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.
Adaptive densification is the engine of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). However, when transposed to the optimization-based Generative Distillation paradigm, this reconstruction-native mechanism reveals fundamental limitations, resulting in inefficient representations cluttered with redundant primitives. We diagnose this failure as a Densification Dilemma stemming from the stochastic nature of generative guidance: the standard magnitude-based accumulation indiscriminately aggregates transient noise alongside geometric signals, making it difficult to strike a balance between over-densification and under-fitting. To resolve this, we introduce Context-Adaptive Moment Estimation (CAdam), a novel framework that reinterprets densification as a statistically grounded signal verification problem. CAdam leverages the first moment of gradients to exploit the interference principle—where stochastic fluctuations cancel out via destructive interference while consistent geometric drifts accumulate via constructive interference—effectively disentangling the underlying signal from the generative noise floor. This is further augmented by a quantile-based context awareness and an intrinsic Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) gating mechanism, which ensure robust adaptation across optimization stages and enable the soft termination of densification. Extensive experiments across diverse objectives (SDS, ISM, VFDS) and strong generative 3DGS backbones show that CAdam reduces Gaussian count by 85%–97% relative to standard densification while preserving overall comparable perceptual quality. These results highlight signal-aware density control as a practical way to improve memory efficiency in optimization-based generative distillation.
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.
This work introduces FilmGPT, an autoregressive transformer designed to address the challenge of video montage – turning a collection of raw, “unwatchable” footage into coherent cinematic sequences. Inspired by language learning in modern LLMs, we train a long-context autoregressive transformer on a large corpus of movies. The aim is to implicitly capture the “grammar” of film directly from data rather than from hand-coded rules. Unlike other generative models, FilmGPT does not generate any new video frames. Instead, at inference time, we introduce a footage-constrained decoding algorithm to select the best next shot from the input raw footage according to the statistical patterns learned from films. We first evaluate these learned statistics directly by using the FilmGPT autoregressive model for next shot prediction on a standard benchmark of shot sequence ordering, outperforming the previous state of the art. We then evaluate our footage-constrained decoding algorithm on the full film editing task via a user study, and find that our FilmGPT-based editing significantly outperforms previous approaches. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of FilmGPT to a wide range of applications in video montage, from automatic video segment trimming to human-in-the-loop film editing. Please see our supplementary material for qualitative results.
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.
As the Web transitions from static retrieval to generative interaction, the escalating environmental footprint of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a critical sustainability challenge. Current paradigms indiscriminately apply computation-intensive strategies like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to billions of daily queries, causing LLM overthinking, a redundancy that amplifies carbon emissions and operational barriers. This inefficiency directly undermines UN Sustainable Development Goals 13 (Climate Action) and 10 (Reduced Inequalities) by hindering equitable AI access in resource-constrained regions. To address this, we introduce EcoThink, an energy-aware adaptive inference framework designed to reconcile high-performance AI intelligence with environmental responsibility. EcoThink employs a lightweight, distillation-based router to dynamically assess query complexity, skipping unnecessary reasoning for factoid retrieval while reserving deep computation for complex logic. Extensive evaluations across 9 diverse benchmarks demonstrate that EcoThink reduces inference energy by 40.4% on average (up to 81.9% for web knowledge retrieval) without statistically significant performance loss. By mitigating algorithmic waste, EcoThink offers a scalable path toward a sustainable, inclusive, and energy-efficient generative AI Agent.
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.
Recent advances in clinical prediction leverage large language models (LLMs) to extract semantic information from Electronic Health Records (EHRs). However, LLMs could produce biased or hallucinated responses camouflaged by their fluency and realistic appearance, which is unacceptable in diagnosis prediction. Uncertainty estimation (UE) has emerged as an effective approach to address this challenge by quantifying hallucination levels and prediction confidence in LLM outputs. Yet, directly determining diagnosis predictions based on UE remains insufficient, as diagnoses with high uncertainty may still correspond to correct outcomes. To this end, we propose ULoR, an uncertainty-aware leave-one-out refinement framework for reliable diagnosis prediction. Specifically, we first compute the UE scores by integrating statistical information from multiple samples of the model's diagnosis ranking distributions and leverage these scores for initial predictions. Then, guided by the leave-one-out strategy, we construct multiple-choice tasks for high-uncertainty diagnoses using external syndrome knowledge and fine-tune the refinement component to resolve them, thereby confirming or replacing uncertain predictions. Extensive experiments on two real-world EHR datasets demonstrate that ULoR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, showcasing its practical utility in real-world clinical settings.
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.
Optimizing numerical systems and mechanism design is crucial for enhancing player experience in Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games. Traditional optimization approaches rely on iterative online experiments or parameter tuning over abstracted statistical models, which can be inaccurate, time-consuming and potentially impair players' experience. Although simplified offline simulation systems are frequently employed as alternatives, their low fidelity constrains agents' ability to faithfully replicate real players' reasoning processes and behavioral responses to interventions. To address these limitations, we propose a generative agent-based MMO simulation system with hundreds of agents empowered by Large Language Models (LLMs). By applying Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) on large-scale real player behavioral data, we adapt LLMs from general priors to game-specific domains, enabling realistic and interpretable player decision-making. In parallel, a data-driven environment model trained on real gameplay logs reconstructs dynamic in-game systems. Experiments demonstrate strong consistency with real-world player behaviors and plausible causal responses under interventions, providing a reliable, interpretable, and cost-efficient framework for data-driven numerical design optimization.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning and prediction across different domains. Yet, their ability to infer temporal regularities from structured behavioral data remains underexplored. This paper presents a systematic study investigating whether LLMs can predict time intervals between recurring user actions, such as repeated purchases, and how different levels of contextual information shape their predictive behavior. Using a simple but representative repurchase scenario, we benchmark state-of-the-art LLMs in zero-shot settings against both statistical and machine-learning models. Two key findings emerge. First, while LLMs surpass lightweight statistical baselines, they consistently underperform dedicated machine-learning models, showing their limited ability to capture quantitative temporal structure. Second, although moderate context can improve LLM accuracy, adding further user-level detail degrades performance. These results challenge the assumption that ''more context leads to better reasoning.'' Our study highlights fundamental limitations of today's LLMs in structured temporal inference and offers guidance for designing future context-aware hybrid models that integrate statistical precision with linguistic flexibility.
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.
Accurately modeling long-term value (LTV) at the ranking stage of short-video recommendation systems remains a practical challenge. Though production systems and recent research have begun exploring delayed feedback and extended user engagement, modeling LTV with fine-grained attribution and robust positional normalization for billion-scale platforms is underdeveloped. In this work, we present a practical ranking-stage LTV framework that systematically addresses three core challenges: position bias, attribution ambiguity, and temporal limitations. First, to address position bias in sequential video feeds, we introduce a Position-aware Debias Quantile (PDQ) module that normalizes engagement signals using quantile-based distributions, enabling position-robust LTV estimation without requiring architectural changes. Second, we propose a multi-dimensional attribution module that learns continuous strengths across contextual, behavioral, and content-related signals, moving beyond static rule sets to capture nuanced influences among videos. Explicit noise filtering is incorporated via a customized hybrid loss, improving causal clarity in LTV attribution. Third, our cross-temporal author modeling module constructs censoring-aware, day-level long-term value targets, capturing creator-driven re-engagement over extended time windows. While our framework currently focuses on the author dimension, it is readily extensible to further aspects such as topics or styles. Extensive offline experiments and online A/B tests demonstrate statistically significant gains in LTV-related metrics and stable trade-offs with short?term objectives. The framework is realized as task augmentation within an existing ranking model, facilitates billion-scale deployment on Taobao's production system with efficient training and serving, achieving sustained user engagement improvements while remaining compatible with industrial constraints.