Credit assignment in modular financial reinforcement learning is difficult to evaluate because an attributed signal may improve a component loss without adding decision-relevant information or improving economic outcomes. We propose an evaluation framework combining equal-information reconstruction controls, fixed-utility comparisons and prespecified downstream guardrails. The framework is instantiated in an attribution-guided modular trading architecture and tested in three controlled studies covering update allocation, supervision-target representation and portfolio risk control. We find that residual-based allocation is exactly reproduced by an ordinary loss-budget control under the disclosed interface; direct shortfall supervision improves component prediction but fails decoded-outcome preservation; and component-wise critic supervision worsens risk-condition certainty equivalent and drawdown relative to scalar supervision under fixed utility. These results identify three distinct evaluation failures: redundant attribution signals, representation-induced prediction trade-offs, and misalignment between component supervision and downstream risk outcomes. A preserved historical engineering case further shows why module-level learning claims require run-level provenance. The contribution is a reusable methodology for evaluating credit assignment in expert systems operating under partial observability, delayed feedback and economic risk constraints.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14750
Extreme low-bit weight-only quantization is an effective approach to reducing the deployment costs of large language models. Below 3 bits, scalar quantization often suffers severe accuracy loss, while vector quantization (VQ) better preserves accuracy through more expressive joint encoding. However, existing VQ methods still exhibit substantial degradation on real-world tasks, and two design challenges remain underexplored: (1) protecting sensitive weight channels within jointly encoded vectors; and (2) allocating a fixed bit budget among representation components, such as direction and radius, to suit different weight matrices. To address these challenges, we propose SAGE: Split Adaptation and Grouping by Energy for weight-only vector quantization. First, Energy-Stratified Grouping (ESG) couples channel grouping with activation-weighted fitting, grouping channels from different energy tiers within each subvector to prioritize sensitive channels. Second, Adaptive Bit Split (ABS) balances direction-codebook capacity and radius precision per matrix, selecting the split with the lowest activation-weighted reconstruction error under a fixed budget. Across benchmarks covering knowledge, mathematics, code generation, instruction following, and tool use, SAGE achieves state-of-the-art performance in the 2-bit quantization setting. On Qwen3-30B-A3B, it retains 95.3% of the BF16 model's average benchmark score. With our custom-designed CUDA kernel, SAGE delivers up to a 2.55-fold non-streaming end-to-end speedup over FP16. The code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14745
Pixel-space world models have recently emerged as a promising approach for GUI agents, predicting future screens prior to execution and subsequently re-perceiving them for action selection. However, this two-stage paradigm faces two key challenges in GUI environments: (L1) the high computational cost of pixel reconstruction and (L2) the need to reconstruct large and diverse appearance-level details beyond what is required for action selection. In practice, this screen-generation objective can induce an identity shortcut problem, where future-state prediction largely preserves the current state rather than capturing action-induced changes. In this work, we reformulate GUI world modeling by shifting the prediction target from full-screen reconstruction to action-induced future information in latent space. Concretely, we leverage a large multimodal model as the latent world model, whose shared representations support two dedicated heads for both action selection and predictive transition modeling. The action head directly translates these latent representations into action selection, while the transition head captures action-conditioned future information. To mitigate the identity shortcut, we further introduce an action-aware contrastive objective that encourages the transition representations to capture discriminative action-induced changes. Extensive experiments across offline and online GUI settings show that our method achieves up to 31.9% and 40.6% relative gains in success rate over pixel-space world models, respectively, while substantially reducing inference latency by up to 98.9%. Our code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14228
Modern machines can solve equations, follow logic and reason through language, yet they still struggle with problems that require visual non-verbal reasoning. This is evident even in advanced systems such as DeepSeek, ChatGPT and Gemini, which remain limited on visual tasks such as completing abstract patterns or delineating ambiguous regions-of-interest. Unlike explicit intermediate steps in verbal reasoning which can be verified through logic or automated tests, visual reasoning involves implicit intermediate steps with no clear methods for verification. Non-verbal reasoning is therefore challenging to model and, as a result, remains a fundamental limitation of current machine intelligence. Here we introduce GenVerOpt, a general framework that unifies generation, verification and optimisation into a reasoning pipeline for machines. By generating candidate solutions, verifying their correctness, and iteratively refining them, GenVerOpt enables per-sample optimisation rather than relying solely on dataset-level trends captured during model training. This process mirrors human problem-solving where multiple possibilities are imagined, evaluated, and refined until a correct solution emerges. Across diverse domains, GenVerOpt demonstrates capabilities beyond existing systems: it surpasses humans on abstract IQ puzzles, matches clinicians in prostate cancer segmentation, exceeds experts in liver vessel reconstruction and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in tumour boundary alignment. These results show that machine reasoning can extend beyond language, establishing visual non-verbal reasoning as a foundation for more flexible and generalisable intelligence.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13925
We present HorizonNav, a video diffusion-based framework for anticipatory robot navigation that transforms a single RGB image and a text prompt into a geometrically aligned representation of plausible surrounding 3D space. Given the initial observation and a textual description of the reconstruction objective, a vision-language model, guided by designed instructions, interprets the scene and constructs structured prompts for a video diffusion model. The resulting video sequence provides plausible future observations of the environment, which are subsequently processed using monocular ORB-SLAM3 for camera pose estimation and Video Depth Anything for dense depth prediction. Our central contribution is a geometry-guided depth alignment stage that combines the estimated camera poses with triangulated visual landmarks to constrain dense depth predictions across multiple views. This alignment improves the geometric consistency of the reconstructed 3D environment, addressing inconsistencies that temporal coherence of the generated video alone cannot resolve. The experimental evaluation of navigation in imagined 3D environment shows that across a 19-scene horizon study, planning-feasible scenes increase from 13/19 at P20 to 15/19 at P81, while successful RRT trials increase from 62/90 to 75/90. In a separate corridor study, 6 of 25 evaluable generated-camera trajectories violate the reconstructed collision constraints; RRT planner recovers feasible alternatives in 5 of those 6 cases. A larger archive contains 58 usable reconstructions from 67 attempted cases, of which 36 support a downstream plan and 22 do not, exposing reconstruction and free-space failure modes rather than hiding them without lidar. Across 15 corridor reconstructions, the mean reconstruction error is approximately 0.30 m at matched structural landmarks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13849
Dead cell detection in fluorescence microscopy is essential for phenotypic screening and drug efficacy assessment. However, automated identification remains challenging due to signal variability, optical artifacts, and colocalization ambiguities across multiple channels. Markers that define nuclear boundaries do not neatly coincide spatially or temporally with apoptotic markers. Furthermore, marker accumulation kinetics vary across individual cells and apoptosis stages, making universal thresholds unreliable. We present a systematic comparison of several computational approaches for detecting apoptotic cells in nucleus-stained specimens: (1) heuristic methods using intensity thresholds, distributions, correlations, and domain guidance; (2) classification using numerical features (Logistic Regression, Random Forest, XGBoost and LightGBM) and image features (ResNet-18 and EfficientNet-B0); and (3) anomaly detection, also using numerical features (Isolation Forest, one-class SVM and PCA reconstruction) and image features (convolutional autoencoders and Deep SVDD). Using a dataset of 258 images containing 65,527 cells/nuclei across multiple scenes with 243 manually annotated ground truth dead cells, we evaluate each method on metrics such as PR-AUC, Precision, Recall, F1-score, and macro-F1. Our results indicate that classification using image features (deep learning) and numerical features (traditional) achieved the best performance, with ResNet-18 and XGBoost significantly outperforming manually designed heuristics and anomaly detection methods. Our findings demonstrate that such biomedical problems remain highly challenging to solve even with the state-of-the-art computational and learning techniques. We aim to provide an effective decision-support tool to researchers while tackling such problems either fully-automatically or in a human-in-the-loop setting as an aide to domain scientists.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13780
Low-bit inference on accelerators with native 4-bit support requires quantizing both weights and activations to realize the full throughput gains these formats provide. While post-training weight quantization has been extensively studied, activation quantization remains considerably more challenging and typically requires calibration data. In this work, we introduce DUALQUANT, a dual-scale, calibration-free post-training quantization framework that directly minimizes the weight-reconstruction Mean Squared Error (MSE) and, as an immediate by-product, yields per-channel activation rescalings prior to activation quantization. Our key observation is that the scaling factors obtained by minimizing weight-reconstruction error provide effective activation rescalings, enabling competitive activation quantization without calibration data. We formulate DUALQUANT as a non-differentiable weight-reconstruction problem and develop an efficient solver based on variable splitting and block coordinate descent, where each subproblem admits a closed-form update. DUALQUANT provides a unified algorithm supporting a wide range of formats, including the full MX family and NVFP4. To our knowledge, DUALQUANT is the first dual-scaling method to formally support MX and NV block formats. Across Llama and Qwen models evaluated on WikiText-2, C4, and zero-shot downstream tasks, DUALQUANT matches or exceeds the accuracy of calibration-based SmoothQuant across most models and formats, and substantially outperforms calibration-free baselines, with large gains for MX and NV block formats. We validate these gains with a real packed W4A4 inference path for Llama-3.1-8B on an RTX 4090. The resulting implementation closely matches the accuracy of fake quantization while delivering up to 2.61x memory reduction and up to 2.46x throughput speedup over BF16.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13767
Decoding visual experience from fMRI is important for understanding human perception and developing brain-computer interfaces. Recent generative decoding methods can reconstruct plausible images and videos, but visual plausibility alone does not ensure that the output is faithfully grounded in brain activity. In this work, we propose Neurons++, a visual-stream fMRI reconstruction framework for both static image and dynamic video reconstruction. Compared with our conference version Neurons, Neurons++ extends the paradigm from video-only reconstruction to visual-stream reconstruction for both images and videos, and replaces parallel task conditioning with serial cortex-inspired decoding. The model first uses image-fMRI pretraining to obtain a stable spatial-semantic initialization, and then performs subject-specific fine-tuning for image and video reconstruction separately. The serial design organizes fMRI-derived representations into explicit spatial, semantic, language-level, and temporal cues. Extensive experiments show that Neurons++ achieves state-of-the-art video reconstruction and competitive image reconstruction across standard benchmarks. Beyond reconstruction fidelity, neural-to-visual analyses indicate that Neurons++ exhibits qualitative directional controllability under neural perturbation, that its fMRI encoder read-out is sensitive to stimulus-relevant cortical features, and that it supports ROI-guided semantic modulation. Code and model weights are available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13763
Scaling generalist robotic policies is limited by the high cost of collecting embodied interaction data. Large-scale egocentric human videos offer a rich alternative, but they lack robot action labels, and existing action annotation methods are often noisy under real-world visual complexity and diverse manipulation dynamics. We introduce LAPT-Scale, a scalable latent action pre-training paradigm with two components: LAPT-Scale-LAM learns continuous latent actions by explaining frame-to-frame visual transitions in human videos and uses them as human-derived supervision, while LAPT-Scale-Policy trains a VLA policy through human-video latent-action pre-training, target-robot embodiment alignment, and task-specific post-training. Unlike prior vector-quantized LAMs, LAPT-Scale-LAM uses a continuous latent space to preserve fine-grained motion and interaction dynamics. We further combine perceptual, semantic, and optical-flow alignment signals to improve transition-level supervision beyond pixel reconstruction. Trained on 23.3K hours of egocentric video, LAPT-Scale-LAM provides implicit action supervision for policy pre-training, yielding consistent scaling gains and improving real-robot success from 63.3% to 85.0% as annotated human video scales from 1K to 5K hours. The learned policy also generalizes to unseen visual conditions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13732
Long-horizon terminal benchmarks measure whether an agent can sustain progress through extended workflows with process rewards, not only whether its final state passes a binary check. We present Long-Horizon-Terminal-Bench 2.0 (LHTB 2.0), an extension of Long-Horizon-Terminal-Bench that preserves its 46 original tasks while correcting task and evaluation-infrastructure defects and extending 31 tasks. LHTB 2.0 contains 77 tasks across 13 domains and eight task types. The extended tasks are produced through a systematic reconstruction-task pipeline. We start from a working scientific or engineering artifact, then use a parameterized reference implementation to generate multiple scenarios, reveal six as behavioral evidence, hold out three for evaluation, and use dense progress ladders to reward partial progress while preventing memorization of public outputs. We also extend the evaluation horizon from 90 minutes to three hours and record verifier checkpoints every 30 minutes, enabling direct measurement of sustained progress within a run. Across 1,145 scored model-task runs from 15 frontier models, GPT-6-astra leads with dense mean reward 0.69 and 37 tasks at R at least 0.95, followed by GPT-5.6-sol with dense mean reward 0.67 and 32 tasks at the same threshold. On the 30 reconstruction tasks, binary verifier scores average 0.221, whereas dense ladder scores average 0.653, showing that outcome-only evaluation discards substantial intermediate progress. LHTB 2.0 provides a broader, hardened, and process-aware testbed for studying reliable agent execution over hours.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14146
Vision Mamba has recently emerged as an efficient alternative to convolutional and Transformer-based architectures by modeling long-range spatial dependencies through recurrent state evolution. Existing studies primarily improve token serialization, scanning strategies, or expert routing, yet largely overlook a state level question question: how should recurrent states be organized for spatially heterogeneous visual restoration? In this paper, we show that forcing tokens with heterogeneous update behaviors to recurrently modify a shared hidden state leads to persistent cross-content interference, which we term \textbf{State Contention}. We further argue that effective recurrent modeling should organize state evolution according to token compatibility rather than token ordering. Based on this observation, we introduce \textbf{State Isolation}, a new recurrent state organization principle for Vision Mamba,tokens with compatible state-update tendencies evolve within independent recurrent state streams. To instantiate this principle, we propose \textbf{IsoMamba}, a $\Delta$-guided architecture that constructs model-intrinsic update representations, discovers update-compatible token groups through label-free clustering, and routes them to isolated Mamba experts following a \textbf{cluster--route--isolate} paradigm. In addition, we develop a dynamic channel-wise reweighting objective to compensate for wavelength-dependent reconstruction difficulty in underwater images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IsoMamba consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple underwater image enhancement benchmarks while providing cleaner hidden state responses, validating the effectiveness of state isolated recurrent modeling.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13720
Recent advances in physical 3D generation have enabled visually faithful assets with simulatable mechanical behavior. However, existing methods provide limited control over material behavior beyond appearance-based inference and struggle to estimate physical properties from complex interactions between objects and semantic parts. Therefore, we present PhysForge, a Video Diffusion Model (VDM)-based framework for addressing these challenges, comprising two complementary modules for material-controllable physical fitting and componentlevel interaction modeling. The first, PhysFit, leverages material-conditioned VDM dynamics as references for physical-property fitting, introducing windowed fitting to focus on material-revealing interactions and Hallucinated Forcing to disentangle nonphysical motion hallucinated by the VDM from material responses. The second, PhysComp decomposes complex interactions into individual objects and semantic components, enabling their physical parameters to be optimized independently and flexibly composed for joint simulation. Experiments on PhysAssets and Google Scanned Objects demonstrate that, compared with existing methods, PhysForge provides stronger control over material-dependent physical responses while supporting component-level physical modeling for complex interactions. It achieves the best CLIP and physical controllability scores on both common and uncommon materials, with qualitative comparisons, component-level ablations, and a user study further supporting these improvements. Our project page is available at this https URL .
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13681
3DGS-MCMC has replaced the gradient-driven density control of 3D Gaussian Splatting with opacity-based sampling and relocation, and is now the de facto standard for prior-free densification under a fixed primitive budget. Because opacity stays high where the scene is already well reconstructed, this sampling sends most new primitives to the foreground and leaves the background under-reconstructed. At low budgets, prior-based methods such as ConeGS and EDGS outperform it, at the cost of a pre-trained radiance field or dense image matches and a separate initialization stage. We argue for a comeback of error-driven densification within the fixed-budget MCMC framework. Our confidence-aware densification keeps the fixed budget and gradual growth of 3DGS-MCMC, but places primitives by the image error instead of the opacity. New primitives are drawn mostly where screen-space gradients are large. We favor primitives with a low learned confidence, which marks regions the reconstruction still explains poorly, and relocate the primitives that contribute least to the rendered images to these places. Averaged over 24 scenes, our method outperforms 3DGS-MCMC in PSNR, SSIM and LPIPS at every budget from 100k to 2M primitives. At 100k, without a prior or an initialization stage, it recovers 0.84dB of the 1.05dB PSNR by which ConeGS leads 3DGS-MCMC, and from 500k on, it has the highest PSNR and SSIM of all fixed-budget methods we compare with, including ConeGS and EDGS. While inherently prior-free, our densification can also exploit priors: from the ConeGS or EDGS initialization, it matches ConeGS in PSNR and SSIM at 100k and is best in all three metrics at 500k.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13541
Representation autoencoders (RAE), created by pairing a frozen pretrained self-supervised learning (SSL) encoder with a trained decoder, have recently demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on image generation. Their use in the audio domain, however, remains limited: text-to-audio (TTA) models are typically trained in the latent space of dedicated autoencoders where the encoder and the decoder are trained jointly with reconstruction objectives. This paper presents a study on audio representation autoencoders (AuRA) and their applicability to general audio TTA. We train decoders for two pretrained SSL audio encoders and evaluate their reconstruction quality against autoencoders used by recent TTA systems. After obtaining decoders for the SSL representations, we also train rectified flow models in the SSL and baseline latent spaces to isolate the autoencoder's effect on generation. We find that generation in SSL spaces achieves comparable or superior performance to generation in the baseline spaces, despite differences in reconstruction performance. These results highlight that reconstruction quality alone is not a sufficient proxy for generative performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26881
Existing 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) pruning methods primarily rely on global Top-K selection based on independent importance scores, lacking regional budget control and ignoring joint deletion effects. Consequently, they cannot ensure balanced reconstruction quality across a scene. We propose SplatQ, a combinatorial pruning algorithm that coordinates regional budget allocation and joint Gaussian selection under a fixed budget. SplatQ partitions Gaussians by spatial proximity and appearance similarity into size-limited blocks, decomposing global selection into subproblems of a specific size. It then smooths importance-based block retention quotas to prevent excessive budget concentration. Finally, it constructs a quadratic approximation of joint deletion effects using the responses of representative pixel colors to changes in Gaussian opacity. Individual responses, pairwise interactions, and quota penalties are incorporated into a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) objective, solved using simulated annealing (SA) or a coherent Ising machine (CIM) to jointly select Gaussians. Experiments on 5 benchmarks demonstrate that SplatQ outperforms state-of-the-art pruning methods in aggregate reconstruction quality, spatial quality balance, and rendering speed. Ablations confirm that budget smoothing improves local detail reconstruction, while interaction modeling improves Gaussian selection quality under a fixed budget.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13503
Anomaly detection, the identification of collision events that deviate from Standard Model expectations, is one of the most promising model-agnostic strategies for new-physics searches at the Large Hadron Collider. Searching for rare events in learned low-dimensional representations removes the need to commit to hand-crafted observables a priori, but sacrifices the immediate physical interpretation those observables provide. For anomaly detection to enter a discovery pipeline, flagged events must therefore be diagnosed locally, both to distinguish potential new physics from mismodeling or detector effects and to identify observables for targeted follow-up searches. We evaluate supervised and self-supervised neural embedding strategies on COLLIDE-2V, a 750-million-event dataset simulated under realistic High-Luminosity LHC conditions, using the reconstruction error of an autoencoder trained in the learned latent space as the anomaly score. Across the configurations and benchmark signals considered, supervised objectives, which exploit simulation process labels during training, generally outperform their self-supervised counterparts and, in their best configurations, improve on an autoencoder trained directly on kinematic features, raising the signal efficiency at 10% background acceptance on all held-out processes. We further introduce a local diagnostic pipeline that fits a Gaussian Mixture Model to the SM latent space, profiles each component through high-level observables without process labels, localizes the flagged events, and ranks observables by their local discriminating power. The ranking recovers the defining kinematics of the held-out processes, while correlating the anomaly score with the same observables quantifies how closely the score tracks them, revealing cases where the most discriminating observable is not the one the score follows most closely.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13437
Raman spectroscopy generates large volumes of unlabeled data that are difficult to exploit with conventional supervised learning. This work introduces a multi-domain self-supervised learning framework based on a masked autoencoder (MAE) for learning transferable Raman spectral representations from heterogeneous biological, chemical, forensic, and materials datasets. The proposed pretraining strategy incorporates physics-aware objectives by combining masked intensity reconstruction with a sparse Voigt-profile decoder that models spectral peak structure through differentiable peak centers, widths, and amplitudes. A denoising objective is further included to improve robustness to spectral corruption. The learned encoder is evaluated on substance classification, component identification, concentration estimation, and spectral denoising under linear probing, attention-based probing, end-to-end fine-tuning, and training from scratch. Experimental results show that self-supervised pretraining is most beneficial for challenging tasks with limited labeled data. Attention-based probing also reveals substantially more useful information in the frozen representation than linear probing, indicating that conventional linear evaluation may underestimate representation quality. In addition, the benefits of pretraining become more pronounced with increasing encoder capacity. Overall, the proposed framework demonstrates that physics-aware, multi-domain self-supervised pretraining can improve label efficiency, robustness, and transferability across diverse Raman spectroscopy tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23955
Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to answer questions over long interaction histories, where relevant evidence may be scattered across distant sessions. Existing memory systems typically construct and maintain sophisticated memory representations offline, before user queries are observed, incurring substantial overhead and limiting their ability to adapt memory construction to query-specific information needs. In this paper, we propose T$^2$Mem, a Test-Time Memory construction framework that defers memory construction to inference and progressively builds memory along the reasoning process. Specifically, T$^2$Mem extracts lightweight episode-level metadata offline to capture key events and temporal associations as retrieval cues, while retaining links to the original interactions to facilitate the reconstruction of dependencies across episodes. At test time, the LLM adaptively retrieves and organizes metadata and raw interactions, progressively constructing query-specific memory as reasoning unfolds. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval show the effectiveness of T$^2$Mem by consistently outperforming strong baselines across different backbone LLMs while substantially reducing the overhead of memory construction. Further analysis demonstrates that deferring memory construction to inference enables the memory construction process to dynamically adapt to the information needs of individual queries. All code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13348
Representation alignment with pretrained visual encoders improves diffusion transformer training but requires auxiliary encoders and extra training overhead. Recent approaches instead exploit representations from the generative model's own variational autoencoder (VAE). However, reconstruction-oriented VAE features are not optimized for the semantic discrimination and spatial structure needed for generative learning. We introduce \textbf{CoVA} (\textbf{Co}mposed \textbf{VA}E Representations), a lightweight framework that composes VAE features online into stage-wise guidance for flow-matching training. A small latent composer is jointly trained with class supervision, masked latent reconstruction, and horizontal-flip consistency, yielding semantically discriminative, spatially structured dense features and sample-dependent class posteriors. CoVA aligns intermediate SiT features with the composed representations early in training, then removes the increasingly detrimental alignment and reuses detached composer posteriors for sample-dependent soft label conditioning. We further uncover a hidden confound in soft label conditioning: averaging class embeddings attenuates their magnitude, coupling semantic interpolation with conditioning strength. This attenuation alone can substantially improve FID while degrading Recall, revealing a non-semantic source of the apparent gain. CoVA corrects this confound by restoring the hard-label magnitude, isolating posterior-dependent directional semantics. CoVA adds only 8.5M training-only auxiliary parameters (1.3\% of SiT-XL/2) and introduces no inference-time overhead. On ImageNet 256$\times$256, CoVA reduces SiT-XL/2 FID from 17.2 to 7.4 (\textbf{57\%}) in 400K steps. With classifier-free guidance, it achieves an FID of \textbf{2.03} in only 400 epochs, versus 2.06 after 1,400 epochs for vanilla SiT-XL/2.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13322
Pretrained vision transformers learn structured image representations spanning spatial patch tokens and non-spatial tokens. Recent analyses suggest that non-spatial register tokens encode global scene properties such as illumination, blur, and style. Yet patch-based image decoders discard these outputs, leaving the decoder to recover image appearance from patches alone. We investigate whether retaining register features improves decoding when the complete spatial patch representation is already available. We study this question using representation autoencoders (RAEs) with frozen register-equipped encoders. Our decoder processes four register tokens together with all patch tokens through joint self-attention. Appearance probes, paired reconstruction-error analysis, and fixed-decoder register substitutions examine which global image properties are accessible from registers and how their values affect reconstructed pixels. For generation, we train a multi-head attention pooling (MHAP) predictor to recover register features from sampled patches, keeping the pretrained diffusion model and its samples unchanged. On ImageNet-1K, our ViT-B decoders achieve mean reconstruction FIDs of 0.472 with DINOv2 and 0.442 with DINOv3, reductions of 9.5% and 5.2% relative to their respective patch-only baselines. The corresponding PSNRs are 19.73 and 20.54 dB. For generation, our DINOv2 models achieve a mean FID of 1.641, 9.8% below the patch-only baseline on identical sampled patches.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13299