Recent work has shown that diffusion models trained with the denoising score matching (DSM) objective often violate the Fokker--Planck (FP) equation that governs the evolution of the true data density. Directly penalizing these deviations in the objective function reduces their magnitude but introduces a significant computational overhead. It is also observed that enforcing strict adherence to the FP equation does not necessarily lead to improvements in the quality of the generated samples, as often the best results are obtained with weaker FP regularization. In this paper, we investigate whether simpler penalty terms can provide similar benefits. We empirically analyze several lightweight regularizers, study their effect on FP residuals and generation quality, and show that the benefits of FP regularization are available at substantially lower computational cost. Our code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.15171
In continual visual question answering (VQA), existing Continual Learning (CL) methods are mostly built for symmetric, unimodal architectures. However, modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) violate this assumption, as their trainable components are inherently asymmetric. This structural mismatch renders VLMs highly prone to catastrophic forgetting when learning from continuous data streams. Specifically, the asymmetry causes standard global regularization to favor the massive language decoder during optimization, leaving the smaller but critical visual projection layers highly vulnerable to interference. Consequently, this localized degradation leads to a severe loss of compositional reasoning capabilities. To address this, we propose Asymmetric Information Masking (AIM), which balances stability and plasticity by applying targeted masks based on modality-specific sensitivity. Experiments on VQA v2 and GQA under continual VQA settings show that AIM achieves state-of-the-art performance in both Average Performance (AP) and Average Forgetting (AF), while better preserving generalization to novel skill-concept compositions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14779
Deepfake detectors face growing challenges in generalization as new image synthesis techniques emerge. In particular, deepfakes generated by diffusion models are highly photorealistic and often evade detectors trained on GAN-based forgeries. This paper addresses the generalization problem in deepfake detection by leveraging diffusion noise characteristics. We propose an Attention-guided Noise Learning (ANL) framework that integrates a pre-trained diffusion model into the deepfake detection pipeline to guide the learning of more robust features. Specifically, our method uses the diffusion model's denoising process to expose subtle artifacts: the detector is trained to predict the noise contained in an input image at a given diffusion step, forcing it to capture discrepancies between real and synthetic images, while an attention-guided mechanism derived from the predicted noise is introduced to encourage the model to focus on globally distributed discrepancies rather than local patterns. By harnessing the frozen diffusion model's learned distribution of natural images, the ANL method acts as a form of regularization, improving the detector's generalization to unseen forgery types. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ANL significantly outperforms existing methods on multiple benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy in detecting diffusion-generated deepfakes. Notably, the proposed framework boosts generalization performance (e.g., improving ACC/AP by a substantial margin on unseen models) without introducing additional overhead during inference. Our results highlight that diffusion noise provides a powerful signal for generalizable deepfake detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14570
Catastrophic forgetting remains a fundamental challenge in continual learning, in which models often forget previous knowledge when fine-tuned on a new task. This issue is especially pronounced in class incremental learning (CIL), which is the most challenging setting in continual learning. Existing methods to address catastrophic forgetting often sacrifice either model interpretability or accuracy. To address this challenge, we introduce ClassIncremental Concept Bottleneck Model (CI-CBM), which leverage effective techniques, including concept regularization and pseudo-concept generation to maintain interpretable decision processes throughout incremental learning phases. Through extensive evaluation on seven datasets, CI-CBM achieves comparable performance to black-box models and outperforms previous interpretable approaches in CIL, with an average 36% accuracy gain. CICBM provides interpretable decisions on individual inputs and understandable global decision rules, as shown in our experiments, thereby demonstrating that human understandable concepts can be maintained during incremental learning without compromising model performance. Our approach is effective in both pretrained and non-pretrained scenarios; in the latter, the backbone is trained from scratch during the first learning phase. Code is publicly available at this http URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14519
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for aligning diffusion models with human preferences, typically by optimizing a single reward function under a KL regularization constraint. In practice, however, human preferences are inherently pluralistic, and aligned models must balance multiple downstream objectives, such as aesthetic quality and text-image consistency. Existing multi-objective approaches either rely on costly multi-objective RL fine-tuning or on fusing separately aligned models at denoising time, but they generally require access to reward values (or their gradients) and/or introduce approximation error in the resulting denoising objectives. In this paper, we revisit the problem of RL fine-tuning for diffusion models and address the intractability of identifying the optimal policy by introducing a step-level RL formulation. Building on this, we further propose Multi-objective Step-level Denoising-time Diffusion Alignment (MSDDA), a retraining-free framework for aligning diffusion models with multiple objectives, obtaining the optimal reverse denoising distribution in closed form, with mean and variance expressed directly in terms of single-objective base models. We prove that this denoising-time objective is exactly equivalent to the step-level RL fine-tuning, introducing no approximation error. Moreover, we provide numerical results, which indicate our method outperforms existing denoising-time approaches.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14379
Efficiency and safety of Large Language Models (LLMs), among other factors, rely on the quality of tokenization. A good tokenizer not only improves inference speed and language understanding but also provides extra defense against jailbreak attacks and lowers the risk of hallucinations. In this work, we investigate the efficiency of code tokenization, in particular from the perspective of data source diversity. We demonstrate that code tokenizers are prone to producing unused, and thus under-trained, tokens due to the imbalance in repository and language diversity in the training data, as well as the dominance of source-specific, repetitive tokens that are often unusable in future inference. By modifying the BPE objective and introducing merge skipping, we implement different techniques under the name Source-Attributed BPE (SA-BPE) to regularize BPE training and minimize overfitting, thereby substantially reducing the number of under-trained tokens while maintaining the same inference procedure as with regular BPE. This provides an effective tool suitable for production use.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14053
Interpretability is essential for deploying object detection systems in critical applications, especially under low-quality imaging conditions that degrade visual information and increase prediction uncertainty. Existing methods either enhance image quality or design complex architectures, but often lack interpretability and fail to improve semantic discrimination. In contrast, prototype learning enables interpretable modeling by associating features with class-centered semantics, which can provide more stable and interpretable representations under degradation. Motivated by this, we propose HiProto, a new paradigm for interpretable object detection based on hierarchical prototype learning. By constructing structured prototype representations across multiple feature levels, HiProto effectively models class-specific semantics, thereby enhancing both semantic discrimination and interpretability. Building upon prototype modeling, we first propose a Region-to-Prototype Contrastive Loss (RPC-Loss) to enhance the semantic focus of prototypes on target regions. Then, we propose a Prototype Regularization Loss (PR-Loss) to improve the distinctiveness among class prototypes. Finally, we propose a Scale-aware Pseudo Label Generation Strategy (SPLGS) to suppress mismatched supervision for RPC-Loss, thereby preserving the robustness of low-level prototype representations. Experiments on ExDark, RTTS, and VOC2012-FOG demonstrate that HiProto achieves competitive results while offering clear interpretability through prototype responses, without relying on image enhancement or complex architectures. Our code will be available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13981
Reinforcement learning (RL) enables high-frequency, closed-loop control for robotic manipulation, but scaling to long-horizon tasks with sparse or imperfect rewards remains difficult due to inefficient exploration and poor credit assignment. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leverage large-scale multimodal pretraining to provide generalist, task-level reasoning, but current limitations hinder their direct use in fast and precise manipulation. In this paper, we propose Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting (VLAJS), a method that bridges sparse VLA guidance with on-policy RL to improve exploration and learning efficiency. VLAJS treats VLAs as transient sources of high-level action suggestions that bias early exploration and improve credit assignment, while preserving the high-frequency, state-based control of RL. Our approach augments Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with a directional action-consistency regularization that softly aligns the RL agent's actions with VLA guidance during early training, without enforcing strict imitation, requiring demonstrations, or relying on continuous teacher queries. VLA guidance is applied sparsely and annealed over time, allowing the agent to adapt online and ultimately surpass the guiding policy. We evaluate VLAJS on six challenging manipulation tasks: lifting, pick-and-place, peg reorientation, peg insertion, poking, and pushing in simulation, and validate a subset on a real Franka Panda robot. VLAJS consistently outperforms PPO and distillation-style baselines in sample efficiency, reducing required environment interactions by over 50% in several tasks. Real-world experiments demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer and robust execution under clutter, object variation, and external perturbations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13733
As large language models (LLMs) generate text that increasingly resembles human writing, the subtle cues that distinguish AI-generated content from human-written content become increasingly challenging to capture. Reliance on generator-specific artifacts is inherently unstable, since new models emerge rapidly and reduce the robustness of such shortcuts. This generalizes unseen generators as a central and challenging problem for AI-text detection. To tackle this challenge, we propose a progressively structured framework that disentangles AI-detection semantics from generator-aware artifacts. This is achieved through a compact latent encoding that encourages semantic minimality, followed by perturbation-based regularization to reduce residual entanglement, and finally a discriminative adaptation stage that aligns representations with task objectives. Experiments on MAGE benchmark, covering 20 representative LLMs across 7 categories, demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 24.2% accuracy gain and 26.2% F1 improvement. Notably, performance continues to improve as the diversity of training generators increases, confirming strong scalability and generalization in open-set scenarios. Our source code will be publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13692
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a common first stage of LLM post-training, teaching the model to follow instructions and shaping its behavior as a helpful assistant. At the same time, SFT may harm the fundamental capabilities of an LLM, particularly after long pretraining: a phenomenon known as catastrophic overtraining (Springer et al., 2025). To understand overtraining, we first investigate catastrophic forgetting in finetuning through the lens of implicit regularization of the learning rate. For models trained to the same SFT loss, we identify how the learning rate mediates optimization: finetuning with large and small steps converges to qualitatively different models. Next, we link forgetting to overtraining: learning rate decay increases the sharpness of the pretrained model, which in turn exacerbates catastrophic forgetting during SFT, leading to overtraining. Our findings paint a picture of the overtraining mechanism in LLMs and broadly contribute to the understanding of the interplay between optimization dynamics during pretraining and finetuning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13627
We present Dehaze-then-Splat, a two-stage pipeline for multi-view smoke removal and novel view synthesis developed for Track~2 of the NTIRE 2026 3D Restoration and Reconstruction Challenge. In the first stage, we produce pseudo-clean training images via per-frame generative dehazing using Nano Banana Pro, followed by brightness normalization. In the second stage, we train 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) with physics-informed auxiliary losses -- depth supervision via Pearson correlation with pseudo-depth, dark channel prior regularization, and dual-source gradient matching -- that compensate for cross-view inconsistencies inherent in frame-wise generative processing. We identify a fundamental tension in dehaze-then-reconstruct pipelines: per-image restoration quality does not guarantee multi-view consistency, and such inconsistency manifests as blurred renders and structural instability in downstream 3D this http URL analysis shows that MCMC-based densification with early stopping, combined with depth and haze-suppression priors, effectively mitigates these artifacts. On the Akikaze validation scene, our pipeline achieves 20.98\,dB PSNR and 0.683 SSIM for novel view synthesis, a +1.50\,dB improvement over the unregularized baseline.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13589
Vision-language models trained with contrastive learning on paired medical images and reports show strong zero-shot diagnostic capabilities, yet the effect of training batch composition on learned representations remains unexplored for 3D medical imaging. We reproduce Merlin, a dual-encoder model that aligns 3D abdominal CT volumes with radiology reports using symmetric InfoNCE loss, achieving a zero-shot macro F1 of 74.45% across 30 findings (original: 73.00%). We then investigate two axes of variation. First, we control the normal-to-abnormal ratio within training batches at 25:75, 50:50, and 75:25 using section-level balanced sampling on the full dataset. All three configurations underperform the unbalanced baseline by 2.4 to 2.8 points, with 75:25 achieving the best result (72.02%) among balanced variants. Second, we conduct data scaling ablations on a 4,362-study subset, training with 20%, 40%, and 100% of the data. Performance scales sub-linearly from 65.26% to 71.88%, with individual findings varying dramatically in data sensitivity. Enforcing 50:50 balanced sampling on the same subset further degrades performance to 68.01%, confirming that explicit class balancing hurts regardless of dataset or balancing granularity. Our results indicate that the stochastic diversity of random sampling, combined with Merlin's alternating batching over anatomical subsections, provides more effective regularization than engineered class ratios at the small batch sizes required by 3D medical volumes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13561
Video chroma-lux editing, which aims to modify illumination and color while preserving structural and temporal fidelity, remains a significant challenge. Existing methods typically rely on expensive supervised training with synthetic paired data. This paper proposes VibeFlow, a novel self-supervised framework that unleashes the intrinsic physical understanding of pre-trained video generation models. Instead of learning color and light transitions from scratch, we introduce a disentangled data perturbation pipeline that enforces the model to adaptively recombine structure from source videos and color-illumination cues from reference images, enabling robust disentanglement in a self-supervised manner. Furthermore, to rectify discretization errors inherent in flow-based models, we introduce Residual Velocity Fields alongside a Structural Distortion Consistency Regularization, ensuring rigorous structural preservation and temporal coherence. Our framework eliminates the need for costly training resources and generalizes in a zero-shot manner to diverse applications, including video relighting, recoloring, low-light enhancement, day-night translation, and object-specific color editing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VibeFlow achieves impressive visual quality with significantly reduced computational overhead. Our project is publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13425
Singular configurations cause loss of task-space mobility, unbounded joint velocities, and solver divergence in inverse kinematics (IK) for serial manipulators. No existing survey bridges classical singularity-robust IK with rapidly growing learning-based approaches. We provide a unified treatment spanning Jacobian regularization, Riemannian manipulability tracking, constrained optimization, and modern data-driven paradigms. A systematic taxonomy classifies methods by retained geometric structure and robustness guarantees (formal vs. empirical). We address a critical evaluation gap by proposing a benchmarking protocol and presenting experimental results: 12 IK solvers are evaluated on the Franka Panda under position-only IK across four complementary panels measuring error degradation by condition number, velocity amplification, out-of-distribution robustness, and computational cost. Results show that pure learning methods fail even on well-conditioned targets (MLP: 0% success, approx. 10 mm mean error), while hybrid warm-start architectures - IKFlow (59% to 100%), CycleIK(0% to 98.6%), GGIK (0% to 100%) - rescue learned solvers via classical refinement, with DLS converging from initial errors up to 207 mm. Deeper singularity-regime evaluation is identified as immediate future work.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13405
Causal representation learning (CRL) aims to identify the underlying latent variables from high-dimensional observations, even when variables are dependent with each other. We study this problem for latent variables that follow a potentially degenerate Gaussian mixture distribution and that are only observed through the transformation via a piecewise affine mixing function. We provide a series of progressively stronger identifiability results for this challenging setting in which the probability density functions are ill-defined because of the potential degeneracy. For identifiability up to permutation and scaling, we leverage a sparsity regularization on the learned representation. Based on our theoretical results, we propose a two-stage method to estimate the latent variables by enforcing sparsity and Gaussianity in the learned representations. Experiments on synthetic and image data highlight our method's effectiveness in recovering the ground-truth latent variables.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13218
The motion planning problem requires finding a collision-free path between start and goal configurations in high-dimensional, cluttered spaces. Recent learning-based methods offer promising solutions, with self-supervised physics-informed approaches such as Neural Time Fields (NTFields) solving the Eikonal equation to learn value functions without expert demonstrations. However, existing physics-informed methods struggle to scale in complex, multi-room environments, where simply increasing the number of samples cannot resolve local minima or guarantee global consistency. We propose Hierarchical Neural Time Fields (H-NTFields), a weakly-supervised framework that combines weak supervision from sparse roadmaps with physics-informed PDE regularization. The roadmap provides global topological anchors through upper and lower bounds on travel times, while PDE losses enforce local geometric fidelity and obstacle-aware propagation. Experiments on 18 Gibson environments and real robotic platforms show that H-NTFields substantially improves robustness over prior physics-informed methods, while enabling fast amortized inference through a continuous value representation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13204
On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as an efficient post-training paradigm for large language models. However, standard OPD requires a live teacher inference server throughout training, resulting in substantial infrastructure overhead. In this work, we investigate whether on-policy distillation can be performed offline. A natural approach is to precompute teacher log-probabilities once over SFT rollouts and reuse them during training. In practice, however, this offline variant fails to reliably match the performance of standard OPD. To understand this discrepancy, we identify a previously overlooked condition that is critical for any OPD pipeline, which we term teacher consistency. This condition requires that the same teacher model be used for both supervised fine-tuning and OPD. We show that violating teacher consistency introduces an irreducible gradient bias, causing both offline and online OPD to converge to a suboptimal fixed point regardless of training duration. Building on this insight, we propose Lightning OPD, an offline on-policy distillation framework that enforces teacher consistency by precomputing teacher log-probabilities over SFT rollouts. This design eliminates the need for a live teacher server entirely. We further show that, under teacher consistency, Lightning OPD shares the same optimum as standard OPD, with bounded gradient discrepancy and an implicit regularization effect that helps prevent policy drift. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning and code generation demonstrate that Lightning OPD achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly improved efficiency. Starting from an SFT-initialized Qwen3-8B-Base model, Lightning OPD reaches 69.9% on AIME 2024 in just 30 GPU hours, achieving a 4.0x speedup over standard OPD and substantially lowering the barrier to entry for academic research on LLM post-training.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13010
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has significantly advanced the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), particularly in their mathemat ical reasoning performance. However, GRPO and related entropy regularization methods still struggle with token-level sparse-rewards, which is an inherent chal lenge in chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. These approaches often rely on undifferen tiated token-level entropy regularization, which easily leads to entropy collapse or model degradation under sparse token rewards. In this work, we propose TEPO, a novel token-level framework that (1) leverages sequence-level likelihood to link group-level rewards with individual tokens via token-level aggregation, and (2) introduces a token-level KL-Divergence mask constraint that targets tokens with positive advantages and decreasing entropy to mitigate abrupt policy updates. Experiments demonstrate that TEPO not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on mathematical reasoning benchmarks but also markedly enhances training stability, reducing convergence time by 50% compared with GRPO/DAPO.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.12736
The core challenge of hyperspectral image denoising is striking the right balance between data fidelity and noise prior modeling. Most existing methods place too much emphasis on the intrinsic priors of the image while overlooking diverse noise assumptions and the dynamic trade-off between fidelity and priors. To address these issues, we propose a denoising framework that integrates noise prior reduction and a spatial-spectral adaptive fidelity term. This framework considers comprehensive noise priors with fewer parameters and introduces an adaptive weight tensor to dynamically balance the fidelity and prior regularization terms. Within this framework, we further develop a fast and robust pixel-wise model combined with the representative coefficient total variation regularizer to accurately remove mixed noise in HSIs. The proposed method not only efficiently handles various types of noise but also accurately captures the spectral low-rank structure and local smoothness of HSIs. An efficient optimization algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers is designed to ensure stable and fast convergence. Extensive experiments on simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model achieves superior denoising performance while maintaining competitive computational efficiency.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.12600
In this article, we propose the optimization of the resolution of time-frequency atoms and the regularization of fitting models to obtain better representations of heart sound signals. This is done by evaluating the classification performance of deep learning (DL) networks in discriminating five heart valvular conditions based on a new class of time-frequency feature matrices derived from the fitting models. We inspect several combinations of resolution and regularization, and the optimal one is that provides the highest performance. To this end, a fitting model is obtained based on a heart sound signal and an overcomplete dictionary of Gabor atoms using elastic net regularization of linear models. We consider two different DL architectures, the first mainly consisting of a 1D convolutional neural network (CNN) layer and a long short-term memory (LSTM) layer, while the second is composed of 1D and 2D CNN layers followed by an LSTM layer. The networks are trained with two algorithms, namely stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) and adaptive moment (ADAM). Extensive experimentation has been conducted using a database containing heart sound signals of five heart valvular conditions. The best classification accuracy of $98.95\%$ is achieved with the second architecture when trained with ADAM and feature matrices derived from optimal models obtained with a Gabor dictionary consisting of atoms with high-time low-frequency resolution and imposing sparsity on the models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.12483