NeurIPS 2026 Papers

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems

Decision breakdown

6,437papers

Counted from the official paper list; may differ slightly from the number the conference announced.

  • Oral
    991.5%
  • Spotlight
    2403.7%
  • Poster
    6,09894.7%

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Topic: Image Generation · 453 papers · Reset filters

Are Text-to-Image Models Inductivist Turkeys? A Counterfactual Benchmark for Causal Reasoning

jiayi lei, Yuandong Pu, Xingyu Han, Rongpeng Zhu, Jing Xu, Jinyao Wang, Zijian Zhou, Bin Fu, Yuewen Cao, Yihao Liu, Hongsheng Li

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Text-to-image (T2I) generation models have achieved remarkable progress in producing visually realistic images from natural language prompts. Yet it remains unclear whether their success reflects genuine causal understanding or sophisticated pattern matching over visual-textual correlations. Inspired by Russell’s inductivist turkey, we introduce Counterfactual-World (CF-World), a counterfactual benchmark designed to probe whether text-to-image models can generate images under rules that systematically contradict real-world priors. CF-World organizes each scenario into three progressive levels: factual generation under ordinary world knowledge, explicit counterfactual generation with direct visual instructions, and implicit counterfactual generation requiring causal deduction from altered rules. We evaluate both open-source and closed-source T2I models using a Vision Language Model(VLM)-based evaluator (CF-Eval), and introduce two metrics: Prior Resistance Rate (PRR), which measures a model’s ability to overcome entrenched real-world priors, and Reasoning Retention Rate (RRR), which assesses whether models can maintain reasoning-dependent counterfactual generation without explicit visual cues. Experiments show that all models exhibit sharp degradation from factual to counterfactual settings. Further analyses suggest that these failures arise because current T2I models encode world knowledge and visual appearances as tightly coupled patterns. They rely heavily on frequent visual co-occurrences in their training data, causing them to default to familiar commonsense priors when tasked with generating counterfactual worlds.

Poster
Antibody Generation via Redistributed Latent Diffusion

Andrey Shevtsov, Viacheslav Meshchaninov, Pavel Strashnov, Dmitry Vetrov

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Generating antibody sequences is challenging because they combine conserved framework regions with hypervariable loops. Latent diffusion is attractive for this task since it enables flexible conditioning and bidirectional generation. But standard approaches fail. Global noise schedules treat all positions equally, so models learn the predictable frameworks well while the diverse loops remain poorly captured. We address this by learning a latent space that redistributes information evenly, allowing standard diffusion to succeed where it previously failed. On organism-conditioned generation across six species, our approach achieves 10× lower Fréchet Distance than latent diffusion without redistribution. It supports chain-type control, loop infilling, and paired-chain generation. Validation across five protein encoders confirms the method is encoder-agnostic. These results establish latent diffusion as a practical tool for antibody sequence design.

Poster
Anchoring LLM-based Chest X-ray Report Generation via Diffusion Language Planning

Jiechao Gao, Chang Liu, Yuandong Pan, Ying Liu, Michael Lepech

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While Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced radiology report generation (RRG) with strong generative priors, standard autoregressive decoders still suffer from sequential error accumulation when they must infer all clinical structures directly from images. Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a non-autoregressive paradigm with iterative masking and denoising mechanisms. Instead of replacing the mature language decoder with a DLM, we reveal that the key value of DLMs for RRG lies in controllable clinical planning, where the model predicts globally consistent anchor points before free-text realization. To harness this complementary strength, we propose ANCHOR-GEN, the first framework that uses a DLM as an explicit diffusion language planner for RRG. Rather than forcing the autoregressive decoder to infer every critical structure from visual tokens alone, ANCHOR-GEN predicts a structured clinical canvas that serves as clinically grounded anchor points. An autoregressive LLM then leverages these anchors to complete report generation with both fluency and clinical faithfulness. By systematically combining non-autoregressive planning and autoregressive decoding, our unified pipeline is trained with structured denoising, hierarchical coarse-to-fine supervision, and planner-decoder binding objectives. Extensive experiments on the public \textsc{MIMIC-CXR} benchmark demonstrate that ANCHOR-GEN improves clinical faithfulness over prior works. Comprehensive analyses and ablations further show that diffusion planning and causal decoding offer complementary strengths for RRG, and that integrating them in one pipeline provides an effective route toward more faithful medical text generation.

Poster
AnalogToBi: Device-Level Analog Circuit Topology Generation via Bipartite Graph and Grammar Guided Decoding

Seungmin Kim, Mingun Kim, Yuna Lee, Yulhwa Kim

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Analog circuit design remains highly dependent on expert knowledge due to the complexity of device-level interactions and topology design. Recent transformer-based approaches for device-level topology generation have shown promise, yet they suffer from low electrical validity without human-in-the-loop (HITL) training and severe memorization caused by sequence-based circuit representations. In this work, we propose **AnalogToBi**, a framework for device-level analog circuit topology generation. AnalogToBi introduces *circuit-type conditioning* for categorizing heterogeneous multi-type topology datasets, *device renaming augmentation* to mitigate memorization, *a bipartite graph representation* for improved structural generalization, and *grammar-guided decoding* to enforce structural validity during bipartite graph generation. Experimental results demonstrate that AnalogToBi achieves high validity and novelty without HITL training while effectively avoiding memorization of training topologies.

Poster
AnaDiffusion: Anatomically Compositional Latent Diffusion for Controllable 3D Brain MRI Generation

Tracy Han, Lulin Liu, Bangya Liu, Yuanhao Cai, Nuo Chen, Jade Wang, Ziqian Xie, Chenyu You, Shuiwang Ji, Degui Zhi, Zhiwen Fan

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3D brain MRI generation has made significant advances for medical imaging, simulation, and controllable anatomical analysis. However, existing generative models typically synthesize 3D volumes monolithically, often overlooking regional anatomical structures and limiting local controllability. To address these limitations, we introduce AnaDiffusion, an anatomically compositional latent diffusion framework that factorizes the generation process into distinct, anatomically meaningful regions followed by part-to-whole assembly and global refinement. Our approach trains part diffusion models first to capture local structural priors. Then, we inject assembled anatomical composite of parts into whole-brain latent and continue denoising. This mechanism enables the model to resolve global context while preserving the injected anatomy. As a result, AnaDiffusion outputs both explicit part assets and a globally coherent volume, enabling controllable part editing without requiring additional dense segmentation masks at inference time while maintaining coherent part-to-whole brain structure. On ADNI, AnaDiffusion achieves the lowest FID across the whole brain, left/right hemispheres, cerebellar-brainstem complex, and seam regions, while also reducing Cohen's d for ventricles, cerebellum, and brainstem. In localized editing experiments, paired MS-SSIM shows high target transfer and off-target preservation, supporting controllable part replacement with limited non-target anatomical drift.

Poster
Amortized Guidance for Image Inpainting with Pretrained Diffusion Models

Yilie Huang, XUNYU ZHOU

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We study image inpainting with generative diffusion models. Existing methods typically either train dedicated task-specific models, or adapt a pretrained diffusion model separately for each masked image at deployment. We introduce a middle-ground model, termed Amortized Inpainting with Diffusion (AID), which keeps a pretrained diffusion backbone fixed, trains a small reusable guidance module offline, and then reuses it across masked images without per-instance optimization. We formulate it as a deterministic guidance problem with a supervised terminal objective. To make this problem learnable in high dimensions, we derive an auxiliary Gaussian formulation and prove that solving this randomized problem recovers the optimal deterministic guidance field. This bridge yields a principled continuous-time actor--critic algorithm for learning the guidance module in a fully data-driven manner. Empirically, on AFHQv2 and FFHQ under the pixel EDM pipeline and on ImageNet under the latent EDM2 pipeline, AID consistently improves the quality--speed trade-off over strong fixed-backbone and amortized inpainting baselines across multiple mask types, while adding less than one percent trainable overhead.

Poster
AgenticOCR: Parsing Only What You Need for Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Zhengren Wang, Dongsheng Ma, Huaping Zhong, Jiayu Li, Yijie Wang, Tianyao He, Wentao Zhang, Bin Wang, Conghui He

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The expansion of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) into multimodal domains has intensified the challenge for processing complex visual documents, such as financial reports. While page-level chunking and retrieval is a natural starting point, it creates a critical bottleneck: delivering entire pages to the generator introduces excessive extraneous context. This not only overloads the generator's attention mechanism but also dilutes the most salient evidence. Moreover, compressing these information-rich pages into a limited visual token budget further increases the risk of hallucinations. To address this, we introduce AgenticOCR, a dynamic parsing approach that extends optical character recognition (OCR) from a static, full-text process into a query-driven, on-demand extraction system. By autonomously analyzing document layout in a "thinking with images" manner, AgenticOCR identifies and selectively recognizes regions of interest. This approach performs on-demand decompression of visual tokens precisely where needed, effectively decoupling retrieval granularity from rigid page-level chunking. AgenticOCR has the potential to serve as the "third building block" of the visual document RAG stack, operating alongside and enhancing standard Embedding and Reranking modules. Experimental results demonstrate that AgenticOCR improves both the accuracy and efficiency of visual RAG systems with pixel-adaptive per-image token allocation (e.g., Qwen3.5 generator), achieving expert-level performance in long document understanding. Our repository is anonymously available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AgenticOCR.

Poster
AgentOdyssey: Open-Ended Long-Horizon Text Game Generation for Test-Time Continual Learning Agents

Zheyuan Zhang, Zehao Wen, Bowei Zhang, Andrew Wang, Jianwen Xie, Daniel Khashabi, Tianmin Shu

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For agents to learn continuously from interaction with the world at test time, they must be able to explore effectively, acquire new world knowledge and skills, retain relevant episodic experiences, and plan over long horizons. To evaluate these key abilities of test-time continual learning agents, we introduce AgentOdyssey, a novel evaluation framework that procedurally generates open-ended text games with rich entities, world dynamics, and long-horizon tasks. Critically, AgentOdyssey goes beyond the conventional machine learning assumption that learning does not occur at test time by placing agents in a continuous, long-horizon setting that interleaves learning and inference throughout deployment. We further propose a multifaceted evaluation methodology that measures not only game progress but also offers diagnostic tests on world knowledge acquisition, episodic memory, object and action exploration, action diversity, and model cost. We evaluate diverse agent paradigms in the generated games. Our experimental results reveal critical limits in agents' key abilities, as well as factors that influence their meaningful horizon. Although performance scales with stronger base models, even the top agent remains far below human performance, leaving substantial headroom for improvement. Among agent mechanisms, we find that short-term memory benefits multiple agent paradigms and is an important component of agent test-time training.

Poster
Affine-Image Propagation for Tight and Scalable $\ell_{2}$ Neural Network Verification

Hong-Ming Chiu, Haoyu Li, Huan Zhang, Richard Y Zhang

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While bound propagation methods are highly effective for certifying neural network robustness against $\ell_{\infty}$ adversaries, scalable verification for $\ell_{2}$ perturbations remains a significant open challenge. Existing approaches suffer from severe geometric loss: elementwise bounding methods like $\alpha$-CROWN relax Euclidean balls to bounding boxes, losing a factor of $\sqrt{n}$ in radius, while the recently proposed SDP-CROWN rounds deformed ellipsoids back into balls, losing a factor proportional to the condition number of the weights. Consequently, tight $\ell_{2}$ verification is currently restricted to near-isometric or Lipschitz-regularized networks where these approximations are not vacuous. In this paper, we introduce affine-image propagation, a novel CROWN-compatible framework that exactly propagates the affine geometry of $\ell_{2}$ balls and $\ell_{\infty}$ boxes through the network. To bypass the prohibitive computational cost of exact Semidefinite Programming (SDP) constraints required by this representation, we derive highly scalable, SDP-based bounds utilizing diagonal-dominance surrogates. Our approach effectively eliminates the geometric bottlenecks of prior work, yielding the first large-scale, SDP-style bound propagation method capable of tight $\ell_{2}$ verification for general, non-Lipschitz-regularized neural networks.

Poster
AegisFlow: Training-free Non-myopic Path-safe Guided Flow Matching

Kunpeng Liu, Boshi Zhang, Keyou You

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Pretrained generative models, such as diffusion and flow matching models, have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in synthesizing high-quality data. However, steering their generative trajectories to satisfy strict constraints—such as identity preservation in image editing or obstacle avoidance in robotics—remains fundamentally challenging. While recent training-free guidance methods enforce path-safety, they rely heavily on min-norm controllers that only account for immediate constraint satisfaction. These myopic approaches often yield suboptimal trajectories that hover dangerously close to the boundary, severely restricting the model's ability to optimize toward its target. In this paper, we propose AegisFlow, a training-free, non-myopic path-safe guidance framework that recasts guided generation as a safety-critical optimal control problem with global scope. By integrating a time-varying barrier function directly into the global cost functional, AegisFlow naturally enforces constraints along the entire generative path. To compute the global optimal control, we derive a tractable, mathematically grounded approximation of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that AegisFlow outperforms state-of-the-art methods across text-guided image manipulation and robotic planning, establishing a significantly better trade-off between target alignment and constraint satisfaction.

Poster
Advancing Narrative Long Video Generation via Training-Free Identity-Aware Memory

Jinzhuo Liu, Jiangning Zhang, Wencan Jiang, Yabiao Wang, Dingkang Liang, Xue zhucun, Ran Yi, Yong Liu

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Autoregressive video generation has improved rapidly in visual fidelity and interactivity, but it still suffers from long-term inconsistency and memory degradation. Most existing solutions either compress historical frames using predefined strategies or retrieve keyframes based on coarse implicit attention signals, both of which fail to handle evolving prompts with shifting entity references, leading to identity drift, character duplication, and attribute loss. To address this, we propose IAMFlow, a training-free identity-aware memory framework that explicitly models and tracks persistent entity identities, enabling consistent generation across prompt transitions. Specifically, an LLM extracts entities with visual attributes from each prompt and assigns unique global IDs for identity-aware memory, while a VLM asynchronously verifies and refines attributes from rendered frames, enabling explicit entity tracking in place of implicit similarity-based matching. To keep the proposed framework computationally practical, we design a systematic inference acceleration pipeline, including asynchronous visual verification, adaptive prompt transition, and model quantization, which achieves faster generation than existing baselines. Furthermore, we introduce NarraStream-Bench, a benchmark for narrative streaming video generation that features 324 multi-prompt scripts spanning six dimensions and a three-dimensional evaluation protocol that integrates both traditional metrics and multimodal large language model-based assessments. Extensive experiments show that IAMFlow, despite being training-free, achieves the best overall performance on NarraStream-Bench, outperforming the strongest baseline by 2.56 points, while achieving a 1.39$\times$ speedup over the most efficient baseline in the 60-second multi-prompt setting.

Poster
Addressable Memory for Video World Models

Xindi Wu, Sven Elflein, James Lucas, Olga Russakovsky, Laura Leal-Taixé, Despoina Paschalidou, Jonathan Lorraine, Aljosa Osep

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We study visual persistence in autoregressive video world models: the Key-Value (KV) cache accumulates a growing visual memory, but once rollouts extend beyond the training horizon, the model can no longer reliably address stored content. A standard fix compresses the cache into a fixed-size memory that retains recent context while summarizing the distant past. However, we show compression alone cannot restore recall: past this horizon, temporal positional encodings go out-of-distribution, so the model cannot reliably retrieve stored history regardless of content. On the evaluated architecture, content compression with out-of-distribution positions yields results identical to a fixed-size sliding window over recent KV entries. We propose WorldTrace, a training-free framework that keeps compressed memory addressable by assigning each slot a fixed, in-distribution position relative to the current frame. With addressable memory, we explore two retention approaches: WorldTrace-Field (coherence-oriented) aggregates history in a rotation-invariant space, improving TempSSIM by +15.5% while reducing scene drift; WorldTrace-LandMark (recall-oriented) stores verbatim scene traces at detected boundaries. The recall-oriented variant sustains scene reconstruction over long rollouts, with stronger long-range recall and smooth temporal coherence.

Poster
AdaPCLA: Curriculum Prior Internalization For Long-Tailed Longitudinal EHR Generation

Shuai Cui, Chen Wenxuan, Wenjie Du, Jian Lou, Dan Li, Wenjie Feng

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Generative modeling of longitudinal Electronic Health Records is increasingly important for privacy-preserving research, yet standard autoregressive models tend to underrepresent the co-occurrence structure of tail events (i.e., diseases, symptoms), reducing the fidelity and faithfulness of generated data for rare subpopulations. To this end, we propose ADAPCLA framework, which enables generative models to adaptively fit and generate EHR data through a data distribution-aware training strategy; this is achieved by internalizing data knowledge parameters by simulated annealing training. It also supports training-free adaptation to a diverse clinical population for generation through zero-shot distribution control. Moreover, our theoretical analysis characterizes rare-code logit updates through the label-wise empirical NTK and derives a prior-internalization bound for how annealing speed and NTK conditioning affect retained prior signals. Experiments on real-world data show that ADAPCLA achieves consistent gains in tail plausibility, downstream utility, and zero-shot control; in particular, it improves TailPairSeen over HALO by 114.2\% on MIMIC-III and 65.1\% on MIMIC-IV, outperforms GPT-style generation by 3.5\% F1 for zero-shot cross-population adaptation.

Poster
Accelerating Rectified Flow Models via Trajectory-Aware Caching

Xiao Liu, Kai Liu, Naiyang Guan, Hongliang Lu, Zhixin Wang, Zhikai Chen, Renjing Pei, Yulun Zhang

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Diffusion and rectified flow (RF) models generate high-fidelity images and videos, but their iterative velocity-field evaluations are computationally expensive. Existing caching methods accelerate sampling by skipping timesteps, yet their coarse approximations introduce accumulated errors over long skip intervals and degrade quality under aggressive acceleration. We propose \textbf{TACache (Trajectory-Aware Cache)}, a training-free acceleration framework following a \textbf{skip-then-compensate} paradigm. TACache performs an orthogonal decomposition of discrete velocity acceleration along the RF trajectory into parallel and orthogonal components, isolating the magnitude and directional sources of per-step approximation error. The framework operates in two stages: \emph{offline}, cumulative variation thresholds on the magnitude and direction indicators yield the skipping schedule and bound how far each skipped interval may extend; \emph{online}, at each skipped step the offline statistics are combined with the sample's historical orthogonal direction to reconstruct the skipped velocity without additional forward passes. Experiments on BAGEL, FLUX.1-dev, and Wan2.1-1.3B show that TACache achieves up to $4.14\times$ speedup on text-to-image generation and $2.11\times$ speedup on text-to-video generation, with consistent improvements over prior cache-based methods on all reference-based fidelity metrics. Code will be released soon.

Poster
Accelerated Image Editing via Consistency-Aware Source Token Pruning

Jeongsol Kim, Jong Chul Ye, Yufei Wang, Jian Wang

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Text-based image editing has recently been reinterpreted in large multimodal transformers as conditional generation, where source image tokens are concatenated with text and noise tokens. While effective, this design incurs substantial computational overhead in attention layers. To mitigate this inefficiency, we propose {\em TokenDrop}, an efficient editing framework that shift the computational burden from dense source-token conditioning to a lightweight regularized sampling update. By transferring the influence of source tokens into a closed-form sampling update, the method preserves source consistency with negligible cost. To support this regularized dynamics, we introduce a deviation-guided adaptive masking strategy that selectively drops redundant tokens while maintaining editing fidelity. Across FluxKontext and Qwen-Image-Edit, our training-free method achieves an average 22.4\% improvement in inference speed on PIEBench, while better preserving non-edited regions. The method delivers up to 1.8$\times$ speedup at 1024$^2$ resolution and 2$\times$ speedup at 2048$^2$ resolution. The code will also be released publicly.

Poster
AbSpecAlign: Specificity Reward Alignment for Antigen-Conditioned Antibody Generation

Jingbo Zeng, Yang Xiao, Shenghua Gao

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Designing antibodies that recognize a target antigen while avoiding non-cognate antigens remains a central challenge in computational antibody engineering. Existing antigen-conditioned generative models can jointly design antibody sequences and structures, but they are typically trained to match structural data distributions and lack an explicit alignment mechanism for antigen-specific preferences. We present AbSpecAlign, a plug-and-play specificity-reward alignment framework for antibody design. AbSpecAlign introduces a Bidirectional Multimodal Specificity Scorer (BiMSS), which integrates antibody and antigen sequence representations with SE(3)-equivariant structural embeddings to produce a contrastive reward over cognate versus non-cognate antigen pairs. We further introduce a GRPO-based post-training strategy that uses group-relative specificity rewards to align pre-trained antibody generators toward higher-scoring antigen-conditioned designs while maintaining structural regularity. To the best of our knowledge, AbSpecAlign is among the first frameworks to apply GRPO-style group-relative reward alignment to antigen-conditioned antibody sequence--structure co-design with an explicit off-target specificity reward. Experiments on RAbD CDR design benchmarks show that AbSpecAlign improves most sequence-recovery and structural-fidelity metrics when combined with diffusion-based antibody generators. Experiment results suggest that GRPO-based reward alignment with contrastive specificity signals provides an effective post-training mechanism for antigen-conditioned antibody generation, while prospective experimental validation remains necessary.

Poster
ASAP: Attention Sink Anchored Pruning

Jaehyuk Lee, Hanyoung Kim, Yanggee Kim, Donghun Lee

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Vision Transformers (ViTs) face severe computational bottlenecks due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention at high resolutions. Existing token reduction methods rely on local metrics—such as single-layer attention scores—that are inherently vulnerable to the \emph{attention sink} phenomenon, where uninformative tokens are paradoxically preserved over salient foreground objects. We propose \textbf{ASAP} (Attention Sink Anchored Pruning), a training-free framework that recasts this sink as a feature. Modeling ViT information flow as a Lazy Random Walk, ASAP identifies the sink as a dominant accumulator of probability mass. By computing the \emph{diffusion distance} to the sink within the cumulative transition matrix, ASAP partitions tokens via \emph{Radial Diffusion Clustering} and compresses background redundancy through \emph{Transition Weight Pooling} in a single shot. Extensive experiments across image, video, and vision-language tasks demonstrate ASAP outperforms state-of-the-art methods, accelerating throughput by up to 48\% while maintaining—or even exceeding—baseline accuracy.

Poster
AIR: Rethinking Image-Text Offset Alignment in Multimodal Contrastive Representation Space

Guimeng Liu, Milad Abdollahzadeh, Ngai-Man (Man) Cheung

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Image-text offset alignment, which refers to the consistency between visual transformation directions and their corresponding textual transformation directions, has become an important relational property in multimodal contrastive representation space (e.g., CLIP or SigLIP). This property is widely utilized in text-guided generative modeling tasks, such as generative model domain adaptation and text-guided Image-text offset alignment, which refers to the consistency between visual transformation directions and their corresponding textual transformation directions, has become an important relational property in multimodal contrastive representation spaces such as CLIP and SigLIP. This property plays a central role in text-guided generative modeling tasks, including generative model domain adaptation and text-guided image editing, where textual offsets are used to guide visual transformations. These methods fundamentally rely on the assumption that image and text offsets are well aligned, such that textual transformation directions can provide reliable guidance for corresponding visual transformations. However, the validity of this assumption has not been systematically examined. **In this work**, we question this foundational assumption by conducting a comprehensive empirical analysis of image-text offset alignment in multimodal contrastive representation space. Our findings reveal not only noticeable offset misalignment but also a meaningful positive correlation between image-text offset misalignment and semantic concept distance across six large datasets and eight contrastive vision-language models. Based on this discovery, we propose Adaptation with Iterative Refinement (AIR), a method that iteratively refines text offsets through anchor sampling and our proposed concept description learning to reduce image-text offset misalignment and improve guidance accuracy. Comprehensive experiments on zero-shot generative model domain adaptation and text-guided image editing, including qualitative, quantitative, and user studies, consistently show that AIR enables state-of-the-art performance in these tasks. **Code and additional experiments are available in the supplementary material.**

Poster
AHPA: Adaptive Hierarchical Prior Alignment for Diffusion Transformers

Ruibin Min, Yexin Liu, Aimin PAN, Changsheng Lu, Jiafei Wu, kelu Yao, Xiaogang Xu, Harry Yang

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Representation alignment has recently emerged as an effective paradigm for accelerating Diffusion Transformer training. Despite their success, existing alignment methods typically impose a fixed supervision target or a fixed alignment granularity throughout the entire denoising trajectory, whether the guidance is provided by external vision encoders, internal self-representations, or VAE-derived features. We argue that such timestep-agnostic alignment is suboptimal because the useful granularity of representation supervision changes systematically with the signal-to-noise ratio. In high-noise regimes, diffusion models benefit more from coarse semantic and layout-level anchoring, whereas in low-noise regimes, the training signal should emphasize spatially detailed and structurally faithful refinement. This non-stationary alignment behavior creates a representational mismatch for static single-level supervisors. To address this issue, we propose Adaptive Hierarchical Prior Alignment (AHPA), a lightweight alignment framework that exploits the hierarchical representations naturally embedded in the frozen VAE encoder. Instead of using only a single compressed latent as the alignment target, AHPA extracts multi-level VAE features that provide complementary priors ranging from local geometry and spatial topology to coarse semantic layout. A timestep-conditioned Dynamic Router adaptively selects and weights these hierarchical priors along the denoising trajectory, thereby synchronizing the alignment granularity with the model's evolving training needs. Extensive experiments show that AHPA improves convergence and generation quality over baselines and incurs no additional inference cost while avoiding external encoder supervision during training.

Poster
A2I: Adjacency-to-Image Structural Encodings for Graph Learning

Heesoo Jung, Hogun Park

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Graph representation learning often relies on message passing or spectral/positional encodings to summarize graph structure, but these indirect summaries can collapse structurally distinct graphs, including non-isomorphic cospectral pairs. We propose A2I, a structural encoding framework that renders BFS--degree-ordered local adjacency patterns as fixed-resolution images and embeds them with a frozen pre-trained vision encoder. The resulting structural tokens are mapped to learnable prototypes and aggregated with node embeddings via a lightweight Transformer. We provide a conditional analysis with two related findings: a stability result, showing that two orderings of the same graph yield embeddings that converge under bounded-degree assumptions, and a separability result, showing that two distinct graphs yield embeddings whose gap grows at least linearly with the difference in their BFS profiles. Empirically, A2I is competitive with recent GNN, Graph Transformer, and structural-encoding baselines on six node-classification benchmarks, with pronounced gains for GCN-based models on heterophilous graphs and under partial feature masking.

Poster