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Diffusion Models and Concept Formation

Paper argues diffusion models implicitly form Cobweb-like concept hierarchies, with a basic level emerging at intermediate noise levels.

The authors draw a formal correspondence between diffusion models and Cobweb, a classic incremental concept-hierarchy learner, noting both are hierarchical Bayesian density models with Gaussian prototypes. Modes of the diffusion model's noisy marginals form a hierarchy whose basic level sits at intermediate noise, where class identity commits. The correspondence is tested on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST via mode-finding. Diffusion is reframed as a cognitive model of concept formation.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research

Diffusion TV: Experiencing Diffusion Models through Tangible, Embodied Interaction

Researchers present Diffusion TV, a CRT-based installation where antenna manipulation lets audiences physically experience diffusion model denoising.

Diffusion TV is an interactive installation built around a modified CRT television where turning the antenna controls the clarity of AI-generated images and sounds, mirroring the denoising process of diffusion models. Three channels present AI-generated animals from the past, present, and future within a temporal and ecological narrative. The authors frame the work as an embodied, non-verbal alternative to explainable AI that highlights intermediate generative states rather than final outputs.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 11d agoAI research

Why AI food looks like that

Experts explain why AI-generated food images look unappetizing, citing diffusion model limitations, weak structural reasoning, and stylized training data.

The Verge examines why AI-generated food imagery from restaurants and brands often appears grotesque, citing researchers from Oxford, Naples, Zurich, and London. Diffusion models recover coarse structure before fine texture, so structural errors like extra fingers or donut shrimp get baked in early. Researchers note the models are weak at thin, continuous, terminating structures such as noodles, and reproduce the glossy conventions of professional food photography without understanding the objects. Odd internet imagery and memes in training data further skew outputs toward strange textures and clustered holes.

The Verge · AI · 12d agoAI research

CanvasAnneal: Curriculum Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Language Models

CanvasAnneal injects teacher reasoning traces into diffusion canvases during curriculum RL, improving diffusion LLMs on MATH500, Countdown, and Tau2.

CanvasAnneal is a curriculum-guided reinforcement learning framework for diffusion language models that addresses exploration bottlenecks in standard RL. It warm-starts exploration by injecting teacher-generated reasoning traces into the initial diffusion canvas, then gradually removes this guidance so the model generates reasoning trajectories independently. Across mathematical reasoning and tool-use benchmarks, it improves over standard diffu-GRPO on MATH500, Countdown, and Tau2 and accelerates reward improvement, though gains are task-dependent.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research1

The Attention Triangle in Audio-Video Models

Researchers analyze the 'attention triangle' in audio-video diffusion models, showing bias-driven cross-attention routing causes semantic leakage and proposing inference-time interventions that improve grounding.

A study probes the three cross-attention edges linking text, audio, and video streams in audio-video diffusion models. It finds the audio-video edge is bidirectional and shaped by parameter-encoded biases, so prompts in tension with learned priors can be overridden, producing visually canonical but incorrect outputs. Attention-derived signals are used as diagnostics and to guide inference-time interventions that improve cross-modal semantic grounding while preserving generation quality.

Hugging Face daily papers · 13d agoAI research

Puppeteer: Object-Grounded Posture-Aware Co-Speech Gesture Generation

Researchers present Puppeteer, a posture-aware, object-grounded diffusion model generating physically consistent co-speech gestures with temporal control.

Puppeteer decomposes long gestures into structured primitives encoded by a causal variational autoencoder into temporally ordered latent tokens. Conditional diffusion in the causal latent space conditions on speech signals, motion history, an initial posture reference, and object geometry to synthesize physically consistent gestures. The authors also introduce new evaluation metrics and release SceneGes, the first curated synthetic 3D dataset of embodied co-speech gestures with corresponding 3D objects.

Hugging Face daily papers · 16d agoAI research1

Decomposition-Guided Diffusion Language Models for Inertial Confinement Fusion Prediction

ICF-DLM, the first language-model-based inertial confinement fusion predictor, cuts peak-timing error from 11.6 to 9.2 steps versus LLaMA-3-8B.

Each National Ignition Facility shot costs roughly one million dollars, motivating accurate AI surrogates for predicting 512-step neutron-rate waveforms from laser pulses and target parameters. ICF-DLM combines physics-typed decomposition into yield, peak timing, and local waveform; bidirectional denoising that defers commitment to peak location; and a physics-driven PPO reward. On ICFBench (50,000 simulations plus 232 experimental shots) it outperforms a matched autoregressive LLaMA-3-8B, classical sequence models, and LLM-based time-series predictors.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 9d agoAI research

Dynin-Robotics: Omnimodal Unified Diffusion Vision-Language-Action Model

Dynin-Robotics unifies action, goal, and dynamics prediction in one omnimodal masked-diffusion VLA model, reaching 78.4% success on Franka Research 3 manipulation tasks.

Built on the Dynin-Omni masked-diffusion backbone, the model represents language, observations, goals, and actions as discrete tokens and is continually pretrained on roughly 1.33 million trajectories from 48 Open X-Embodiment datasets. The shared trajectory interface enables test-time scaling via goal prediction, action-candidate evaluation, and joint action/future-state refinement. It achieves competitive results on LIBERO and zero-shot LIBERO-Plus, 78.4% average success across four Franka Research 3 conditions, and up to 29.2x faster model-side action decoding from a block-parallel implementation.

Hugging Face daily papersupdated · 5d agofirst · 5d agoAI research 2 sources

Reflection-aware Generative Novel View Synthesis

Ref-GeNVS is a training-free method for reflection-consistent generative novel view synthesis that treats mirror images as two complementary views.

An arXiv paper proposes Ref-GeNVS, a training-free approach to generative novel view synthesis in scenes containing mirrors. It estimates the mirror plane, reflects camera poses to create virtual views, and applies mirror-gated attention plus reflection injection within a multi-view diffusion model. On synthetic and real mirror scenes, Ref-GeNVS outperforms recent generative NVS methods while requiring no fine-tuning.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 11d agoAI research

Mask Forcing: Improving Autoregressive Video Diffusion Distillation via Dual-Noise Masking Rollout

Researchers propose Mask Forcing, a dual-noise masking rollout that mitigates mode collapse in autoregressive video diffusion distillation.

The paper targets over-saturation and over-smoothing in autoregressive video diffusion models distilled via Distribution Matching Distillation, attributed to reverse-KL mode-seeking behavior. Mask Forcing perturbs the student self-rollout with random masks along spatial and temporal axes, injecting cleaner tokens that act as denoising guidance for noisier tokens. Experiments show improved visual quality across multiple distillation methods without using real video data or extra post-training stages.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

Why don't machine learning research agents overfit?

Amazon researchers explain why ML research agents avoid benchmark overfitting, attributing generalization to compressibility of successful strategies.

Amazon Science summarizes the paper "What fits (into few tokens) doesn't overfit: Compression and generalization in ML research agents," which investigates why benchmark hill-climbing loops, whether run by human communities or LLM research agents, do not produce rampant overfitting. The explanation formalizes Occam's razor via a counting argument: successful ML strategies are highly compressible, so short descriptions lack room to memorize benchmark data and must capture real structure. LLM-based agents, being resettable and controllable, allow this hypothesis to be tested empirically.

Hacker News · security · 2d agoAI researchHN 21↑ · 3 comments

Foundation Models for Generalizable Semantic and Goal-Oriented Communication

FMSGOC uses vision-language foundation model priors plus diffusion reconstruction to enable generalizable semantic communication at 0.039 bits per pixel for 6G.

FMSGOC targets generalization failures in semantic and goal-oriented communication for 6G by leveraging broad visual-linguistic foundation model priors. A vision-language model selects sparse, goal-aligned semantic anchors while a fine-tuned diffusion model performs masked completion to reconstruct images at the receiver, decoupling what to send from how to reconstruct. On CIFAR-10 it reaches 0.039 bits per pixel with cosine similarity 0.87-0.90 and 0.83-0.86 on unseen ImageNet inputs, outperforming end-to-end baselines at lower bit rates.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 8d agoAI research

Model-Aware Schedules Improve Generation via Fiberwise Optimal Transport

Researchers introduce model-aware diffusion schedules via fiberwise optimal transport, cutting flow-matching FID on CIFAR-10 by 38.6% at 16 function evaluations.

The paper proposes constructing diffusion and flow-matching sampling schedules from a fiberwise prediction risk defined via optimal transport, combined with coefficient-path kinetic action, yielding a closed-form time allocation. Across DDPM and flow-matching experiments spanning targets, datasets, and architectures, the schedules beat model-agnostic baselines, including a 38.6% relative FID reduction for flow matching on CIFAR-10 at 16 function evaluations. Normalized fiberwise-risk profiles from independently trained models align closely, suggesting empirical universality, and a frozen analytic allocation template retains most of the gains.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research

Unlocking Lossless Speedups in LLMs via Discrete Diffusion

Uno pairs autoregressive LLMs with lightweight diffusion weights to draw multiple tokens in parallel, delivering up to 3x lossless speedup without a draft model.

The paper introduces diffusion-augmented LLMs: autoregressive weights trained with the standard next-token objective plus lightweight diffusion weights trained via a Diffusion Distillation phase to emit multiple tokens in parallel. Psi-Spec samplers enable lossless acceleration without the separate draft model required by speculative decoding. The 8B Uno model outperforms the 26B open DiffusionGemma and proprietary Mercury 2 on agentic tool use, coding, and long-context reasoning benchmarks, with up to 3x throughput gains over the base model at all evaluated batch sizes. Code and checkpoints are released publicly.

Hugging Face daily papers · 13d agoAI research

LynnReal-Omni: Native multi-modal Video Generation for Agentic Visual Workflows

LynnReal-Omni unifies controllable video generation tasks in a 32B multimodal diffusion transformer, with a 27B Flash variant rendering 540p clips in 377 ms.

LynnReal-Omni is a native multimodal video generation framework built on a 32B shared multimodal diffusion transformer unifying text-to-video, image-conditioned generation, reference guidance, structural control, editing, restoration and long-video generation, accepting heterogeneous inputs like 3D renders and game recordings for agentic visual workflows. A dedicated 27B Flash model enables real-time rendering, producing a 22-frame 540p video in 377 ms on one H100 versus 843 ms for the full model. The work introduces a curated multi-shot audiovisual data pipeline and MSAVP, a 100-prompt, 20-metric evaluation design covering instruction following, plausibility, visual quality, temporal behavior and audio coordination.

Hugging Face daily papers · 2d agoAI research

BVB: Benchmarking Agentic Video Understanding via Programmatic Reconstruction in Blender

Blender-VideoBench evaluates agentic video understanding by having agents programmatically reconstruct real videos in Blender scenes.

BVB (Blender-VideoBench) tests whether multimodal agents truly understand videos by requiring programmatic reconstruction of real-world videos as animated Blender scenes via a lightweight Mini-BVB harness under identical sandbox and cost constraints. Evaluation uses Dual VQA for spatiotemporal fact preservation and Latent Similarity for perceptual match, combined in a square-root mean overall score. Across 51 configurations from 10 model families, the best model reaches 88.6 Latent Similarity but retains only 53.7% of source-correct spatiotemporal answers, showing semantic retention remains the main challenge.

Hugging Face daily papers · 2d agoAI research

TransNormal-2: Geometry-Grounded Rectified Flow with Edge-Aware Decoding for Precise Normal Estimation

TransNormal-2 improves monocular surface-normal estimation by fixing VAE edge degradation with geometry-aware losses and refinement, matching MoGe-2 with 1.4% of annotations.

TransNormal-2 is a FLUX.2-based rectified-flow framework for monocular surface-normal estimation with single-step deterministic inference. The authors quantify that VAE 8x spatial compression introduces 1.3-8.5 degrees of mean angular error even on ground-truth normals, with edge error up to 2.8x the global error. The method adds geometry-aware pixel-space losses and an RGB-guided Geometric Refinement Module to correct boundary-localized decoding errors. It matches or exceeds MoGe-2 on all eight reported metrics using only 1.4% as many task-specific annotations, and cuts transparent-object MAE by 4.2 degrees on ClearGrasp and 3.1 degrees on ClearPose.

Hugging Face daily papers · 10d agoAI research

Discrete Beckmann Transport Models for One-Step Language Modeling and Reasoning

DBTM achieves one-step text generation via a time-independent transport map trained directly from data, removing pretrained teacher distillation.

Discrete Beckmann Transport Models (DBTM) build a time-independent flow whose autonomous transport map provably carries any point in ambient space to a fixed point on simplex vertices in a single step. The fixed-point property is characterized by a conservation equation whose residual can be minimized directly from data, eliminating the need for a teacher flow, distillation, and time conditioning. A partial-context interpolant extension turns additional function evaluations into refinement steps rather than ODE integration steps. On language modeling and reasoning tasks, DBTM's one- and few-step generation improves quality and accuracy over discrete diffusion and continuous flow baselines.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 2d agoAI research1

VoT: Vision-of-Thought for Unified Multimodal Representation Alignment

Researchers propose Vision-of-Thought (VoT), a discrete visual-planning token layer between VLMs and diffusion transformers improving text-to-image semantic alignment.

VoT introduces a discrete visual-thinking layer between vision-language models and diffusion transformers, letting the VLM act as a multimodal planner that emits tokens describing objects and layouts before pixel generation. A specialized VoT tokenizer is trained with VLM alignment, feature reconstruction, and vector-quantization losses. Experiments show improved semantic alignment and a structured, interpretable interface for controllable generation.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 8d agoAI research

LLaDA-UI: Bringing Block-wise Diffusion to Vision-Language GUI Agents

LLaDA-UI, a 16.7B block-wise diffusion vision-language GUI agent, outperforms Qwen2.5-VL-7B and beats Qwen3-VL-8B on four of six GUI benchmarks.

LLaDA-UI is a 16.7B-parameter MoE-based, block-wise diffusion vision-language GUI agent built on the LLaDA2.0-mini-base diffusion language backbone with a native-resolution vision encoder. It uses a two-stage pipeline: general multimodal pre-training followed by GUI-agent supervised fine-tuning on mobile, desktop, web, and grounding data. It substantially outperforms Qwen2.5-VL-7B and surpasses Qwen3-VL-8B on four of six reported GUI benchmarks, establishing block-wise diffusion as a practical paradigm for latency-sensitive multimodal agents.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research

Marigold V2: Revisiting Diffusion Transformers for Monocular Depth Estimation

Marigold V2 adapts diffusion transformers for monocular depth estimation, improving AbsRel 16-26% over the previous best on KITTI and ETH3D.

Huawei's Bayer lab revisits the Marigold approach to repurpose image generation and editing models built on the diffusion transformer (DiT) architecture into monocular depth estimators. The recipes target single-step inference from pretrained multi-step flow-matching models, with remedies including alignment to ground-truth semantic features and a two-stage fine-tuning protocol using a Sinkhorn-based loss. The resulting model produces crisper depth maps that generalize out-of-distribution and also achieves state-of-the-art results on surface normals estimation and intrinsic image decomposition.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

UniMate: One Unified Model to Animate Diverse Skeletons

UniMate is a topology-aware diffusion transformer generating articulated motion for arbitrary rigged skeletons from text, trained on 13,006 motion sequences.

UniMate is a unified foundation model that animates arbitrary rigged 3D skeletons from an asset and text prompt with no test-time optimization or per-skeleton retraining. It uses a topology-aware diffusion transformer combining graph-aware attention bias from joint relations and geodesic distances, a spectral rotary position embedding generalizing RoPE to kinematic trees via the graph Laplacian, and a global topological conditioner. The accompanying UniML3D dataset spans 13,006 motion sequences across bipedal, quadrupedal, avian, marine, insectoid, serpentine, and articulated rigid-object skeletons; the model outperforms baselines and supports zero-shot cross-topology transfer, in-betweening, expansion, and text-guided editing.

Hugging Face daily papers · 12d agoAI research

UniMate: One Unified Model to Animate Diverse Skeletons

Researchers introduce UniMate, a topology-aware diffusion transformer generating text-driven motion for arbitrary 3D skeletons without per-skeleton retraining.

UniMate is a unified foundation model that synthesizes articulated motion for arbitrary skeletons from a rigged 3D asset and a text prompt, with no test-time optimization or per-skeleton fine-tuning. It uses a topology-aware diffusion transformer combining graph-aware attention bias, a spectral rotary position embedding generalizing RoPE via the graph Laplacian, and a rest-pose topological conditioner. Trained on UniML3D, a curated set of 13,006 motion sequences spanning bipedal to serpentine skeletons, it outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and supports zero-shot cross-topology transfer, in-betweening, and text-guided editing.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 11d agoAI research

How Lossless Is Lossless Speculative Decoding? The Role of Numerical Precision in Orthrus

Reproduction study finds Orthrus speculative-decoding trajectories match the reference model in only ~45% of cases under BF16, but 100% under FP32.

Researchers independently reproduced Orthrus, a hybrid autoregressive-diffusion architecture claiming lossless speculative decoding via intra-model consensus, testing exact trajectory matching on 1,190 prompts across 12 domains. Under BF16, exact matching occurred in only 45% of cases for the authors' checkpoint and 43% for an independently trained model, with matching probability strongly tied to reference-model response-conditional perplexity. Despite trajectory divergence, downstream lm-eval-harness benchmarks showed no systematic degradation, while FP32 evaluation yielded exact matching on all prompts.

Hugging Face daily papers · 2d agoAI research1

StepAudio 3 Gen Technical Report

StepAudio 3 Gen unifies TTS, voice design, music, and sound effects via discrete autoregressive modeling over RVQ tokens.

StepAudio 3 Gen is a general-purpose audio generation model covering zero-shot TTS, voice design, vocal generation, sound effects, music, vibe speech, and mixed audio in one framework. It uses discrete autoregressive modeling over residual vector quantization (RVQ) tokens rather than the diffusion Transformer paradigm, with a StepAudio Tokenizer representing audio at 12.5 Hz in a shared 16x2048 residual code space. Key design principles include interference-aware progressive pretraining, an RVQ Adaptor for multi-codebook acoustic representations, and shared discrete autoregressive modeling. The model reports state-of-the-art performance on TTS and voice design while retaining strong generation across speech, vocals, sound effects, and music.

Hugging Face daily papers · 5d agoAI research

Semigroup-JEPA: Latent Dynamics Consistency for Zero-Shot Physics Generalization

SG-JEPA world model conditions latent prediction on physical parameters, halving open-loop prediction error versus DINO-WM and boosting robotic control success.

SG-JEPA extends the LeWorldModel JEPA framework by supplying the governing physics parameter to the temporal model via action-conditioning and jointly training an encoder and predictor through autoregressive latent rollout. On out-of-distribution gravitational-field tasks it reduces open-loop prediction error by up to 2x versus DINO-WM on 2D datasets and increases 3D robotic control success rate up to 2.5x using independently trained diffusion policies. A linear feature analysis attributes most of the gain to the encoder learning features that the predictor can carry forward through rollout.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research

StepAudio 3 Music Technical Report

StepAudio 3 Music introduces long-form text-controlled music generation using ABC-notation planning and flow-matching diffusion, ranking near the top music arena.

StepAudio 3 Music generates long-form, text-controlled music using a 50-Hz single-codebook tokenizer with 65,536 entries and a flow-matching diffusion Transformer over VAE latents. A Mixture-of-Experts autoregressive model first plans an arrangement in ABC notation (ABC-CoT) before predicting music tokens. With DPO fine-tuning, it tops AudioBox content and production quality scores and reaches Quality Elo 1105 on the Artificial Analysis Music Arena, behind Suno V5.5 and Mureka. Generation covers songs, accompaniment from dry vocals, and cover synthesis up to 5 minutes 30 seconds at 48-kHz output.

Hugging Face daily papers · 5d agoAI research

Lessons from the hacks

The recent run of cyberattacks by in-development frontier models has got me thinking a lot about how our current incentive systems are not well suited for such fast technological transitions. The two primary power structures here are the rapidly growing technology companies and the federal government. The companies are incentivized to grow, so they can keep growing and keep scaling – in what is…

Interconnects · Aug 9, 2026AI research