen-Searcher-SFT-10k and Gen-Searcher-RL-6k, containing diverse search-intensive prompts and corresponding ground-truth synthesis images. We further introduce KnowGen, a comprehensive benchmark that explicitly requires search-grounded external knowledge for image generation and evaluates models from multiple dimensions. Based on these resources, we train Gen-Searcher with SFT followed by agentic reinforcement learning with dual reward feedback, which combines text-based and image-based rewards to provide more stable and informative learning signals for GRPO training. Experiments show that Gen-Searcher brings substantial gains, improving Qwen-Image by around 16 points on KnowGen and 15 points on WISE. We hope this work can serve as an open foundation for search agents in image generation, and we fully open-source our data, models, and code.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 30 3

FastLightGen: Fast and Light Video Generation with Fewer Steps and Parameters

The recent advent of powerful video generation models, such as Hunyuan, WanX, Veo3, and Kling, has inaugurated a new era in the field. However, the practical deployment of these models is severely impeded by their substantial computational overhead, which stems from enormous parameter counts and the iterative, multi-step sampling process required during inference. Prior research on accelerating generative models has predominantly followed two distinct trajectories: reducing the number of sampling steps (e.g., LCM, DMD, and MagicDistillation) or compressing the model size for more efficient inference (e.g., ICMD). The potential of simultaneously compressing both to create a fast and lightweight model remains an unexplored avenue. In this paper, we propose FastLightGen, an algorithm that transforms large, computationally expensive models into fast, lightweight counterparts. The core idea is to construct an optimal teacher model, one engineered to maximize student performance, within a synergistic framework for distilling both model size and inference steps. Our extensive experiments on HunyuanVideo-ATI2V and WanX-TI2V reveal that a generator using 4-step sampling and 30\% parameter pruning achieves optimal visual quality under a constrained inference budget. Furthermore, FastLightGen consistently outperforms all competing methods, establishing a new state-of-the-art in efficient video generation.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 2

Droplet3D: Commonsense Priors from Videos Facilitate 3D Generation

Scaling laws have validated the success and promise of large-data-trained models in creative generation across text, image, and video domains. However, this paradigm faces data scarcity in the 3D domain, as there is far less of it available on the internet compared to the aforementioned modalities. Fortunately, there exist adequate videos that inherently contain commonsense priors, offering an alternative supervisory signal to mitigate the generalization bottleneck caused by limited native 3D data. On the one hand, videos capturing multiple views of an object or scene provide a spatial consistency prior for 3D generation. On the other hand, the rich semantic information contained within the videos enables the generated content to be more faithful to the text prompts and semantically plausible. This paper explores how to apply the video modality in 3D asset generation, spanning datasets to models. We introduce Droplet3D-4M, the first large-scale video dataset with multi-view level annotations, and train Droplet3D, a generative model supporting both image and dense text input. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating its ability to produce spatially consistent and semantically plausible content. Moreover, in contrast to the prevailing 3D solutions, our approach exhibits the potential for extension to scene-level applications. This indicates that the commonsense priors from the videos significantly facilitate 3D creation. We have open-sourced all resources including the dataset, code, technical framework, and model weights: https://dropletx.github.io/.

  • 14 authors
·
Aug 28, 2025 2

Echo-Infinity: Learning Evolving Memory for Real-Time Infinite Video Generation

We present Echo Infinity, an autoregressive (AR) framework towards real-time infinite video generation that employs a learnable evolving memory to dynamically filter, abstract, and compress any-length history at constant cost. Existing methods mainly curate memory with predefined KV-cache schedules, fixed-ratio heuristic compression, or inference-time RoPE adaptation. These designs inevitably lose historical information and amplify compounding errors due to their limited cache window and ignorance of autoregressive generation noise. Inspired by human memory consolidation, Echo-Infinity replaces handcrafted memory curation with learnable Memory Query, which are updated by attention and a gating mechanism when past frames are evicted from the local window. The queries are optimized end-to-end with the video diffusion transformers (DiTs), forming an evolving memory that supports arbitrary compression ratios with constant computation independent of video length. They also act as a generalizable generation prior, improving quality even when only the optimized initial state is used. We further introduce Unified Relative RoPE Recipe, which anchors the sink frames to start from id 0 and lets the newest frame id grow at most to the DiTs' pretrained maximum temporal RoPE id throughout training and inference, freeing the model from the finite RoPE constraint and closing the train-test RoPE extrapolation gap. In long and short video generation, Echo-Infinity achieves state-of-the-art performance, and, to our knowledge, demonstrates promising 24-hour (>1.3 M frames) real-time rollouts for the first time, suggesting a practical path toward infinite video generation.

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 2 2

DStruct2Design: Data and Benchmarks for Data Structure Driven Generative Floor Plan Design

Text conditioned generative models for images have yielded impressive results. Text conditioned floorplan generation as a special type of raster image generation task also received particular attention. However there are many use cases in floorpla generation where numerical properties of the generated result are more important than the aesthetics. For instance, one might want to specify sizes for certain rooms in a floorplan and compare the generated floorplan with given specifications Current approaches, datasets and commonly used evaluations do not support these kinds of constraints. As such, an attractive strategy is to generate an intermediate data structure that contains numerical properties of a floorplan which can be used to generate the final floorplan image. To explore this setting we (1) construct a new dataset for this data-structure to data-structure formulation of floorplan generation using two popular image based floorplan datasets RPLAN and ProcTHOR-10k, and provide the tools to convert further procedurally generated ProcTHOR floorplan data into our format. (2) We explore the task of floorplan generation given a partial or complete set of constraints and we design a series of metrics and benchmarks to enable evaluating how well samples generated from models respect the constraints. (3) We create multiple baselines by finetuning a large language model (LLM), Llama3, and demonstrate the feasibility of using floorplan data structure conditioned LLMs for the problem of floorplan generation respecting numerical constraints. We hope that our new datasets and benchmarks will encourage further research on different ways to improve the performance of LLMs and other generative modelling techniques for generating designs where quantitative constraints are only partially specified, but must be respected.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 21, 2024

e1: Learning Adaptive Control of Reasoning Effort

Increasing the thinking budget of AI models can significantly improve accuracy, but not all questions warrant the same amount of reasoning. Users may prefer to allocate different amounts of reasoning effort depending on how they value output quality versus latency and cost. To leverage this tradeoff effectively, users need fine-grained control over the amount of thinking used for a particular query, but few approaches enable such control. Existing methods require users to specify the absolute number of desired tokens, but this requires knowing the difficulty of the problem beforehand to appropriately set the token budget for a query. To address these issues, we propose Adaptive Effort Control, a self-adaptive reinforcement learning method that trains models to use a user-specified fraction of tokens relative to the current average chain-of-thought length for each query. This approach eliminates dataset- and phase-specific tuning while producing better cost-accuracy tradeoff curves compared to standard methods. Users can dynamically adjust the cost-accuracy trade-off through a continuous effort parameter specified at inference time. We observe that the model automatically learns to allocate resources proportionally to the task difficulty and, across model scales ranging from 1.5B to 32B parameters, our approach enables a 2-3x reduction in chain-of-thought length while maintaining or improving performance relative to the base model used for RL training.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 30, 2025

BANG: Dividing 3D Assets via Generative Exploded Dynamics

3D creation has always been a unique human strength, driven by our ability to deconstruct and reassemble objects using our eyes, mind and hand. However, current 3D design tools struggle to replicate this natural process, requiring considerable artistic expertise and manual labor. This paper introduces BANG, a novel generative approach that bridges 3D generation and reasoning, allowing for intuitive and flexible part-level decomposition of 3D objects. At the heart of BANG is "Generative Exploded Dynamics", which creates a smooth sequence of exploded states for an input geometry, progressively separating parts while preserving their geometric and semantic coherence. BANG utilizes a pre-trained large-scale latent diffusion model, fine-tuned for exploded dynamics with a lightweight exploded view adapter, allowing precise control over the decomposition process. It also incorporates a temporal attention module to ensure smooth transitions and consistency across time. BANG enhances control with spatial prompts, such as bounding boxes and surface regions, enabling users to specify which parts to decompose and how. This interaction can be extended with multimodal models like GPT-4, enabling 2D-to-3D manipulations for more intuitive and creative workflows. The capabilities of BANG extend to generating detailed part-level geometry, associating parts with functional descriptions, and facilitating component-aware 3D creation and manufacturing workflows. Additionally, BANG offers applications in 3D printing, where separable parts are generated for easy printing and reassembly. In essence, BANG enables seamless transformation from imaginative concepts to detailed 3D assets, offering a new perspective on creation that resonates with human intuition.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 29, 2025 3

Advances in 4D Generation: A Survey

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant progress across various domains in recent years. Building on the rapid advancements in 2D, video, and 3D content generation fields, 4D generation has emerged as a novel and rapidly evolving research area, attracting growing attention. 4D generation focuses on creating dynamic 3D assets with spatiotemporal consistency based on user input, offering greater creative freedom and richer immersive experiences. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the 4D generation field, systematically summarizing its core technologies, developmental trajectory, key challenges, and practical applications, while also exploring potential future research directions. The survey begins by introducing various fundamental 4D representation models, followed by a review of 4D generation frameworks built upon these representations and the key technologies that incorporate motion and geometry priors into 4D assets. We summarize five major challenges of 4D generation: consistency, controllability, diversity, efficiency, and fidelity, accompanied by an outline of existing solutions to address these issues. We systematically analyze applications of 4D generation, spanning dynamic object generation, scene generation, digital human synthesis, 4D editing, and autonomous driving. Finally, we provide an in-depth discussion of the obstacles currently hindering the development of the 4D generation. This survey offers a clear and comprehensive overview of 4D generation, aiming to stimulate further exploration and innovation in this rapidly evolving field. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/MiaoQiaowei/Awesome-4D.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 18, 2025

Search Beyond What Can Be Taught: Evolving the Knowledge Boundary in Agentic Visual Generation

Visual generators excel at rendering, but they confidently fabricate what they do not know. User requests are unbounded, evolving, and deeply long-tailed: new characters, trending entities, post-cutoff events, and more. This world-knowledge bottleneck is structural: generators are trained on fixed corpora, but the visual world is open-ended. We construct SearchGen-20K and SearchGen-Bench, with 20,839 prompts spanning twelve failure categories and twenty-two domains, paired with a pre-executed multimodal SearchGen-Corpus-1M to support offline, reproducible research. On SearchGen-Bench, frontier open generators score only 21 to 28 out of 100, a 40-point collapse invisible to existing benchmarks. The natural remedy is to employ search tools, enabling agentic visual generation. However, we find that naive search fails: it retrieves indiscriminately, injecting noise into prompts the generator already handles. We trace the root cause to a generator-specific, evolving knowledge boundary: the divide between what a generator can internalize through training and what must remain in external context. Although this boundary is hard to specify in advance, we show that it is discoverable through a teach-then-search co-training framework. Even a minimal version of this co-training recipe produces monotonic improvement, laying the foundation for recursive self-improvement in visual generation that can meet world-knowledge-grounded requests. We release the full dataset, co-training corpus, and search corpus as a replayable harness for tool-augmented, world-knowledge-grounded visual generation.

TIGER-Lab TIGER-Lab
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Jul 8 4

Ctrl-U: Robust Conditional Image Generation via Uncertainty-aware Reward Modeling

In this paper, we focus on the task of conditional image generation, where an image is synthesized according to user instructions. The critical challenge underpinning this task is ensuring both the fidelity of the generated images and their semantic alignment with the provided conditions. To tackle this issue, previous studies have employed supervised perceptual losses derived from pre-trained models, i.e., reward models, to enforce alignment between the condition and the generated result. However, we observe one inherent shortcoming: considering the diversity of synthesized images, the reward model usually provides inaccurate feedback when encountering newly generated data, which can undermine the training process. To address this limitation, we propose an uncertainty-aware reward modeling, called Ctrl-U, including uncertainty estimation and uncertainty-aware regularization, designed to reduce the adverse effects of imprecise feedback from the reward model. Given the inherent cognitive uncertainty within reward models, even images generated under identical conditions often result in a relatively large discrepancy in reward loss. Inspired by the observation, we explicitly leverage such prediction variance as an uncertainty indicator. Based on the uncertainty estimation, we regularize the model training by adaptively rectifying the reward. In particular, rewards with lower uncertainty receive higher loss weights, while those with higher uncertainty are given reduced weights to allow for larger variability. The proposed uncertainty regularization facilitates reward fine-tuning through consistency construction. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our methodology in improving the controllability and generation quality, as well as its scalability across diverse conditional scenarios. Code will soon be available at https://grenoble-zhang.github.io/Ctrl-U-Page/.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 14, 2024

SmartMeterFM: Unifying Smart Meter Data Generative Tasks Using Flow Matching Models

Smart meter data is the foundation for planning and operating the distribution network. Unfortunately, such data are not always available due to privacy regulations. Meanwhile, the collected data may be corrupted due to sensor or transmission failure, or it may not have sufficient resolution for downstream tasks. A wide range of generative tasks is formulated to address these issues, including synthetic data generation, missing data imputation, and super-resolution. Despite the success of machine learning models on these tasks, dedicated models need to be designed and trained for each task, leading to redundancy and inefficiency. In this paper, by recognizing the powerful modeling capability of flow matching models, we propose a new approach to unify diverse smart meter data generative tasks with a single model trained for conditional generation. The proposed flow matching models are trained to generate challenging, high-dimensional time series data, specifically monthly smart meter data at a 15 min resolution. By viewing different generative tasks as distinct forms of partial data observations and injecting them into the generation process, we unify tasks such as imputation and super-resolution with a single model, eliminating the need for re-training. The data generated by our model not only are consistent with the given observations but also remain realistic, showing better performance against interpolation and other machine learning based baselines dedicated to the tasks.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 29

GenMRP: A Generative Multi-Route Planning Framework for Efficient and Personalized Real-Time Industrial Navigation

Existing industrial-scale navigation applications contend with massive road networks, typically employing two main categories of approaches for route planning. The first relies on precomputed road costs for optimal routing and heuristic algorithms for generating alternatives, while the second, generative methods, has recently gained significant attention. However, the former struggles with personalization and route diversity, while the latter fails to meet the efficiency requirements of large-scale real-time scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose GenMRP, a generative framework for multi-route planning. To ensure generation efficiency, GenMRP first introduces a skeleton-to-capillary approach that dynamically constructs a relevant sub-network significantly smaller than the full road network. Within this sub-network, routes are generated iteratively. The first iteration identifies the optimal route, while the subsequent ones generate alternatives that balance quality and diversity using the newly proposed correctional boosting approach. Each iteration incorporates road features, user historical sequences, and previously generated routes into a Link Cost Model to update road costs, followed by route generation using the Dijkstra algorithm. Extensive experiments show that GenMRP achieves state-of-the-art performance with high efficiency in both offline and online environments. To facilitate further research, we have publicly released the training and evaluation dataset. GenMRP has been fully deployed in a real-world navigation app, demonstrating its effectiveness and benefits.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 3

Order-agnostic Identifier for Large Language Model-based Generative Recommendation

Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for generative recommendation has attracted significant research interest, where item tokenization is a critical step. It involves assigning item identifiers for LLMs to encode user history and generate the next item. Existing approaches leverage either token-sequence identifiers, representing items as discrete token sequences, or single-token identifiers, using ID or semantic embeddings. Token-sequence identifiers face issues such as the local optima problem in beam search and low generation efficiency due to step-by-step generation. In contrast, single-token identifiers fail to capture rich semantics or encode Collaborative Filtering (CF) information, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address these issues, we propose two fundamental principles for item identifier design: 1) integrating both CF and semantic information to fully capture multi-dimensional item information, and 2) designing order-agnostic identifiers without token dependency, mitigating the local optima issue and achieving simultaneous generation for generation efficiency. Accordingly, we introduce a novel set identifier paradigm for LLM-based generative recommendation, representing each item as a set of order-agnostic tokens. To implement this paradigm, we propose SETRec, which leverages CF and semantic tokenizers to obtain order-agnostic multi-dimensional tokens. To eliminate token dependency, SETRec uses a sparse attention mask for user history encoding and a query-guided generation mechanism for simultaneous token generation. We instantiate SETRec on T5 and Qwen (from 1.5B to 7B). Extensive experiments demonstrate its effectiveness under various scenarios (e.g., full ranking, warm- and cold-start ranking, and various item popularity groups). Moreover, results validate SETRec's superior efficiency and show promising scalability on cold-start items as model sizes increase.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 15, 2025

Off-the-Shelf LLMs as Process Scorers: Training-Free Alternative to PRMs for Mathematical Reasoning

Selecting the best response from multiple small-model samples using a stronger scorer is a simple inference-time strategy, but fails when the small model has already committed to incorrect reasoning paths. PRM guided search avoids this by scoring candidate continuations during generation, but requires a reward model trained with step-level labels. We propose Chunk-Level Guided Generation, a training-free alternative that uses an off-the-shelf large language model as a process scorer. At each step, a small model samples k fixed-length candidate chunks, while the larger model scores the candidates using likelihoods without generating any text. The selected chunk is committed before the next step, steering generation before errors can propagate. We instantiate this framework with two selection rules: Likelihood-Guided Selection (LGS), which selects the chunk with the highest length-normalized large-model log-probability, and Contrastive-Guided Selection (CGS), which subtracts the small model's log-probability to favor chunks where the large model's preference diverges from the small model's. We show that scoring variable-length reasoning steps with large-model likelihoods is unreliable due to a systematic length bias that persists even after length normalization, and that fixed-length chunks avoid this confound. On GSM8K, MATH, Minerva Math, AMC23, and AIME24 with Qwen2.5-1.5B guided by Qwen2.5-32B and Llama-3.2-1B guided by Llama-3.1-70B, CGS outperforms majority voting by up to 28 pp and, under matched guidance budgets, matches or outperforms Qwen2.5-Math-PRM-72B guided search on most benchmarks without reward-model training. With Qwen2.5-7B guided by Qwen2.5-72B, CGS reaches 81.8% on MATH and 63.6% on Minerva Math at k=16, surpassing majority voting by 4--6 pp. Finally, Chunk-Level Guided Generation produces substantially shorter reasoning traces than PRM guided search.

UniCTokens: Boosting Personalized Understanding and Generation via Unified Concept Tokens

Personalized models have demonstrated remarkable success in understanding and generating concepts provided by users. However, existing methods use separate concept tokens for understanding and generation, treating these tasks in isolation. This may result in limitations for generating images with complex prompts. For example, given the concept langle borangle, generating "langle borangle wearing its hat" without additional textual descriptions of its hat. We call this kind of generation \textbf{personalized attribute-reasoning generation}. To address the limitation, we present UniCTokens, a novel framework that effectively integrates personalized information into a unified vision language model (VLM) for understanding and generation. UniCTokens trains a set of unified concept tokens to leverage complementary semantics, boosting two personalized tasks. Moreover, we propose a progressive training strategy with three stages: understanding warm-up, bootstrapping generation from understanding, and deepening understanding from generation to enhance mutual benefits between both tasks. To quantitatively evaluate the unified VLM personalization, we present UnifyBench, the first benchmark for assessing concept understanding, concept generation, and attribute-reasoning generation. Experimental results on UnifyBench indicate that UniCTokens shows competitive performance compared to leading methods in concept understanding, concept generation, and achieving state-of-the-art results in personalized attribute-reasoning generation. Our research demonstrates that enhanced understanding improves generation, and the generation process can yield valuable insights into understanding. Our code and dataset will be released at: https://github.com/arctanxarc/UniCTokens{https://github.com/arctanxarc/UniCTokens}.

  • 13 authors
·
May 20, 2025

Understanding-in-Generation: Reinforcing Generative Capability of Unified Model via Infusing Understanding into Generation

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

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 23, 2025

M^4olGen: Multi-Agent, Multi-Stage Molecular Generation under Precise Multi-Property Constraints

Generating molecules that satisfy precise numeric constraints over multiple physicochemical properties is critical and challenging. Although large language models (LLMs) are expressive, they struggle with precise multi-objective control and numeric reasoning without external structure and feedback. We introduce M olGen, a fragment-level, retrieval-augmented, two-stage framework for molecule generation under multi-property constraints. Stage I : Prototype generation: a multi-agent reasoner performs retrieval-anchored, fragment-level edits to produce a candidate near the feasible region. Stage II : RL-based fine-grained optimization: a fragment-level optimizer trained with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) applies one- or multi-hop refinements to explicitly minimize the property errors toward our target while regulating edit complexity and deviation from the prototype. A large, automatically curated dataset with reasoning chains of fragment edits and measured property deltas underpins both stages, enabling deterministic, reproducible supervision and controllable multi-hop reasoning. Unlike prior work, our framework better reasons about molecules by leveraging fragments and supports controllable refinement toward numeric targets. Experiments on generation under two sets of property constraints (QED, LogP, Molecular Weight and HOMO, LUMO) show consistent gains in validity and precise satisfaction of multi-property targets, outperforming strong LLMs and graph-based algorithms.

GenAgent: Scaling Text-to-Image Generation via Agentic Multimodal Reasoning

We introduce GenAgent, unifying visual understanding and generation through an agentic multimodal model. Unlike unified models that face expensive training costs and understanding-generation trade-offs, GenAgent decouples these capabilities through an agentic framework: understanding is handled by the multimodal model itself, while generation is achieved by treating image generation models as invokable tools. Crucially, unlike existing modular systems constrained by static pipelines, this design enables autonomous multi-turn interactions where the agent generates multimodal chains-of-thought encompassing reasoning, tool invocation, judgment, and reflection to iteratively refine outputs. We employ a two-stage training strategy: first, cold-start with supervised fine-tuning on high-quality tool invocation and reflection data to bootstrap agent behaviors; second, end-to-end agentic reinforcement learning combining pointwise rewards (final image quality) and pairwise rewards (reflection accuracy), with trajectory resampling for enhanced multi-turn exploration. GenAgent significantly boosts base generator(FLUX.1-dev) performance on GenEval++ (+23.6\%) and WISE (+14\%). Beyond performance gains, our framework demonstrates three key properties: 1) cross-tool generalization to generators with varying capabilities, 2) test-time scaling with consistent improvements across interaction rounds, and 3) task-adaptive reasoning that automatically adjusts to different tasks. Our code will be available at https://github.com/deep-kaixun/GenAgent{this url}.

  • 9 authors
·
Jan 26

Language Generation with Replay: A Learning-Theoretic View of Model Collapse

As scaling laws push the training of frontier large language models (LLMs) toward ever-growing data requirements, training pipelines are approaching a regime where much of the publicly available online text may be consumed. At the same time, widespread LLM usage increases the volume of machine-generated content on the web; together, these trends raise the likelihood of generated text re-entering future training corpora, increasing the associated risk of performance degradation often called model collapse. In practice, model developers address this concern through data cleaning, watermarking, synthetic-data policies, or, in some cases, blissful ignorance. However, the problem of model collapse in generative models has not been examined from a learning-theoretic perspective: we study it through the theoretical lens of the language generation in the limit framework, introducing a replay adversary that augments the example stream with the generator's own past outputs. Our main contribution is a fine-grained learning-theoretic characterization of when replay fundamentally limits generation: while replay is benign for the strongest notion of uniform generation, it provably creates separations for the weaker notions of non-uniform generation and generation in the limit. Interestingly, our positive results mirror heuristics widely used in practice, such as data cleaning, watermarking, and output filtering, while our separations show when these ideas can fail.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 12

Light Forcing: Accelerating Autoregressive Video Diffusion via Sparse Attention

Advanced autoregressive (AR) video generation models have improved visual fidelity and interactivity, but the quadratic complexity of attention remains a primary bottleneck for efficient deployment. While existing sparse attention solutions have shown promise on bidirectional models, we identify that applying these solutions to AR models leads to considerable performance degradation for two reasons: isolated consideration of chunk generation and insufficient utilization of past informative context. Motivated by these observations, we propose Light Forcing, the first sparse attention solution tailored for AR video generation models. It incorporates a Chunk-Aware Growth mechanism to quantitatively estimate the contribution of each chunk, which determines their sparsity allocation. This progressive sparsity increase strategy enables the current chunk to inherit prior knowledge in earlier chunks during generation. Additionally, we introduce a Hierarchical Sparse Attention to capture informative historical and local context in a coarse-to-fine manner. Such two-level mask selection strategy (\ie, frame and block level) can adaptively handle diverse attention patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing sparse attention in quality (\eg, 84.5 on VBench) and efficiency (\eg, 1.2{sim}1.3times end-to-end speedup). Combined with FP8 quantization and LightVAE, Light Forcing further achieves a 2.3times speedup and 19.7\,FPS on an RTX~5090 GPU. Code will be released at https://github.com/chengtao-lv/LightForcing{https://github.com/chengtao-lv/LightForcing}.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 4 3

GameFactory: Creating New Games with Generative Interactive Videos

Generative game engines have the potential to revolutionize game development by autonomously creating new content and reducing manual workload. However, existing video-based game generation methods fail to address the critical challenge of scene generalization, limiting their applicability to existing games with fixed styles and scenes. In this paper, we present GameFactory, a framework focused on exploring scene generalization in game video generation. To enable the creation of entirely new and diverse games, we leverage pre-trained video diffusion models trained on open-domain video data. To bridge the domain gap between open-domain priors and small-scale game dataset, we propose a multi-phase training strategy that decouples game style learning from action control, preserving open-domain generalization while achieving action controllability. Using Minecraft as our data source, we release GF-Minecraft, a high-quality and diversity action-annotated video dataset for research. Furthermore, we extend our framework to enable autoregressive action-controllable game video generation, allowing the production of unlimited-length interactive game videos. Experimental results demonstrate that GameFactory effectively generates open-domain, diverse, and action-controllable game videos, representing a significant step forward in AI-driven game generation. Our dataset and project page are publicly available at https://vvictoryuki.github.io/gamefactory/.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 14, 2025 3

Mem^2Evolve: Towards Self-Evolving Agents via Co-Evolutionary Capability Expansion and Experience Distillation

While large language model--powered agents can self-evolve by accumulating experience or by dynamically creating new assets (i.e., tools or expert agents), existing frameworks typically treat these two evolutionary processes in isolation. This separation overlooks their intrinsic interdependence: the former is inherently bounded by a manually predefined static toolset, while the latter generates new assets from scratch without experiential guidance, leading to limited capability growth and unstable evolution. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel paradigm of co-evolutionary Capability Expansion and Experience Distillation. Guided by this paradigm, we propose the Mem^{textbf{2}Evolve}, which integrates two core components: Experience Memory and Asset Memory. Specifically, Mem^{2}Evolve leverages accumulated experience to guide the dynamic creation of assets, thereby expanding the agent's capability space while simultaneously acquiring new experience to achieve co-evolution. Extensive experiments across 6 task categories and 8 benchmarks demonstrate that Mem^{2}Evolve achieves improvement of 18.53\% over standard LLMs, 11.80\% over agents evolving solely through experience, and 6.46\% over those evolving solely through asset creation, establishing it as a substantially more effective and stable self-evolving agent framework. Code is available at: https://buaa-irip-llm.github.io/Mem2Evolve.

  • 10 authors
·
Apr 12

OptMATH: A Scalable Bidirectional Data Synthesis Framework for Optimization Modeling

Despite the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), a fundamental challenge persists: the lack of high-quality optimization modeling datasets hampers LLMs' robust modeling of practical optimization problems from natural language descriptions (NL). This data scarcity also contributes to the generalization difficulties experienced by learning-based methods. To address these challenges, we propose a scalable framework for synthesizing a high-quality dataset, named OptMATH. Starting from curated seed data with mathematical formulations (MF), this framework automatically generates problem data (PD) with controllable complexity. Then, a back-translation step is employed to obtain NL. To verify the correspondence between the NL and the PD, a forward modeling step followed by rejection sampling is used. The accepted pairs constitute the training part of OptMATH. Then a collection of rejected pairs is identified and further filtered. This collection serves as a new benchmark for optimization modeling, containing difficult instances whose lengths are much longer than these of NL4OPT and MAMO. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that models of various sizes (0.5B-32B parameters) trained on OptMATH achieve superior results on multiple modeling benchmarks, thereby validating the effectiveness and scalability of our approach. Our dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/AuroraLHL/OptMATH.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 16, 2025

A Mutual Information Perspective on Multiple Latent Variable Generative Models for Positive View Generation

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 23, 2025

Seed2Scale: A Self-Evolving Data Engine for Embodied AI via Small to Large Model Synergy and Multimodal Evaluation

Existing data generation methods suffer from exploration limits, embodiment gaps, and low signal-to-noise ratios, leading to performance degradation during self-iteration. To address these challenges, we propose Seed2Scale, a self-evolving data engine that overcomes the data bottleneck through a heterogeneous synergy of "small-model collection, large-model evaluation, and target-model learning". Starting with as few as four seed demonstrations, the engine employs the lightweight Vision-Language-Action model, SuperTiny, as a dedicated collector, leveraging its strong inductive bias for robust exploration in parallel environments. Concurrently, a pre-trained Vision-Language Model is integrated as a Verifer to autonomously perform success/failure judgment and quality scoring for the massive generated trajectories. Seed2Scale effectively mitigates model collapse, ensuring the stability of the self-evolution process. Experimental results demonstrate that Seed2Scale exhibits signifcant scaling potential: as iterations progress, the success rate of the target model shows a robust upward trend, achieving a performance improvement of 131.2%. Furthermore, Seed2Scale signifcantly outperforms existing data augmentation methods, providing a scalable and cost-effective pathway for the large-scale development of Generalist Embodied AI. Project page: https://terminators2025.github.io/Seed2Scale.github.io

  • 15 authors
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Mar 8

PLaID++: A Preference Aligned Language Model for Targeted Inorganic Materials Design

Discovering novel materials is critical for technological advancements such as solar cells, batteries, and carbon capture. However, the development of new materials is constrained by a slow and expensive trial-and-error process. To accelerate this pipeline, we introduce PLaID++, a Large Language Model (LLM) fine-tuned for stable and property-guided crystal generation. We fine-tune Qwen-2.5 7B to generate crystal structures using a novel Wyckoff-based text representation. We show that generation can be effectively guided with a reinforcement learning technique based on Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), with sampled structures categorized by their stability, novelty, and space group. By encoding symmetry constraints directly into text and guiding model outputs towards desirable chemical space, PLaID++ generates structures that are thermodynamically stable, unique, and novel at a sim50\% greater rate than prior methods and conditionally generates structures with desired space group properties. Our experiments highlight the effectiveness of iterative DPO, achieving sim115\% and sim50\% improvements in unconditional and space group conditioned generation, respectively, compared to fine-tuning alone. Our work demonstrates the potential of adapting post-training techniques from natural language processing to materials design, paving the way for targeted and efficient discovery of novel materials.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 8, 2025

Combinatorial Creativity: A New Frontier in Generalization Abilities

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, and Large Language Models (LLMs) in particular, are increasingly employed for creative tasks like scientific idea generation, constituting a form of generalization from training data unaddressed by existing conceptual frameworks. Despite its similarities to compositional generalization (CG), combinatorial creativity (CC) is an open-ended ability. Instead of evaluating for accuracy or correctness against fixed targets, which would contradict the open-ended nature of CC, we propose a theoretical framework and algorithmic task for evaluating outputs by their degrees of novelty and utility. From here, we make several important empirical contributions: (1) We obtain the first insights into the scaling behavior of creativity for LLMs. (2) We discover that, for fixed compute budgets, there exist optimal model depths and widths for creative ability. (3) We find that the ideation-execution gap, whereby LLMs excel at generating novel scientific ideas but struggle to ensure their practical feasibility, may be explained by a more fundamental novelty-utility tradeoff characteristic of creativity algorithms in general. Importantly, this tradeoff remains persistent even at scale, casting doubt on the long-term creative potential of LLMs in their current form. Together, our conceptual framework and empirical findings provide a foundation for understanding and improving creativity in modern AI models, bridging the gap between human and machine intelligence.

spiralworks Spiral Works
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Sep 25, 2025 2

MatterGPT: A Generative Transformer for Multi-Property Inverse Design of Solid-State Materials

Inverse design of solid-state materials with desired properties represents a formidable challenge in materials science. Although recent generative models have demonstrated potential, their adoption has been hindered by limitations such as inefficiency, architectural constraints and restricted open-source availability. The representation of crystal structures using the SLICES (Simplified Line-Input Crystal-Encoding System) notation as a string of characters enables the use of state-of-the-art natural language processing models, such as Transformers, for crystal design. Drawing inspiration from the success of GPT models in generating coherent text, we trained a generative Transformer on the next-token prediction task to generate solid-state materials with targeted properties. We demonstrate MatterGPT's capability to generate de novo crystal structures with targeted single properties, including both lattice-insensitive (formation energy) and lattice-sensitive (band gap) properties. Furthermore, we extend MatterGPT to simultaneously target multiple properties, addressing the complex challenge of multi-objective inverse design of crystals. Our approach showcases high validity, uniqueness, and novelty in generated structures, as well as the ability to generate materials with properties beyond the training data distribution. This work represents a significant step forward in computational materials discovery, offering a powerful and open tool for designing materials with tailored properties for various applications in energy, electronics, and beyond.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 14, 2024

Model as a Game: On Numerical and Spatial Consistency for Generative Games

Recent advances in generative models have significantly impacted game generation. However, despite producing high-quality graphics and adequately receiving player input, existing models often fail to maintain fundamental game properties such as numerical and spatial consistency. Numerical consistency ensures gameplay mechanics correctly reflect score changes and other quantitative elements, while spatial consistency prevents jarring scene transitions, providing seamless player experiences. In this paper, we revisit the paradigm of generative games to explore what truly constitutes a Model as a Game (MaaG) with a well-developed mechanism. We begin with an empirical study on ``Traveler'', a 2D game created by an LLM featuring minimalist rules yet challenging generative models in maintaining consistency. Based on the DiT architecture, we design two specialized modules: (1) a numerical module that integrates a LogicNet to determine event triggers, with calculations processed externally as conditions for image generation; and (2) a spatial module that maintains a map of explored areas, retrieving location-specific information during generation and linking new observations to ensure continuity. Experiments across three games demonstrate that our integrated modules significantly enhance performance on consistency metrics compared to baselines, while incurring minimal time overhead during inference.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 27, 2025

EpiGRAF: Rethinking training of 3D GANs

A very recent trend in generative modeling is building 3D-aware generators from 2D image collections. To induce the 3D bias, such models typically rely on volumetric rendering, which is expensive to employ at high resolutions. During the past months, there appeared more than 10 works that address this scaling issue by training a separate 2D decoder to upsample a low-resolution image (or a feature tensor) produced from a pure 3D generator. But this solution comes at a cost: not only does it break multi-view consistency (i.e. shape and texture change when the camera moves), but it also learns the geometry in a low fidelity. In this work, we show that it is possible to obtain a high-resolution 3D generator with SotA image quality by following a completely different route of simply training the model patch-wise. We revisit and improve this optimization scheme in two ways. First, we design a location- and scale-aware discriminator to work on patches of different proportions and spatial positions. Second, we modify the patch sampling strategy based on an annealed beta distribution to stabilize training and accelerate the convergence. The resulted model, named EpiGRAF, is an efficient, high-resolution, pure 3D generator, and we test it on four datasets (two introduced in this work) at 256^2 and 512^2 resolutions. It obtains state-of-the-art image quality, high-fidelity geometry and trains {approx} 2.5 times faster than the upsampler-based counterparts. Project website: https://universome.github.io/epigraf.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 21, 2022

Unlocking the Latent Canvas: Eliciting and Benchmarking Symbolic Visual Expression in LLMs

Current multimodal approaches predominantly treat visual generation as an external process, relying on pixel rendering or code execution, thereby overlooking the native visual representation capabilities latent within Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we unlock this potential through ASCII art, a compact, efficient, and text-native visual format. We introduce SVE-ASCII, a unified framework designed to elicit and benchmark Symbolic Visual Expression directly within the pure text space. To address the scarcity of systematic resources, we construct ASCIIArt-7K, a high-quality dataset synthesized via a novel "Seed-and-Evolve" pipeline that augments human-curated anchors through in-context stylistic editing. We further implement a unified instruction-tuning strategy that jointly optimizes for both Generation (Text-to-ASCII) and Understanding (ASCII-to-Text). Crucially, our experiments reveal a critical phenomenon regarding task duality: while it is established that perception aids generation, we provide compelling evidence that generative training significantly enhances visual comprehension. This confirms a mutually reinforcing cycle in symbolic visual processing, a relationship previously hypothesized but rarely empirically demonstrated in the visual domain. We release our dataset, the ASCIIArt-Bench benchmark, and the SVE-ASCII model, establishing a robust baseline for native text-based visual intelligence.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 14

Kinetics: Rethinking Test-Time Scaling Laws

We rethink test-time scaling laws from a practical efficiency perspective, revealing that the effectiveness of smaller models is significantly overestimated. Prior work, grounded in compute-optimality, overlooks critical memory access bottlenecks introduced by inference-time strategies (e.g., Best-of-N, long CoTs). Our holistic analysis, spanning models from 0.6B to 32B parameters, reveals a new Kinetics Scaling Law that better guides resource allocation by incorporating both computation and memory access costs. Kinetics Scaling Law suggests that test-time compute is more effective when used on models above a threshold than smaller ones. A key reason is that in TTS, attention, rather than parameter count, emerges as the dominant cost factor. Motivated by this, we propose a new scaling paradigm centered on sparse attention, which lowers per-token cost and enables longer generations and more parallel samples within the same resource budget. Empirically, we show that sparse attention models consistently outperform dense counterparts, achieving over 60 points gains in low-cost regimes and over 5 points gains in high-cost regimes for problem-solving accuracy on AIME, encompassing evaluations on state-of-the-art MoEs. These results suggest that sparse attention is essential for realizing the full potential of test-time scaling because, unlike training, where parameter scaling saturates, test-time accuracy continues to improve through increased generation. The code is available at https://github.com/Infini-AI-Lab/Kinetics.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 5, 2025 1