JEPA-style world models learn action-conditioned latent dynamics without reconstructing observations, but distributional regularization alone does not ensure that their representations preserve information needed for control. We identify static collapse, a failure mode in which the encoder preserves episode-specific static content while suppressing manipulation-relevant state changes. Because static content is temporally predictable yet diverse across episodes, this failure can persist despite regularizers such as SIGReg. A controlled study on OGBench-Cube shows that introducing randomized backgrounds substantially degrades planning performance while leaving the underlying manipulation task unchanged. To address this problem, we propose motion-guided contrastive regularization. Our approach compares predicted latent transitions with transitions to candidate observations from the same episode, reducing the usefulness of static background identity for distinguishing action outcomes. Optical-flow similarities provide soft contrastive targets, allowing candidates with similar motion to receive similar supervision. Combined with latent prediction and SIGReg, our objective encourages representations to preserve within-episode state distinctions and similarities between related transitions. Our method improves planning success over LeWorldModel (LeWM) from 52% to 78% on OGBench-Cube with randomized backgrounds and from 14% to 54% on LIBERO-Object, while maintaining comparable performance on four other visual-control benchmarks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06901
Retrospective battery characterization across heterogeneous cells is challenging because cycling records vary substantially with chemistry, protocol, cell format, capacity, and operating conditions. An endpoint charge--discharge curve captures the local condition of an evaluated cycle, while a cell-level lifecycle terrain summarizes structural evolution across the archived trajectory. We propose STEK, a structural-terrain-enhanced framework for retrospective battery multi-target estimation. STEK combines a cell-level lifecycle (dQ/dV) terrain with an endpoint-derived structural proxy through quality-proxy-conditioned gating. Bounded FiLM and a validity-gated residual head refine the endpoint-curve representation while preserving a curve-based prediction pathway. Battery-type and optional material-text representations further condition an identity-centered low-rank linear map, providing a Koopman-inspired cross-channel consistency objective without modeling temporal dynamics or performing rollout. Under the fixed seven-output MIX-battery protocol, the full retrospective setting improves aggregate performance over endpoint-only learned baselines across multiple temporal backbones; this comparison reflects both the additional archived context and the modeling design. Under matched auxiliary inputs, STEK outperforms direct concatenation and quality-unaware FiLM, while descriptor-removal tests show graceful fallback to the endpoint pathway. Deterministic rules remain preferable for directly recoverable capacity summaries. The method targets retrospective archive harmonization rather than online estimation from cycle t alone.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06299
Reward alignment for diffusion- and flow-based generative models is often formulated over stochastic trajectories, making it less suitable for few-step deterministic generators. Initial noise optimization provides a trajectory-free alternative, but existing gradient-free methods require costly per-sample search at inference. We introduce LeNO (Learning Noise Optimization), which amortizes reward-guided initial noise optimization into a learned residual transport while keeping the pretrained generator frozen. LeNO learns an anchor-conditioned distribution over noise corrections using Local GRPO and scalar rewards, eliminating iterative test-time optimization. For Gaussian initial noise with norm-preserving projection, we derive a tractable upper bound on the KL divergence between the corrected noise distribution and the original prior, providing a principled regularization objective. We evaluate LeNO on few-step text-to-image and protein structure generation, including expensive black-box designability rewards. Across both domains, LeNO improves target rewards with a single noise correction at inference while largely preserving generation quality and diversity.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06255
Cross-modal remote sensing image retrieval (RS-CMIR) requires representations that are simultaneously modality-invariant and semantically discriminative, despite the profound physical gap between heterogeneous sensors such as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and multispectral imagery. Recent JEPA-based Predictive self-supervised approaches such as X-JEPA formulate cross-modal alignment as a deterministic latent forecasting task, implicitly assuming uniform patch predictability and leaving cross-modal distributional alignment unaddressed. We propose CAPE-JEPA, a probabilistic cross-modal Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture with three contributions: (i) a cross-attentional Gaussian predictor outputting per-patch parameters (mu, sigma^2) conditioned on opposite-modality context, trained via negative log-likelihood to model inherent cross-sensor prediction uncertainty; (ii) adversarial distributional regularization combining unimodal isotropic Gaussian regularization with a novel cross-modal adversarial variant that aligns modality distributions via worst-case Epps-Pulley characteristic function tests without explicit sample pairing; and (iii) in-training contrastive learning with attention-pooled heads for scene-level discriminative grounding. Evaluated on BigEarthNet-14K (BEN-14K) and fMoW across SAR, multispectral, and RGB modalities, CAPE-JEPA surpasses X-JEPA by up to 13.74 points on BEN-14K and 15.59 points on fMoW, outperforming all baselines including SkySense and CROMA across both unimodal and cross-modal directions while using fewer parameters (407.30M vs. 432.72M).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06247
Knowledge editing has become a key technique for updating knowledge in large language models. However, existing methods neglect the geometric structure of the knowledge representation space, leading to two key limitations: they cannot distinguish which pre-trained knowledge should be preferentially preserved (core vs. non-core) nor which new edits are inherently difficult (hard vs. easy). To address this, we propose GEdit, a geometry-aware framework built on a Low-Rank Plus Diagonal (LR+D) factor model that captures the intrinsic low-rank structure of Transformer FFN hidden representations. GEdit features two complementary mechanisms. First, the low-rank regularization applies targeted protection on a low-rank core knowledge subspace. Second, the adaptive regularization dynamically adjusts the regularization strength based on each edit request's editability: relaxing constraints for hard edits to ensure success, and tightening them for easy edits to better preserve pretrained knowledge. Extensive experiments on GPT2-XL, GPT-J, and LLaMA-3-8B under large-scale editing scenarios, including both mini-batch and fully sequential editing settings with up to 10,000 continuous updates, show that GEdit consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both editing success and knowledge preservation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06185
Proof assistants such as Lean check mathematical proofs down to the axioms, and AI agents have recently made writing such proofs cheap. We describe AutoIP, a Lean library in which classical linear regularization theory, together with the functional analysis it rests on, has been autoformalized by AI agents. A machine-checked proof certifies only the formal statement it proves, so the remaining human task is to confirm that each formal statement says what was intended. We organize the library around this task: a reviewer compares the formal statements with their natural-language counterparts and never needs to read a proof. Our experience is that the risks lie in the statements rather than in the proofs, and that simple automated tests on the statements can expose problems even in the established literature. We illustrate this with a textbook theorem whose hypothesis is more restrictive than asserted. We invite the inverse problems community to extend and build on the library.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06962
Self-supervised pre-training on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery enables transferable representations, but the optical-SAR domain gap and speckle perturbations limit representation stability. Most SAR foundation models use masked image modeling (MIM) through pixel reconstruction or structural feature prediction, which is sensitive to speckle or relies on predefined operators. Joint modeling of cross-view semantics and perturbation stability at corresponding spatial locations remains underexplored. We propose XuanJian-DINOSAR, a SAR foundation model based on global and local semantic consistency. We curate over 360K publicly available SAR target chips, detection images, and scene images spanning diverse targets, scenes, and sensors, and adapt an optically pre-trained DINOv2 model to SAR through self-supervised learning. The framework combines DINO global semantic self-distillation, iBOT local masked modeling, and KoLeo feature-distribution regularization to learn globally discriminative and locally structure-aware representations. We introduce a local semantic consistency branch tailored to SAR intensity statistics and coherent imaging characteristics. Shared geometric transformations produce spatially aligned teacher weak views and student strong views. Intensity transformations and Gamma multiplicative speckle perturbations are applied to student views, while a cosine consistency loss aligns patch tokens at corresponding locations, promoting stability under radiometric perturbations. This objective complements the cross-region and cross-scale semantic consistency of DINOv2 multi-crop training, jointly enforcing global and local semantic consistency. Experiments on multiple downstream classification and detection datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on most evaluation metrics, validating the generality and transferability of the learned representations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06105
Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) support planning by comparing predicted latent states with an encoded goal. For this comparison to guide temporal progress, states closer in time to the goal should receive lower costs. However, training representations for prediction and distribution regularization does not directly enforce this ordering. We examine this mismatch in flat LeWorldModel (LeWM) by analyzing how its Euclidean goal cost changes with temporal separation. Our analysis identifies conditions under which states at different long offsets receive similar average costs, weakening their temporal distinction. To learn the missing ordering explicitly, we introduce Time-to-Goal (T2G), a lightweight metric trained on latent triples from offline trajectories. A margin ranking loss encourages smaller distances for temporally nearer states, requiring no rewards or policy labels. The learned metric then replaces the Euclidean planning cost while the JEPA encoder and predictor remain frozen. Diagnostics on AntMaze and FourRoom show that T2G preserves stronger temporal contrast and improves near--far ranking at long offsets. Across four navigation and manipulation benchmarks, T2G improves the average planning success rate from 32.7\% (flat LeWM) to 63.0\% and approaches or even surpasses the performance of the hierarchical H-JEPA baselines. These results show that learning temporal ordering for the goal cost can substantially improve latent planning even with a flat world model.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05847
Scaling depth is a key route to stronger large language models, but Pre-LN architectures often suffer from depth-wise information dilution, limiting the effective use of deep layers. While cross-layer connectivity has proven effective at mitigating this problem, existing designs usually introduce additional computation or memory access. We revisit cross-layer KV sharing as an efficient form of such connectivity. Beyond cache compression, each KV reuse edge creates a direct gradient path from deep layers to source KV projections, turning KV sharing into an implicit structural regularizer for KV representation geometry. We provide a systematic analysis of this mechanism, showing that proper sharing topologies sharpen key retrieval directions while enriching the value content subspace, whereas existing adjacent or global-anchor designs do not fully exploit this effect. Motivated by this, we propose DepthGraft, a hierarchical KV-sharing architecture that reconstructs deep-layer KV from stride-aligned shallow-middle source pairs. DepthGraft distributes non-local gradient flow across source layers, while preserving prefill early completion and reducing KV cache by roughly one third. Experiments on dense and MoE models from 0.5B to 16B parameters show consistent downstream improvements under both GQA and MLA. Notably, on the 16B MoE model, DepthGraft achieves a 7.0% absolute improvement on MMLU-Pro, along with gains of 6.6% on CMMLU and 6.4% on C3. These results validate the potential of DepthGraft as a scalable design for large-scale pretraining. The project page is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03142
Multi-head attention in Vision Transformers (ViTs) allows independent attention patterns across heads, but without explicit regularization, heads may learn redundant patterns rather than complementary roles. Correlation-based penalties encourage head disentanglement, yet apply uniform regularization across all training samples. In face recognition (FR), hard samples whose embeddings lie close to competing identities are critical for optimization and generalization. Motivated by this, we propose ViT-HarDis, which conditions attention head disentanglement on sample difficulty: samples with high cosine similarity to negative class centers receive stronger head decorrelation, enforcing specialization where identity ambiguity is highest. Experiments show improvements over both the baseline and uniform disentanglement on most benchmarks. Our analysis shows that ViT-HarDis reduces the similarity of hard samples to competing class centers while decreasing inter-head attention similarity, and that applying disentanglement only to the final transformer layers outperforms regularizing the entire network. Trained on WebFace4M, ViT-HarDis achieves SOTA results among ViT-based methods on IJB-B, IJB-C, and TinyFace Rank-1, while achieving the best IJB-B and TinyFace results when trained on MS1MV3, improving FR without architectural modifications or additional inference cost. Code: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41789
Recent offline reinforcement learning methods increasingly rely on expressive generative policies and specialized value guidance. We ask how far systematic modernization of a conventional behavior-regularized actor-critic can go while preserving algorithmic simplicity. ReBRAC-v2 directly trains an exact-likelihood normalizing-flow actor with likelihood, MSE, and MAE behavior regularization, classification-based residual critics, staged optimization, and multi-sample inference. We develop one shared configuration through roughly 600 Bayesian proposals on six OGBench tasks, then adapt only two behavior-regularization coefficients using a 16-point grid for the main comparisons. Across ten common OGBench categories, ReBRAC-v2 averages 74.8 versus 52.3 for the next-best method and ranks first in eight categories. Without structural changes, it also obtains the strongest compared averages on D4RL AntMaze (90.2) and Adroit (33.6). Motivated by these results, we extend evaluation to all 235 state-based single-task problems across the 47 dataset variants in the original OGBench suite. To our knowledge, this is the first complete evaluation in this setting; no compared baseline reports results across the full suite. Per-task scores and configurations establish ReBRAC-v2 as a reference baseline for future work beyond the common task subset. The complete cloning objective retains the highest average after coefficient retuning of its alternatives, while further ablations characterize training, capacity, and inference choices. These results demonstrate the strength of systematic engineering within a minimalist offline RL foundation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01205
Large language models (LLMs) acquire extensive factual knowledge during pre-training, which may include sensitive, private, or copyrighted information, motivating the development of unlearning methods that selectively remove specific knowledge while preserving general capabilities. However, existing approaches typically optimize entire responses without explicitly identifying the knowledge to be forgotten, resulting in coarse and uncontrolled forgetting. To address this, we revisit the forgetting target of LLM unlearning and introduce Knowledge Association (KA), which characterizes the association between a query context and its target knowledge and is instantiated by the corresponding conditional predictive distribution, as the fundamental target of forgetting. Based on KA, we propose Knowledge Association Reinforcement Unlearning (KARU), a unified reinforcement learning framework that suppresses forgotten knowledge associations while preserving retained ones. Specifically, KARU derives complementary mechanisms from the KA-based formulation: token-level reward construction for finer-grained forgetting supervision, distribution-level regularization for precise knowledge suppression, and proximity-aware retain sampling to mitigate collateral degradation. Experiments across diverse LLMs on representative benchmarks demonstrate that KARU consistently improves forgetting effectiveness over existing baselines while maintaining comparable retention performance and general utility.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41616
RGB-D SLAM requires accurate online tracking, high-quality rendering, and geometrically consistent reconstruction. Existing Gaussian SLAM methods mainly optimize Gaussian primitives with photometric, depth, or local frame-to-model constraints, which are often insufficient in indoor scenes with weak textures, large planar structures, noisy depth, and long trajectories. The resulting maps may suffer from pose drift, surface thickness artifacts, noisy normals, and blurred structural boundaries. We propose DrawSplat, an Atlanta World-guided implicit Gaussian SLAM framework for indoor reconstruction. DrawSplat follows a drawing-like process: explicit point-line geometry first sketches the structural layout, and implicit neural Gaussians then fill in high-fidelity appearance and continuous geometric details. It estimates camera poses, sparse geometry, and gravity direction through point-line joint tracking, infers structural planes from tracked lines using the shared-gravity component of the Atlanta World prior, and converts them into differentiable regularization terms on Gaussian centers and normals. To improve compactness and efficiency, DrawSplat further combines an anchor-based implicit neural Gaussian representation with adaptive structural sampling, which allocates Gaussian capacity to structurally informative regions. Experiments on multiple datasets show that DrawSplat achieves robust tracking, high-fidelity rendering, and strong geometric reconstruction among Gaussian-based SLAM systems, while maintaining a practical balance among quality, efficiency, and model size.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41602
Training acceleration methods for diffusion transformers, such as REPA and dispersive regularization, are commonly explained by additional supervision, spatial-structure priors, or improved feature geometry. We revisit this view and uncover a striking internal change: the AdaLN-Zero residual gate $\alpha$, which directly controls how conditioned updates enter the residual stream, is substantially reorganized by these methods. This observation motivates our hypothesis that acceleration arises, at least in part, from reshaping the residual gating pathway rather than solely from the feature structures explicitly imposed by auxiliary objectives. Supporting this view, accelerated models are markedly more sensitive to perturbations of $\alpha$, and their gate geometry reflects semantic relationships among classes. We further introduce the normalized participation ratio (nPR) to characterize the channel-wise organization of the gates and find that, across REPA teachers, projector architectures, and radial-objective targets, broader gate participation accompanies better generation quality. Guided by this insight, we propose a simple teacher-free radial objective that promotes broader gate participation through feature-norm regularization, without pairwise feature comparisons. On ImageNet $256\times256$ with SiT-B/2, our method improves FID over dispersive loss while increasing mean gate participation over timesteps and classes, further supporting the link between gate organization and training acceleration. Our results identify residual-gate reorganization as a measurable axis of diffusion training acceleration and suggest a simple direction for further acceleration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40914
Industrial shampoo-bottle surface defect detection must operate across many stock keeping units (SKUs), where differences in bottle geometry, material, label layout, reflectance, and imaging conditions can substantially alter the appearance of the same defect. Existing industrial defect datasets rarely provide both instance-level defect annotations and product-variant identities, making it difficult to study SKU-aware detection under realistic manufacturing conditions. We introduce Bottle-SKU, a large-scale multi-SKU benchmark for shampoo bottle surface defect detection. Bottle-SKU contains 13,119 images, 20,419 instance-level bounding boxes, seven defect categories, and 48 bottle SKUs, enabling evaluation of both shared defect recognition and SKU-specific appearance variation. To address the challenge of SKU-specific appearance variation, we propose Prototype-Guided Dynamic Domain Modulation (ProDMM). ProDMM constructs a visual prototype for each SKU from training images and predicts a soft SKU distribution for each input. The resulting prototype-conditioned representation dynamically generates low-rank Query/Value modulation for the visual backbone and residual conditioning for defect-text-to-visual attention, while preserving the pretrained Grounding DINO detection pathway. The model is trained jointly with detection, SKU-domain classification, and modulation-regularization objectives. Experiments on Bottle-SKU and the public GC10-DET-SKU metallic surface defect dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of prototype-guided domain conditioning for industrial surface defect detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38194
Adapting foundation models to a new task within or beyond the training domain is the de facto standard for building specialized machine learning models. Recently, Visual Prompting (VP) has emerged as a promising technique for efficient knowledge transfer. As new foundation model families~(like Mamba) get introduced and VP pipelines such as AutoVP reach greater maturity, we find a growing need for a systematic evaluation of current approaches. In this work, we assess the performance of the latest models, comparing them to earlier architectures and alternative fine-tuning methods, to better understand the progress, challenges and opportunities in the field of efficient fine-tuning under resource limitations. Towards this goal, this paper provides a concise empirical overview of the interactions among foundation model families (Attention-, Convolution-, and Mamba-based) and transfer paradigms: VP, Linear Probing (LP), Full Fine-tuning (FFT) and Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Our work builds up on previous findings by broadening the selection of evaluated models and techniques while tuning hyperparameters. In the interest of delivering practical guidelines for the user, we also explore application of prevalent regularization techniques to boost performance in the context of VP.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37510
Variational inference with normalizing flows provides a flexible posterior approximation for Bayesian model calibration, but struggles when the posterior has several modes separated by regions of low probability mass. We study this behavior in a two-parameter twin experiment and regularize the variational objective. Under Gaussian observation errors and a Gaussian prior, the corresponding minimization objective is the expected Tikhonov calibration objective minus the differential entropy of the approximating distribution. However, the expected Tikhonov term favors concentration near one of the modes, while entropy maximization does not guarantee multimodality. We introduce a regularization term based on Rényi divergence that encourages the approximate posterior to cover the prior support. In the connected bimodal case, a flow approximation represents both modes; in the case with well-separated modes, the flow and Gaussian mixture frequently miss one mode. The introduced regularization reduces the near-collapse fraction from 50% to 25%. While the regularization improves mode coverage in this experiment, it changes the Bayesian variational objective, introduces a trade-off in approximation accuracy, and does not provide a general solution to mode collapse.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37169
Humanoid parkour requires robots to reason about future footholds and whole-body motions over highly discontinuous terrain. We revisit the information asymmetry in asymmetric actor-critic learning for perceptive humanoid locomotion: the critic exploits privileged simulator signals during training, whereas the deployable actor operates solely from onboard perception. We argue that the key is not exposing privileged information to the actor, but learning a deployable approximation of it to narrow the information gap between training and deployment. We present HC2Robot, a deployable perceptive humanoid parkour framework consisting of a Predicted Foresight Module (PFM) and a Hyper-Connection (HC) Transformer. PFM predicts from deployable observations the policy-conditioned timing, location, and support quality of each foot's next touchdown event, converting privileged supervision into a deployable latent representation that provides the actor with predicted touchdown information without privileged runtime sensing. The HC Transformer further enhances temporal reasoning through learnable multi-stream routing, while a future motion prediction head provides short-horizon motion priors for regularization. Across stairs, gaps, high platforms, and slopes, HC2Robot achieves a mean simulated traversal success rate of 97.60% and consistently higher safe foothold rates than strong perceptive locomotion baselines, supporting improved traversal performance and geometric foothold support under deployable sensing.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36825
Spectral-temporal unmixing of MODIS time series is essential for applications such as abundance mapping and spectral library construction, yet it remains challenging due to (i) spectral-temporal information coupling in MODIS data, (ii) intra-class endmember spectral variability and inter-class signature ambiguity, and (iii) the instability of naively fusing multiple expert representations. This paper presents the Multi- task Disentangling Fusion Mamba (MDF-Mamba) to address these limitations. To resolve spectral-temporal coupling, we design a disentangling architecture that pairs per-channel spectral experts with a dedicated bidirectional state-space (Mamba) temporal branch. Convolutional modules each process a single spectral channel, while the Mamba branch encodes the cross-channel seasonal trajectory, forming a multi-branch expert ensemble with soft inter-expert reweighting based on squeeze-and-excitation. For the integration of these spectral and temporal expert outputs, we introduce mHCFusion, adapting the manifold-constrained hyper-connection framework to merge the outputs in a stable and interpretable manner. Endmember variability is addressed by extending the linear mixing model with pixel-wise learnable spectral variability weights that capture intra-class endmember variation. Finally, we design a multi-task training objective that combines supervised abundance estimation with self-supervised spectral reconstruction and endmember regularization terms on the same training data, yielding a highly efficient framework for spectral-temporal unmixing. Experiments on MODIS time series covering the Alberta and Saskatchewan provinces show that MDF-Mamba achieves the best performance on 12 of 14 evaluation metrics across both datasets (7 of 7 on Alberta; 5 of 7 on Saskatchewan), ranking second on the remaining two.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36750
Robotic agents operating in real-world environments must adapt continuously from a stream of multimodal demonstrations, often under constraints that preclude storing or revisiting past data. In this replay-free, single-pass lifelong imitation learning setting, sequential updates can progressively distort the representation space, making expert-based approaches particularly sensitive to routing interference, causing expert selection to degrade over time. We propose HIDRA, a structured routing framework that mitigates this issue through a hierarchical dual-attention mechanism, which decouples instruction-level expert retrieval from context-dependent refinement. To further stabilize routing under representation drift, HIDRA introduces a key-level geometric regularization that enforces both alignment within tasks and separation across tasks. The resulting approach enables reliable expert selection while supporting an expandable set of experts for continual adaptation. We evaluate HIDRA on several LIBERO benchmark suites, including more challenging variants with heterogeneous task sequences and paraphrased language instructions. Our approach consistently outperforms both replay-free and replay-based baselines, improving AUC and forward transfer while maintaining low forgetting, with stronger gains under high interference and language variation. The code is available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36374