Traditional statistical graphics are precise but often lack the visual appeal, memorability, and engagement of pictorial charts. We present a generative framework for the automated synthesis of pictorial charts that bridges the gap between semantic expression and structural faithfulness. Rather than treating charts merely as images to be stylized, we frame the problem as a dual-conditioned generation task guided by two parallel external control signals: a text prompt capturing the semantic context of the editing intent, and a context image providing the abstract statistical chart's global structure. To reinforce these controls within a Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer, we introduce two complementary feature-level mechanisms: structural alignment to anchor spatial layouts to the input chart, and semantic alignment to transfer expressive textures from reference images. Generalizing across major visual channels (i.e., length, area, angle, and position) and diverse semantic domains, our method produces pictorial charts that are both artistically compelling and structurally consistent. Extensive quantitative evaluations and perceptual user studies demonstrate that our framework outperforms traditional controllable generation and image editing baselines, providing a foundation for high-fidelity, data-driven generative modeling in expressive visual storytelling. Project page: https://ssalign.github.io/.
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k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) search is a fundamental primitive in geometry processing and computer graphics. While spatial partitioning structures such as kd-trees are standard, they are often manifold-blind, failing to exploit the intrinsic low-dimensional structure of points sampled from 2-manifolds. Recent advances in dynamic programming-based nearest neighbor search (DP-NNS) leverage incrementally constructed Voronoi diagrams to accelerate queries, where each site p maintains a list of successors that progressively refine its Voronoi cell. However, DP-NNS is restricted to single nearest neighbor (k = 1) searches, precluding their adoption in applications that require local neighborhood statistics. In this paper, we generalize the DP-NNS framework to support arbitrary k-NN queries for manifold-aligned data. Our approach is founded on the geometric observation that if pi is the nearest neighbor of a query q in P, then the second nearest neighbor of q must reside either within the prefix set P1:i-1 = [p1, ..., pi-1} or within pi's successor list. By recursively extending this principle, we introduce Manifold k-NN, a recursive algorithmic scheme that significantly outperforms conventional kd-trees for manifold-aligned data. Our method achieves a 1×-10× speedup in volume-to-surface query scenarios and inherently supports dynamic prefix queries—enabling k-NN searches within any subset P1:m (m ≤ n) with zero overhead. Furthermore, we extend the framework to support point deletion via local Delaunay updates, providing a complete suite of dynamic operations for point set modification. Comprehensive experiments on diverse geometric datasets demonstrate the efficiency and broad applicability of our approach for modern graphics pipelines. Source code is available at https://github.com/sssomeone/manifold-knn.
We present HumanFlow, a unified flow-matching-based framework that enables high-fidelity and controllable full-body human image generation under diverse human-centric control conditions. Despite recent progress, controllable human image generation poses a fundamental challenge in balancing high visual fidelity with strict adherence to human-centric control conditions. HumanFlow formulates human image generation as a conditional flow-matching process with deterministic generation dynamics. To incorporate such human-centric control conditions into the pretrained model, we introduce a unified control framework with Control Encoder and Token-ControlNet. A Control Encoder maps diverse conditions into a unified latent representation that is spatially aligned with the image latent space. Token-ControlNet is a lightweight control network architecturally aligned with the FLUX double-stream design. To address accurate structural control over human bodies, we further propose the Human Topology Consistency Loss (HTCL). HTCL regularizes conditional flow matching by constraining generated human configurations to a union of statistically grounded topology manifolds defined by normalized bone ratios and joint angles. To support large-scale training and systematic evaluation, we construct MiCoGen, a multi-condition human image dataset comprising over one million full-body human images with aligned text descriptions and rich human-centric control conditions. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations on the MiCoGen dataset show that HumanFlow consistently achieves improved structural consistency than the existing diffusion-based and flow-matching-based methods, while maintaining high visual fidelity.
Anisotropic friction is a critical source of propulsion for efficient locomotion of many terrestrial animals. The interplay between animal morphology, control, and anisotropically frictional contact makes designing optimal anisotropic friction for terrestrial locomotion intriguing and challenging. We propose a computational pipeline for co-designing anisotropic friction and controllers of terrestrial robots with diverse morphologies. Our pipeline presents a co-design algorithm that alternates between optimizing direction of anisotropic friction and training a neural network controller to improve the locomotion performance of a given robot morphology. Based on the intuition that controller’s performance does not change significantly when the frictional force differs slightly, we introduce the concept of trust-region into robot co-design, allowing the controller network to continue training from the previous iteration. Our evaluation on various morphologies show that anisotropic friction is critical for terrestrial robot locomotion, and our pipeline is statistically better than current state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we reveal that large language models (LLM) constitute a strong baseline for this kind of co-design problems, worth receiving more attention. We demonstrate that co-designing anisotropic friction and control unlocks effective locomotion in various downstream tasks, including locomotion on uneven terrain, navigation in a maze, and object manipulation. To validate our pipeline in the real world, we design and 3D print a variety of scales and systematically measure their anisotropic friction coefficients. Then we construct a multi-link robot with anisotropic scales designed by our pipeline and compare its performance with isotropic scales. Our real-world experiments confirm that isotropic scales are insufficient to support terrestrial robots’ locomotion abilities, and computationally co-designing friction and control enables robots to perform tasks including turning, slithering, and other non-trivial locomotion tasks.
While cages provide a powerful reduction model to simulate elastic deformations, interactive real-time cutting of cages has been a longstanding challenge. Traditional solvers require costly volumetric re-meshing and global matrix updates after each modification. For a mesh-free harmonic weight computation using walk on spheres (WoS), we make a key observation: only a small fraction of walks (5-10%) is invalidated by the local cut in most practical cases. We propose a novel reuse pipeline to efficiently update only weights subject to a topological modification. Our approach leverages walk on spheres as an output sensitive and mesh-free Monte Carlo method for solving Laplacian equations, to enable localized updates of harmonic weights. By identifying and reusing unaffected walks, we minimize our re-walking updates. Our method achieves speedups of 10 × -40 × while being statistically identical to a complete WoS weight recomputation. This enables a real time simulation of interactive cutting on complex 2D and 3D cages, and is easily generalizable to other local cage editing operations.
Geometry optimization often encounters sparse gradients from limited observations, which can cause optimization to drift toward unnatural shapes. Prior work stabilizes this process by exploiting spatial structure encoded by the Laplacian operator within a single shape, enforcing spatial smoothness on gradients. However, such smoothness alone propagates gradients to unobserved regions without any prior knowledge of how shapes typically deform in a given domain. We introduce statistical gradient filtering, which leverages statistical structure across a shape collection by learning shape variations via principal component analysis (PCA) and guiding geometry updates along directions consistent with this learned prior. Unlike previous PCA-based methods that constrain solutions to a linear subspace or modify the objective with regularization terms, we filter gradients at each iteration to steer the optimization path toward plausible shapes, without restricting the solution space or altering the original objective. We validate our approach across a range of shape optimization tasks, demonstrating robust convergence even under challenging conditions.
Text-to-image diffusion models generate images by gradually converting white Gaussian noise into a natural image. White Gaussian noise is well suited for producing diverse outputs from a single text prompt due to its absence of structure. However, this very property limits control over, and predictability of, specific visual attributes, as the noise is not human-interpretable. In this work, we investigate the characteristics of the input noise in diffusion models. We show that, although all frequencies in white Gaussian noise have comparable statistical energy, low-frequency components primarily determine the image’s global structure and color composition, while high-frequency components control finer details. Building on this observation, we demonstrate that simple manipulations of the low-frequency noise using low-frequency image priors can effectively condition the generation process to reconstruct these low-frequency visual cues. This allows us to define a simple, training-free method with minimal overhead that steers overall image structure and color, while letting high-frequency components freely emerge as fine details, enabling variability across generated outputs.
Traditional physically-based material models rely on analytically derived bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs), typically by considering statistics of micro-primitives such as facets, flakes, or spheres, sometimes combined with multi-bounce interactions such as layering and multiple scattering. These derivations are often complex and model-specific. Once an analytic BRDF evaluation is defined, one still needs to design an importance sampling method for it and evaluate the probability density function (pdf) of that sampling distribution, requiring further model-specific derivations. We present PureSample: a novel neural BRDF representation that allows learning a material’s appearance purely by sampling forward random walks on the microgeometry, which is usually straightforward to implement. Our representation allows for efficient BRDF evaluation, importance sampling, and pdf evaluation, for homogeneous as well as spatially varying materials. We achieve this by two learnable components: first, the sampling distribution is modeled using a flow matching neural network, which allows both importance sampling and pdf evaluation; second, we introduce a view-dependent albedo term, captured by a lightweight neural network, which allows for converting a pdf value to a BRDF value for any pair of view and light directions. We demonstrate PureSample on challenging materials, including various microgeometries, multi-layered materials, and multiple-scattering microfacet materials.
Accurate rainfall forecasting is essential for climate and disaster management, but precipitation exhibits extreme zero inflation that modern time-series Foundation Models (TSFMs) fundamentally cannot represent due to their continuous regression outputs. This structural mismatch causes pervasive drizzle-like false alarms, miscalibrated nonzero intensities, and severely underdetected extremes, while retraining large TSFMs is computationally prohibitive and environmentally unsustainable for most regions. We present a training-free wrapper that corrects zero inflation for frozen TSFMs without updating any parameters. Our method restores discrete zero mass using empirical occurrence statistics, aligns positive-value distributions via probability-integral transforms, and applies Generalized Pareto tail mapping for extreme-value consistency. Experiments on South Australian rainfall show substantial gains with negligible overhead (<5,ms per forecast, compared to hundreds of GPU-hours for retraining). The proposed wrapper enables carbon-neutral, globally deployable climate services and directly advances the goals of UN SDG~13 (Climate Action).
Online advertising platforms serve as a critical bridge between advertisers and media, requiring precise prediction of user behaviors. Systematic underestimation or overestimation in these predictions can undermine the interests of both parties. Existing calibration methods fall short in addressing two key challenges. First, significant differences in CVR distributions across various targets lead to biased calibration when using global posterior statistics, causing some sample groups to be overestimated while others are underestimated. Second, current field-aware approaches are typically limited to single-field calibration and fail to account for field sensitivity. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Pareto Frontier-based Multi-field Personalized Calibration (PF-MPC) method which formulates multi-field calibration as a multi-objective optimization problem. PF-MPC identifies the optimal Pareto-efficient weight combinations to balance the conflicting calibration errors across different fields. We evaluate PF-MPC on both public calibration benchmark and a large-scale industrial dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements in calibration performance compared to existing approaches.
With the rise of modern search and recommendation platforms, insufficient collaborative information of cold-start items exacerbates the Matthew effect of existing platform items, challenging platform diversity and becoming a longstanding issue. Existing methods align items' side content with collaborative information to transfer collaborative signals from high-popularity items to cold-start items. However, these methods fail to account for the asymmetry between collaboration and content, nor the fine-grained differences among items. To address these issues, we propose COINS, an item representation enhancement approach based on fused alignment of semantic IDs. Specifically, we use RQ-OPQ encoding to quantize item content and collaborative information, followed by a two-step alignment: RQ encoding transfers shared collaborative signals across items, while OPQ encoding learns items' differentiated information. Comprehensive offline experiments on large-scale industrial datasets demonstrate COINS's superiority, and rigorous online A/B tests confirm statistically significant improvements.
In modern e-commerce search systems, dense retrieval has become an indispensable component. By computing similarities between query and item (product) embeddings, it efficiently selects candidate products from large-scale repositories. With the breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs), mainstream embedding models have gradually shifted from BERT to LLMs for more accurate text modeling. However, these models still adopt direct-embedding methods, and the semantic accuracy of embeddings remains inadequate. Therefore, contrastive learning is heavily employed to achieve tight semantic alignment between positive pairs. Consequently, such models tend to capture statistical co-occurrence patterns in the training data, biasing them toward shallow lexical and semantic matches. For difficult queries exhibiting notable lexical disparity from target items, the performance degrades significantly. In this work, we propose the Large Reasoning Embedding Model (LREM), which novelly integrates reasoning processes into representation learning. For difficult queries, LREM first conducts reasoning to achieve a deep understanding of the original query, and then produces a reasoning-augmented query embedding for retrieval. This reasoning process effectively bridges the semantic gap between original queries and target items, significantly improving retrieval accuracy. Specifically, we adopt a two-stage training process: the first stage optimizes the LLM on carefully curated Query-CoT-Item triplets with SFT and InfoNCE losses to establish preliminary reasoning and embedding capabilities, and the second stage further refines the reasoning trajectories via reinforcement learning (RL). Extensive offline and online experiments validate the effectiveness of LREM, leading to its deployment on China's largest e-commerce platform since August 2025.
Traditional search engines return uniform results for identical queries, overlooking users' personalized intents. While personalized search has been extensively studied, research on query rewriting for personalized intents has been constrained by traditional approaches like statistical co-occurrence and synonym expansion. Current work primarily addresses multi-turn dialogue scenarios in Conversational AI rather than exploring applications in large-scale search engines. This typically stems from the absence of real search scenario data and the difficulty of inferring users' intents through personalized reasoning. While Large Language Models (LLMs) combined with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) capabilities provide possibilities for personalized reasoning, CoT introduces additional reasoning overhead that is difficult to accept in online scenarios requiring low latency. To address this, this paper proposes PicQue (Personalized Efficient Query Rewrite), a personalized query rewriting model training pipeline aimed at achieving high accuracy with low latency. PicQue contains a two-stage training that first employs a novel Hybrid Supervised Fine-Tuning strategy to retain the model's reasoning capabilities while allowing the decoding process to skip CoT, thereby obtaining CoT's accuracy gains without increasing latency. Building on this foundation, PicQue conducts second-stage reinforcement learning using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to further improve rewriting accuracy and reduce the risk of over-rewriting. We also propose a Guided Search strategy to optimize GRPO training, alleviating the reduction in training sample utilization when all sampling rollouts are wrong. Extensive offline and online experiments demonstrate PicQue's effectiveness. In offline metrics, PicQue achieves over 7% improvement in rewriting accuracy compared to baseline methods and compresses up to 95% of decoding tokens. In online A/B tests, user satisfaction increases by 1.78% and query change rate decreases by 0.71%, achieving significant online gains.
With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), producing realistic fake news has become increasingly effortless, challenging existing detection methods that rely on lexical and syntactic patterns. To address this, we shift our focus to the generation process and analyze how malicious prompts manipulate model outputs. We construct pairs of LLM-generated real and fake news and apply malicious prompts to reconstruct them as fake. By comparing the original-token generation probabilities recorded during reconstruction, we observe a consistent statistical divergence: tokens from real news tend to have lower reconstruction likelihoods than those from fake news. We define this distributional divergence as linguistic fingerprint. Building on this insight, we propose LIFE (Linguistic Fingerprints Extraction), a novel detection framework that reconstructs token-level probability distributions guided by malicious prompts to capture these discriminative linguistic patterns. To fully exploit the extracted fingerprints, LIFE further introduces a key-fragment amplification module that adaptively identifies and accentuates the most distinctive linguistic fragments, thereby enhancing detection reliability across diverse prompting scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LIFE achieves state-of-the-art performance in detecting LLM-generated fake news while maintaining strong generalization to human-LLM mixed cases. The code is available.
Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition (DFER), as a crucial part of affective computing, has broad applications in many areas such as human-computer interaction and social media content analysis. Effectively integrating multimodal information, particularly audio-visual signals, remains the core challenge. However, existing approaches are generally constrained by two major challenges: (1) shallow and static fusion mechanisms, which fail to capture the dynamic co-evolution of audio-visual features during deep interaction; (2) implicit and coarse alignment strategies, which are insufficient to bridge the modality gap caused by heterogeneous feature distributions. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework, BHGap, which integrates deep iterative prompt generation with multi-stage feature alignment and fusion. The key idea is to reformulate audio-visual collaboration from a one-shot fusion event into a continuous, reciprocal generation process that spans every layer of frozen backbone encoders. Specifically, we design a State Space Model (SSM)-based cross-modal prompt generator that dynamically produces ''guidance prompts'' for the counterpart modality at each encoding layer, thereby enabling deep and fine-grained feature co-evolution. Beyond encoding, we further introduce a coarse-to-fine multi-stage alignment module: at the macro level, low-rank adversarial alignment is employed to establish spatio-temporal congruity between audio and video while reducing global distributional discrepancies; at the micro level, Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) constraints combined with implicit differentiation optimization ensure fine-grained statistical consistency and semantic alignment. Extensive experiments on the public DFEW and MAFW datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, offering a new paradigm of deep iterative fusion and explicit alignment for multimodal emotion recognition. Code is available at https://github.com/NDYZD666/-public-BHGap.
Analysis and anomaly detection in event tensor streams consisting of timestamps and multiple attributes—such as communication logs (time, IP address, packet length)—are essential tasks in data mining. While existing tensor decomposition and anomaly detection methods provide useful insights, they face the following two limitations. (i) They cannot handle heterogeneous tensor streams, which comprises both categorical attributes (e.g., IP address) and continuous attributes (e.g., packet length). They typically require either discretizing continuous attributes or treating categorical attributes as continuous, both of which distort the underlying statistical properties of the data. Furthermore, incorrect assumptions about the distribution family of continuous attributes often degrade the model's performance. (ii) They discretize timestamps, failing to track the temporal dynamics of streams (e.g., trends, abnormal events), which makes them ineffective for detecting anomalies at the group level, referred to as ''group anomalies'' (e.g, DoS attacks). To address these challenges, we propose HeteroComp, a method for continuously summarizing heterogeneous tensor streams into ''components'' representing latent groups in each attribute and their temporal dynamics, and detecting group anomalies. Our method employs Gaussian process priors to model unknown distributions of continuous attributes, and temporal dynamics, which directly estimate probability densities from data. Extracted components give concise but effective summarization, enabling accurate group anomaly detection. Extensive experiments on real datasets demonstrate that HeteroComp outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms for group anomaly detection accuracy, and its computational time does not depend on the data stream length.
Recommender systems have been shown to exhibit popularity bias by over-recommending popular items and under-recommending relevant niche items. We seek to understand niche users in benchmark recommendation datasets as a step toward mitigating popularity bias. We find that, compared to mainstream users, niche-preferring users exhibit a longer-tailed activity-level distribution, indicating the existence of users who both prefer niche items and exhibit high activity levels on platforms. We partition users along two axes: (1) activity level (''power'' vs. ''light'') and (2) item-popularity preference (''mainstream'' vs. ''niche''), and show that in three benchmark datasets, the number of power-niche users (high activity and niche preference) is statistically significantly larger than expected. We also find that interaction data from power-niche users is especially valuable for improving recommendations for not only niche but also mainstream users. In contrast, many existing popularity bias mitigation methods have focused on upweighting niche users regardless of activity level. Motivated by the value of power-niche user data, we propose PAIR (Popularity-and-Activity-Informed Reweighting), a framework for reweighting the Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) loss that simultaneously reweights based on user activity level and item popularity, upweighting power-niche users the most. We instantiate the framework on both deep and shallow collaborative filtering models, and experiments on benchmark datasets show that PAIR reduces popularity bias and can increase overall performance. Although existing popularity-bias mitigation methods yield a trade-off between performance and bias, our results suggest that considering both user activity level and popularity preference leads to Pareto-dominant performance.
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) prediction, a central problem in modern marketing, is characterized by a unique zero-inflated and long-tail data distribution. This distribution presents two fundamental challenges: (1) the vast majority of low-to-medium value users numerically overwhelm the small but critically important segment of high-value ''whale'' users, and (2) significant value heterogeneity exists even within the low-to-medium value user base. Common approaches either rely on rigid statistical assumptions or attempt to decouple ranking and regression using ordered buckets; however, they often enforce ordinality through loss-based constraints rather than inherent architectural design, failing to balance global accuracy with high-value precision. To address this gap, we propose Conditional Cascaded Ordinal-Residual Networks (CC-OR-Net), a novel unified framework that achieves a more robust decoupling through structural decomposition, where ranking is architecturally guaranteed. CC-OR-Net integrates three specialized components: a structural ordinal decomposition module for robust ranking, an intra-bucket residual module for fine-grained regression, and a targeted high-value augmentation module for precision on top-tier users. Evaluated on real-world datasets with over 300M users, CC-OR-Net achieves a superior trade-off across all key business metrics, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in creating a holistic and commercially valuable LTV prediction solution.
The growing presence of mobile and IoT devices has led to massive decentralized and evolving data, driving the rise of Federated Learning (FL) to enable collaborative training without data sharing. However, traditional FL assumes static data distributions, which is unrealistic for dynamic real-world environments. To address this challenge, Federated Class-Incremental Learning (FCIL) has emerged as a promising framework that enables flexible adaptation to newly introduced classes over time. Existing FCIL methods typically integrate old knowledge preservation into local client training. However, these methods cannot avoid spatial-temporal client drift caused by data heterogeneity and often incur significant computational and communication overhead, limiting practical deployment. To address these challenges simultaneously, we propose a novel approach, Spatial-Temporal Statistics Aggregation (STSA), which provides a unified framework to aggregate feature statistics both spatially (across clients) and temporally (across stages). The aggregated feature statistics are unaffected by data heterogeneity and can be used to update the classifier in closed form at each stage. Additionally, we introduce STSA-E, a communication-efficient variant that enables the server to approximate global second-order feature statistics using first-order statistics uploaded from clients. Theoretical analysis shows that it achieves similar performance to STSA with much lower communication overhead. Extensive experiments on three widely used FCIL datasets, with varying degrees of data heterogeneity, show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art FCIL methods in terms of performance, flexibility, and both communication and computation efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/Yuqin-G/STSA.
Personalized Federated Learning (pFL) effectively addresses the challenge of statistical heterogeneity in traditional Federated Learning (FL), with feature alignment methods (e.g., FedProto) standing out due to their communication efficiency and model-agnostic design, making them practically viable in real-world non-IID scenarios. These methods directly align class-level features across clients without requiring model parameter transmission. However, they represent each class as a holistic prototype, which limits the diversity and expressiveness of shared features. This restriction hampers the model's ability to generalize across clients and impedes personalized adaptation, as clients lack sufficient semantic components to reconstruct discriminative features tailored to their local data distributions. To overcome these limitations, we propose Federated Visual Primitive Learning (FedVPL), a novel framework comprising two key components: (1) Visual Primitive Space Sharing, which decomposes class-level features into semantically meaningful and reusable visual primitives, enabling cross-client and cross-class sharing to enrich feature diversity and decouple communication cost from the number of classes, significantly improving efficiency; and (2) Text-Guided Semantic Alignment, a parameter-free personalization mechanism that leverages external language priors to align shared primitives with client-specific semantics, without requiring additional communication overhead. Extensive experiments across diverse non-IID benchmarks demonstrate that FedVPL substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to a 5.62% improvement in accuracy, reducing communication overhead by at least 12.5x, and effectively addressing generalization and personalization challenges in heterogeneous federated environments.