Daily Papers

This paper presents a novel generative framework for learning shared latent representations across multimodal data. Many advanced multimodal methods focus on capturing all combinations of modality-specific details across inputs, which can inadvertently obscure the high-level semantic concepts that are shared across modalities. Notably, Multimodal VAEs with low-dimensional latent variables are designed to capture shared representations, enabling various tasks such as joint multimodal synthesis and cross-modal inference. However, multimodal VAEs often struggle to design expressive joint variational posteriors and suffer from low-quality synthesis. In this work, ShaLa addresses these challenges by integrating a novel architectural inference model and a second-stage expressive diffusion prior, which not only facilitates effective inference of shared latent representation but also significantly improves the quality of downstream multimodal synthesis. We validate ShaLa extensively across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating superior coherence and synthesis quality compared to state-of-the-art multimodal VAEs. Furthermore, ShaLa scales to many more modalities while prior multimodal VAEs have fallen short in capturing the increasing complexity of the shared latent space.

Video and audio content creation serves as the core technique for the movie industry and professional users. Recently, existing diffusion-based methods tackle video and audio generation separately, which hinders the technique transfer from academia to industry. In this work, we aim at filling the gap, with a carefully designed optimization-based framework for cross-visual-audio and joint-visual-audio generation. We observe the powerful generation ability of off-the-shelf video or audio generation models. Thus, instead of training the giant models from scratch, we propose to bridge the existing strong models with a shared latent representation space. Specifically, we propose a multimodality latent aligner with the pre-trained ImageBind model. Our latent aligner shares a similar core as the classifier guidance that guides the diffusion denoising process during inference time. Through carefully designed optimization strategy and loss functions, we show the superior performance of our method on joint video-audio generation, visual-steered audio generation, and audio-steered visual generation tasks. The project website can be found at https://yzxing87.github.io/Seeing-and-Hearing/

Building Behavioral Foundation Models (BFMs) for humanoid robots has the potential to unify diverse control tasks under a single, promptable generalist policy. However, existing approaches are either exclusively deployed on simulated humanoid characters, or specialized to specific tasks such as tracking. We propose BFM-Zero, a framework that learns an effective shared latent representation that embeds motions, goals, and rewards into a common space, enabling a single policy to be prompted for multiple downstream tasks without retraining. This well-structured latent space in BFM-Zero enables versatile and robust whole-body skills on a Unitree G1 humanoid in the real world, via diverse inference methods, including zero-shot motion tracking, goal reaching, and reward optimization, and few-shot optimization-based adaptation. Unlike prior on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks, BFM-Zero builds upon recent advancements in unsupervised RL and Forward-Backward (FB) models, which offer an objective-centric, explainable, and smooth latent representation of whole-body motions. We further extend BFM-Zero with critical reward shaping, domain randomization, and history-dependent asymmetric learning to bridge the sim-to-real gap. Those key design choices are quantitatively ablated in simulation. A first-of-its-kind model, BFM-Zero establishes a step toward scalable, promptable behavioral foundation models for whole-body humanoid control.

Human demonstrations collected by wearable devices (e.g., tactile gloves) provide fast and dexterous supervision for policy learning, and are guided by rich, natural tactile feedback. However, a key challenge is how to transfer human-collected tactile signals to robots despite the differences in sensing modalities and embodiment. Existing human-to-robot (H2R) approaches that incorporate touch often assume identical tactile sensors, require paired data, and involve little to no embodiment gap between human demonstrator and the robots, limiting scalability and generality. We propose TactAlign, a cross-embodiment tactile alignment method that transfers human-collected tactile signals to a robot with different embodiment. TactAlign transforms human and robot tactile observations into a shared latent representation using a rectified flow, without paired datasets, manual labels, or privileged information. Our method enables low-cost latent transport guided by hand-object interaction-derived pseudo-pairs. We demonstrate that TactAlign improves H2R policy transfer across multiple contact-rich tasks (pivoting, insertion, lid closing), generalizes to unseen objects and tasks with human data (less than 5 minutes), and enables zero-shot H2R transfer on a highly dexterous tasks (light bulb screwing).

Communication enables coordination in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), but many real-world applications, e.g., search-and-rescue with drone swarms, operate under severe bandwidth constraints. Many communication architectures still expose a coupled bottleneck in which a shared latent representation is used for both policy execution and inter-agent communication. Consequently, reducing message size directly limits the policy's latent space, often leading to significant performance degradation. We address this with two contributions. First, we introduce β, a normalised per-agent bandwidth budget that unifies sparsity, rounds, and message dimension into a single comparable constraint. Second, we provide SLIM, a minimal architecture that decouples the communication pathway from the policy's latent representation, allowing us to isolate the effect of bandwidth from the effect of policy capacity while benefiting from in-step communication. We evaluate our method on several partially-observable MARL benchmarks, where communication is essential. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits scalability and robustness under limited communication, with only marginal degradation as bandwidth is reduced.

Existing single-domain and multi-task audio systems remain limited in directly organizing heterogeneous audio components, ambience, and multiple roles into long-form temporal scenes. We present Qwen-Audio-3.0-Gen-Preview, a unified non-autoregressive framework that uses a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) and a shared variational autoencoder (VAE) to generate the complete mixed waveform. Prompt enhancement converts free-form requests into structured temporal records that are rendered as textual conditions, while a two-stage data curriculum and semantic conditional views train the proposed model to use these conditions across standalone and mixed-scene audio. A shared continuous VAE compresses 48kHz stereo waveforms into 25Hz latent sequences and incorporates semantic supervision, providing one representation for heterogeneous audio. On the public reference-conditioned benchmark, speaker similarity is the proposed model's clearest strength across all three subsets. Across the multi-speaker and rich-timeline benchmarks, its clearest comparative strengths are cross-turn consistency in both languages and temporal localization, respectively. On AudioCaps, its advantages are concentrated in evaluations using large audio-language models and AudioBox. These results demonstrate the potential of unified generation for temporally structured audio without task-specific branches.

Known for efficient computation and easy storage, hashing has been extensively explored in cross-modal retrieval. The majority of current hashing models are predicated on the premise of a direct one-to-one mapping between data points. However, in real practice, data correspondence across modalities may be partially provided. In this research, we introduce an innovative unsupervised hashing technique designed for semi-paired cross-modal retrieval tasks, named Reconstruction Relations Embedded Hashing (RREH). RREH assumes that multi-modal data share a common subspace. For paired data, RREH explores the latent consistent information of heterogeneous modalities by seeking a shared representation. For unpaired data, to effectively capture the latent discriminative features, the high-order relationships between unpaired data and anchors are embedded into the latent subspace, which are computed by efficient linear reconstruction. The anchors are sampled from paired data, which improves the efficiency of hash learning. The RREH trains the underlying features and the binary encodings in a unified framework with high-order reconstruction relations preserved. With the well devised objective function and discrete optimization algorithm, RREH is designed to be scalable, making it suitable for large-scale datasets and facilitating efficient cross-modal retrieval. In the evaluation process, the proposed is tested with partially paired data to establish its superiority over several existing methods.

Achieving disentangled control over multiple facial motions and accommodating diverse input modalities greatly enhances the application and entertainment of the talking head generation. This necessitates a deep exploration of the decoupling space for facial features, ensuring that they a) operate independently without mutual interference and b) can be preserved to share with different modal input, both aspects often neglected in existing methods. To address this gap, this paper proposes a novel Efficient Disentanglement framework for Talking head generation (EDTalk). Our framework enables individual manipulation of mouth shape, head pose, and emotional expression, conditioned on video or audio inputs. Specifically, we employ three lightweight modules to decompose the facial dynamics into three distinct latent spaces representing mouth, pose, and expression, respectively. Each space is characterized by a set of learnable bases whose linear combinations define specific motions. To ensure independence and accelerate training, we enforce orthogonality among bases and devise an efficient training strategy to allocate motion responsibilities to each space without relying on external knowledge. The learned bases are then stored in corresponding banks, enabling shared visual priors with audio input. Furthermore, considering the properties of each space, we propose an Audio-to-Motion module for audio-driven talking head synthesis. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of EDTalk. We recommend watching the project website: https://tanshuai0219.github.io/EDTalk/

Estimating piano dynamic from audio recordings is a fundamental challenge in computational music analysis. In this paper, we propose an efficient multi-task network that jointly predicts dynamic levels, change points, beats, and downbeats from a shared latent representation. These four targets form the metrical structure of dynamics in the music score. Inspired by recent vocal dynamic research, we use a multi-scale network as the backbone, which takes Bark-scale specific loudness as the input feature. Compared to log-Mel as input, this reduces model size from 14.7 M to 0.5 M, enabling long sequential input. We use a 60-second audio length in audio segmentation, which doubled the length of beat tracking commonly used. Evaluated on the public MazurkaBL dataset, our model achieves state-of-the-art results across all tasks. This work sets a new benchmark for piano dynamic estimation and delivers a powerful and compact tool, paving the way for large-scale, resource-efficient analysis of musical expression.

Silent Speech Interfaces (SSIs) offer a noninvasive alternative to brain-computer interfaces for soundless verbal communication. We introduce Multimodal Orofacial Neural Audio (MONA), a system that leverages cross-modal alignment through novel loss functions--cross-contrast (crossCon) and supervised temporal contrast (supTcon)--to train a multimodal model with a shared latent representation. This architecture enables the use of audio-only datasets like LibriSpeech to improve silent speech recognition. Additionally, our introduction of Large Language Model (LLM) Integrated Scoring Adjustment (LISA) significantly improves recognition accuracy. Together, MONA LISA reduces the state-of-the-art word error rate (WER) from 28.8% to 12.2% in the Gaddy (2020) benchmark dataset for silent speech on an open vocabulary. For vocal EMG recordings, our method improves the state-of-the-art from 23.3% to 3.7% WER. In the Brain-to-Text 2024 competition, LISA performs best, improving the top WER from 9.8% to 8.9%. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first instance where noninvasive silent speech recognition on an open vocabulary has cleared the threshold of 15% WER, demonstrating that SSIs can be a viable alternative to automatic speech recognition (ASR). Our work not only narrows the performance gap between silent and vocalized speech but also opens new possibilities in human-computer interaction, demonstrating the potential of cross-modal approaches in noisy and data-limited regimes.

Climate hazards increasingly disrupt urban transportation and emergency-response operations by damaging housing stock, degrading infrastructure, and reducing network accessibility. This paper presents Skjold-DiT, a diffusion-transformer framework that integrates heterogeneous spatio-temporal urban data to forecast building-level climate-risk indicators while explicitly incorporating transportation-network structure and accessibility signals relevant to intelligent vehicles (e.g., emergency reachability and evacuation-route constraints). Concretely, Skjold-DiT enables hazard-conditioned routing constraints by producing calibrated, uncertainty-aware accessibility layers (reachability, travel-time inflation, and route redundancy) that can be consumed by intelligent-vehicle routing and emergency dispatch systems. Skjold-DiT combines: (1) Fjell-Prompt, a prompt-based conditioning interface designed to support cross-city transfer; (2) Norrland-Fusion, a cross-modal attention mechanism unifying hazard maps/imagery, building attributes, demographics, and transportation infrastructure into a shared latent representation; and (3) Valkyrie-Forecast, a counterfactual simulator for generating probabilistic risk trajectories under intervention prompts. We introduce the Baltic-Caspian Urban Resilience (BCUR) dataset with 847,392 building-level observations across six cities, including multi-hazard annotations (e.g., flood and heat indicators) and transportation accessibility features. Experiments evaluate prediction quality, cross-city generalization, calibration, and downstream transportation-relevant outcomes, including reachability and hazard-conditioned travel times under counterfactual interventions.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) extend large language models (LLMs) from independent single-model reasoning to coordinative system-level intelligence. While existing LLM agents depend on text-based mediation for reasoning and communication, we take a step forward by enabling models to collaborate directly within the continuous latent space. We introduce LatentMAS, an end-to-end training-free framework that enables pure latent collaboration among LLM agents. In LatentMAS, each agent first performs auto-regressive latent thoughts generation through last-layer hidden embeddings instead of text. Then, a shared latent working memory preserves and transfers each agent's internal representations and latent thoughts, ensuring lossless information exchange without re-encoding. We provide detailed theoretical analyses showing that LatentMAS achieves higher expressiveness and lossless information preservation with lower overall complexity than standard text-based MAS. In addition, empirical evaluations across 9 comprehensive benchmarks spanning math and science reasoning, commonsense understanding, and code generation show that LatentMAS outperforms advanced single agents and text-based MAS baselines, achieving up to 14.6% higher accuracy, reducing output token usage by 70.8%-83.7%, and providing 4times-4.3times faster end-to-end inference. Code and data are fully open-sourced at https://github.com/Gen-Verse/LatentMAS.

Behavior Foundation Models (BFMs) give humanoids a promptable policy over a latent behavior space, enabling one single vector to represent a motion to imitate, a pose to reach, or a reward to maximize. Forward-Backward representations successfully produce such spaces, but at the cost of hundreds of GPU-hours for a single robot. Moreover, when the training process is repeated for a second robot, it produces a second space unrelated to the first, resulting in embodiment-specific latents that do not unify or transfer. We address these problems with CrossBFM, treating the latent space as the transferable asset for various embodiments. As retargeting provides frame-level cross-embodiment correspondence, we propose a unified encoder architecture with no robot-specific parameters for distilling the behavior space to address all training embodiments simultaneously in less than a GPU-hour. Following this encoder, latent-conditioned trackers turn the distilled latent into whole-body control in a conventional PPO training manner in just 10 more GPU-hours. On three distilled humanoids, all three prompting modes transfer: motion tracking with latent-conditioned policy losing only 0.025 rad to its joint-conditioned counterpart, smooth goal reaching between poses with no falls, and reward optimization for all 41 reward prompts. Our experiments further reveal that 1) regressing the encoder on a quarter of the motion corpus costs only 5% of tracking performance and 2) training the encoder on a subset of robots and evaluating on an unseen one recovers up to 89% of the tracking performance of seen robots, demonstrating cross-embodiment generalization to morphologically similar robots. We also verify the pipeline on real robots across all three prompting modes and with flow-based generated latents. Project website: https://dotandung.github.io/crossbfm/

Dexterous manipulation is essential for real-world robot autonomy, mirroring the central role of human hand coordination in daily activity. Humans rely on rich multimodal perception--vision, sound, and language-guided intent--to perform dexterous actions, motivating vision-based, language-conditioned manipulation systems for robots. However, training reliable vision-language-action (VLA) models for dexterous manipulation requires large-scale demonstrations across many robotic hands. In addition, as new dexterous embodiments appear rapidly, collecting data for each becomes costly and impractical, creating a need for scalable cross-embodiment learning. We introduce XL-VLA, a vision-language-action framework integrated with a unified latent action space shared across diverse dexterous hands. This embodiment-invariant latent space is directly pluggable into standard VLA architectures, enabling seamless cross-embodiment training and efficient reuse of both existing and newly collected data. Experimental results demonstrate that XL-VLA consistently outperforms baseline VLA models operating in raw joint spaces, establishing it as an effective solution for scalable cross-embodiment dexterous manipulation.

This paper addresses the challenge of novel view synthesis for a human performer from a very sparse set of camera views. Some recent works have shown that learning implicit neural representations of 3D scenes achieves remarkable view synthesis quality given dense input views. However, the representation learning will be ill-posed if the views are highly sparse. To solve this ill-posed problem, our key idea is to integrate observations over video frames. To this end, we propose Neural Body, a new human body representation which assumes that the learned neural representations at different frames share the same set of latent codes anchored to a deformable mesh, so that the observations across frames can be naturally integrated. The deformable mesh also provides geometric guidance for the network to learn 3D representations more efficiently. To evaluate our approach, we create a multi-view dataset named ZJU-MoCap that captures performers with complex motions. Experiments on ZJU-MoCap show that our approach outperforms prior works by a large margin in terms of novel view synthesis quality. We also demonstrate the capability of our approach to reconstruct a moving person from a monocular video on the People-Snapshot dataset. The code and dataset are available at https://zju3dv.github.io/neuralbody/.

Generative modeling, representation learning, and classification are three core problems in machine learning (ML), yet their state-of-the-art (SoTA) solutions remain largely disjoint. In this paper, we ask: Can a unified principle address all three? Such unification could simplify ML pipelines and foster greater synergy across tasks. We introduce Latent Zoning Network (LZN) as a step toward this goal. At its core, LZN creates a shared Gaussian latent space that encodes information across all tasks. Each data type (e.g., images, text, labels) is equipped with an encoder that maps samples to disjoint latent zones, and a decoder that maps latents back to data. ML tasks are expressed as compositions of these encoders and decoders: for example, label-conditional image generation uses a label encoder and image decoder; image embedding uses an image encoder; classification uses an image encoder and label decoder. We demonstrate the promise of LZN in three increasingly complex scenarios: (1) LZN can enhance existing models (image generation): When combined with the SoTA Rectified Flow model, LZN improves FID on CIFAR10 from 2.76 to 2.59-without modifying the training objective. (2) LZN can solve tasks independently (representation learning): LZN can implement unsupervised representation learning without auxiliary loss functions, outperforming the seminal MoCo and SimCLR methods by 9.3% and 0.2%, respectively, on downstream linear classification on ImageNet. (3) LZN can solve multiple tasks simultaneously (joint generation and classification): With image and label encoders/decoders, LZN performs both tasks jointly by design, improving FID and achieving SoTA classification accuracy on CIFAR10. The code and trained models are available at https://github.com/microsoft/latent-zoning-networks. The project website is at https://zinanlin.me/blogs/latent_zoning_networks.html.

Focal cortical dysplasia (FCD) lesions in epilepsy FLAIR MRI are subtle and scarce, making joint image--mask generative modeling prone to instability and memorization. We propose SLIM-Diff, a compact joint diffusion model whose main contributions are (i) a single shared-bottleneck U-Net that enforces tight coupling between anatomy and lesion geometry from a 2-channel image+mask representation, and (ii) loss-geometry tuning via a tunable L_p objective. As an internal baseline, we include the canonical DDPM-style objective (ε-prediction with L_2 loss) and isolate the effect of prediction parameterization and L_p geometry under a matched setup. Experiments show that x_0-prediction is consistently the strongest choice for joint synthesis, and that fractional sub-quadratic penalties (L_{1.5}) improve image fidelity while L_2 better preserves lesion mask morphology. Our code and model weights are available in https://github.com/MarioPasc/slim-diff

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) possess intrinsic reasoning and world-knowledge capabilities, yet adapting them for dense retrieval remains challenging. Existing approaches rely on invasive parameter updates, such as full fine-tuning and LoRA, which may disrupt the pre-trained semantic space and impair the structured knowledge essential for reasoning. To address this, we propose SLQ, a parameter-efficient tuning framework that adapts MLLMs for retrieval while keeping the backbone entirely frozen. SLQ introduces a small set of Shared Latent Queries that are appended to both text and image tokens, leveraging the model's native causal attention to aggregate multimodal context into a unified embedding space. Furthermore, to better evaluate retrieval beyond superficial pattern matching, we construct KARR-Bench, a benchmark designed for knowledge-aware reasoning retrieval. Extensive experiments show that SLQ outperforms full fine-tuning and LoRA on COCO and Flickr30K, while achieving competitive performance on MMEB and yielding substantial gains on KARR-Bench, validating that preserving the pre-trained representations via non-invasive adaptation is an effective strategy for MLLM-based retrieval. The code is available under: https://github.com/CnFaker/SLQ.

Recent studies have introduced a new class of generative models for synthesizing implicit neural representations (INRs) that capture arbitrary continuous signals in various domains. These models opened the door for domain-agnostic generative models, but they often fail to achieve high-quality generation. We observed that the existing methods generate the weights of neural networks to parameterize INRs and evaluate the network with fixed positional embeddings (PEs). Arguably, this architecture limits the expressive power of generative models and results in low-quality INR generation. To address this limitation, we propose Domain-agnostic Latent Diffusion Model for INRs (DDMI) that generates adaptive positional embeddings instead of neural networks' weights. Specifically, we develop a Discrete-to-continuous space Variational AutoEncoder (D2C-VAE), which seamlessly connects discrete data and the continuous signal functions in the shared latent space. Additionally, we introduce a novel conditioning mechanism for evaluating INRs with the hierarchically decomposed PEs to further enhance expressive power. Extensive experiments across four modalities, e.g., 2D images, 3D shapes, Neural Radiance Fields, and videos, with seven benchmark datasets, demonstrate the versatility of DDMI and its superior performance compared to the existing INR generative models.

This paper presents T3: Transferable Tactile Transformers, a framework for tactile representation learning that scales across multi-sensors and multi-tasks. T3 is designed to overcome the contemporary issue that camera-based tactile sensing is extremely heterogeneous, i.e. sensors are built into different form factors, and existing datasets were collected for disparate tasks. T3 captures the shared latent information across different sensor-task pairings by constructing a shared trunk transformer with sensor-specific encoders and task-specific decoders. The pre-training of T3 utilizes a novel Foundation Tactile (FoTa) dataset, which is aggregated from several open-sourced datasets and it contains over 3 million data points gathered from 13 sensors and 11 tasks. FoTa is the largest and most diverse dataset in tactile sensing to date and it is made publicly available in a unified format. Across various sensors and tasks, experiments show that T3 pre-trained with FoTa achieved zero-shot transferability in certain sensor-task pairings, can be further fine-tuned with small amounts of domain-specific data, and its performance scales with bigger network sizes. T3 is also effective as a tactile encoder for long horizon contact-rich manipulation. Results from sub-millimeter multi-pin electronics insertion tasks show that T3 achieved a task success rate 25% higher than that of policies trained with tactile encoders trained from scratch, or 53% higher than without tactile sensing. Data, code, and model checkpoints are open-sourced at https://t3.alanz.info.

The Strong Platonic Representation Hypothesis suggests that representational convergence in artificial neural networks can be harnessed constructively: embeddings can be translated across models through a universal latent space without paired data. We ask whether an analogous geometry can be recovered across human brains. Using fMRI data from the Natural Scenes Dataset, we propose a self-supervised encoder that learns subject-specific embeddings from brain data alone by exploiting repeated stimulus presentations. We show that these independently learned spaces can be translated across subjects using unsupervised orthogonal rotations, without paired cross-subject samples or intermediate model representations. Synchronizing pairwise rotations into a single shared latent space further improves cross-subject retrieval, indicating that subject-specific spaces are mutually compatible with a common coordinate system. These results provide evidence for a shared neural geometry in the human visual cortex: subject-specific fMRI representations are approximately isometric across individuals and can be translated through purely geometric transformations.

Unsupervised video object-centric learning aims to decompose dynamic scenes into temporally persistent entity representations. Existing recurrent video slot-attention methods propagate a fixed set of slots across frames, but typically assume unconditional slot propagation: every slot is updated and decoded at every frame, regardless of whether its corresponding object is visible. We show that this design violates a basic lifecycle requirement for persistent slots: when an object is absent or fully occluded, its slot should preserve its previous state and avoid explaining unrelated visible content. Instead, unconditional propagation creates two failure pathways: update-induced state drift, where current-frame evidence overwrites the absent object's representation, and decoder-induced reconstruction interference, where the inactive slot remains coupled to reconstruction through decoder attention. We propose Temporal Slot Activation (TSA), a mechanism that learns a per-slot, per-frame activation score α_{k,t} in (0, 1) without visibility supervision. TSA uses this activation as a shared latent control variable for slot lifecycle modeling. When a slot is inactive, TSA anchors its state to the previous slot via activation-gated updating and suppresses its decoder participation through an activation-dependent additive bias on attention logits before softmax normalization. This jointly reduces state drift and reconstruction-driven interference. To improve decisions under partial occlusion and gradual reappearance, TSA further conditions activation prediction on a per-slot temporal memory produced by a Temporal Context Encoder. We evaluate TSA on MOVi-C/E, YT-VIS, and OVIS benchmarks using both standard and tracking-based metrics (FG-ARI, mBO, IDF1, HOTA). TSA consistently improves object decomposition and temporal identity preservation, with large gains on long, heavily occluded videos.

Masked Image Modeling (MIM) with Vector Quantization (VQ) has achieved great success in both self-supervised pre-training and image generation. However, most existing methods struggle to address the trade-off in shared latent space for generation quality vs. representation learning and efficiency. To push the limits of this paradigm, we propose MergeVQ, which incorporates token merging techniques into VQ-based generative models to bridge the gap between image generation and visual representation learning in a unified architecture. During pre-training, MergeVQ decouples top-k semantics from latent space with the token merge module after self-attention blocks in the encoder for subsequent Look-up Free Quantization (LFQ) and global alignment and recovers their fine-grained details through cross-attention in the decoder for reconstruction. As for the second-stage generation, we introduce MergeAR, which performs KV Cache compression for efficient raster-order prediction. Extensive experiments on ImageNet verify that MergeVQ as an AR generative model achieves competitive performance in both visual representation learning and image generation tasks while maintaining favorable token efficiency and inference speed. The code and model will be available at https://apexgen-x.github.io/MergeVQ.

We study sinusoidal recurrence as an iterative mechanism for harmonic spectral enrichment in implicit neural representations (INRs). Our analysis reveals that sinusoidal activations induce a harmonic line spectrum, providing a spectral account of how recurrent unrolling enriches the effective spectral support. We realize this principle with a shared sinusoidal block that iteratively refines the latent representation. We empirically validate the resulting spectral behavior against feed-forward INRs, non-sinusoidal recurrent variants, and equilibrium-style sinusoidal models. Complementing this analysis, we evaluate the proposed architecture across image and 3D representation tasks. On RGB image benchmarks, our method achieves higher fidelity than feed-forward baselines with fewer parameters and fewer optimization steps, and it further transfers favorably to super-resolution, NeRF, and SDF tasks.

Recent progress in generative modeling has made safety control a central challenge, yet existing approaches remain largely model-specific, requiring retraining or tailored interventions for each new architecture. In this work, we ask whether safety can be represented as a portable latent direction, learned once and reused across heterogeneous generators. We introduce the first framework for cross-model safety steering, in which a safety direction is estimated in a source LLM from paired safe-unsafe prompts, transported to a target generator through a lightweight alignment fitted on benign data alone, and applied at inference time. Crucially, our pipeline never accesses unsafe data on the target side, isolating whether safety can be transferred through shared representation geometry. Beyond a single global direction, we also identify a multi-vector extension that captures category-specific safety behaviors, enabling more selective control. We evaluate our approach in text-to-image and text-to-video generation across diverse source-target model pairs. Across models, transferred safety directions achieve ASR reduction and CLIP-Score/FID trade-offs comparable to directions learned natively on the target model using unsafe data, while requiring no target-side unsafe data. This indicates that safety improvements do not come at the expense of generation quality. Our results point to a modular view of safety: safety-relevant behavior is not purely model-local, but can be controlled through latent directions that persist across models. This suggests a new path toward lightweight, reusable safety mechanisms that do not require target-side unsafe data.

Despite strong results on recognition and segmentation, current 3D visual pre-training methods often underperform on robotic manipulation. We attribute this gap to two factors: the lack of state-action-state dynamics modeling and the unnecessary redundancy of explicit geometric reconstruction. We introduce AFRO, a self-supervised framework that learns dynamics-aware 3D representations without action or reconstruction supervision. AFRO casts state prediction as a generative diffusion process and jointly models forward and inverse dynamics in a shared latent space to capture causal transition structure. To prevent feature leakage in action learning, we employ feature differencing and inverse-consistency supervision, improving the quality and stability of visual features. When combined with Diffusion Policy, AFRO substantially increases manipulation success rates across 16 simulated and 4 real-world tasks, outperforming existing pre-training approaches. The framework also scales favorably with data volume and task complexity. Qualitative visualizations indicate that AFRO learns semantically rich, discriminative features, offering an effective pre-training solution for 3D representation learning in robotics. Project page: https://kolakivy.github.io/AFRO/

We investigate whether socio-economic indicators like household wealth leave recoverable imprints in satellite imagery (capturing physical features) and Internet-sourced text (reflecting historical/economic narratives). Using Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from African neighborhoods, we pair Landsat images with LLM-generated textual descriptions conditioned on location/year and text retrieved by an AI search agent from web sources. We develop a multimodal framework predicting household wealth (International Wealth Index) through five pipelines: (i) vision model on satellite images, (ii) LLM using only location/year, (iii) AI agent searching/synthesizing web text, (iv) joint image-text encoder, (v) ensemble of all signals. Our framework yields three contributions. First, fusing vision and agent/LLM text outperforms vision-only baselines in wealth prediction (e.g., R-squared of 0.77 vs. 0.63 on out-of-sample splits), with LLM-internal knowledge proving more effective than agent-retrieved text, improving robustness to out-of-country and out-of-time generalization. Second, we find partial representational convergence: fused embeddings from vision/language modalities correlate moderately (median cosine similarity of 0.60 after alignment), suggesting a shared latent code of material well-being while retaining complementary details, consistent with the Platonic Representation Hypothesis. Although LLM-only text outperforms agent-retrieved data, challenging our Agent-Induced Novelty Hypothesis, modest gains from combining agent data in some splits weakly support the notion that agent-gathered information introduces unique representational structures not fully captured by static LLM knowledge. Third, we release a large-scale multimodal dataset comprising more than 60,000 DHS clusters linked to satellite images, LLM-generated descriptions, and agent-retrieved texts.

World models have demonstrated significant potential for perceiving and simulating complex environments. Despite their strong performance, the fundamental nature of their learned representations remains poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate the Platonic Representation Hypothesis within this domain by proposing the Predictive Consistency Assumption: we posit that the optimization of a shared state transition objective acts as a selective pressure that encourages heterogeneous models to converge toward a shared latent structure. Through systematic experiments with the DINO World Model (DINO-WM), in which we vary visual encoders to create heterogeneous models, we find that capable world models evolve toward geometrically similar internal structures. Moreover, via model stitching, we show that the internal features of one world model can be mapped to another with limited performance degradation, providing evidence of functional compatibility. Our findings suggest that the pursuit of predictive consistency can promote shared, transition-compatible latent structure across world models.

Multi-task learning over heterogeneous data is fundamental to modern recommendation, while generative models are emerging as the backbone of next-generation recommenders. However, the integration of multi-task learning into the generative paradigm remains largely unexplored. Existing multi-task recommenders, in both discriminative and generative paradigms, extract task-relevant features from a single task-agnostic representation and wire tasks into a predefined conversion funnel. We show that this scheme is inherently prone to a threefold collapse. Source collapse, where task-specific signals are injected late and diluted in the shared latent space. Relational collapse, where task dependencies are either implicitly absorbed by the backbone or statically fixed by predefined funnels. Hierarchical collapse, where tasks depend on features at different scales and shift across training stages. We propose IntHQ, a multi-task generative recommender with three components, each alleviating one collapse. Dual-Stream Decoupling (DSD) injects task identity into computation stream early and separates the shared context stream from the task-specific stream, alleviating signal dilution. Task-Interactive Modeling (TIM) replaces the predefined funnel with explicit cross-task interaction, letting each task condition on the realized outcomes of its predecessors with learned, input-adaptive strength. Hierarchical Querying (HQ) lets each task gather multi-scale information across different layers at different training stages. In offline evaluations, IntHQ consistently outperforms competitive encoder backbones under four representative task-head configurations. Deployed in production on Amap, serving hundreds of millions of users for travel recommendation, IntHQ yields a 1.60\% relative UVCTR lift.

Representation autoencoders (RAEs) reuse features from a pretrained visual encoder as reconstruction and diffusion latents, integrating strong visual representations into image generation. However, RAEs still need to decide which encoder layers form the shared latent space for the generator and pixel decoder. This choice involves a trade-off. Shallower layers tend to preserve fine pixel details better, while deeper layers tend to yield better generation metrics. A fixed heuristic layer fusion therefore couples two stages that benefit from different information. We introduce FuseReg, which replaces heuristic feature selection with training over random subsets of encoder layers. We theoretically analyze the underlying mechanism: subset sampling explicitly penalizes sensitivity to cross-layer disagreement. On ImageNet-256 with DINOv3-L, a single FuseReg decoder reconstructs from full, sparse, and single-layer fusions without retraining, achieving higher PSNR than decoders specialized to fixed fusions. This flexibility also benefits generation: decoder replacement alone reduces unguided gFID by 27% with an unchanged RAEv2 DiT-XL generator. The same regularization principle extends to diffusion training, with joint regularization of both stages reducing unguided gFID by 29% on DiT-Base. These results show that training downstream models for layer-fusion robustness narrows the reconstruction-generation gap without modifying the pretrained encoder.

The development of unified multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is fundamentally challenged by the granularity gap between visual understanding and generation: understanding requires high-level semantic abstractions, while image generation demands fine-grained pixel-level representations. Existing approaches usually enforce the two supervision on the same set of representation or decouple these two supervision on separate feature spaces, leading to interference and inconsistency, respectively. In this work, we propose EvoTok, a unified image tokenizer that reconciles these requirements through a residual evolution process within a shared latent space. Instead of maintaining separate token spaces for pixels and semantics, EvoTok encodes an image into a cascaded sequence of residual tokens via residual vector quantization. This residual sequence forms an evolution trajectory where earlier stages capture low-level details and deeper stages progressively transition toward high-level semantic representations. Despite being trained on a relatively modest dataset of 13M images, far smaller than the billion-scale datasets used by many previous unified tokenizers, EvoTok achieves a strong reconstruction quality of 0.43 rFID on ImageNet-1K at 256x256 resolution. When integrated with a large language model, EvoTok shows promising performance across 7 out of 9 visual understanding benchmarks, and remarkable results on image generation benchmarks such as GenEval and GenAI-Bench. These results demonstrate that modeling visual representations as an evolving trajectory provides an effective and principled solution for unifying visual understanding and generation.

This paper introduces ARM, a discrete representation-based AutoRegressive Model that unifies image understanding, generation, and editing within a next-token prediction framework. ARM is built on three efforts: first, we train a discrete semantic visual tokenizer that maps images into compact token sequences. Our tokenizer is supervised with multiple objectives that jointly promote semantic discriminability, language alignment and faithful reconstruction, thereby supporting diverse tasks in a shared latent space. With this, we train a 7B autoregressive model over large-scale text and image token sequences, seamlessly developing vision-language perception and generation capabilities. Finally, to further improve preference-aligned behavior for text-to-image generation and instruction-guided editing, ARM applies reinforcement learning (RL) to optimize task-level objectives such as visual quality, instruction adherence, and edit consistency. Surprisingly, the results show that RL not only substantially improves performance on the target tasks (e.g., raising WISE overall from 0.50 to 0.56, GEdit-Bench-EN G_O from 5.75 to 6.68), but also induces cross-task synergy between text-to-image generation and editing. Collectively, these findings highlight autoregressive modeling, when paired with strong representations and preference optimization, as a scalable foundation for multimodal intelligence. Code: https://github.com/wdrink/ARM.

Modeling 3D human-object interaction (HOI) is a problem of great interest for computer vision and a key enabler for virtual and mixed-reality applications. Existing methods work in a one-way direction: some recover plausible human interactions conditioned on a 3D object; others recover the object pose conditioned on a human pose. Instead, we provide the first unified model - TriDi which works in any direction. Concretely, we generate Human, Object, and Interaction modalities simultaneously with a new three-way diffusion process, allowing to model seven distributions with one network. We implement TriDi as a transformer attending to the various modalities' tokens, thereby discovering conditional relations between them. The user can control the interaction either as a text description of HOI or a contact map. We embed these two representations into a shared latent space, combining the practicality of text descriptions with the expressiveness of contact maps. Using a single network, TriDi unifies all the special cases of prior work and extends to new ones, modeling a family of seven distributions. Remarkably, despite using a single model, TriDi generated samples surpass one-way specialized baselines on GRAB and BEHAVE in terms of both qualitative and quantitative metrics, and demonstrating better diversity. We show the applicability of TriDi to scene population, generating objects for human-contact datasets, and generalization to unseen object geometry. The project page is available at: https://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/tridi.

Sound source distance estimation (SDE) is a critical capability in human-robot interaction. An inappropriate interaction distance not only reduces the reliability of speech acquisition and understanding, but also compromises the naturalness and comfort of the interaction. Most existing SDE methods rely on microphone arrays, however, multi-microphone systems typically require careful hardware synchronization, geometric calibration, and additional space and computational resources, which limits applicability to size-constrained and computability-limited embodied platforms. To alleviate these issues, we propose Fast-SDE, a lightweight single-microphone SDE framework that is suited for deployment on robot platforms with limited computational resources and strict size constraints. Specifically, Fast-SDE employs a subband-based backbone that decomposes the frequency axis into multiple subbands, rather than processing the entire spectrum with a wide full-band backbone. A shared subband encoder then maps each subband to a compact latent representation and learns the relationship between acoustic structure and time-frequency patterns. Finally, a lightweight regression head converts the fused subband representations into the estimated distance. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate the merits of the proposed method. To benefit the broader research community, we have open-sourced our code at https://github.com/JiangWAV/FAST-SDE.

Bridging different modalities lies at the heart of cross-modality generation. While conventional approaches treat the text modality as a conditioning signal that gradually guides the denoising process from Gaussian noise to the target image modality, we explore a much simpler paradigm-directly evolving between text and image modalities through flow matching. This requires projecting both modalities into a shared latent space, which poses a significant challenge due to their inherently different representations: text is highly semantic and encoded as 1D tokens, whereas images are spatially redundant and represented as 2D latent embeddings. To address this, we introduce FlowTok, a minimal framework that seamlessly flows across text and images by encoding images into a compact 1D token representation. Compared to prior methods, this design reduces the latent space size by 3.3x at an image resolution of 256, eliminating the need for complex conditioning mechanisms or noise scheduling. Moreover, FlowTok naturally extends to image-to-text generation under the same formulation. With its streamlined architecture centered around compact 1D tokens, FlowTok is highly memory-efficient, requires significantly fewer training resources, and achieves much faster sampling speeds-all while delivering performance comparable to state-of-the-art models. Code will be available at https://github.com/bytedance/1d-tokenizer.

This paper presents a family of advanced vision encoder, named OpenVision 3, that learns a single, unified visual representation that can serve both image understanding and image generation. Our core architecture is simple: we feed VAE-compressed image latents to a ViT encoder and train its output to support two complementary roles. First, the encoder output is passed to the ViT-VAE decoder to reconstruct the original image, encouraging the representation to capture generative structure. Second, the same representation is optimized with contrastive learning and image-captioning objectives, strengthening semantic features. By jointly optimizing reconstruction- and semantics-driven signals in a shared latent space, the encoder learns representations that synergize and generalize well across both regimes. We validate this unified design through extensive downstream evaluations with the encoder frozen. For multimodal understanding, we plug the encoder into the LLaVA-1.5 framework: it performs comparably with a standard CLIP vision encoder (e.g., 62.4 vs 62.2 on SeedBench, and 83.7 vs 82.9 on POPE). For generation, we test it under the RAE framework: ours substantially surpasses the standard CLIP-based encoder (e.g., gFID: 1.89 vs 2.54 on ImageNet). We hope this work can spur future research on unified modeling.

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 sometimes appear to be creative, solving novel tasks often with a few demonstrations in the prompt. These tasks require the models to generalize on distributions different from those from training data -- which is known as out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. Despite the tremendous success of LLMs, how they approach OOD generalization remains an open and underexplored question. We examine OOD generalization in settings where instances are generated according to hidden rules, including in-context learning with symbolic reasoning. Models are required to infer the hidden rules behind input prompts without any fine-tuning. We empirically examined the training dynamics of Transformers on a synthetic example and conducted extensive experiments on a variety of pretrained LLMs, focusing on a type of components known as induction heads. We found that OOD generalization and composition are tied together -- models can learn rules by composing two self-attention layers, thereby achieving OOD generalization. Furthermore, a shared latent subspace in the embedding (or feature) space acts as a bridge for composition by aligning early layers and later layers, which we refer to as the common bridge representation hypothesis.

Text-based person search (TBPS) is a problem that gained significant interest within the research community. The task is that of retrieving one or more images of a specific individual based on a textual description. The multi-modal nature of the task requires learning representations that bridge text and image data within a shared latent space. Existing TBPS systems face two major challenges. One is defined as inter-identity noise that is due to the inherent vagueness and imprecision of text descriptions and it indicates how descriptions of visual attributes can be generally associated to different people; the other is the intra-identity variations, which are all those nuisances e.g. pose, illumination, that can alter the visual appearance of the same textual attributes for a given subject. To address these issues, this paper presents a novel TBPS architecture named MARS (Mae-Attribute-Relation-Sensitive), which enhances current state-of-the-art models by introducing two key components: a Visual Reconstruction Loss and an Attribute Loss. The former employs a Masked AutoEncoder trained to reconstruct randomly masked image patches with the aid of the textual description. In doing so the model is encouraged to learn more expressive representations and textual-visual relations in the latent space. The Attribute Loss, instead, balances the contribution of different types of attributes, defined as adjective-noun chunks of text. This loss ensures that every attribute is taken into consideration in the person retrieval process. Extensive experiments on three commonly used datasets, namely CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES, and RSTPReid, report performance improvements, with significant gains in the mean Average Precision (mAP) metric w.r.t. the current state of the art.

Fashion design is a complex creative process that blends visual and textual expressions. Designers convey ideas through sketches, which define spatial structure and design elements, and textual descriptions, capturing material, texture, and stylistic details. In this paper, we present LOcalized Text and Sketch for fashion image generation (LOTS), an approach for compositional sketch-text based generation of complete fashion outlooks. LOTS leverages a global description with paired localized sketch + text information for conditioning and introduces a novel step-based merging strategy for diffusion adaptation. First, a Modularized Pair-Centric representation encodes sketches and text into a shared latent space while preserving independent localized features; then, a Diffusion Pair Guidance phase integrates both local and global conditioning via attention-based guidance within the diffusion model's multi-step denoising process. To validate our method, we build on Fashionpedia to release Sketchy, the first fashion dataset where multiple text-sketch pairs are provided per image. Quantitative results show LOTS achieves state-of-the-art image generation performance on both global and localized metrics, while qualitative examples and a human evaluation study highlight its unprecedented level of design customization.

Scaling humanoid foundation models is bottlenecked by the scarcity of robotic data. While massive egocentric human data offers a scalable alternative, bridging the cross-embodiment chasm remains a fundamental challenge due to kinematic mismatches. We introduce UniT (Unified Latent Action Tokenizer via Visual Anchoring), a framework that establishes a unified physical language for human-to-humanoid transfer. Grounded in the philosophy that heterogeneous kinematics share universal visual consequences, UniT employs a tri-branch cross-reconstruction mechanism: actions predict vision to anchor kinematics to physical outcomes, while vision reconstructs actions to filter out irrelevant visual confounders. Concurrently, a fusion branch synergies these purified modalities into a shared discrete latent space of embodiment-agnostic physical intents. We validate UniT across two paradigms: 1) Policy Learning (VLA-UniT): By predicting these unified tokens, it effectively leverages diverse human data to achieve state-of-the-art data efficiency and robust out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization on both humanoid simulation benchmark and real-world deployments, notably demonstrating zero-shot task transfer. 2) World Modeling (WM-UniT): By aligning cross-embodiment dynamics via unified tokens as conditions, it realizes direct human-to-humanoid action transfer. This alignment ensures that human data seamlessly translates into enhanced action controllability for humanoid video generation. Ultimately, by inducing a highly aligned cross-embodiment representation (empirically verified by t-SNE visualizations revealing the convergence of human and humanoid features into a shared manifold), UniT offers a scalable path to distill vast human knowledge into general-purpose humanoid capabilities.

Audio generation has long been fragmented, with speech, music, and sound effects produced by domain-specific models that fail to jointly generate coherent audio scenes from a single description. The key obstacles are insufficient fine-grained supervision for real-world mixed audio and limited acoustic representations for modeling concurrent audio components. We present Dasheng AudioGen, a unified framework for generating general mixed-audio scenes from text. Dasheng AudioGen introduces structured multi-view captions, which explicitly decouple complex acoustic scenes into complementary description views, thereby enabling fine-grained control over audio layers. Furthermore, we employ a high-dimensional unified semantic-acoustic representation as the shared latent space. It injects semantic priors that facilitate cross-modal training convergence, while its high-dimensional feature space provides sufficient capacity to disentangle and fuse concurrent audio components effectively. With these designs, a simple flow-matching DiT achieves high-quality end-to-end audio scene generation. We also establish a comprehensive evaluation pipeline for audio scene generation. Experiments demonstrate that Dasheng AudioGen achieves performance approaching real-world recordings in mixed-audio categories, while remaining competitive with specialized models in single-type generation tasks. Demos are available at https://nieeim.github.io/Dasheng-AudioGen-Web/.

Audio-video generation has recently gained unprecedented research attention, aiming to synthesize high-quality sounding video content with fine-grained synchronization and semantic alignment between the auditory and visual components. The preceding methods predominantly adopt a dual-branch design with separate tokenization and generation modules per modality, neglecting the representation gap while necessitating intensive computational resources for proper training. Inspired by recent advancements in one-dimensional visual tokenization, we present AVTok, a novel unified tokenizer designated for holistic audio-video generation. AVTok features a dual-stream transformer-based architecture with shared encoder-decoder and modal-specific learnable queries to efficiently and effectively encode an audio-video pair into a compact one-dimensional latent representation with a unified codebook. To cope with the heterogeneous information imbalance that hinders AVTok from exploiting aligned audio-visual information, we devise a hierarchical training strategy to progressively realize reconstruction capabilities for each modality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AVTok excels both in audio-video reconstruction and when integrated into downstream pipelines for audio-to-video, video-to-audio, and class-conditional joint audio-video generation. AVTok paves the way for the challenge of joint audio-video tokenization and provides a potential direction to build unified large multimodal models for audio-video generation.

Adversarial diffusion and diffusion-inversion methods have advanced unpaired image-to-image translation, but each faces key limitations. Adversarial approaches require target-domain adversarial loss during training, which can limit generalization to unseen data, while diffusion-inversion methods often produce low-fidelity translations due to imperfect inversion into noise-latent representations. In this work, we propose the Self-Supervised Semantic Bridge (SSB), a versatile framework that integrates external semantic priors into diffusion bridge models to enable spatially faithful translation without cross-domain supervision. Our key idea is to leverage self-supervised visual encoders to learn representations that are invariant to appearance changes but capture geometric structure, forming a shared latent space that conditions the diffusion bridges. Extensive experiments show that SSB outperforms strong prior methods for challenging medical image synthesis in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings, and extends easily to high-quality text-guided editing.

Understanding physical human-robot and human-human interactions is a challenging yet emerging topic in 3D vision. While most existing methods rely on skeleton sequences--effective in low-light and privacy-sensitive environment--they face two major challenges: 1) learning and effectively exploiting interaction cues from skeletal data, and 2) compensating for the lack of visual information absent in skeletons alone. To address these challenges, we propose skeletal token alignment and rearrangement (STAR) for human-robot and human-human interaction recognition. It learns interaction-specific skeleton features and enriches them using visual cues by aligning skeleton and RGB video representations in a shared latent space. Specifically, STAR consists of three key components. First, we design a skeleton encoder that captures fine-grained interdependencies using Entity Rearrangement (ER) and Interactive Spatiotemporal Tokens (ISTs). Second, we present Visual Interaction Encoding that introduces a Focus on Interactions (FoI) strategy to attend to spatiotemporal regions relevant to interactions in RGB videos. Finally, these representations are aligned via a contrastive learning objective, with a refinement head further refines predictions. During training, STAR leverages both skeleton and RGB video data to learn robust, discriminative interaction representations. At inference time, it operates on skeletons alone, retaining visual-informed benefits while preserving skeleton-only efficiency. Extensive experiments on Chico, HARPER, NTU Mutual 11 and 26 datasets consistently validate our approach by demonstrating superior performance over state-of-the-art methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Necolizer/STAR.

We propose Fast Language-Audio Pre-training (FLAP), a self-supervised approach that efficiently and effectively learns aligned audio and language representations through masking, contrastive learning and reconstruction. For efficiency, FLAP randomly drops audio spectrogram tokens, focusing solely on the remaining ones for self-supervision. Through inter-modal contrastive learning, FLAP learns to align paired audio and text representations in a shared latent space. Notably, FLAP leverages multiple augmented views via masking for inter-modal contrast and learns to reconstruct the masked portion of audio tokens. Moreover, FLAP leverages large language models (LLMs) to augment the text inputs, contributing to improved performance. These approaches lead to more robust and informative audio-text representations, enabling FLAP to achieve state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance on audio-text retrieval tasks on AudioCaps (achieving 53.0% R@1) and Clotho (achieving 25.5% R@1).

Looped Language Models (LoopLMs) perform "latent reasoning" by recursively refining internal latent representations with shared weights, offering a more effective alternative to explicit verbal reasoning. Despite their effectiveness, we find that LoopLMs remain prone to loop instability: unstable refinement across iterations can produce localized uncertain "hard" tokens associated with reasoning errors. To address this, we propose LoopCD, loop-wise contrastive decoding that enhances the reasoning performance of LoopLMs by intervening on these tokens at inference time. Specifically, we exploit the internal dynamics of LoopLMs and contrast the logits from earlier iterations with logits from the last refined iteration to form the final sampling distribution. We find that this strategy is highly efficient, introducing only negligible inference overhead and requiring no additional training, while effectively improving reasoning performance by naturally refining reasoning-critical hard tokens. Extensive experiments show that our method improves the performance of recent representative LoopLMs across various reasoning tasks.

Diffusion models are the standard toolkit for generative modelling of 3D atomic systems. However, for different types of atomic systems - such as molecules and materials - the generative processes are usually highly specific to the target system despite the underlying physics being the same. We introduce the All-atom Diffusion Transformer (ADiT), a unified latent diffusion framework for jointly generating both periodic materials and non-periodic molecular systems using the same model: (1) An autoencoder maps a unified, all-atom representations of molecules and materials to a shared latent embedding space; and (2) A diffusion model is trained to generate new latent embeddings that the autoencoder can decode to sample new molecules or materials. Experiments on QM9 and MP20 datasets demonstrate that jointly trained ADiT generates realistic and valid molecules as well as materials, exceeding state-of-the-art results from molecule and crystal-specific models. ADiT uses standard Transformers for both the autoencoder and diffusion model, resulting in significant speedups during training and inference compared to equivariant diffusion models. Scaling ADiT up to half a billion parameters predictably improves performance, representing a step towards broadly generalizable foundation models for generative chemistry. Open source code: https://github.com/facebookresearch/all-atom-diffusion-transformer

Autonomous driving requires efficient reasoning about the location and appearance of the different agents in the scene, which aids in downstream tasks such as object detection, object tracking, and path planning. The past few years have witnessed a surge in approaches that combine the different taskbased modules of the classic self-driving stack into an End-toEnd(E2E) trainable learning system. These approaches replace perception, prediction, and sensor fusion modules with a single contiguous module with shared latent space embedding, from which one extracts a human-interpretable representation of the scene. One of the most popular representations is the Birds-eye View (BEV), which expresses the location of different traffic participants in the ego vehicle frame from a top-down view. However, a BEV does not capture the chromatic appearance information of the participants. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel representation that captures various traffic participants appearance and occupancy information from an array of monocular cameras covering 360 deg field of view (FOV). We use a learned image embedding of all camera images to generate a BEV of the scene at any instant that captures both appearance and occupancy of the scene, which can aid in downstream tasks such as object tracking and executing language-based commands. We test the efficacy of our approach on synthetic dataset generated from CARLA. The code, data set, and results can be found at https://rebrand.ly/APP OCC-results.

Effective root cause analysis (RCA) is vital for swiftly restoring services, minimizing losses, and ensuring the smooth operation and management of complex systems. Previous data-driven RCA methods, particularly those employing causal discovery techniques, have primarily focused on constructing dependency or causal graphs for backtracking the root causes. However, these methods often fall short as they rely solely on data from a single modality, thereby resulting in suboptimal solutions. In this work, we propose Mulan, a unified multi-modal causal structure learning method for root cause localization. We leverage a log-tailored language model to facilitate log representation learning, converting log sequences into time-series data. To explore intricate relationships across different modalities, we propose a contrastive learning-based approach to extract modality-invariant and modality-specific representations within a shared latent space. Additionally, we introduce a novel key performance indicator-aware attention mechanism for assessing modality reliability and co-learning a final causal graph. Finally, we employ random walk with restart to simulate system fault propagation and identify potential root causes. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

Recent advances in vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown promise in integrating image generation with action prediction to improve generalization and reasoning in robot manipulation. However, existing methods are limited to challenging image-based forecasting, which suffers from redundant information and lacks comprehensive and critical world knowledge, including dynamic, spatial and semantic information. To address these limitations, we propose DreamVLA, a novel VLA framework that integrates comprehensive world knowledge forecasting to enable inverse dynamics modeling, thereby establishing a perception-prediction-action loop for manipulation tasks. Specifically, DreamVLA introduces a dynamic-region-guided world knowledge prediction, integrated with the spatial and semantic cues, which provide compact yet comprehensive representations for action planning. This design aligns with how humans interact with the world by first forming abstract multimodal reasoning chains before acting. To mitigate interference among the dynamic, spatial and semantic information during training, we adopt a block-wise structured attention mechanism that masks their mutual attention, preventing information leakage and keeping each representation clean and disentangled. Moreover, to model the conditional distribution over future actions, we employ a diffusion-based transformer that disentangles action representations from shared latent features. Extensive experiments on both real-world and simulation environments demonstrate that DreamVLA achieves 76.7% success rate on real robot tasks and 4.44 average length on the CALVIN ABC-D benchmarks.

The deployment of efficient long-context LLMs in applications like autonomous agents, long-chain reasoning, and creative writing is fundamentally bottlenecked by the linear growth of KV cache memory. Existing compression and eviction methods often struggle to balance accuracy, compression ratio, and hardware efficiency. We propose DeltaKV, a residual-based KV cache compression framework motivated by two empirical findings: long-range inter-token similarity and highly shared latent components in KV representations. Instead of discarding tokens, DeltaKV encodes semantic residuals relative to retrieved historical references, preserving fidelity while substantially reducing storage. To translate compression gains into real system speedups, we further introduce Sparse-vLLM, a high-performance inference engine with decoupled memory management and kernels optimized for sparse and irregular KV layouts. Experiments show that DeltaKV reduces KV cache memory to 29\% of the original while maintaining near-lossless accuracy on LongBench, SCBench, and AIME. When integrated with Sparse-vLLM, it achieves up to 2times throughput improvement over vLLM in long-context scenarios, demonstrating a practical path toward scalable long-context LLM deployment. Code, model checkpoints, and datasets are available at https://github.com/CURRENTF/Sparse-vLLM.

The analysis of public opinion from multiple heterogeneous sources presents significant challenges due to structural differences, semantic variations, and platform-specific biases. This paper introduces a novel Collaborative Reasoning and Adaptive Fusion (CRAF) framework that systematically integrates traditional feature-based methods with large language models (LLMs) through a structured multi-stage reasoning mechanism. Our approach features four key innovations: (1) a cross-platform collaborative attention module that aligns semantic representations while preserving source-specific characteristics, (2) a hierarchical adaptive fusion mechanism that dynamically weights features based on both data quality and task requirements, (3) a joint optimization strategy that simultaneously learns topic representations and sentiment distributions through shared latent spaces, and (4) a novel multimodal extraction capability that processes video content from platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou by integrating OCR, ASR, and visual sentiment analysis. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that CRAF achieves a tighter generalization bound with a reduction of O(sqrt(d log K / m)) compared to independent source modeling, where d is feature dimensionality, K is the number of sources, and m is sample size. Comprehensive experiments on three multi-platform datasets (Weibo-12, CrossPlatform-15, NewsForum-8) show that CRAF achieves an average topic clustering ARI of 0.76 (4.1% improvement over best baseline) and sentiment analysis F1-score of 0.84 (3.8% improvement). The framework exhibits strong cross-platform adaptability, reducing the labeled data requirement for new platforms by 75%.

This paper presents XLSR which learns cross-lingual speech representations by pretraining a single model from the raw waveform of speech in multiple languages. We build on wav2vec 2.0 which is trained by solving a contrastive task over masked latent speech representations and jointly learns a quantization of the latents shared across languages. The resulting model is fine-tuned on labeled data and experiments show that cross-lingual pretraining significantly outperforms monolingual pretraining. On the CommonVoice benchmark, XLSR shows a relative phoneme error rate reduction of 72% compared to the best known results. On BABEL, our approach improves word error rate by 16% relative compared to a comparable system. Our approach enables a single multilingual speech recognition model which is competitive to strong individual models. Analysis shows that the latent discrete speech representations are shared across languages with increased sharing for related languages. We hope to catalyze research in low-resource speech understanding by releasing XLSR-53, a large model pretrained in 53 languages.

Unified models (UMs) hold promise for their ability to understand and generate content across heterogeneous modalities. Compared to merely generating visual content, the use of UMs for interleaved cross-modal reasoning is more promising and valuable, e.g., for solving understanding problems that require dense visual thinking, improving visual generation through self-reflection, or modeling visual dynamics of the physical world guided by stepwise action interventions. However, existing UMs necessitate pixel decoding as a bridge due to their disjoint visual representations for understanding and generation, which is both ineffective and inefficient. In this paper, we introduce LatentUM, a novel unified model that represents all modalities within a shared semantic latent space, eliminating the need for pixel-space mediation between visual understanding and generation. This design naturally enables flexible interleaved cross-modal reasoning and generation. Beyond improved computational efficiency, the shared representation substantially alleviates codec bias and strengthens cross-modal alignment, allowing LatentUM to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Visual Spatial Planning benchmark, push the limits of visual generation through self-reflection, and support world modeling by predicting future visual states within the shared semantic latent space.

We present a CLSRIL-23, a self supervised learning based audio pre-trained model which learns cross lingual speech representations from raw audio across 23 Indic languages. It is built on top of wav2vec 2.0 which is solved by training a contrastive task over masked latent speech representations and jointly learns the quantization of latents shared across all languages. We compare the language wise loss during pretraining to compare effects of monolingual and multilingual pretraining. Performance on some downstream fine-tuning tasks for speech recognition is also compared and our experiments show that multilingual pretraining outperforms monolingual training, in terms of learning speech representations which encodes phonetic similarity of languages and also in terms of performance on down stream tasks. A decrease of 5% is observed in WER and 9.5% in CER when a multilingual pretrained model is used for finetuning in Hindi. All the code models are also open sourced. CLSRIL-23 is a model trained on 23 languages and almost 10,000 hours of audio data to facilitate research in speech recognition for Indic languages. We hope that new state of the art systems will be created using the self supervised approach, especially for low resources Indic languages.

Cloud computing and DevOps have made microservices a common architecture for scalable, maintainable software systems. However, migrating monoliths to microservices remains challenging due to tight coupling and unclear service boundaries. Existing decomposition approaches typically rely on either structural dependencies or semantic similarity signals, but rarely integrate both within a unified representation learning objective. This paper proposes TripleBound, a hybrid framework for automated monolith-to-microservices decomposition that augments a heterogeneous graph neural network with weakly supervised triplet constraints derived from parser-inferred service groups based on package structure, naming conventions, and code location. TripleBound injects triplet-based constraints directly into the shared structural latent space, enabling both signals to be jointly optimized during representation learning. Structural dependencies are captured using CHGNN, which models the monolith as a heterogeneous graph with program nodes, resource nodes, CALL edges, and CRUD edges. Semantic relationships are incorporated through triplet constraints generated from parser-inferred service groups. Evaluation on AcmeAir, DayTrader, PlantsByWebSphere, and JPetStore shows that TripleBound achieves the highest composite decomposition score under the selected weighting on AcmeAir, DayTrader, and JPetStore compared to CHGNN and MonoEmbed, while CHGNN remains stronger on PlantsByWebSphere. Per-metric analysis reveals trade-offs: gains in structural modularity and inter-partition coupling are accompanied by higher entity distribution imbalance on some datasets. Alternative composite weightings preserve TripleBound's first-place ranking on AcmeAir and DayTrader but not on JPetStore, showing that the aggregate ranking is metric-dependent.

Human bilinguals often use similar brain regions to process multiple languages, depending on when they learned their second language and their proficiency. In large language models (LLMs), how are multiple languages learned and encoded? In this work, we explore the extent to which LLMs share representations of morphosyntactic concepts such as grammatical number, gender, and tense across languages. We train sparse autoencoders on Llama-3-8B and Aya-23-8B, and demonstrate that abstract grammatical concepts are often encoded in feature directions shared across many languages. We use causal interventions to verify the multilingual nature of these representations; specifically, we show that ablating only multilingual features decreases classifier performance to near-chance across languages. We then use these features to precisely modify model behavior in a machine translation task; this demonstrates both the generality and selectivity of these feature's roles in the network. Our findings suggest that even models trained predominantly on English data can develop robust, cross-lingual abstractions of morphosyntactic concepts.

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) learn world models by predicting in representation space rather than reconstructing pixels, making them a natural backbone for latent model predictive control from offline demonstration logs. JEPA-style training optimizes short-horizon latent prediction, whereas planning requires a multi-step ranking of imagined futures by goal progress. Prior JEPA planners often inherit that ranking from embedding geometry, typically latent Euclidean distance, which arises as a byproduct of representation learning rather than as a progress cost mined from the logs. We propose temporal-distance JEPA (TD-JEPA), which retains the LeWM encoder--predictor backbone and mines a directed temporal cost from reward-free trajectories: same-trajectory step order supplies positive targets, cross-trajectory pairs act as heuristic negatives, and a rollout-consistency term matches the planner horizon. The mined supervision serves two roles: as the deployed planning cost when progress is topological, and as a representation signal that improves Euclidean planning when contact geometry dominates. Under locked evaluation, deploying the mined cost raises Two-Room success to 100.0% versus LeWM's 97.4%, while shared Euclidean planning on the same temporally trained checkpoint raises OGB-Cube by 14.2 points over LeWM and improves Push-T. Against LeWM and the concurrent RC-aux baseline under locked evaluation, TD-JEPA matches or exceeds both methods on every environment. Ablations show that the directed head, cross-trajectory negatives, and rollout consistency each contribute. TD-JEPA narrows the train--plan gap for JEPA world-model planners by discovering temporal progress structure in offline logs and co-designing cost form with plan-time deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/HKBU-KnowComp/TD-JEPA.

Electrocardiography (ECG), photoplethysmography (PPG), and phonocardiography (PCG) provide complementary views of the same cardiac cycle, yet existing cardiac foundation models are trained for a single sensing modality, leaving the shared physiology across sensors unexploited. We introduce CardioState-JEPA, a cardiac foundation model to learn a single shared representation jointly across ECG, PPG, and PCG, built on a physiology-aware joint-embedding predictive architecture. The model maps heterogeneous waveforms into a common token space, processes them with a single shared Transformer encoder, and learns by predicting masked latent cardiac states, placing the pretraining target on shared physiology rather than sensor-specific waveform appearance. To handle the temporal offsets between electrical, mechanical, and hemodynamic events, cross-modal prediction uses a learned delay aligner that matches signals at the corresponding cardiac time. Because synchronized multi-sensor recordings are scarce, CardioState-JEPA first learns within-modality structure from abundant unimodal data and then uses paired data to align modalities in latent cardiac time. Evaluated as a frozen encoder across 25 downstream tasks spanning ECG, PPG, and PCG, our encoder improves average PPG classification by 8.2 AUROC points, PCG murmur detection by 18.8 AUROC points, and ECG classification by 15.5 AUROC points over the best self-supervised signal baseline and matches or exceeds cardiac models trained with privileged clinical text or supervised labels on several ECG benchmarks. These results establish that heterogeneous cardiac signals can mutually supervise a single foundation model of cardiac physiology.

Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA) have emerged as a powerful framework for learning general-purpose representations. However, these models often lack interpretability and suffer from inefficiencies due to dense embedding representations. We propose SparseJEPA, an extension that integrates sparse representation learning into the JEPA framework to enhance the quality of learned representations. SparseJEPA employs a penalty method that encourages latent space variables to be shared among data features with strong semantic relationships, while maintaining predictive performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SparseJEPA by training on the CIFAR-100 dataset and pre-training a lightweight Vision Transformer. The improved embeddings are utilized in linear-probe transfer learning for both image classification and low-level tasks, showcasing the architecture's versatility across different transfer tasks. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical proof that demonstrates that the grouping mechanism enhances representation quality. This was done by displaying that grouping reduces Multiinformation among latent-variables, including proofing the Data Processing Inequality for Multiinformation. Our results indicate that incorporating sparsity not only refines the latent space but also facilitates the learning of more meaningful and interpretable representations. In further work, hope to further extend this method by finding new ways to leverage the grouping mechanism through object-centric representation learning.

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on the responses it generates. Existing LLM multi-teacher OPD transfers what specialists predict through their output distributions. We introduce Latent-MOPD, to our knowledge the first representation-level multi-teacher OPD method for LLMs. It integrates existing specialists through both their predictions and the hidden states used to compute them, without additional teacher training. To coordinate representation supervision from multiple specialists, we select late-layer targets according to the teacher-student relationship, bridge unequal hidden widths with a shared projection, and group updates by domain. Each teacher's supervision gradually shifts from hidden states to token predictions, with both channels using the same routed specialist. In our main same-family setting, Latent-MOPD outperforms the token-only, representation-only and uniform-averaging baselines on all nine benchmarks across math, code and logic. With the same parameter count as each teacher, the student also surpasses the per-benchmark best teacher on a majority of these benchmarks. With larger, separately developed cross-family teachers, Latent-MOPD outperforms both single-channel baselines on all benchmarks. A same-family all-layer representation-only control remains stable with domain-pure updates but collapses when teacher domains are interleaved within an update. Our results show that a single student can integrate capabilities from several specialists through both their output distributions and internal representations.

Autoregressive (AR) models, common in sequence generation, are limited in many biological tasks such as de novo peptide sequencing and protein modeling by their unidirectional nature, failing to capture crucial global bidirectional token dependencies. Non-Autoregressive (NAR) models offer holistic, bidirectional representations but face challenges with generative coherence and scalability. To transcend this, we propose a hybrid framework enhancing AR generation by dynamically integrating rich contextual information from non-autoregressive mechanisms. Our approach couples a shared input encoder with two decoders: a non-autoregressive one learning latent bidirectional biological features, and an AR decoder synthesizing the biological sequence by leveraging these bidirectional features. A novel cross-decoder attention module enables the AR decoder to iteratively query and integrate these bidirectional features, enriching its predictions. This synergy is cultivated via a tailored training strategy with importance annealing for balanced objectives and cross-decoder gradient blocking for stable, focused learning. Evaluations on a demanding nine-species benchmark of de novo peptide sequencing show that our model substantially surpasses AR and NAR baselines. It uniquely harmonizes AR stability with NAR contextual awareness, delivering robust, superior performance on diverse downstream data. This research advances biological sequence modeling techniques and contributes a novel architectural paradigm for augmenting AR models with enhanced bidirectional understanding for complex sequence generation. Code is available at https://github.com/BEAM-Labs/denovo.

Text-to-spatial audio generation, such as text-to-First-Order Ambisonics (FOA), provides a convenient way to create spatial audio for billion-dollar gaming and film industries. However, existing text-to-FOA methods are largely data-driven and may produce audio that violates acoustic relations between source direction and distance. They also separate descriptive and parametric control, forcing users to trade usability for precision. In this paper, we present PhysWave, a physics-guided latent diffusion model for controllable text-to-FOA generation. PhysWave unifies natural-language and trajectory control through a shared waypoint-caption representation, and augments diffusion training with two differentiable acoustic priors: spherical-harmonic direction consistency and inverse-square distance consistency. To support dynamic spatial generation, we further construct a 300K-clip FOA dataset with diverse sound categories and source trajectories. Extensive results show that the proposed priors help PhysWave generate spatially consistent FOA audio while maintaining competitive audio quality. Further analyses show that these physics priors improve spatial consistency during training and can also be used as inference-time guidance for training-free spatial refinement.

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) achieve strong performance in both understanding and generation by learning a shared latent space, yet they often exhibit functional inconsistency between these two capabilities. We observe that this issue does not stem from a lack of shared representations, but from the absence of explicit alignment between the transformations that map into and out of the latent space. As a result, generation and re-encoding can follow inconsistent trajectories, leading to semantic drift under modality transitions. In this work, we propose LatentUMM, a framework that constructs an enhanced shared latent space to explicitly align these transformations and improve cross-modal consistency. LatentUMM consists of two stages. First, dual latent alignment enforces consistency at both the modality and capacity levels: cross-modal alignment uses a stronger embedding model to impose structured cross-modal semantics, while dual capacity alignment enforces bidirectional consistency under generation and re-encoding. Second, latent dynamics stabilization improves robustness via stochastic latent rollouts and preference optimization, favoring trajectories that better preserve semantic consistency. Experiments show that LatentUMM consistently improves multimodal consistency across diverse architectures. Code is available at: https://github.com/AIFrontierLab/TorchUMM/tree/main/src/umm/post_training/LatentUMM.

Underwater robots combine complementary sensors whose reliability changes abruptly with water visibility, viewpoint, and vehicle motion. We introduce AquaJEPA, an action-conditioned joint-embedding predictive model that fuses an RGB camera, forward-looking sonar, and proprioception with explicit sensor validity. It predicts a future latent target conditioned on eight-thruster commands and supplies velocity and sonar-profile predictions to a shared receding-horizon planner. We study the method in Stonefish against reactive, state-only, ordinary multimodal, supervised dynamics, and recurrent world-model baselines. We further isolate the EMA target, action margin, masks, and modality dropout. A preregistered 120-environment replication comprises five independent replicates of a grid crossing three unseen obstacle maps, four water-visibility coefficients, and nominal versus shifted dynamics, while intermittently removing DVL observations. In 120 fresh paired environments with scheduled DVL loss, AquaJEPA reaches 74 goals, versus 68 for both state-only and the recurrent world model, and attains the lowest mean final error (0.906 m). Paired final-error reductions relative to ordinary multimodal prediction, supervised dynamics, and the recurrent world model are 0.273 m (95% CI: 0.190-0.356), 0.364 m (0.260-0.468), and 0.106 m (0.025-0.187), respectively. AquaJEPA therefore achieves the best aggregate closed-loop performance and significantly outperforms three action-conditioned predictive baselines in paired final error; its advantage over state-only remains statistically unresolved.

Despite their remarkable ability to capture linguistic nuances across diverse languages, questions persist regarding the degree of alignment between languages in multilingual embeddings. Drawing inspiration from research on high-dimensional representations in neural language models, we employ clustering to uncover latent concepts within multilingual models. Our analysis focuses on quantifying the alignment and overlap of these concepts across various languages within the latent space. To this end, we introduce two metrics and aimed at quantifying these aspects, enabling a deeper exploration of multilingual embeddings. Our study encompasses three multilingual models (mT5, mBERT, and XLM-R) and three downstream tasks (Machine Translation, Named Entity Recognition, and Sentiment Analysis). Key findings from our analysis include: i) deeper layers in the network demonstrate increased cross-lingual alignment due to the presence of language-agnostic concepts, ii) fine-tuning of the models enhances alignment within the latent space, and iii) such task-specific calibration helps in explaining the emergence of zero-shot capabilities in the models.The code is available at \url{https://github.com/baselmousi/multilingual-latent-concepts}

Multi-View Reinforcement Learning (MVRL) seeks to provide agents with multi-view observations, enabling them to perceive environment with greater effectiveness and precision. Recent advancements in MVRL focus on extracting latent representations from multiview observations and leveraging them in control tasks. However, it is not straightforward to learn compact and task-relevant representations, particularly in the presence of redundancy, distracting information, or missing views. In this paper, we propose Multi-view Fusion State for Control (MFSC), firstly incorporating bisimulation metric learning into MVRL to learn task-relevant representations. Furthermore, we propose a multiview-based mask and latent reconstruction auxiliary task that exploits shared information across views and improves MFSC's robustness in missing views by introducing a mask token. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in MVRL tasks. Even in more realistic scenarios with interference or missing views, MFSC consistently maintains high performance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong multilingual performance despite being predominantly trained on English-centric corpora. This raises a fundamental question: How do LLMs achieve such multilingual capabilities? Focusing on languages written in non-Roman scripts, we investigate the role of Romanization - the representation of non-Roman scripts using Roman characters - as a potential bridge in multilingual processing. Using mechanistic interpretability techniques, we analyze next-token generation and find that intermediate layers frequently represent target words in Romanized form before transitioning to native script, a phenomenon we term Latent Romanization. Further, through activation patching experiments, we demonstrate that LLMs encode semantic concepts similarly across native and Romanized scripts, suggesting a shared underlying representation. Additionally, for translation into non-Roman script languages, our findings reveal that when the target language is in Romanized form, its representations emerge earlier in the model's layers compared to native script. These insights contribute to a deeper understanding of multilingual representation in LLMs and highlight the implicit role of Romanization in facilitating language transfer.

Interpretability work on the convolutional layers of CNNs has primarily focused on computer vision, but some studies also explore correspondences between the latent space and the output in the audio domain. However, it has not been thoroughly examined how acoustic and linguistic information is represented in the fully connected (FC) layer that bridges the latent space and convolutional layers. The current study presents the first exploration of how the FC layer of CNNs for speech synthesis encodes linguistically relevant information. We propose two techniques for exploration of the fully connected layer. In Experiment 1, we use weight matrices as inputs into convolutional layers. In Experiment 2, we manipulate the FC layer to explore how symbolic-like representations are encoded in CNNs. We leverage the fact that the FC layer outputs a feature map and that variable-specific weight matrices are temporally structured to (1) demonstrate how the distribution of learned weights varies between latent variables in systematic ways and (2) demonstrate how manipulating the FC layer while holding constant subsequent model parameters affects the output. We ultimately present an FC manipulation that can output a single segment. Using this technique, we show that lexically specific latent codes in generative CNNs (ciwGAN) have shared lexically invariant sublexical representations in the FC-layer weights, showing that ciwGAN encodes lexical information in a linguistically principled manner.

End-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving has recently attracted increasing interest in unifying Vision-Language-Action (VLA) with World Models to enhance decision-making and forward-looking imagination. However, existing methods fail to effectively unify future scene evolution and action planning within a single architecture due to inadequate sharing of latent states, limiting the impact of visual imagination on action decisions. To address this limitation, we propose DriveWorld-VLA, a novel framework that unifies world modeling and planning within a latent space by tightly integrating VLA and world models at the representation level, which enables the VLA planner to benefit directly from holistic scene-evolution modeling and reducing reliance on dense annotated supervision. Additionally, DriveWorld-VLA incorporates the latent states of the world model as core decision-making states for the VLA planner, facilitating the planner to assess how candidate actions impact future scene evolution. By conducting world modeling entirely in the latent space, DriveWorld-VLA supports controllable, action-conditioned imagination at the feature level, avoiding expensive pixel-level rollouts. Extensive open-loop and closed-loop evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of DriveWorld-VLA, which achieves state-of-the-art performance with 91.3 PDMS on NAVSIMv1, 86.8 EPDMS on NAVSIMv2, and 0.16 3-second average collision rate on nuScenes. Code and models will be released in https://github.com/liulin815/DriveWorld-VLA.git.

Learning large-scale vision-language-action (VLA) models from multi-embodiment datasets remains challenging due to heterogeneous action spaces across end effectors. Although latent action models (LAMs) can learn embodiment-agnostic action representations from diverse video data, existing image-based LAMs often fail to capture fine-grained end-effector articulation, particularly finger-level geometric changes in human and dexterous robot hands. To address this limitation, we propose GALA, a Geometry-Aware Latent-Action modeling framework that augments image-based latent actions with 3D end-effector geometric motion. However, naively incorporating point clouds yields fine-grained action representations with limited shared semantics, hindering cross-embodiment pretraining. To address this issue, we introduce the Unified End-effector Motion Representation (UEMR), which preserves fine-grained motion information while improving the cross-embodiment generalizability of latent actions. Building upon UEMR, GALA combines visual latent actions that capture scene-level dynamics with geometric latent actions that capture shared fine-grained end-effector articulation, providing effective supervision for VLA pretraining from multi-embodiment data, including action-free ego-centric human videos. Experiments on fine-grained motion probing, cross-embodiment retrieval, and downstream VLA evaluation demonstrate GALA's effectiveness in modeling generalizable fine-grained motions across embodiments, achieving 68.3% RoboCasa-GR1 success rate and 75.5% real-world success rate. Code, appendix, and demos are available at https://puzhenyuan.github.io/GALA-website/.

Latent generative models typically follow a two-stage pipeline, training a variational autoencoder for reconstruction and then a generative model on the frozen latent space. Since reconstruction-optimized latents are not necessarily generation-friendly, jointly training both models is an appealing alternative. However, direct end-to-end training remains challenging, as it is prone to latent collapse and faces a generation-reconstruction conflict. We revisit this problem by analyzing how different objectives shape the latent space and identify two key insights. First, the entropy term in the Kullback-Leibler divergence objective is essential for preventing collapse: reconstruction and prior fitting tend to shrink the posterior, while entropy preserves non-degenerate latent uncertainty. Second, reconstruction and generation exhibit asymmetric learning dynamics: reconstruction is fast and strongly supervised, whereas generation is slower and harder to optimize. Based on these insights, we achieve the first direct end-to-end training without latent collapse and propose GenFirst, a simple generation-before-reconstruction strategy. The generative objective first shapes the latent space under weak reconstruction pressure, after which reconstruction is progressively strengthened to recover visual details. We validate GenFirst with continuous autoregressive priors with exact likelihoods and SiT priors with implicit likelihoods. With our end-to-end objective and GenFirst, SiT achieves a gFID of 0.97 with CFG and 1.45 without CFG on ImageNet-256, while MMDiT reaches a GenEval score of 0.90 on text-to-image generation. Beyond image generation, we extend the framework to shared visual latents for generation and representation learning, and to continuous unified text-image generation. These results demonstrate the generality of stable end-to-end latent learning across generative priors and modalities.

Recent works have shown that, when trained at scale, uni-modal 2D vision and text encoders converge to learned features that share remarkable structural properties, despite arising from different representations. However, the role of 3D encoders with respect to other modalities remains unexplored. Furthermore, existing 3D foundation models that leverage large datasets are typically trained with explicit alignment objectives with respect to frozen encoders from other representations. In this work, we investigate the possibility of a posteriori alignment of representations obtained from uni-modal 3D encoders compared to text-based feature spaces. We show that naive post-training feature alignment of uni-modal text and 3D encoders results in limited performance. We then focus on extracting subspaces of the corresponding feature spaces and discover that by projecting learned representations onto well-chosen lower-dimensional subspaces the quality of alignment becomes significantly higher, leading to improved accuracy on matching and retrieval tasks. Our analysis further sheds light on the nature of these shared subspaces, which roughly separate between semantic and geometric data representations. Overall, ours is the first work that helps to establish a baseline for post-training alignment of 3D uni-modal and text feature spaces, and helps to highlight both the shared and unique properties of 3D data compared to other representations.

Real-world decision-making, from tax compliance assessment to medical diagnosis, requires aggregating multiple noisy and potentially contradictory evidence sources. Existing approaches either lack explicit uncertainty quantification (neural aggregation methods) or rely on manually engineered discrete predicates (probabilistic logic frameworks), limiting scalability to unstructured data. We introduce Latent Posterior Factors (LPF), a framework that transforms Variational Autoencoder (VAE) latent posteriors into soft likelihood factors for Sum-Product Network (SPN) inference, enabling tractable probabilistic reasoning over unstructured evidence while preserving calibrated uncertainty estimates. We instantiate LPF as LPF-SPN (structured factor-based inference) and LPF-Learned (end-to-end learned aggregation), enabling a principled comparison between explicit probabilistic reasoning and learned aggregation under a shared uncertainty representation. Across eight domains (seven synthetic and the FEVER benchmark), LPF-SPN achieves high accuracy (up to 97.8%), low calibration error (ECE 1.4%), and strong probabilistic fit, substantially outperforming evidential deep learning, LLMs and graph-based baselines over 15 random seeds. Contributions: (1) A framework bridging latent uncertainty representations with structured probabilistic reasoning. (2) Dual architectures enabling controlled comparison of reasoning paradigms. (3) Reproducible training methodology with seed selection. (4) Evaluation against EDL, BERT, R-GCN, and large language model baselines. (5) Cross-domain validation. (6) Formal guarantees in a companion paper.

Novel view synthesis from sparse images must reconcile faithful reconstruction of observed regions with plausible completion of unseen content, while maintaining world consistency across viewpoints. Existing geometry-based methods preserve observed scene structure but often struggle to complete unseen regions, whereas video generative models offer rich appearance priors but accumulate inconsistencies during sequential view generation. We propose GeoVerse, a framework that synthesizes world-consistent novel views by performing generation within the geometric latent space of a pretrained 3D foundation model and injecting appearance priors from a video generative model. Specifically, GeoVerse extracts multilevel features from Wan2.2 VACE and injects them into the geometric latent diffusion model via a ControlNet-style adapter, incorporating video-learned appearance priors to enhance structural completion. To enforce cross-view coherence, a global spatial memory continuously aggregates observed and synthesized content, reprojecting target-aligned guidance to anchor subsequent predictions to a shared scene representation. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets demonstrate improved visual quality and geometric consistency, with a 2.23 dB higher PSNR on DL3DV and 32.4% lower ATE on Mip-NeRF360 compared to GLD.

Looped Transformers have recently demonstrated strong performance in both reasoning and language tasks by reusing a shared set of parameters across multiple iterations, achieving parameter efficiency without sacrificing representational power. Besides, looped Transformers perform inference directly in the latent space (latent reasoning) to reduce the number of tokens consumed during inference, thereby achieving improved sample efficiency. However, these models typically apply a fixed recursion depth uniformly to every token, leading to suboptimal compute allocation and leaving significant efficiency gains on the table. In this work, we propose dynamic token-choice routing for looped transformers, enabling each token to adaptively determine its own number of loop iterations based on its hidden state, which can improve the token generation accuracy. Moreover, we further introduce recursion-wise KV cache, which maintains an independent key-value cache for each recursion loop, this design ensures that tokens at different depths only attend to their corresponding cached states, effectively enabling faster autoregressive decoding. Extensive experiments show that T-LoopFormer achieves robust performance on language modeling and zero-shot reasoning tasks and our model can reach the lowest decoding latency, which validate the effectiveness of token-choice router and recursion-wise KV cache. Code is available at https://github.com/YuMingQian1234/T-LoopFormer

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (LLMs) have led to significant progress in understanding, generation, and retrieval tasks. However, current solutions often treat these tasks in isolation or require training LLMs from scratch, resulting in high computational costs and limited generalization across modalities. In this work, we present OmniBridge, a unified and modular multimodal framework that supports vision-language understanding, generation, and retrieval within a unified architecture. OmniBridge adopts a language-centric design that reuses pretrained LLMs and introduces a lightweight bidirectional latent alignment module. To address the challenge of task interference, we propose a two-stage decoupled training strategy: supervised fine-tuning and latent space alignment for aligning LLM behavior with multimodal reasoning, and semantic-guided diffusion training to align cross-modal latent spaces via learnable query embeddings. Extensive experiments across a wide range of benchmarks demonstrate that OmniBridge achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance in all three tasks. Moreover, our results highlight the effectiveness of latent space alignment for unifying multimodal modeling under a shared representation space. Code and models are released at https://github.com/xiao-xt/OmniBridge.

We present DIMO, a generative approach capable of generating diverse 3D motions for arbitrary objects from a single image. The core idea of our work is to leverage the rich priors in well-trained video models to extract the common motion patterns and then embed them into a shared low-dimensional latent space. Specifically, we first generate multiple videos of the same object with diverse motions. We then embed each motion into a latent vector and train a shared motion decoder to learn the distribution of motions represented by a structured and compact motion representation, i.e., neural key point trajectories. The canonical 3D Gaussians are then driven by these key points and fused to model the geometry and appearance. During inference time with learned latent space, we can instantly sample diverse 3D motions in a single-forward pass and support several interesting applications including 3D motion interpolation and language-guided motion generation. Our project page is available at https://linzhanm.github.io/dimo.

Face Restoration (FR) is a crucial area within image and video processing, focusing on reconstructing high-quality portraits from degraded inputs. Despite advancements in image FR, video FR remains relatively under-explored, primarily due to challenges related to temporal consistency, motion artifacts, and the limited availability of high-quality video data. Moreover, traditional face restoration typically prioritizes enhancing resolution and may not give as much consideration to related tasks such as facial colorization and inpainting. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for the Generalized Video Face Restoration (GVFR) task, which integrates video BFR, inpainting, and colorization tasks that we empirically show to benefit each other. We present a unified framework, termed as stable video face restoration (SVFR), which leverages the generative and motion priors of Stable Video Diffusion (SVD) and incorporates task-specific information through a unified face restoration framework. A learnable task embedding is introduced to enhance task identification. Meanwhile, a novel Unified Latent Regularization (ULR) is employed to encourage the shared feature representation learning among different subtasks. To further enhance the restoration quality and temporal stability, we introduce the facial prior learning and the self-referred refinement as auxiliary strategies used for both training and inference. The proposed framework effectively combines the complementary strengths of these tasks, enhancing temporal coherence and achieving superior restoration quality. This work advances the state-of-the-art in video FR and establishes a new paradigm for generalized video face restoration. Code and video demo are available at https://github.com/wangzhiyaoo/SVFR.git.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models can turn multimodal context into robot actions, but their action decoders are still trained largely by behavior cloning. This supervises which motor command was demonstrated while leaving implicit the local objective served by the behavior under the instruction. Future-based supervision enriches action learning with frames, latent observations, trajectories, or motion representations, but these signals capture particular realizations of what may happen rather than the shared semantic objective of the forthcoming behavior. We propose Intention Distillation (INDI), which distills behavior-level intent into the action decoder. During training, a frozen teacher VLM interprets a demonstrated segment from the current observation, instruction, coarse action summary, and corresponding execution video. From its standard inputs, the deployed VLA recovers the resulting multimodal intent representation at an intermediate decoder layer and uses it to organize action prediction together with representations of how the behavior unfolds and what it achieves. On SimplerEnv-Bridge, INDI improves GR00T-N1.7 from 64.3% to 84.7%, and on RoboCasa Kitchen it improves the controlled GR00T-N1.7 baseline from 64.1% to 70.3%, with consistent gains on π_{0.5} across both benchmarks. In real-world tasks, INDI improves average success from 62.0% to 68.7%, with gains of up to 12.0 pp on longer-horizon tasks. Further analyses show that the recovered latent is used by the decoder, captures behavior objective and execution progress, and organizes downstream predictions in an objective-dependent manner. These results show that action decoders benefit from explicitly modeling the semantic objective of the behavior they generate.

Video world models trained with Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA) acquire rich spatiotemporal representations by predicting masked regions in latent space rather than reconstructing pixels. This removes the visual verification pathway of generative models, creating a structural interpretability gap: the encoder has learned physical structure inaccessible in any inspectable form. Existing probing methods either operate in continuous space without a structured intermediate layer, or attach generative components whose parameters confound attribution of behavior to the encoder. We propose the AI Mother Tongue (AIM) framework as a passive quantization probe: a lightweight, vocabulary-free probe that converts V-JEPA 2 continuous latent vectors into discrete symbol sequences without task-specific supervision or modifying the encoder. Because the encoder is kept completely frozen, any symbolic structure in the AIM codebook is attributable entirely to V-JEPA 2 pre-trained representations -- not to the probe. We evaluate through category-contrast experiments on Kinetics-mini along three physical dimensions: grasp angle, object geometry, and motion temporal structure. AIM symbol distributions differ significantly across all three experiments (chi^2 p < 10^{-4}; MI 0.036--0.117 bits, NMI 1.2--3.9% of the 3-bit maximum; JSD up to 0.342; codebook active ratio 62.5%). The experiments reveal that V-JEPA 2 latent space is markedly compact: diverse action categories share a common representational core, with semantic differences encoded as graded distributional variations rather than categorical boundaries. These results establish Stage 1 of a four-stage roadmap toward an action-conditioned symbolic world model, demonstrating that structured symbolic manifolds are discoverable properties of frozen JEPA latent spaces.

Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA), introduced in DeepSeek-V2, compresses key-value states into a low-rank latent vector, caching only this vector to reduce memory. In tensor parallelism (TP), however, attention heads are computed across multiple devices, and each device must load the full cache, eroding the advantage of MLA over Grouped Query Attention (GQA). We propose Tensor-Parallel Latent Attention (TPLA): a scheme that partitions both the latent representation and each head's input dimension across devices, performs attention independently per shard, and then combines results with an all-reduce. TPLA preserves the benefits of a compressed KV cache while unlocking TP efficiency. Unlike Grouped Latent Attention (GLA), every head in TPLA still leverages the full latent representation, maintaining stronger representational capacity. TPLA is drop-in compatible with models pre-trained using MLA: it supports MLA-style prefilling and enables efficient tensor-parallel decoding without retraining. Applying simple orthogonal transforms -- e.g., the Hadamard transform or PCA -- before TP slicing further mitigates cross-shard interference, yielding minimal accuracy degradation. By reducing the per-device KV cache for DeepSeek-V3 and Kimi-K2, we achieve 1.79x and 1.93x speedups, respectively, at a 32K-token context length while maintaining performance on commonsense and LongBench benchmarks. TPLA can be implemented with FlashAttention-3, enabling practical end-to-end acceleration.

Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) has emerged as an effective paradigm that augments a shared Large Language Model backbone with auxiliary heads, training the model to predict several future tokens in parallel to enrich its supervision signal and accelerate inference. However, existing training frameworks adopt a rigid, fixed-length prediction horizon, disregarding the highly non-uniform information density of natural language and code. Forcing the auxiliary heads to predict across high-entropy semantic boundaries injects noisy, conflicting training signals; because these heads share the backbone's latent representations, the resulting gradients backpropagate and interfere with the model's core capabilities. We propose AdaMTP, an adaptive training paradigm that dynamically aligns the prediction horizon with the intrinsic predictability of the sequence. At its core, an entropy-based segmentation algorithm leverages the base model to detect sudden surges in uncertainty as semantic boundaries, partitioning sequences into variable-length groups. Each token is assigned an adaptive prediction depth, and a dynamically masked MTP objective suppresses the loss for predictions that cross these boundaries, attenuating the noisy gradients that degrade the backbone. Across mathematical reasoning, code generation, and general benchmarks on three backbones (Llama-3.1-8B, Qwen-2.5-7B, Gemma-3-12B), AdaMTP consistently outperforms standard MTP in both task performance and inference speedup.

The emergence of similar representations between independently trained neural models has sparked significant interest in the representation learning community, leading to the development of various methods to obtain communication between latent spaces. "Latent space communication" can be achieved in two ways: i) by independently mapping the original spaces to a shared or relative one; ii) by directly estimating a transformation from a source latent space to a target one. In this work, we combine the two into a novel method to obtain latent space translation through the relative space. By formalizing the invertibility of angle-preserving relative representations and assuming the scale invariance of decoder modules in neural models, we can effectively use the relative space as an intermediary, independently projecting onto and from other semantically similar spaces. Extensive experiments over various architectures and datasets validate our scale invariance assumption and demonstrate the high accuracy of our method in latent space translation. We also apply our method to zero-shot stitching between arbitrary pre-trained text and image encoders and their classifiers, even across modalities. Our method has significant potential for facilitating the reuse of models in a practical manner via compositionality.

Neural networks embed the geometric structure of a data manifold lying in a high-dimensional space into latent representations. Ideally, the distribution of the data points in the latent space should depend only on the task, the data, the loss, and other architecture-specific constraints. However, factors such as the random weights initialization, training hyperparameters, or other sources of randomness in the training phase may induce incoherent latent spaces that hinder any form of reuse. Nevertheless, we empirically observe that, under the same data and modeling choices, the angles between the encodings within distinct latent spaces do not change. In this work, we propose the latent similarity between each sample and a fixed set of anchors as an alternative data representation, demonstrating that it can enforce the desired invariances without any additional training. We show how neural architectures can leverage these relative representations to guarantee, in practice, invariance to latent isometries and rescalings, effectively enabling latent space communication: from zero-shot model stitching to latent space comparison between diverse settings. We extensively validate the generalization capability of our approach on different datasets, spanning various modalities (images, text, graphs), tasks (e.g., classification, reconstruction) and architectures (e.g., CNNs, GCNs, transformers).

Recent empirical works have successfully used unlabeled data to learn feature representations that are broadly useful in downstream classification tasks. Several of these methods are reminiscent of the well-known word2vec embedding algorithm: leveraging availability of pairs of semantically "similar" data points and "negative samples," the learner forces the inner product of representations of similar pairs with each other to be higher on average than with negative samples. The current paper uses the term contrastive learning for such algorithms and presents a theoretical framework for analyzing them by introducing latent classes and hypothesizing that semantically similar points are sampled from the same latent class. This framework allows us to show provable guarantees on the performance of the learned representations on the average classification task that is comprised of a subset of the same set of latent classes. Our generalization bound also shows that learned representations can reduce (labeled) sample complexity on downstream tasks. We conduct controlled experiments in both the text and image domains to support the theory.

Different research lines use the term world model in different ways, yet they share a common aim: to capture how the world evolves under action in a form that supports perception, simulation, and planning. Two prominent realizations are neural predictors that learn dynamics in continuous vector spaces, and hand-built physics engines that expose explicit state and physical laws. Neural predictors scale from data but leave the form of the dynamics implicit; physics engines are inspectable and editable but difficult to construct at scale. We introduce VisualPatchWorld (VPW), which represents world dynamics as code. VPW first selects a qualitative dynamical form with short active probes, then fits that form's free parameters from recorded state-action traces by minimizing multi-step prediction error. The resulting programs can be rolled forward like a simulator, inspected in source form, and used inside model-predictive control; image-derived scene graphs can supply the live state at replan time. Across comparisons with prior code-based world models, VPW attains 69.0% mean planning success and exceeds the strongest code baseline by 23.5 points. The largest gains arise when choosing the correct qualitative dynamics is essential. Under the same planner, the induced models approach ground-truth engine success on navigation and grasp-rich control; a residual gap remains for contact-rich pushing, and checking a shortlist of promising plans in the engine closes most of that gap. These results establish a practical route toward automatically constructed code world models that are useful for planning. Code is available at https://github.com/HKBU-KnowComp/VisualPatchWorld/.

Many real-world tasks require models to compare images along multiple similarity conditions (e.g. similarity in color, category or shape). Existing methods often reason about these complex similarity relationships by learning condition-aware embeddings. While such embeddings aid models in learning different notions of similarity, they also limit their capability to generalize to unseen categories since they require explicit labels at test time. To address this deficiency, we propose an approach that jointly learns representations for the different similarity conditions and their contributions as a latent variable without explicit supervision. Comprehensive experiments across three datasets, Polyvore-Outfits, Maryland-Polyvore and UT-Zappos50k, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach: our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, even those that are strongly supervised with pre-defined similarity conditions, on fill-in-the-blank, outfit compatibility prediction and triplet prediction tasks. Finally, we show that our model learns different visually-relevant semantic sub-spaces that allow it to generalize well to unseen categories.

Multi-subject fMRI studies are challenging due to the high variability of both brain anatomy and functional brain topographies across participants. An effective way of aggregating multi-subject fMRI data is to extract a shared representation that filters out unwanted variability among subjects. Some recent work has implemented probabilistic models to extract a shared representation in task fMRI. In the present work, we improve upon these models by incorporating temporal information in the common latent structures. We introduce a new model, Shared Gaussian Process Factor Analysis (S-GPFA), that discovers shared latent trajectories and subject-specific functional topographies, while modelling temporal correlation in fMRI data. We demonstrate the efficacy of our model in revealing ground truth latent structures using simulated data, and replicate experimental performance of time-segment matching and inter-subject similarity on the publicly available Raider and Sherlock datasets. We further test the utility of our model by analyzing its learned model parameters in the large multi-site SPINS dataset, on a social cognition task from participants with and without schizophrenia.

Latent representations learned by neural networks often exhibit semantic structure, where concept similarity is reflected by geometric proximity in embedding space. However, comparing such spaces across models remains difficult: changes in architecture, pretraining data, objective, or random seed can yield embeddings with similar content but incompatible geometry. This latent space alignment problem is central to interpretability, transfer and multimodal learning, federated systems, and semantic communication; however, progress remains limited by the lack of large-scale, model-diverse, and metadata-rich benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce SEMASIA, a large-scale collection of latent representations extracted from approximately 1,700 pretrained vision models across eight standard image-classification benchmarks. SEMASIA pairs embeddings with structured metadata describing architectures, training regimes, pretraining sources, and model scale. We demonstrate three applications of the resource. First, we analyze the conceptual organization of individual latent spaces, showing consistent prototype-like clustering and hierarchical semantic neighborhoods across models and datasets. Second, we benchmark supervised alignment mappings between latent spaces using reconstruction error and downstream task performance. Third, we perform a large-scale regression analysis of how pretraining-data complexity, specialization, transfer learning, augmentation, and model scale relate to geometric and probing properties of embeddings. By coupling representational scale with standardized metadata, SEMASIA provides a reproducible foundation for studying latent geometry, evaluating alignment methods, and developing next-generation heterogeneous and interoperable AI systems.

Recent work on speech representation models jointly pre-trained with text has demonstrated the potential of improving speech representations by encoding speech and text in a shared space. In this paper, we leverage such shared representations to address the persistent challenge of limited data availability in spoken language understanding tasks. By employing a pre-trained speech-text model, we find that models fine-tuned on text can be effectively transferred to speech testing data. With as little as 1 hour of labeled speech data, our proposed approach achieves comparable performance on spoken language understanding tasks (specifically, sentiment analysis and named entity recognition) when compared to previous methods using speech-only pre-trained models fine-tuned on 10 times more data. Beyond the proof-of-concept study, we also analyze the latent representations. We find that the bottom layers of speech-text models are largely task-agnostic and align speech and text representations into a shared space, while the top layers are more task-specific.

The use of relative representations for latent embeddings has shown potential in enabling latent space communication and zero-shot model stitching across a wide range of applications. Nevertheless, relative representations rely on a certain amount of parallel anchors to be given as input, which can be impractical to obtain in certain scenarios. To overcome this limitation, we propose an optimization-based method to discover new parallel anchors from a limited known set (seed). Our approach can be used to find semantic correspondence between different domains, align their relative spaces, and achieve competitive results in several tasks.

We investigate feature universality in large language models (LLMs), a research field that aims to understand how different models similarly represent concepts in the latent spaces of their intermediate layers. Demonstrating feature universality allows discoveries about latent representations to generalize across several models. However, comparing features across LLMs is challenging due to polysemanticity, in which individual neurons often correspond to multiple features rather than distinct ones. This makes it difficult to disentangle and match features across different models. To address this issue, we employ a method known as dictionary learning by using sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to transform LLM activations into more interpretable spaces spanned by neurons corresponding to individual features. After matching feature neurons across models via activation correlation, we apply representational space similarity metrics like Singular Value Canonical Correlation Analysis to analyze these SAE features across different LLMs. Our experiments reveal significant similarities in SAE feature spaces across various LLMs, providing new evidence for feature universality.

Latent diffusion models (LDMs) enable high-fidelity synthesis by operating in learned latent spaces. However, training state-of-the-art LDMs requires complex staging: a tokenizer must be trained first, before the diffusion model can be trained in the frozen latent space. We propose UNITE - an autoencoder architecture for unified tokenization and latent diffusion. UNITE consists of a Generative Encoder that serves as both image tokenizer and latent generator via weight sharing. Our key insight is that tokenization and generation can be viewed as the same latent inference problem under different conditioning regimes: tokenization infers latents from fully observed images, whereas generation infers them from noise together with text or class conditioning. Motivated by this, we introduce a single-stage training procedure that jointly optimizes both tasks via two forward passes through the same Generative Encoder. The shared parameters enable gradients to jointly shape the latent space, encouraging a "common latent language". Across image and molecule modalities, UNITE achieves near state of the art performance without adversarial losses or pretrained encoders (e.g., DINO), reaching FID 2.12 and 1.73 for Base and Large models on ImageNet 256 x 256. We further analyze the Generative Encoder through the lenses of representation alignment and compression. These results show that single stage joint training of tokenization & generation from scratch is feasible.

We present Unified Latents (UL), a framework for learning latent representations that are jointly regularized by a diffusion prior and decoded by a diffusion model. By linking the encoder's output noise to the prior's minimum noise level, we obtain a simple training objective that provides a tight upper bound on the latent bitrate. On ImageNet-512, our approach achieves competitive FID of 1.4, with high reconstruction quality (PSNR) while requiring fewer training FLOPs than models trained on Stable Diffusion latents. On Kinetics-600, we set a new state-of-the-art FVD of 1.3.

External memory effectively grounds large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs)-based question answering (QA) in relevant multimodal evidence. However, existing memory paradigms represent each memory item in raw text and image forms, so retrieval-based systems must pass the retrieved text or images to the generation LLMs/VLMs, resulting in high token consumption and storage pressure, making it unaffordable for resource-constrained applications. We propose Latent Memory, a latent-space memory paradigm that replaces each raw text or image evidence item with a single high-dimensional latent token produced by a small compressor LLM/VLM. Rather than retrieving raw evidence for generation, Latent Memory operates in a unified latent representation space: the query is embedded into this space to retrieve relevant latent tokens, and the retrieved latent tokens are directly prompted to a pretrained LLM or VLM for answer generation. To make each latent token simultaneously informative for reconstruction, retrieval, and generation, we train the compressor with reconstruction, contrastive, and distillation objectives in a unified end-to-end manner. Latent Memory is evaluated on seven text-only QA benchmarks (e.g., HotpotQA) and multimodal QA benchmarks, where it achieves competitive QA performance compared to advanced RAG baselines while consuming 3x to 10x fewer generator tokens. It can also deliver the strongest image-grounded QA performance on WebQA. Code is available at https://github.com/zz1358m/Latent-Memory-Master.

Generative models and vision encoders have largely advanced on separate tracks, optimized for different goals and grounded in different mathematical principles. Yet, they share a fundamental property: latent space Gaussianity. Generative models map Gaussian noise to images, while encoders map images to semantic embeddings whose coordinates empirically behave as Gaussian. We hypothesize that both are views of a shared latent source, the Universal Normal Embedding (UNE): an approximately Gaussian latent space from which encoder embeddings and DDIM-inverted noise arise as noisy linear projections. To test our hypothesis, we introduce NoiseZoo, a dataset of per-image latents comprising DDIM-inverted diffusion noise and matching encoder representations (CLIP, DINO). On CelebA, linear probes in both spaces yield strong, aligned attribute predictions, indicating that generative noise encodes meaningful semantics along linear directions. These directions further enable faithful, controllable edits (e.g., smile, gender, age) without architectural changes, where simple orthogonalization mitigates spurious entanglements. Taken together, our results provide empirical support for the UNE hypothesis and reveal a shared Gaussian-like latent geometry that concretely links encoding and generation. Code and data are available https://rbetser.github.io/UNE/

It has been observed that representations learned by distinct neural networks conceal structural similarities when the models are trained under similar inductive biases. From a geometric perspective, identifying the classes of transformations and the related invariances that connect these representations is fundamental to unlocking applications, such as merging, stitching, and reusing different neural modules. However, estimating task-specific transformations a priori can be challenging and expensive due to several factors (e.g., weights initialization, training hyperparameters, or data modality). To this end, we introduce a versatile method to directly incorporate a set of invariances into the representations, constructing a product space of invariant components on top of the latent representations without requiring prior knowledge about the optimal invariance to infuse. We validate our solution on classification and reconstruction tasks, observing consistent latent similarity and downstream performance improvements in a zero-shot stitching setting. The experimental analysis comprises three modalities (vision, text, and graphs), twelve pretrained foundational models, nine benchmarks, and several architectures trained from scratch.

We propose Latent Terms, a method revealing that models trained for dense retrieval, whether single- or multi-vector, learn representations that can trivially be decomposed into retrieval-ready sparse features. When trained on frozen retrievers, Sparse Autoencoders without any retrieval-specific adjustments extract a latent vocabulary with approximately Zipfian collection statistics, directly suitable for classical sparse retrieval scoring via BM25. This approach enables sparse retrieval while requiring no learned expansion objective or sparse retrieval supervision whatsoever, and can be readily applied to any dense retriever. Latent Terms is able to match or outperform single-vector scoring methods from its own base model as well as comparable SPLADE variants. In addition, it substantially outperforms its base model on LIMIT, a task specifically designed to highlight the failures of single-vector retrieval. Overall, our results highlight that neural retrievers contain more expressive and indexable structure than their default scoring functions expose, but that other methods can nonetheless be leveraged.

Topic modeling is used for discovering latent semantic structure, usually referred to as topics, in a large collection of documents. The most widely used methods are Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis. Despite their popularity they have several weaknesses. In order to achieve optimal results they often require the number of topics to be known, custom stop-word lists, stemming, and lemmatization. Additionally these methods rely on bag-of-words representation of documents which ignore the ordering and semantics of words. Distributed representations of documents and words have gained popularity due to their ability to capture semantics of words and documents. We present top2vec, which leverages joint document and word semantic embedding to find topic vectors. This model does not require stop-word lists, stemming or lemmatization, and it automatically finds the number of topics. The resulting topic vectors are jointly embedded with the document and word vectors with distance between them representing semantic similarity. Our experiments demonstrate that top2vec finds topics which are significantly more informative and representative of the corpus trained on than probabilistic generative models.

Multi-modal data-sets are ubiquitous in modern applications, and multi-modal Variational Autoencoders are a popular family of models that aim to learn a joint representation of the different modalities. However, existing approaches suffer from a coherence-quality tradeoff, where models with good generation quality lack generative coherence across modalities, and vice versa. We discuss the limitations underlying the unsatisfactory performance of existing methods, to motivate the need for a different approach. We propose a novel method that uses a set of independently trained, uni-modal, deterministic autoencoders. Individual latent variables are concatenated into a common latent space, which is fed to a masked diffusion model to enable generative modeling. We also introduce a new multi-time training method to learn the conditional score network for multi-modal diffusion. Our methodology substantially outperforms competitors in both generation quality and coherence, as shown through an extensive experimental campaign.

Learning representations that are useful for unknown downstream tasks is a fundamental challenge in representation learning. Prominent approaches in this domain include contrastive learning, self-supervised masking, and denoising auto-encoders. In this paper, we introduce a novel method, termed contrastive Mutual Information Machine (cMIM), which aims to enhance the utility of learned representations for downstream tasks. cMIM integrates a new contrastive learning loss with the Mutual Information Machine (MIM) learning framework, a probabilistic auto-encoder that maximizes the mutual information between inputs and latent representations while clustering the latent codes. Despite MIM's potential, initial experiments indicated that the representations learned by MIM were less effective for discriminative downstream tasks compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. The proposed cMIM method directly addresses this limitation. The main contributions of this work are twofold: (1) We propose a novel contrastive extension to MIM for learning discriminative representations which eliminates the need for data augmentation and is robust to variations in the number of negative examples (i.e., batch size). (2) We introduce a generic method for extracting informative embeddings from encoder-decoder models, which significantly improves performance in discriminative downstream tasks without requiring additional training. This method is applicable to any pre-trained encoder-decoder model. By presenting cMIM, we aim to offer a unified generative model that is effective for both generative and discriminative tasks. Our results demonstrate that the learned representations are valuable for downstream tasks while maintaining the generative capabilities of MIM.

While text-to-image generative models can synthesize diverse and faithful contents, subject variation across multiple creations limits the application in long content generation. Existing approaches require time-consuming tuning, references for all subjects, or access to other creations. We introduce Contrastive Concept Instantiation (CoCoIns) to effectively synthesize consistent subjects across multiple independent creations. The framework consists of a generative model and a mapping network, which transforms input latent codes into pseudo-words associated with certain instances of concepts. Users can generate consistent subjects with the same latent codes. To construct such associations, we propose a contrastive learning approach that trains the network to differentiate the combination of prompts and latent codes. Extensive evaluations of human faces with a single subject show that CoCoIns performs comparably to existing methods while maintaining higher flexibility. We also demonstrate the potential of extending CoCoIns to multiple subjects and other object categories.

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful tool for generating high-quality images from textual descriptions. Despite their successes, these models often exhibit limited diversity in the sampled images, particularly when sampling with a high classifier-free guidance weight. To address this issue, we present Kaleido, a novel approach that enhances the diversity of samples by incorporating autoregressive latent priors. Kaleido integrates an autoregressive language model that encodes the original caption and generates latent variables, serving as abstract and intermediary representations for guiding and facilitating the image generation process. In this paper, we explore a variety of discrete latent representations, including textual descriptions, detection bounding boxes, object blobs, and visual tokens. These representations diversify and enrich the input conditions to the diffusion models, enabling more diverse outputs. Our experimental results demonstrate that Kaleido effectively broadens the diversity of the generated image samples from a given textual description while maintaining high image quality. Furthermore, we show that Kaleido adheres closely to the guidance provided by the generated latent variables, demonstrating its capability to effectively control and direct the image generation process.

We propose a statistical framework built on latent variable modeling for scaling laws of large language models (LLMs). Our work is motivated by the rapid emergence of numerous new LLM families with distinct architectures and training strategies, evaluated on an increasing number of benchmarks. This heterogeneity makes a single global scaling curve inadequate for capturing how performance varies across families and benchmarks. To address this, we propose a latent variable modeling framework in which each LLM family is associated with a latent variable that captures the common underlying features in that family. An LLM's performance on different benchmarks is then driven by its latent skills, which are jointly determined by the latent variable and the model's own observable features. We develop an estimation procedure for this latent variable model and establish its statistical properties. We also design efficient numerical algorithms that support estimation and various downstream tasks. Empirically, we evaluate the approach on 12 widely used benchmarks from the Open LLM Leaderboard (v1/v2).

Fair representation learning transforms user data into a representation that ensures fairness and utility regardless of the downstream application. However, learning individually fair representations, i.e., guaranteeing that similar individuals are treated similarly, remains challenging in high-dimensional settings such as computer vision. In this work, we introduce LASSI, the first representation learning method for certifying individual fairness of high-dimensional data. Our key insight is to leverage recent advances in generative modeling to capture the set of similar individuals in the generative latent space. This enables us to learn individually fair representations that map similar individuals close together by using adversarial training to minimize the distance between their representations. Finally, we employ randomized smoothing to provably map similar individuals close together, in turn ensuring that local robustness verification of the downstream application results in end-to-end fairness certification. Our experimental evaluation on challenging real-world image data demonstrates that our method increases certified individual fairness by up to 90% without significantly affecting task utility.

In recent years supervised representation learning has provided state of the art or close to the state of the art results in semantic analysis tasks including ranking and information retrieval. The core idea is to learn how to embed items into a latent space such that they optimize a supervised objective in that latent space. The dimensions of the latent space have no clear semantics, and this reduces the interpretability of the system. For example, in personalization models, it is hard to explain why a particular item is ranked high for a given user profile. We propose a novel model of representation learning called Supervised Explicit Semantic Analysis (SESA) that is trained in a supervised fashion to embed items to a set of dimensions with explicit semantics. The model learns to compare two objects by representing them in this explicit space, where each dimension corresponds to a concept from a knowledge base. This work extends Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) with a supervised model for ranking problems. We apply this model to the task of Job-Profile relevance in LinkedIn in which a set of skills defines our explicit dimensions of the space. Every profile and job are encoded to this set of skills their similarity is calculated in this space. We use RNNs to embed text input into this space. In addition to interpretability, our model makes use of the web-scale collaborative skills data that is provided by users for each LinkedIn profile. Our model provides state of the art result while it remains interpretable.

In a wide range of multimodal tasks, contrastive learning has become a particularly appealing approach since it can successfully learn representations from abundant unlabeled data with only pairing information (e.g., image-caption or video-audio pairs). Underpinning these approaches is the assumption of multi-view redundancy - that shared information between modalities is necessary and sufficient for downstream tasks. However, in many real-world settings, task-relevant information is also contained in modality-unique regions: information that is only present in one modality but still relevant to the task. How can we learn self-supervised multimodal representations to capture both shared and unique information relevant to downstream tasks? This paper proposes FactorCL, a new multimodal representation learning method to go beyond multi-view redundancy. FactorCL is built from three new contributions: (1) factorizing task-relevant information into shared and unique representations, (2) capturing task-relevant information via maximizing MI lower bounds and removing task-irrelevant information via minimizing MI upper bounds, and (3) multimodal data augmentations to approximate task relevance without labels. On large-scale real-world datasets, FactorCL captures both shared and unique information and achieves state-of-the-art results on six benchmarks

Self-supervised representation learning has shown remarkable success in a number of domains. A common practice is to perform data augmentation via hand-crafted transformations intended to leave the semantics of the data invariant. We seek to understand the empirical success of this approach from a theoretical perspective. We formulate the augmentation process as a latent variable model by postulating a partition of the latent representation into a content component, which is assumed invariant to augmentation, and a style component, which is allowed to change. Unlike prior work on disentanglement and independent component analysis, we allow for both nontrivial statistical and causal dependencies in the latent space. We study the identifiability of the latent representation based on pairs of views of the observations and prove sufficient conditions that allow us to identify the invariant content partition up to an invertible mapping in both generative and discriminative settings. We find numerical simulations with dependent latent variables are consistent with our theory. Lastly, we introduce Causal3DIdent, a dataset of high-dimensional, visually complex images with rich causal dependencies, which we use to study the effect of data augmentations performed in practice.

Masked Image Modeling (MIM) has emerged as a promising method for deriving visual representations from unlabeled image data by predicting missing pixels from masked portions of images. It excels in region-aware learning and provides strong initializations for various tasks, but struggles to capture high-level semantics without further supervised fine-tuning, likely due to the low-level nature of its pixel reconstruction objective. A promising yet unrealized framework is learning representations through masked reconstruction in latent space, combining the locality of MIM with the high-level targets. However, this approach poses significant training challenges as the reconstruction targets are learned in conjunction with the model, potentially leading to trivial or suboptimal solutions.Our study is among the first to thoroughly analyze and address the challenges of such framework, which we refer to as Latent MIM. Through a series of carefully designed experiments and extensive analysis, we identify the source of these challenges, including representation collapsing for joint online/target optimization, learning objectives, the high region correlation in latent space and decoding conditioning. By sequentially addressing these issues, we demonstrate that Latent MIM can indeed learn high-level representations while retaining the benefits of MIM models.

Session-based recommender systems (SBRSs) have shown superior performance over conventional methods. However, they show limited scalability on large-scale industrial datasets since most models learn one embedding per item. This leads to a large memory requirement (of storing one vector per item) and poor performance on sparse sessions with cold-start or unpopular items. Using one public and one large industrial dataset, we experimentally show that state-of-the-art SBRSs have low performance on sparse sessions with sparse items. We propose M2TRec, a Metadata-aware Multi-task Transformer model for session-based recommendations. Our proposed method learns a transformation function from item metadata to embeddings, and is thus, item-ID free (i.e., does not need to learn one embedding per item). It integrates item metadata to learn shared representations of diverse item attributes. During inference, new or unpopular items will be assigned identical representations for the attributes they share with items previously observed during training, and thus will have similar representations with those items, enabling recommendations of even cold-start and sparse items. Additionally, M2TRec is trained in a multi-task setting to predict the next item in the session along with its primary category and subcategories. Our multi-task strategy makes the model converge faster and significantly improves the overall performance. Experimental results show significant performance gains using our proposed approach on sparse items on the two datasets.

In this paper, we show that a binary latent space can be explored for compact yet expressive image representations. We model the bi-directional mappings between an image and the corresponding latent binary representation by training an auto-encoder with a Bernoulli encoding distribution. On the one hand, the binary latent space provides a compact discrete image representation of which the distribution can be modeled more efficiently than pixels or continuous latent representations. On the other hand, we now represent each image patch as a binary vector instead of an index of a learned cookbook as in discrete image representations with vector quantization. In this way, we obtain binary latent representations that allow for better image quality and high-resolution image representations without any multi-stage hierarchy in the latent space. In this binary latent space, images can now be generated effectively using a binary latent diffusion model tailored specifically for modeling the prior over the binary image representations. We present both conditional and unconditional image generation experiments with multiple datasets, and show that the proposed method performs comparably to state-of-the-art methods while dramatically improving the sampling efficiency to as few as 16 steps without using any test-time acceleration. The proposed framework can also be seamlessly scaled to 1024 times 1024 high-resolution image generation without resorting to latent hierarchy or multi-stage refinements.

Fair representation learning provides an effective way of enforcing fairness constraints without compromising utility for downstream users. A desirable family of such fairness constraints, each requiring similar treatment for similar individuals, is known as individual fairness. In this work, we introduce the first method that enables data consumers to obtain certificates of individual fairness for existing and new data points. The key idea is to map similar individuals to close latent representations and leverage this latent proximity to certify individual fairness. That is, our method enables the data producer to learn and certify a representation where for a data point all similar individuals are at ell_infty-distance at most epsilon, thus allowing data consumers to certify individual fairness by proving epsilon-robustness of their classifier. Our experimental evaluation on five real-world datasets and several fairness constraints demonstrates the expressivity and scalability of our approach.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in multimodal tasks. Despite their impressive performance, MLLMs suffer from the modality imbalance issue, where visual information is often underutilized compared to textual representations in deeper layers, leading to degraded visual performance or hallucinations. This issue stems from the predominant reliance on next-text-token-prediction during training, which fails to provide direct visual supervisory signals, resulting in progressive homogenization of visual representations throughout the layers. To this end, we propose Latent Visual Reconstruction (LaVer), a novel training framework that facilitates MLLMs in learning more discriminative visual representations via masked image modeling in the joint latent semantic space of LLM. Our method offers direct visual activation to MLLMs, which exhibit increased visual attention allocation, indicating enhanced utilization of visual information. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks prove the superiority of our approach in various scenarios, especially those requiring dense visual capabilities. Code of LaVer is available at https://github.com/Fir-lat/LaVer.

Document editing has become a pervasive component of the production of information, with version control systems enabling edits to be efficiently stored and applied. In light of this, the task of learning distributed representations of edits has been recently proposed. With this in mind, we propose a novel approach that employs variational inference to learn a continuous latent space of vector representations to capture the underlying semantic information with regard to the document editing process. We achieve this by introducing a latent variable to explicitly model the aforementioned features. This latent variable is then combined with a document representation to guide the generation of an edited version of this document. Additionally, to facilitate standardized automatic evaluation of edit representations, which has heavily relied on direct human input thus far, we also propose a suite of downstream tasks, PEER, specifically designed to measure the quality of edit representations in the context of natural language processing.

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.

Learning user representations is a vital technique toward effective user modeling and personalized recommender systems. Existing approaches often derive an individual set of model parameters for each task by training on separate data. However, the representation of the same user potentially has some commonalities, such as preference and personality, even in different tasks. As such, these separately trained representations could be suboptimal in performance as well as inefficient in terms of parameter sharing. In this paper, we delve on research to continually learn user representations task by task, whereby new tasks are learned while using partial parameters from old ones. A new problem arises since when new tasks are trained, previously learned parameters are very likely to be modified, and as a result, an artificial neural network (ANN)-based model may lose its capacity to serve for well-trained previous tasks forever, this issue is termed catastrophic forgetting. To address this issue, we present Conure the first continual, or lifelong, user representation learner -- i.e., learning new tasks over time without forgetting old ones. Specifically, we propose iteratively removing less important weights of old tasks in a deep user representation model, motivated by the fact that neural network models are usually over-parameterized. In this way, we could learn many tasks with a single model by reusing the important weights, and modifying the less important weights to adapt to new tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on two real-world datasets with nine tasks and show that Conure largely exceeds the standard model that does not purposely preserve such old "knowledge", and performs competitively or sometimes better than models which are trained either individually for each task or simultaneously by merging all task data.

In this paper, we show that the performance of a learnt generative model is closely related to the model's ability to accurately represent the inferred latent data distribution, i.e. its topology and structural properties. We propose LaDDer to achieve accurate modelling of the latent data distribution in a variational autoencoder framework and to facilitate better representation learning. The central idea of LaDDer is a meta-embedding concept, which uses multiple VAE models to learn an embedding of the embeddings, forming a ladder of encodings. We use a non-parametric mixture as the hyper prior for the innermost VAE and learn all the parameters in a unified variational framework. From extensive experiments, we show that our LaDDer model is able to accurately estimate complex latent distribution and results in improvement in the representation quality. We also propose a novel latent space interpolation method that utilises the derived data distribution.

Recent works have argued that high-level semantic concepts are encoded "linearly" in the representation space of large language models. In this work, we study the origins of such linear representations. To that end, we introduce a simple latent variable model to abstract and formalize the concept dynamics of the next token prediction. We use this formalism to show that the next token prediction objective (softmax with cross-entropy) and the implicit bias of gradient descent together promote the linear representation of concepts. Experiments show that linear representations emerge when learning from data matching the latent variable model, confirming that this simple structure already suffices to yield linear representations. We additionally confirm some predictions of the theory using the LLaMA-2 large language model, giving evidence that the simplified model yields generalizable insights.

Standard flow matching scales well but typically relies on an unstructured source distribution, limiting its ability to learn interpretable latent structure. Latent-variable models, by contrast, capture structure but often sacrifice generative quality. We bridge this gap by proposing Structured Coupling for Flow Matching (SCFM), a cooperative framework that augments flow matching with structured latent representation learning. By introducing structured latent variables and exogenous noise into the source, SCFM jointly learns a structured prior (via latent variable modeling) and a continuous transport map (via flow matching). It uses a shared time-dependent recognition network for both latent variable model variational inference and intermediate-time flow velocity estimation. This yields a structurally informed yet unconditional, simulation-free flow model, where the latent variable model can also assist flow sampling. Empirically, SCFM facilitates unsupervised latent representation learning for clustering, disentanglement and downstream tasks, while remaining competitive with flow matching in sample quality, showing that meaningful structure can be learned without sacrificing generative fidelity.