Nachrichten & Forschung

arXiv:2605.23868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision Transformers (ViTs) can learn strong image-level representations while their patch representations become less effective for dense prediction during prolonged training. We revisit this dense degradation phenomenon and argue that it is not fully explained by high-norm artifacts alone. Instead, we characterize \emph{semantic diffusion}: an optimization shortcut in which global semantic information spreads through patch tokens beyond what is locally justified. Our analysis shows that dense representation quality is not captured by locality alone: shallow features can remain better aligned with foreground regions yet underperform deeper features, and \texttt{[CLS]} features remain complementary for dense prediction. These observations suggest that the goal should not be to remove global context, but to make token interactions more selective. We therefore study sparse attention as a minimal intervention, replacing softmax attention with

arXiv:2605.23471v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aggressive driving is a major cause of traffic accidents and poses a serious threat to road safety. Although deep learning methods have shown promising results in detecting risky driving behaviours from vehicle sensor data, their performance in real-world conditions is often limited by severe data imbalance, large variability between drivers, and the lack of physically interpretable vehicle dynamics representations. In this paper, we propose an enhanced deep learning framework for aggressive driving detection using multivariate vehicle dynamics signals. Instead of relying solely on raw measurements, the proposed approach constructs engineered dynamic features that capture steering, acceleration, and braking behaviour. To address the extreme rarity of aggressive events in naturalistic driving data, we introduce a stable training strategy that combines controlled SMOTE-based oversampling with a class-weighted loss formulation, and evaluat

arXiv:2605.23550v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study nonsmooth difference-of-convex programs whose subtracted convex term is a finite maximum of smooth convex functions. In this setting, standard DCA iterations may converge to critical points that are not directionally stationary, whereas exact active-vertex screening can be expensive when active sets are large or combinatorial. We propose RA-DCA, a vertex-first randomized active-set DCA that projects active gradients onto sampled directions, checks a sampled vertex residual, and uses a small linear program only as a low-residual convex-combination fallback. The method preserves the descent structure of DCA and reduces the randomized screening layer to matrix multiplications. Under the stated regularity, numerical active-set consistency, and random-embedding assumptions, every accumulation point generated by the safeguarded method is directionally stationary with probability one. MATLAB experiments first test the theorem on degen

arXiv:2605.23879v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Gradient-flow sampling interprets a Gibbs distribution as the minimizer of an energy functional over probability measures and generates dynamics converging to this target. Under spherical Hellinger-Kantorovich (SHK) geometry, the flow couples transport and reaction and coincides with birth-death Langevin dynamics. In this work, we develop a perturbation theory for SHK gradient flows. For two potentials $V$ and $V^{\prime}$, we compare the associated flows from a common initialization and quantify how potential discrepancies propagate over time. A uniform perturbation bound yields dimension-free, pointwise control of the log-likelihood ratio and R\'enyi divergence, while additional structure allows us to derive bounds for the KL divergence as well. We apply these results to approximate sampling for the exponential mechanism in differential privacy. The likelihood-ratio control provides explicit time-dependent Pure-DP guarantees for SHK-b

arXiv:2602.20210v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Crystal modeling spans a family of conditional and unconditional generation tasks, including crystal structure prediction (CSP) and de novo generation (DNG). While recent deep generative models have shown promising performance, they remain largely task-specific, lacking a unified framework that shares crystal representations across tasks. To address this limitation, we propose Multimodal Crystal Flow (MCFlow), a unified multimodal flow model that realizes multiple crystal generation tasks as distinct inference trajectories via independent time variables for atom types and crystal structures. To enable multimodal flow in a standard transformer model, we introduce a composition- and symmetry-aware atom ordering with hierarchical permutation augmentation, injecting compositional and crystallographic priors without explicit structural templates. Experiments on the MP-20 and MPTS-52 benchmarks show that a single MCFlow model is compe

arXiv:2605.22950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Score matching is an alternative to maximum likelihood estimation when the normalizing constant is unknown or too costly to evaluate. However, vanilla score matching has shown to be inefficient relative to maximum likelihood estimation for multimodal distributions with well-separated modes, which are commonly encountered in practical applications. We compare a novel diffusion-based denoising score matching estimator (DDSME) to the vanilla score matching estimator (SME) in this scenario. In particular, we prove statistical guarantees for both estimators, showing that the error bound for the vanilla SME worsens when the separation between the modes increases, which can be avoided in case of the DDSME with suitable hyperparameter tuning. This provides a novel theoretical explanation for the superior behavior of diffusion-based score matching over the vanilla version.

arXiv:2605.23346v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discrete diffusion models have emerged as powerful frameworks for generating structured categorical data. However, efficiently sampling from reward-tilted distributions remains a fundamental challenge. While Twisted Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) offers asymptotic exactness for this task, estimating the optimal twist function in discrete state spaces necessitates costly Monte Carlo approximations, resulting a severe computational bottleneck at inference. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Contrastive Distribution Matching (CDM), a novel framework that amortizes the cost of SMC inference by learning a parameterized twist function via positive and negative samples. For efficient training, we reformulate the gradient estimator to leverage the closed-form forward kernels of discrete diffusion models. In practice, evaluating our learned twist function incurs less than 5% additional computational overhead compared to a single forward pass

arXiv:2511.16014v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Digitisation in the cultural heritage sector has produced large but fragmented repositories of museum collection data, spanning structured catalogue records, images, and unstructured descriptions. Existing museum information systems often make it difficult to integrate these sources into a unified, queryable representation that supports relation-aware exploration. We present MuseKG, an interactive knowledge graph system that organises heterogeneous museum data into a typed graph that links objects, people, organisations, images, image-derived labels, and extracted semantic entities within a coherent schema. MuseKG supports natural-language queries by grounding user questions to graph entities and retrieving a compact neighbourhood of evidence for answer generation. Through an interactive demonstration on real museum collections, we show that MuseKG supports common exploration tasks such as attribute lookup, relation exploration, and r

arXiv:2603.28767v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: 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 di

arXiv:2605.22964v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As state-of-the-art neural networks are deployed on reasoning and algorithmic tasks, exactness guarantees become increasingly important. However, high average-case accuracy can still mask inconsistent behaviors. This motivates exact certification, which asks for the smallest set of labeled examples needed to certify that a learned hypothesis equals the target. We show that while some hypotheses are easy to certify, even minimal overparametrization can make certification exponentially hard across several hypothesis classes. For threshold circuits of depth $\ge 2$, adding a single extra gate can force certificate sizes exponential in the input dimension. We show an analogous hardness result for log-precision Transformers with only constant architectural overhead. We also characterize approximate certification, showing that allowing only polynomially many mistakes still requires exponentially large certificates, whereas constant relative-err

arXiv:2605.23295v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spatial photonic Ising machines (SPIMs) based on spatial light modulators (SLMs) have emerged as highly effective solvers for many tasks, including combinatorial optimization problems and spin-glass simulations. However, traditional SPIMs relying solely on the simulated annealing algorithm require a large number of measurement-feedback iterations to find a relatively optimal solution in complex energy landscapes, suffering from slow convergence and high time cost. Here, we propose an optical genetic-simulated annealing hybrid algorithm to accelerate the ground-state search of SPIMs. GA conducts a global coarse-grained search in the early iteration stage, while SA performs fine-grained local refinement in the late stage. Numerical simulations show that our method enables a higher solution quality of full-rank Max-Cut problems than pure GA or SA at different scales. We also experimentally demonstrate its superiority over conventional algo

arXiv:2605.23733v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Whole-body tracking (WBT) models have become a key foundation for humanoid robots, enabling them to imitate diverse motions with high fidelity. Training such models from scratch requires large-scale data and computation, making rapid deployment on new humanoid platforms costly. This raises a natural question: Can pretrained WBT models transfer across embodiments with minimal adaptation? To answer this question, we propose Any2Any, a paradigm that efficiently transfers an existing WBT specialist to a new humanoid embodiment with only a small amount of data and compute. Any2Any first performs kinematic alignment between source and target humanoids, aligning their input and output spaces so that the pretrained source policy can be meaningfully reused on the target embodiment.Any2Any then performs dynamics adaptation by applying lightweight parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) components to selected dynamics-sensitive modules, preservin

arXiv:2605.23861v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal generative modeling is essential for developing reliable and transparent AI systems capable of counterfactual reasoning. While existing approaches focus on integrating causal constraints during the training of generative models, they often lack a unified framework to leverage the zero-shot reasoning capabilities of pretrained foundation models. We introduce FM-CGM, a modular framework for end-to-end visual causal reasoning using pretrained foundation models. FM-CGM formalizes the causal pipeline through three core components: a concept extractor, a concept manipulator, and a counterfactual generator. By leveraging a large reasoning model for causal inference and a text-to-image diffusion model for generation, our approach enables zero-shot causal discovery, intervention, and counterfactual generation. We then develop Causal Semantic Guidance (CSG), a cross-attention-based mechanism that ensures semantic interventions propagate to

arXiv:2605.22836v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rapid earthquake magnitude estimation is crucial for effective early warning systems that can save lives and reduce economic damage. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of magnitude classification using only the vertical component of the initial 7-second P-wave window from a single station. We compare six machine learning approaches that range from traditional models to state-of-the-art deep learning architectures. We also curated a novel dataset of 7,318 earthquake events in South Asia. The dataset was categorized into five Richter-scale classes: slight (3.0-3.9), light (4.0-4.9), moderate (5.0-5.9), strong (6.0-6.9) and severe (>= 7.0). Our experiments show that deep learning models substantially outperform traditional approaches. Our Transformer based architecture achieved 76.23% standard accuracy and 81.56% adaptive accuracy with 4.8 ms inference latency. The adaptive-accuracy metric is introduced for the inherent uncert

arXiv:2605.23652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On a 300-persona life-simulation benchmark, pcsp achieves compositional zero-shot persona identification up to 17x above chance, Spearman rho approx 0.73 semantic-behavioral alignment, and 22x faster inference than an LLM-as-policy baseline. Life simulation games require hundreds to thousands of non-player characters (NPCs) that behave consistently with distinct personalities while remaining controllable through designer-authored natural language. Existing methods fail on constraints like persona consistency, controllability, or real-time inference. We introduce pcsp (Persona Conditioned Shared Policy), a single reinforcement learning policy conditioned on frozen LLM embeddings of free-form persona descriptions. pcsp combines once-per-NPC persona encoding, low-rank persona projection, neural persona conditioning, and a PPO + InfoNCE consistency + KL diversity training objective. Across three experimental settings, ablations show that the