Diffusion
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Multi-Target Few-Shot Prompting with Diffusion Language Models
2026-10-15 17:44:46Anton Xue, Alan Li, Rahul SahaAbstract
Few-shot prompting is useful when instructions and rewards are hard to specify. One such application is editing by example, where a demonstrated formatting change or API migration may need to be applied across multiple sites. However, such edits often depend on both left and right context, making generation with causal autoregressive models awkward. We therefore introduce multi-target few-shot prompting with diffusion language models, where examples guide the infilling of multiple masked regions within a shared canvas. To address the known challenge of reliably following demonstrations in few-shot prompting, we further leverage selective masking of the canvas to derive a likelihood-ratio reward that favors example-supported infills. Across few-shot prompting benchmarks and software refactoring case studies, we find that demonstrations improve infilling accuracy, with example guidance yielding further gains in several settings.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22294
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Routing Policy Optimization for Online Diffusion Reinforcement Learning
2026-10-15 17:40:30Qiuhong Shen, Yiding Yang, Yuxin Zhang, Xinwei Huang, Minxuan Lin, Bo Liu, Hao Kang, Haotian Yang, Yizhi Wang, Chongyang Ma, Xinchao WangAbstract
Reinforcement learning can align visual generators with reward signals beyond their pretraining objectives, but existing score-function methods typically introduce stochasticity by perturbing the reverse denoising trajectory, leading to costly rollout-based optimization. We instead ask whether stochastic exploration can be introduced inside the generator while preserving its original sampler. Routing Policy Optimization (RPO) answers this question by turning attention routing into a stochastic exploration action. At a few selected denoising levels, each query block keeps its own block and samples further key blocks in proportion to the generator's native attention mass, or keeps dense attention. The sampled route perturbs the velocity of that transition, and a Gaussian likelihood around the dense velocity scores the perturbation with a score-function objective. RPO further uses a controlled two-rollout estimator: two rollouts share the same prompt, initial latent, routed denoising levels, and dense anchor layers, differing only in their sampled attention routes. Their reward difference provides an advantage signal for the routed transitions. Because the likelihood differentiates the dense velocity itself, the learned updates remain effective after routing is removed. At inference, RPO restores dense attention and retains the original deterministic sampler. Experiments on text-to-image and text-to-video generation show that RPO improves generation quality while achieving nearly 4x higher training efficiency than Flow-GRPO-style methods. Please see our project page at this https URL for visual results.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22282
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Beyond Pairwise Repulsion: Collective Diversity via Determinant Maximization in Diffusion Sampling
2026-10-15 17:32:25Kwanyoung Lee, SeungJu Cha, Yebin Ahn, Sungho Koh, Dong-Jin KimAbstract
Strong guidance in text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models concentrates sampling toward high-density modes of the conditional distribution, collapsing independently sampled noise vectors onto nearly identical visual prototypes. This limits utility for tasks that demand distributional breadth, most critically synthetic data augmentation. Diversity, however, is a collective property of the whole batch: a set can preserve every pairwise distance yet still collapse onto a low-dimensional subspace. Existing sum-of-pairwise noise-optimization and repulsion objectives respond only weakly to this higher-order failure. We propose DetNO (Determinant Noise Optimization), which formulates diverse generation as RKHS volume maximization on the initial noise, maximizing the log-determinant of an RBF Gram matrix over one-step Tweedie predictions. This set-level functional equals the squared batch volume; its repulsion is strongest when the batch is most collapsed and self-attenuates as diversity is achieved. An anchor-based fidelity term keeps the optimized noises near plausible regions, and Lagrangian relaxation gives a two-term objective with a single hyperparameter $\lambda$ governing the diversity-quality trade-off, without training or sampler modification. Across three backbones (SD1.5, SDXL, SD3), DetNO achieves leading intra-batch diversity in VendiScore and Mean Self-Similarity, and a downstream few-shot classification experiment confirms that broader mode coverage brings statistically significant accuracy gains for synthetic data augmentation in the low-shot regime. Fixing the pipeline and varying only the batch objective, both RBF-based aggregators outperform InfoNCE, and the log-determinant attains the best downstream accuracy on both benchmarks. Its diversity advantage over InfoNCE widens as the batch grows. Code is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22267
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MOSS: Mode-Oriented Source Shaping for Robot Flow Matching Policies
2026-10-15 16:44:18Zirun Ma, Jindou Jia, Tuo An, Jiaqi Bai, Jiahua Dong, Jianfei YangAbstract
In robotic manipulation, the same observation often admits multiple feasible actions. Generative policies such as diffusion and flow matching naturally capture such multimodal behaviors, yet which mode is executed is left to random sampling and cannot be actively controlled. We propose Mode-Oriented Source Shaping (MOSS), which turns mode selection into an explicit choice of where generation starts. We first reveal, both empirically and theoretically, that deterministic flow transport induces mode-dependent structure in the source space. Under ideal deterministic ODE transport, distinct behavioral modes have distinct source-space preimages, while practical approximation errors can blur their boundaries due to imbalanced data, limited model capacity, and few inference steps. Motivated by this source-space structure, MOSS constructs semantically aligned mode-specific Gaussian sources that encode mode identity in the initial noise. A modality-strength estimator predicts the local degree of multimodality, which adaptively controls the geometry of the mode-specific sources. It contracts them toward a shared Gaussian where behaviors are similar and separates them near behavioral branching points. During deployment, the desired behavior is selected at inference simply by sampling from the corresponding component. Across 6 simulated and 3 real-world manipulation tasks, MOSS steers to the target mode up to 100% of the time with high task success, recovers minority modes at over 90% guidance rate under a 10:90 imbalance dataset, and surpasses mode-conditioned flow policy by 43.3 points of guidance rate on real robots.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22193
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Erase the Mark, Preserve the Motion: Temporally Consistent Removal of Video Watermarks
2026-10-15 16:36:32Yifan Liao, Zhen Sun, Zhicong Huang, Jiaming He, Zongmin Zhang, Xi Ai, Cheng Hong, Xinhu Zheng, Xinlei HeAbstract
Recent advances in video generation have increased the demand for reliable watermarking for copyright protection, yet the robustness of video watermarks against removal attacks remains underexplored. Most watermark-removal methods originate from the image domain: signal optimization injects imperceptible pixel-domain perturbations, whereas generative resynthesis produces a visually similar instance through diffusion synthesis. When extended to videos, the former introduces temporally varying noise that causes visible flickering, while the latter regenerates fine-grained structures inconsistently across frames, leading to structural motion inconsistency. To evaluate video watermark robustness, we propose PoseRegen, a pose-consistent reconstruction framework that removes watermarks while preserving the original content and motion. PoseRegen first applies a temporally shared viewpoint transformation to disrupt watermark-bearing spatial patterns and then jointly reconstructs the transformed sequence with a pose-conditioned video model. A frozen video DiT processes the complete sequence with its reference-video latent, and full-sequence Flow Matching supervision keeps identity and background consistent across frames. To further preserve motion structure, we introduce a lightweight Pose-Conditioned Motion Consistency Adapter that adapts the frozen backbone to temporally ordered pose guidance and constrains body-part trajectories throughout reconstruction. Experiments on eleven video watermarking schemes show that PoseRegen reduces the average bit accuracy to 0.505, near random guessing, while outperforming the strongest baseline by 9.34% on motion-related VBench metrics. These results reveal a practical vulnerability of current video watermarks and highlight the need to evaluate robustness jointly with temporal and motion quality.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22457
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Towards Unbiased On-Policy Distillation for Block Diffusion Language Models
2026-10-15 15:52:33Zaiquan Yang, Fei Wei, Yong Wang, Yudong Han, Yiyu Li, Zhuofan Zong, Gerhard Petrus Hancke, Xiangxiang Chu, Rynson WH LauAbstract
On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for language models, with recent efforts extending it to block diffusion language models (BDLMs). However, existing studies focus almost exclusively on small block sizes, leaving distillation into student models with larger blocks underexplored. In this work, we investigate this regime and reveal two critical optimization biases that induce severe training instability. First, mismatched block boundaries between teacher and student cause \textbf{\textit{context misalignment}}, providing distorted supervisory signals that misguide student decoding. Second, even under aligned contexts, an \textbf{\textit{intrinsic optimization bias}} in OPD, where the student tends to rapidly absorb high-support signals while lagging on low-support updates, drives a premature confidence surge that traps weaker students in catastrophic overconfidence collapse. To resolve these, we propose \mbox{\textbf{Un-OPD}}, an unbiased on-policy distillation framework with two novelties for stabilizing BDLM training. First, Un-OPD introduces a boundary-aware step filtering strategy that eliminates context-misaligned decoding steps. Second, Un-OPD proposes moderating optimization intensity at high-support positions via a support-rebalanced confidence calibration, thereby bypassing overconfidence collapse. Beyond stability, we also introduce a rollout reuse mechanism to reduce rollout generation overhead. Extensive experiments on math reasoning and code generation benchmarks show that Un-OPD consistently stabilizes training and delivers superior performance while reducing wall-clock training time by approximately half.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05373
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TIPS: A Tiny Inference-time Policy for Scaling in Diffusion Language Models
2026-10-15 15:46:55Ya-Shi Zhang, Jian Tang, Pierre-Andr\'e No\"el, Oleksiy OstapenkoAbstract
Masked diffusion language models expose an inference-time choice: which positions become visible after each denoising pass. Many existing decoding methods use hand-designed rules or require visibility to grow monotonically. We present a $\textbf{T}$iny $\textbf{I}$nference-time $\textbf{P}$olicy for $\textbf{S}$caling ($\textbf{TIPS}$), an approximately $600$K-parameter controller that learns both unmasking and remasking while keeping the underlying language model frozen. TIPS uses visibility-aware confidence features and a shallow transformer to select which tokens should be visible, while a fixed schedule controls the expected visible fraction. We train the controller through supervised warmup followed by reinforcement learning from terminal correctness rewards. On GSM8K and MATH-500 with LLaDA-8B-Instruct, the full-canvas and two-block TIPS variants achieve $58.46\%$ and $57.97\%$ micro-averaged accuracy at a budget of $32$ decoder evaluations, exceeding the strongest baseline in our main comparison by $12.1$ and $11.6$ percentage points, respectively. Both variants are trained at a budget of $32$ evaluations and remain competitive at higher budgets without retraining. These results demonstrate that learning when to reveal and reconsider tokens can improve the accuracy-compute trade-off without updating the decoder backbone.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22099
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GRID-Planner: Graph-Structured Relational Reward Shaping for Diffusion Planning
2026-10-15 14:34:18Zhao Yang, Zezhong Qian, Yinan Shi, Longjun Liu, Yawei JueluoAbstract
Autonomous driving planning requires selecting trajectories that remain safe, rule-compliant, and comfortable under complex multi-agent interactions, yet robust closed-loop decision making in planning-critical scenes remains challenging. Existing diffusion- and RL-based planners often rely on generic rewards and use relational structure mainly for representation, limiting how planning-critical rollouts shape policy improvement. We present GRID-Planner, a graph--reward integrated diffusion planning framework that aligns generative planning with structured relational signals. Specifically, GRID-Planner combines graph-aware importance weighting, a time-indexed relational reward surrogate, and an advantage-weighted diffusion objective with on-policy self-distillation, forming a rollout-return-advantage-update loop without explicit likelihoods. Experiments on nuPlan and interPlan show that, compared with the diffusion-only baseline, GRID-Planner reduces collision rate, lane deviation, and jerk by 35.8\%, 60.8\%, and 27.4\%, respectively, and improves the planning score by 3.4\%. Project website: this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21984
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What Should Robot Policies Learn to Predict? Rethinking Supervision Targets in Vision-Language-Action Learning
2026-10-15 14:01:06Haitao Shen, Hanyu Liu, Yihan Lin, Huiping Liu, Junbo Cui, Daoheng Li, Yang Li, Jing Zhang, Wenxin Li, Yuan YaoAbstract
Vision-language-action (VLA) policies are typically trained with action prediction as the primary supervision signal, since robots ultimately execute actions. Auxiliary objectives such as latent-action (LA) and future-vision (FV) prediction are often added to improve policy learning, yet they compete with action prediction for the same training budget. We ask whether, under a fixed budget, allocating a substantial share of training samples to such objectives, rather than to further action prediction, can improve policy learning. We build a unified VLA framework that couples a two-stream multimodal diffusion transformer (MMDiT) with a sample-level router, which assigns each training sample to either action prediction or an auxiliary objective and thus makes supervision allocation explicit. Within this framework, we instantiate three LA targets based on LAPA and its DINO-feature variants, and three FV targets based on DINOv3, V-JEPA 2, and Wan2.2 representations. Across LIBERO, CALVIN, and four real-robot tasks, suitable LA and FV supervision outperforms action-only training under the same budget, even when action prediction receives no more than half of the training samples. FV generally outperforms LA, although the strongest LA target remains competitive on CALVIN. Diagnostic analyses suggest that DINO-based LA targets emphasize relative motion, whereas FV targets emphasize absolute position and task identity. We therefore argue that what robot policies learn to predict, and how training is allocated among these targets, should be treated as explicit design choices rather than defaulting to action-dominant training.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21915
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Single-stage joint diffusion of sky images and clear-sky index for ultra-short-term irradiance forecasting: what the frame-to-irradiance stage discards
2026-10-15 12:47:12Kanawut Suwandee, Suwichaya SuwanwimolkulAbstract
Sky-image irradiance forecasting is dominated by a two-stage design: a video-prediction model forecasts future sky frames, and a separately trained regressor maps those frames to irradiance. We propose a single-stage alternative that co-denoises the future sky-image and clear-sky-index sequences in one diffusion process, with an irradiance head that reads a denoised preview of the future sky rather than the noised diffusion state. The forecaster needs no regression stage and runs from sky images and deterministic covariates alone, with no measured irradiance at its input --- the situation at a site with a camera but no pyranometer. On 2023 SIRTA data the model reaches a pooled RMSE of $104.1$~W\,m$^{-2}$ and a skill score of $+0.34$ on the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS) against smart persistence, higher than any of twelve baseline configurations, and retains that skill when retrained on 2021--2022. On the model's own generated frames, a separately trained regressor reaches $150.6$~W\,m$^{-2}$ against the joint head's $104.1$: roughly $46$~W\,m$^{-2}$ that joint training recovers and a cascade discards. Point accuracy is competitive but not best: a deterministic network that also reads measured irradiance attains $97.6$~W\,m$^{-2}$. The model's CRPS skill leads that network's in every sky-condition tertile, by $0.26$ to $0.30$.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21795
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Trajectory-based Diffusion from One-shot Human Video for Generalizable Manipulation
2026-10-15 12:45:26Guoping Pan, Xinmiao Yu, Wannan Cao, Jincheng Li, Baolin Jiang, Yizhe Li, Yi Cheng, Houde LiuAbstract
Imitation learning enables robots to perform complex tasks by leveraging human-collected demonstrations. However, most existing approaches require labor-intensive data collection with additional teleoperation systems, which hinders scalability. Human videos represent a natural source of data that implicitly contain knowledge of manipulation behaviors. However, transferring them to robots remains challenging due to the visual domain gap and the absence of explicit action labels. In this work, we introduce TDV, a trajectory-based framework that leverages data generation to enable generalizable manipulation. TDV focuses on task-relevant objects by leveraging plug-and-play 6D pose estimation techniques to extract object trajectories from human videos, thereby mitigating the impact of irrelevant backgrounds and varying viewpoints. As a modality-agnostic intermediate representation, trajectories are inherently independent of the visual domains and different embodiments, enabling efficient data generation. Our method outperforms previous approaches on RLBench simulation tasks, achieving near 100\% success rates across seven tasks. In real-world experiments, TDV enables cross-embodiment generalization manipulation from one-shot human demonstrations by leveraging efficient trajectory generation techniques.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21792
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Diffusion Language Models as Open Quantum Systems
2026-10-15 10:57:07Akinori Tanaka, Yukinao Akamatsu, Takuki Tomita, Yuji HironoAbstract
Diffusion language models generate text by reversing a classical diffusion process over token sequences. We show that their continuous-time forward and reverse dynamics can be embedded in the framework of open quantum systems, which describes quantum systems interacting with their environment. This connection provides a basis for extending diffusion sampling to superpositions of sentence states and for modifying the underlying generation dynamics. We construct a $\tau$-leaping unraveling scheme that simulates stochastic trajectories of these states while updating multiple token positions at each step. This enables generation conditioned on superposed prompts or thoughts, which we call Superposition of Prompts (SoP) and Superposition of Thoughts (SoT). The same formulation yields Quantum-Inspired Remasking (QIR): perturbing the masked-diffusion dynamics produces a confidence-based rule for revising previously generated tokens. Experiments with pretrained diffusion language models show that superposition-based generation can retain information from conditioning components not selected at the final measurement, while QIR improves LLM-assessed text quality when applied at an appropriate stage of generation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21672
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Decoupled Safety Control: A Safety-Control Algorithm for Training-Free Safety Guidance
2026-10-15 09:24:00Huilin Zhou, Ruoxi Cheng, Yuhang Wang, Yuming Liu, Minghao Sun, Ruolong Ma, Lan ZhangAbstract
Diffusion models achieve strong performance in text-to-image generation, but they can still produce unsafe content. Training-free safety guidance offers a practical inference-time alternative that intervenes during sampling without modifying model weights. However, many existing safeguards still rely on a coupled safety-control chain. In this chain, the same unsafe condition simultaneously specifies what should be avoided, indicates the current unsafe signal, constructs the intervention, and determines when that intervention remains active. This coupling can work when unsafe factors are explicit, but becomes less reliable once harmful and benign semantics are entangled in the current generation state, often leaving residual unsafe content or unnecessarily degrading benign-generation quality or prompt fidelity. We address this problem with Decoupled Safety Control (DSC), a plug-in safety-control algorithm for training-free safety guidance. DSC reformulates training-free safety guidance as an explicit state-dependent control process, so the executed intervention is determined from the current generation state rather than inherited directly from a single unsafe condition. Experiments on standard safety benchmarks show that DSC improves representative latent- and text-space safeguards, achieving stronger unsafe-content suppression while preserving benign-generation quality and maintaining efficient inference.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21569
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Reinforcement Learning-driven Diffusion Models: Language, Vision, and Beyond
2026-10-15 09:05:38Zhiyuan Ma, Jiabao Wei, Tianyu Wang, Hanqing Wang, Jiadong Pan, Haowen Xu, Liangliang Zhao, Ruixun Liu, Yuhan Wang, Yuwei Zhang, Liang Feng, Junhao Xiao, Kaiyan Zhang, Xuekai Zhu, Daizong Liu, Biqing Qi, Yihao Liu, Ganqu Cui, Ning Ding, Linfeng Zhang, Jianjun Li, Kun He, Xiang Bai, Bowen ZhouAbstract
Diffusion models (DMs) have steadily demonstrated outstanding performance in high-fidelity, controllable generation across diverse scenarios, following the "pretraining-finetuning" paradigm established in LLMs. Despite these advances, conventional DMs still face critical limitations in sophisticated reasoning, autonomous exploration of generation pathways, and adaptability to complex, human-aligned objectives. Inspired by RLHF's success in LLMs, RL has recently emerged as a pivotal post-training mechanism to iteratively refine DMs through reward-driven trajectory optimization. This paper presents the first comprehensive review of RL-driven DMs and an empirical analysis of how RL reshapes the diffusion process towards experience-centric, goal-directed generation. We propose a novel technical panorama elucidating RL's multifaceted roles in diffusion-based language, multimodal, robotic, and scientific models, with a granular focus on diffusion trajectory optimization and reward engineering. Through extensive experiments on multiple task-specific benchmarks, we systematically evaluate representative methods to intuitively highlight the advantages of different RL post-training strategies. Furthermore, we reveal and dissect three crucial bottlenecks that currently hinder the real-world deployment of RL-driven DMs: reward design fragility, exploration-exploitation trade-off in high-dimensional generation spaces, and training instability under sparse rewards. Based on these perspectives, we provide a principled roadmap for the integration of RL into DMs and outline promising future research directions for robust, interpretable RL-diffusion systems. We also construct a public repository to continuously track the latest developments in this rapidly evolving field: this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21539
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TRACE: Typed Reference-Aware Conversational Editing for Humanoid Motion Diffusion
2026-10-15 08:49:53Zejian Kang, Yifu Luo, Boyang Shen, Jingxuan Li, Zekai Chen, Zekun Shi, Yongxue Xu, Zhenyu Hou, Bingqian Wu, Shaolei Zhang, Wentao Yang, Xiangru HuangAbstract
Language-conditioned humanoid motion generation enables users to create and refine robot movements through natural language. The central challenge is to connect an underspecified request to concrete motion structure that can subsequently be revised relative to an accepted reference. We present TRACE, a generation and editing framework for the Unitree G1 humanoid robot built around typed, measurable kinematic quantities. Our insight is to ground generation conditions in paired training motions and editing goals in the current motion. A language model learns to predict support, root, and hand events from motion-derived supervision; their time-aligned encodings complement the original text in a diffusion generator. Gravity-referenced states and trajectory--contact objectives improve kinematic consistency. For editing, typed requests define body--time scopes and source-relative goals. A separate reference-conditioned diffusion editor uses these goals and revised events to realize changes, while sampling-time projection preserves protected state coordinates. Quantitative evaluation and human assessment show improved semantic alignment and motion quality over the compared methods. Controlled ablations support the value of motion-grounded conditioning and kinematic consistency, while multi-turn editing evaluations demonstrate more reliable execution of successive relative requests under shared preservation constraints. Together, these results support typed kinematic structure as a common basis for motion generation and reference-aware revision.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21515
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ManiFusion: Unlocking the High-Throughput Generation via Superposition in Manifold Space
2026-10-15 07:44:55Minkyu Kim, Baekseung Kim, Junhoo Lee, Jangho Kim, Nojun KwakAbstract
Diffusion models achieve high-quality image generation but remain computationally expensive due to iterative denoising across many timesteps. Existing acceleration methods mainly reduce per-sample latency, but gains along this axis are becoming saturated. We instead explore an orthogonal throughput-oriented direction by processing multiple samples within a single denoising evaluation. To this end, we propose ManiFusion, a backbone-agnostic framework for multi-sample generation through fused-space computation. ManiFusion jointly processes multiple samples by fusing them before the denoising backbone and separating them afterward through unfusion. We provide a geometric perspective on how multiple samples can share a fused representation while retaining the information needed to guide their individual generation trajectories. To better align fusion allocation with denoising stages, ManiFusion uses Trajectory-Fusion Scheduling (TFS), which dynamically adjusts fusion factors throughout sampling. ManiFusion generalizes across diffusion families, including both U-Net and transformer backbones in pixel and latent spaces. We further show that ManiFusion composes with existing acceleration methods and reaches throughput regimes unattainable by prior approaches with minimal quality degradation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21433
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ReState: Noise-Level-Aware State Correction for Training-Free Object Removal in Few-Step Diffusion Models
2026-10-15 05:32:49Donghwan Lee, Sanghyun Jo, Sihyun Kim, Ziseok Lee, Kyungsu KimAbstract
Training-free object removal commonly redirects self-attention away from the target region, but on few-step distilled diffusion models this often leaves object-shaped residuals. We identify a temporal mismatch: a structured prediction forms inside the mask at the first forward, and the short trajectory offers few later chances to revise it, while attention rerouting acts mainly in later steps. Across four distilled backbones, magnitude-matched single-forward interventions show that background-directed state correction affects the final result more than attention rerouting. We therefore propose ReState, which corrects the masked clean prediction toward background evidence retrieved from the input using a noise-level-aware weight that vanishes at the final forward. ReState retains object-excluding attention as a complementary constraint and adds no denoiser evaluations. Across two paired benchmarks and two few-step backbones, ReState achieves the best masked PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS among training-free methods, improving PSNR by 3.17 dB on average over the strongest baseline. On OBER-Test, it also outperforms the 50-step attention-forcing reference on all three metrics at 6.7x lower latency. The same configuration transfers to two additional distilled backbones without retuning. Project page: this https URL
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21287
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FocusOPD: Structure-Guided On-Policy Distillation for Diffusion Models
2026-10-15 04:45:14Xinrui Lin, Shumin Wang, Suqi Song, Fan Li, Yanyong ZhangAbstract
Multi-teacher on-policy distillation enables rectified-flow models with diffusion-transformer architectures to combine task-specific capabilities within a single student. However, matching model outputs does not guarantee that their internal representations are aligned, and it remains unclear where and when additional feature supervision is most useful. We analyze the teacher-student feature mismatch across Transformer blocks and denoising timesteps, and find that the mismatch is concentrated in deeper Transformer blocks during early denoising and persists after OPD distillation, indicating ineffective distillation. Motivated by this observation, we introduce FocusOPD, which augments the base OPD objective with token-wise directional feature alignment restricted to deep layers and early denoising steps. Across two rectified-flow backbones and multiple OPD objectives, FocusOPD improves capability transfer in compositional generation, text rendering, and preference-based evaluation. On the primary benchmark, it improves over DiffusionOPD from 0.953 to 0.967 on GenEval, from 23.797 to 23.944 on PickScore, and from 6.052 to 6.199 on LAION-Aesthetic. Ablations show that selective deep and early supervision is more effective and efficient than alignment over the full network and trajectory.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21250
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MIRAGE: Stealthy Visual Prompt Injection for Vulnerability Detection in Web Agents
2026-10-15 04:29:19Xuelong Dai, Jianyu Ma, Boyang Ma, Biwei Yan, Yijun Yang, Yue ZhangAbstract
Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based web agents provide practical, high-precision solutions for visual browser automation; however, they inherently expand the attack surface, introducing novel vision-based vulnerabilities. Existing adversarial evaluations targeting these agents frequently rely on permissive threat models and visually conspicuous artifacts. In this paper, we investigate a constrained vulnerability detection setting: a trusted web platform where the evaluator acts solely as an unprivileged third party, such as a merchant or advertiser, controlling only a semantically legitimate, spatially constrained region, such as an ad slot, a sponsored card, or a localized widget. Operating under these realistic constraints, we propose MIRAGE, a novel visual indirect prompt injection framework for targeted next-action hijacking. Our approach leverages diffusion models to generate perceptually benign adversarial images strictly confined to the attacker-controlled boundaries permitted by the trusted service provider. To maximize attack efficacy within such a restrictive setting, we introduce a robust optimization technique combining curvature-aware adversarial diffusion guidance with sparse, dark-pixel residual perturbations. Comprehensive evaluations against prominent MLLM web agent frameworks, specifically SeeAct and OpenClaw, empirically demonstrate the potency, realism, and stealth of our proposed MIRAGE.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20717
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Witness Overlap: Directional Provenance Inside Open-Weight Model Families
2026-10-15 04:28:35Siyuan Li, Haoxuan Zeng, Xin Luo, Fernando Jia, Florence Li, Zhengyang Geng, Zico Kolter, Tai Sing Lee, Tianqin LiAbstract
Open-weight models are often released, fine-tuned, aligned, merged, and re-released, making provenance audits ask not only whether checkpoints are related, but also which checkpoint came first. Many existing model-provenance methods are designed for a base-known audit setting: given a victim or source model, they test whether a suspect model is related to it. Although these audits are framed as source-to-suspect tests, their underlying evidence is often symmetric, relying on representation similarity, weight similarity, behavioral fingerprints, or correlation statistics. Symmetric pairwise comparisons can detect relatedness, but they cannot by themselves orient relationship between checkpoints A and B. We therefore introduce a local geometric comparison: instead of comparing two checkpoints directly, we add a third same-family checkpoint as a witness and compare the geometry around each candidate endpoint. Direction is inferred by asking which candidate behaves more like a branching parent. Motivated by this idea, and by the empirically observed asymmetry between parent-anchored and child-anchored witness-overlap distributions, we propose Witness Overlap, a prompt-free, training-free white-box test for directional provenance. On 176 LLM checkpoints from 16 families, our one-witness test orients 95.3\% of parent-child decisions using Frobenius cosine. We further evaluate root identification, sibling discrimination, generalizations to VLM and diffusion families, and chain-structured ordering. The signal is robust to weight noise and sparse pruning, with a proposed SVD weight reduction variant showing greater robustness than Frobenius cosine.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31784
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