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Oct 2

Data Cleansing for GANs

As the application of generative adversarial networks (GANs) expands, it becomes increasingly critical to develop a unified approach that improves performance across various generative tasks. One effective strategy that applies to any machine learning task is identifying harmful instances, whose removal improves the performance. While previous studies have successfully estimated these harmful training instances in supervised settings, their approaches are not easily applicable to GANs. The challenge lies in two requirements of the previous approaches that do not apply to GANs. First, previous approaches require that the absence of a training instance directly affects the parameters. However, in the training for GANs, the instances do not directly affect the generator's parameters since they are only fed into the discriminator. Second, previous approaches assume that the change in loss directly quantifies the harmfulness of the instance to a model's performance, while common types of GAN losses do not always reflect the generative performance. To overcome the first challenge, we propose influence estimation methods that use the Jacobian of the generator's gradient with respect to the discriminator's parameters (and vice versa). Such a Jacobian represents the indirect effect between two models: how removing an instance from the discriminator's training changes the generator's parameters. Second, we propose an instance evaluation scheme that measures the harmfulness of each training instance based on how a GAN evaluation metric (e.g., Inception score) is expected to change by the instance's removal. Furthermore, we demonstrate that removing the identified harmful instances significantly improves the generative performance on various GAN evaluation metrics.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 1, 2025

Cylindric plane partitions, Lambda determinants, Commutants in semicircular systems

This thesis is divided into three parts. The first part deals with cylindric plane partitions. The second with lambda-determinants and the third with commutators in semi-circular systems. For more detailed abstract please see inside. Cylindric plane partitions may be thought of as a natural generalization of reverse plane partitions. A generating series for the enumeration of cylindric plane partitions was recently given by Borodin. The first result of section one is a new bijective proof of Borodin's identity which makes use of Fomin's growth diagram framework for generalized RSK correspondences. The second result is a (q,t)-analog of Borodin's identity which extends previous work by Okada in the reverse plane partition case. The third result is an explicit combinatorial interpretation of the Macdonald weight occurring in the (q,t)-analog using the non-intersecting lattice path model for cylindric plane partitions. Alternating sign matrices were discovered by Robbins and Rumsey whilst studying λ-determinants. In the second part of this thesis we prove a multi-parameter generalization of the λ-determinant, generalizing a recent result by di Francesco. Like the original λ-determinant, our formula exhibits the Laurent phenomenon. Semicircular systems were first introduced by Voiculescu as a part of his study of von Neumann algebras. In the third part of this thesis we study certain commutator subalgebras of the semicircular system. We find a projection matrix with an interesting self-similar structure. Making use of our projection formula we given an alternative, elementary proof that the semicircular system is a factor.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 25, 2021

GENIE: Higher-Order Denoising Diffusion Solvers

Denoising diffusion models (DDMs) have emerged as a powerful class of generative models. A forward diffusion process slowly perturbs the data, while a deep model learns to gradually denoise. Synthesis amounts to solving a differential equation (DE) defined by the learnt model. Solving the DE requires slow iterative solvers for high-quality generation. In this work, we propose Higher-Order Denoising Diffusion Solvers (GENIE): Based on truncated Taylor methods, we derive a novel higher-order solver that significantly accelerates synthesis. Our solver relies on higher-order gradients of the perturbed data distribution, that is, higher-order score functions. In practice, only Jacobian-vector products (JVPs) are required and we propose to extract them from the first-order score network via automatic differentiation. We then distill the JVPs into a separate neural network that allows us to efficiently compute the necessary higher-order terms for our novel sampler during synthesis. We only need to train a small additional head on top of the first-order score network. We validate GENIE on multiple image generation benchmarks and demonstrate that GENIE outperforms all previous solvers. Unlike recent methods that fundamentally alter the generation process in DDMs, our GENIE solves the true generative DE and still enables applications such as encoding and guided sampling. Project page and code: https://nv-tlabs.github.io/GENIE.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 11, 2022

GrokAlign: Geometric Characterisation and Acceleration of Grokking

A key challenge for the machine learning community is to understand and accelerate the training dynamics of deep networks that lead to delayed generalisation and emergent robustness to input perturbations, also known as grokking. Prior work has associated phenomena like delayed generalisation with the transition of a deep network from a linear to a feature learning regime, and emergent robustness with changes to the network's functional geometry, in particular the arrangement of the so-called linear regions in deep networks employing continuous piecewise affine nonlinearities. Here, we explain how grokking is realised in the Jacobian of a deep network and demonstrate that aligning a network's Jacobians with the training data (in the sense of cosine similarity) ensures grokking under a low-rank Jacobian assumption. Our results provide a strong theoretical motivation for the use of Jacobian regularisation in optimizing deep networks -- a method we introduce as GrokAlign -- which we show empirically to induce grokking much sooner than more conventional regularizers like weight decay. Moreover, we introduce centroid alignment as a tractable and interpretable simplification of Jacobian alignment that effectively identifies and tracks the stages of deep network training dynamics. Accompanying webpage (https://thomaswalker1.github.io/blog/grokalign.html) and code (https://github.com/ThomasWalker1/grokalign).

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 13, 2025

AdaPreLoRA: Adafactor Preconditioned Low-Rank Adaptation

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) reparameterizes a weight update as a product of two low-rank factors, but the Jacobian J_{G} of the generator mapping the factors to the weight matrix is rank-deficient, so the factor-space preconditioner J_{G}^* {F}_t J_{G} induced by any {W}-space preconditioner {F}_t is singular, and consequently the standard chain rule cannot be uniquely inverted to map a preconditioned {W}-space direction back to a factor-space update. We cast existing LoRA optimizers in a unified framework parameterized by two choices: (i) which invertible surrogate for J_{G}^* {F}_t J_{G} to use, and (ii) which {F}_t on {W} to use. Existing methods occupy four families along these axes: factor-space adaptive updates, block-diagonal surrogates for J_{G}^* J_{G}, Frobenius-residual pseudoinverse methods, and Riemannian manifold constraint. Within this design space, a gradient-statistics-aware {F}_t paired with a closed-form factor-space solve at {O}((m+n)r) memory remains underexplored. We propose AdaPreLoRA, which fills this gap by adopting the Adafactor diagonal Kronecker preconditioner {H}_t on {W} and selecting from the resulting factor-space solution family the element minimizing an {H}_t-weighted imbalance between the two factor contributions; by construction, the resulting factor update is the closest LoRA approximation to the preconditioned {W}-space direction under the {H}_t-weighted norm. Across GPT-2 (E2E), Mistral-7B and Qwen2-7B (GLUE, ARC, GSM8K), and diffusion-model personalization, AdaPreLoRA is competitive with or improves over a representative set of LoRA optimizers while keeping peak GPU memory at the LoRA optimizer level.

  • 3 authors
·
May 8 1

Scaling Limits of Wide Neural Networks with Weight Sharing: Gaussian Process Behavior, Gradient Independence, and Neural Tangent Kernel Derivation

Several recent trends in machine learning theory and practice, from the design of state-of-the-art Gaussian Process to the convergence analysis of deep neural nets (DNNs) under stochastic gradient descent (SGD), have found it fruitful to study wide random neural networks. Central to these approaches are certain scaling limits of such networks. We unify these results by introducing a notion of a straightline tensor program that can express most neural network computations, and we characterize its scaling limit when its tensors are large and randomized. From our framework follows (1) the convergence of random neural networks to Gaussian processes for architectures such as recurrent neural networks, convolutional neural networks, residual networks, attention, and any combination thereof, with or without batch normalization; (2) conditions under which the gradient independence assumption -- that weights in backpropagation can be assumed to be independent from weights in the forward pass -- leads to correct computation of gradient dynamics, and corrections when it does not; (3) the convergence of the Neural Tangent Kernel, a recently proposed kernel used to predict training dynamics of neural networks under gradient descent, at initialization for all architectures in (1) without batch normalization. Mathematically, our framework is general enough to rederive classical random matrix results such as the semicircle and the Marchenko-Pastur laws, as well as recent results in neural network Jacobian singular values. We hope our work opens a way toward design of even stronger Gaussian Processes, initialization schemes to avoid gradient explosion/vanishing, and deeper understanding of SGD dynamics in modern architectures.

  • 1 authors
·
Feb 13, 2019

The Hamilton-Jacobi Theory of Deep Learning

In this paper, training a neural network is identified, exactly, as a search through Hamilton--Jacobi initial-value problems: each gradient step selects the initial data of a viscous Hamilton--Jacobi equation whose Hopf--Cole propagator best fits the observations; at inference, the input is the spatial point at which that solution is evaluated and the initial condition is already encoded in the weights. The correspondence is exact for log-sum-exp layers and structural for broader architectures: residual networks, transformers, and recurrent architectures (RNNs, LSTMs, SSMs) each discretize the same class of Hamilton--Jacobi equations, with architecture-dependent Hamiltonian and viscosity. A single deformation parameter varepsilon unifies all four perspectives (network, tropical algebra, viscous PDE, convex optimization) in a commutative diagram closed under Lipschitz conditions. Quantitative consequences include: the minimax optimal generalization rate O(n^{-1/(d+2)}) for fixed t; adversarial robustness controlled by varepsilon; backpropagation as the co-state equation of the Hamiltonian system for residual networks (Pontryagin Maximum Principle); scaling exponents consistent with data intrinsic dimension via PDE quadrature; and a closed-form O(N) influence function (softmax attribution weights π_j) whose entropy landscape undergoes fold bifurcations as varepsilon increases, each merging attribution basins.

Supervised Learning Has a Necessary Geometric Blind Spot: Theory, Consequences, and Minimal Repair

PGD adversarial training, the standard robustness method, can reduce Jacobian Frobenius norm yet worsen clean-input geometry (e.g., TDI 1.336 vs. ERM 1.093). We show this is not an implementation artifact but a theorem-level consequence of supervised learning. We prove that any encoder minimizing supervised loss must retain non-zero sensitivity along directions correlated with training labels, including directions that are nuisance at test time. This holds across proper scoring rules, architectures, and dataset sizes. We call this the geometric blind spot of supervised learning. This theorem unifies four empirical phenomena often treated separately: non-robust features, texture bias, corruption fragility, and the robustness-accuracy tradeoff. It also explains why suppressing sensitivity in one adversarial direction can redistribute sensitivity elsewhere. We introduce Trajectory Deviation Index (TDI), a diagnostic of geometric isotropy. Unlike CKA, intrinsic dimension, or Jacobian Frobenius norm alone, TDI captures the failure mode above. In our experiments, PGD attains low Frobenius norm but high TDI, while PMH attains the lowest TDI with one additional training term and no architectural changes. Across seven tasks, BERT/SST-2, and ImageNet ViT-B/16 (backbone family underlying CLIP/DINO/SAM), the blind spot is measurable and repairable. It appears at foundation-model scale, worsens with model scale and task-specific fine-tuning, and is substantially reduced by PMH. PMH also leads on non-Gaussian corruption types (blur/brightness/contrast) without corruption-specific training.

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 26 1

JAWS: Enhancing Long-term Rollout of Neural Operators via Spatially-Adaptive Jacobian Regularization

Data-driven surrogate models improve the efficiency of simulating continuous dynamical systems, yet their autoregressive rollouts are often limited by instability and spectral blow-up. While global regularization techniques can enforce contractive dynamics, they uniformly damp high-frequency features, introducing a contraction-dissipation dilemma. Furthermore, long-horizon trajectory optimization methods that explicitly correct drift are bottlenecked by memory constraints. In this work, we propose Jacobian-Adaptive Weighting for Stability (JAWS), a probabilistic regularization strategy designed to mitigate these limitations. By framing operator learning as Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimation with spatially heteroscedastic uncertainty, JAWS dynamically modulates the regularization strength based on local physical complexity. This allows the model to enforce contraction in smooth regions to suppress noise, while relaxing constraints near singular features to preserve gradients, effectively realizing a behavior similar to numerical shock-capturing schemes. Experiments demonstrate that this spatially-adaptive prior serves as an effective spectral pre-conditioner, which reduces the base operator's burden of handling high-frequency instabilities. This reduction enables memory-efficient, short-horizon trajectory optimization to match or exceed the long-term accuracy of long-horizon baselines. Evaluated on the 1D viscous Burgers' equation, our hybrid approach improves long-term stability, shock fidelity, and out-of-distribution generalization while reducing training computational costs.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 4

Learning Smooth Time-Varying Linear Policies with an Action Jacobian Penalty

Reinforcement learning provides a framework for learning control policies that can reproduce diverse motions for simulated characters. However, such policies often exploit unnatural high-frequency signals that are unachievable by humans or physical robots, making them poor representations of real-world behaviors. Existing work addresses this issue by adding a reward term that penalizes a large change in actions over time. This term often requires substantial tuning efforts. We propose to use the action Jacobian penalty, which penalizes changes in action with respect to the changes in simulated state directly through auto differentiation. This effectively eliminates unrealistic high-frequency control signals without task specific tuning. While effective, the action Jacobian penalty introduces significant computational overhead when used with traditional fully connected neural network architectures. To mitigate this, we introduce a new architecture called a Linear Policy Net (LPN) that significantly reduces the computational burden for calculating the action Jacobian penalty during training. In addition, a LPN requires no parameter tuning, exhibits faster learning convergence compared to baseline methods, and can be more efficiently queried during inference time compared to a fully connected neural network. We demonstrate that a Linear Policy Net, combined with the action Jacobian penalty, is able to learn policies that generate smooth signals while solving a number of motion imitation tasks with different characteristics, including dynamic motions such as a backflip and various challenging parkour skills. Finally, we apply this approach to create policies for dynamic motions on a physical quadrupedal robot equipped with an arm.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 20 2

How Token Influence Decays with Distance: A Green-Function View of Trained Language Models

We study how the next-token prediction of an autoregressive Transformer language model changes under small perturbations of earlier input token embeddings. Motivated by operator learning and iterative solvers for differential equations, we investigate how the influence of one token on another decays with distance in a trained model. In multilevel methods for differential equations, such as domain decomposition, multigrid, and multilevel preconditioning, one often exploits a separation between strong local interactions and weaker but essential global interactions. The latter correspond to the long tail of the Green's function and are typically handled by a coarse-level operator. Inspired by this perspective, we compute an empirical, distance-resolved gradient profile of token dependencies using autograd. Experiments on trained Pythia models and Qwen2.5-0.5B show that, over the measured distance range, the median Jacobian sensitivity is much better described by a power-law-type decay than by an exponential alternative: the diagonal-normalized profile is well described by $overline G(r) approx γ+β(r+1)^{-p} with exponents p \approx 0.7--0.9 (typically 0.8--0.9$). This behavior appears on coherent text from Gutenberg and WikiText-103. Token-shuffling experiments show that the power-law profile persists even when syntax and prediction quality collapse, whereas randomly initialized models do not exhibit it. The slowly decaying long-range sensitivity thus appears to be a learned property of trained autoregressive Transformer operators. These findings suggest that hierarchical or coarse-level mechanisms in language models may be able to exploit the long-tailed sensitivity profiles.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 27

Constructing and Sampling Directed Graphs with Linearly Rescaled Degree Matrices

In recent years, many large directed networks such as online social networks are collected with the help of powerful data engineering and data storage techniques. Analyses of such networks attract significant attention from both the academics and industries. However, analyses of large directed networks are often time-consuming and expensive because the complexities of a lot of graph algorithms are often polynomial with the size of the graph. Hence, sampling algorithms that can generate graphs preserving properties of original graph are of great importance because they can speed up the analysis process. We propose a promising framework to sample directed graphs: Construct a sample graph with linearly rescaled Joint Degree Matrix (JDM) and Degree Correlation Matrix (DCM). Previous work shows that graphs with the same JDM and DCM will have a range of very similar graph properties. We also conduct experiments on real-world datasets to show that the numbers of non-zero entries in JDM and DCM are quite small compared to the number of edges and nodes. Adopting this framework, we propose a novel graph sampling algorithm that can provably preserves in-degree and out-degree distributions, which are two most fundamental properties of a graph. We also prove the upper bound for deviations in the joint degree distribution and degree correlation distribution, which correspond to JDM and DCM. Besides, we prove that the deviations in these distributions are negatively correlated with the sparsity of the JDM and DCM. Considering that these two matrices are always quite sparse, we believe that proposed algorithm will have a better-than-theory performance on real-world large directed networks.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 30, 2025

Can Transformers Do Enumerative Geometry?

How can Transformers model and learn enumerative geometry? What is a robust procedure for using Transformers in abductive knowledge discovery within a mathematician-machine collaboration? In this work, we introduce a Transformer-based approach to computational enumerative geometry, specifically targeting the computation of psi-class intersection numbers on the moduli space of curves. By reformulating the problem as a continuous optimization task, we compute intersection numbers across a wide value range from 10^{-45} to 10^{45}. To capture the recursive nature inherent in these intersection numbers, we propose the Dynamic Range Activator (DRA), a new activation function that enhances the Transformer's ability to model recursive patterns and handle severe heteroscedasticity. Given precision requirements for computing the intersections, we quantify the uncertainty of the predictions using Conformal Prediction with a dynamic sliding window adaptive to the partitions of equivalent number of marked points. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no prior work on modeling recursive functions with such a high-variance and factorial growth. Beyond simply computing intersection numbers, we explore the enumerative "world-model" of Transformers. Our interpretability analysis reveals that the network is implicitly modeling the Virasoro constraints in a purely data-driven manner. Moreover, through abductive hypothesis testing, probing, and causal inference, we uncover evidence of an emergent internal representation of the the large-genus asymptotic of psi-class intersection numbers. These findings suggest that the network internalizes the parameters of the asymptotic closed-form and the polynomiality phenomenon of psi-class intersection numbers in a non-linear manner.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 27, 2024

Improved Bounds for the Bilu--Linial Conjecture via Spectral Recovery from Mixed Determinantal Polynomials

The Bilu--Linial conjecture asks whether every finite d-regular graph with d geq 2 admits an edge signing σ whose signed adjacency matrix A_σ has spectral radius at most 2d-1. We prove that every signing meeting the mixed-root condition r_{A_σ}leq2(d-1) satisfies \[ ρ(A_σ) < 3+\sqrt5{2}d-1, \] where r_{A_σ} is the largest root of the mixed determinantal polynomial χ[A_σ,-A_σ]. The interlacing theorem of Ravichandran and Srivastava guarantees a signing satisfying the mixed-root condition, so our result improves the coefficient 2sqrt2 in their two-sided spectral bound. In the proof, we construct a positive matrix-valued probability measure supported on the roots of χ[A_σ,-A_σ]. The second moment gives a simple matrix inequality A_σ^2 + dI preceq 4r_{A_σ}^2I, which yields a preliminary coefficient 7. Estimates for the fourth moment use information about short walks to obtain the coefficient (3+5)/2. With more graph structural assumptions, the coefficient improves to sqrt6 for triangle-free graphs and to (5+3sqrt5)/2 for graphs of girth at least five. As a result of independent interest, we extend the construction to χ[A_1,ldots,A_k] for Hermitian matrices A_1,ldots,A_k with zero diagonal, and compute the first two moments explicitly. Finally, an explicit signing of K_8 shows that the mixed-root condition alone cannot guarantee a coefficient below (4+sqrt5)/sqrt6.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 13

A Numerical Realization of Suzuki's Weil-Quadratic-Form Operator: The Archimedean Spectral Law, its Universality, and an Operator Form of Weil's Positivity Criterion

This paper presents the first numerical realization of Suzuki's Weil-Quadratic-Form operator, a candidate for the Hilbert--Pólya program linking spectral positivity to the Riemann Hypothesis (RH). Suzuki's 2026 construction was purely theoretical; here, the operator is instantiated via P1 finite-element discretization and Richardson extrapolation. Key results include: (R1) In the prime-free regime, the spectrum follows a closed Archimedean law A_k(a) = log(1/a) + log(k-2) + B_0 + O(a), with B_0 = log q - 2log 2, confirmed to 30-digit precision. (R2) A Mellin double-pole argument proves the head coefficient B(ν) and shows B_0 depends only on the conductor q, independent of the Archimedean parameter. (R2b) The degree d of an L-function appears directly as the logarithmic slope of the spectrum. (R3) Total spectral intensity follows the prime number theorem, S(a) sim (2a)^3/6. (R4) Nontrivial zeros are not eigenvalues but occur in the explicit-formula error term of the prime symbol. (R5) The best-match line σ^*(a) descends toward the critical line. (R6) Weil's positivity criterion is realized in operator form: bounded residual growth corresponds to all zeros on the line, while an injected off-line zero causes exponential blow-up. (R7) The lowest eigenvalue λ_1(a) is strictly positive, decays superexponentially, and passes smoothly through the first prime threshold. (R8) The characteristic function W(a,0;z) is computed for the first time, with all zeros confirmed real. (R9) Indirect traces of GUE statistics appear in the moment structure, even where direct detection is blocked. The authors emphasize that this work does not prove RH. All results are Archimedean and universal, with significance lying in the faithful numerical realization of classical identities rather than new arithmetic.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 22

A Third-Order Gaussian Process Trajectory Representation Framework with Closed-Form Kinematics for Continuous-Time Motion Estimation

In this paper, we propose a third-order, i.e., white-noise-on-jerk, Gaussian Process (GP) Trajectory Representation (TR) framework for continuous-time (CT) motion estimation (ME) tasks. Our framework features a unified trajectory representation that encapsulates the kinematic models of both SO(3)timesR^3 and SE(3) pose representations. This encapsulation strategy allows users to use the same implementation of measurement-based factors for either choice of pose representation, which facilitates experimentation and comparison to achieve the best model for the ME task. In addition, unique to our framework, we derive the kinematic models with the closed-form temporal derivatives of the local variable of SO(3) and SE(3), which so far has only been approximated based on the Taylor expansion in the literature. Our experiments show that these kinematic models can improve the estimation accuracy in high-speed scenarios. All analytical Jacobians of the interpolated states with respect to the support states of the trajectory representation, as well as the motion prior factors, are also provided for accelerated Gauss-Newton (GN) optimization. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of the framework in various motion estimation tasks such as localization, calibration, and odometry, facilitating fast prototyping for ME researchers. We release the source code for the benefit of the community. Our project is available at https://github.com/brytsknguyen/gptr.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 30, 2024

Fast and Accurate Causal Parallel Decoding using Jacobi Forcing

Multi-token generation has emerged as a promising paradigm for accelerating transformer-based large model inference. Recent efforts primarily explore diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) for parallel decoding to reduce inference latency. To achieve AR-level generation quality, many techniques adapt AR models into dLLMs to enable parallel decoding. However, they suffer from limited speedup compared to AR models due to a pretrain-to-posttrain mismatch. Specifically, the masked data distribution in post-training deviates significantly from the real-world data distribution seen during pretraining, and dLLMs rely on bidirectional attention, which conflicts with the causal prior learned during pretraining and hinders the integration of exact KV cache reuse. To address this, we introduce Jacobi Forcing, a progressive distillation paradigm where models are trained on their own generated parallel decoding trajectories, smoothly shifting AR models into efficient parallel decoders while preserving their pretrained causal inference property. The models trained under this paradigm, Jacobi Forcing Model, achieves 3.8x wall-clock speedup on coding and math benchmarks with minimal loss in performance. Based on Jacobi Forcing Models' trajectory characteristics, we introduce multi-block decoding with rejection recycling, which enables up to 4.5x higher token acceptance count per iteration and nearly 4.0x wall-clock speedup, effectively trading additional compute for lower inference latency. Our code is available at https://github.com/hao-ai-lab/JacobiForcing.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 16, 2025 2

Accelerating Auto-regressive Text-to-Image Generation with Training-free Speculative Jacobi Decoding

The current large auto-regressive models can generate high-quality, high-resolution images, but these models require hundreds or even thousands of steps of next-token prediction during inference, resulting in substantial time consumption. In existing studies, Jacobi decoding, an iterative parallel decoding algorithm, has been used to accelerate the auto-regressive generation and can be executed without training. However, the Jacobi decoding relies on a deterministic criterion to determine the convergence of iterations. Thus, it works for greedy decoding but is incompatible with sampling-based decoding which is crucial for visual quality and diversity in the current auto-regressive text-to-image generation. In this paper, we propose a training-free probabilistic parallel decoding algorithm, Speculative Jacobi Decoding (SJD), to accelerate auto-regressive text-to-image generation. By introducing a probabilistic convergence criterion, our SJD accelerates the inference of auto-regressive text-to-image generation while maintaining the randomness in sampling-based token decoding and allowing the model to generate diverse images. Specifically, SJD facilitates the model to predict multiple tokens at each step and accepts tokens based on the probabilistic criterion, enabling the model to generate images with fewer steps than the conventional next-token-prediction paradigm. We also investigate the token initialization strategies that leverage the spatial locality of visual data to further improve the acceleration ratio under specific scenarios. We conduct experiments for our proposed SJD on multiple auto-regressive text-to-image generation models, showing the effectiveness of model acceleration without sacrificing the visual quality.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 2, 2024 2

Uniformly Stable Minimal Weyl--Heisenberg Measurements Approaching the SIC Benchmark

Informational completeness (IC) guarantees that an inverse exists, not that it is statistically well conditioned. For minimal rank-one Weyl--Heisenberg (WH) measurements, covariance makes the nonidentity projector-Gram spectrum proportional to the fiducial's ambiguity intensities, with eigenvalues \(d|χ_ϕ(u)|^2\), turning stability into an explicit worst-direction design problem; write \(λ\) for its smallest nonidentity eigenvalue. Haar fiducials are IC almost surely while \(\mathbb E[λ^{-1}]=\infty\), and an explicit geometric family used to establish balanced informationally complete measurements in every dimension has a normalized spectral floor bounded above by an exponentially decaying envelope. We then construct a hierarchy of minimal measurements. A cyclic family with exactly \(d^2\) outcomes in every integer dimension has floors \(Θ(d^{-3})\) for odd \(d\) and \(Θ(d^{-5})\) for even \(d\); a finite-field family for \(q=2^m\) obeys the uniform bound \(λ\ge4/9\). Our main result treats every prime-power dimension of characteristic \(p\ge5\). A balanced one-coordinate perturbation repairs the zero ambiguity axis of a cubic Alltop state, gives an attained floor uniformly bounded below by a positive constant, and confines the entire nonidentity spectrum to \([L_q,U_q]\) with \(U_q/L_q\to1\). Its SIC-normalized minimum tends to one, and \(λ(ϕ_q)/Λ_q^\star\to1\) for the global finite-field WH max--min optimum \(Λ_q^\star\), without assuming SIC existence. The complete spectrum determines the exact finite-sample Hilbert--Schmidt error of canonical linear inversion at \(I/d\), while its lower edge controls local Fisher efficiency and canonical-shadow bounds.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 11

Linear statistics for Coulomb gases: higher order cumulants

We consider N classical particles interacting via the Coulomb potential in spatial dimension d and in the presence of an external trap, at equilibrium at inverse temperature beta. In the large N limit, the particles are confined within a droplet of finite size. We study smooth linear statistics, i.e. the fluctuations of sums of the form {cal L}_N = sum_{i=1}^N f({bf x}_i), where {bf x}_i's are the positions of the particles and where f({bf x}_i) is a sufficiently regular function. There exists at present standard results for the first and second moments of {cal L}_N in the large N limit, as well as associated Central Limit Theorems in general dimension and for a wide class of confining potentials. Here we obtain explicit expressions for the higher order cumulants of {cal L}_N at large N, when the function f({bf x})=f(|{bf x}|) and the confining potential are both rotationnally invariant. A remarkable feature of our results is that these higher cumulants depend only on the value of f'(|{bf x}|) and its higher order derivatives evaluated exactly at the boundary of the droplet, which in this case is a d-dimensional sphere. In the particular two-dimensional case d=2 at the special value beta=2, a connection to the Ginibre ensemble allows us to derive these results in an alternative way using the tools of determinantal point processes. Finally we also obtain the large deviation form of the full probability distribution function of {cal L}_N.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 25, 2023

Taming the Loss Landscape of PINNs with Noisy Feynman-Kac Supervision: Operator Preconditioning and Non-Asymptotic Error Bounds

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) often train slowly or fail to converge on challenging partial differential equations (PDEs), a behavior recently linked to severely ill-conditioned loss landscapes inherited from the underlying differential operator. We study PINNs augmented with a pointwise data-fidelity term, added at a few points in the domain to the standard residual and boundary losses. We show that this supervision term acts as an operator-level preconditioner: for suitable weights, our comparison bounds guarantee a substantially smaller condition number than under the standard PINN loss, independently of how the pointwise labels are obtained. For a broad class of PDEs admitting a Feynman-Kac (FK) representation, we generate such labels by Monte Carlo averages of the FK functional, resulting in what we call ``FK-PINNs", and using the excess risk decomposition approach, we derive non-asymptotic L^2(Ω)-error bounds for FK-PINNs with tanh activation trained by finitely many steps of gradient descent. Along the way, we establish pseudo-dimension bounds for first- and second-order derivatives of tanh neural networks, which are of independent interest and, to the best of our knowledge, new. Numerical experiments on Poisson, Schrödinger, mean exit time, and committor problems corroborate the theory, and show that FK-PINNs can successfully solve PDEs for which standard PINNs exhibit severe failure modes.

  • 4 authors
·
May 29

A micro Lie theory for state estimation in robotics

A Lie group is an old mathematical abstract object dating back to the XIX century, when mathematician Sophus Lie laid the foundations of the theory of continuous transformation groups. As it often happens, its usage has spread over diverse areas of science and technology many years later. In robotics, we are recently experiencing an important trend in its usage, at least in the fields of estimation, and particularly in motion estimation for navigation. Yet for a vast majority of roboticians, Lie groups are highly abstract constructions and therefore difficult to understand and to use. This may be due to the fact that most of the literature on Lie theory is written by and for mathematicians and physicists, who might be more used than us to the deep abstractions this theory deals with. In estimation for robotics it is often not necessary to exploit the full capacity of the theory, and therefore an effort of selection of materials is required. In this paper, we will walk through the most basic principles of the Lie theory, with the aim of conveying clear and useful ideas, and leave a significant corpus of the Lie theory behind. Even with this mutilation, the material included here has proven to be extremely useful in modern estimation algorithms for robotics, especially in the fields of SLAM, visual odometry, and the like. Alongside this micro Lie theory, we provide a chapter with a few application examples, and a vast reference of formulas for the major Lie groups used in robotics, including most jacobian matrices and the way to easily manipulate them. We also present a new C++ template-only library implementing all the functionality described here.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 4, 2018

Efficiently Computing Local Lipschitz Constants of Neural Networks via Bound Propagation

Lipschitz constants are connected to many properties of neural networks, such as robustness, fairness, and generalization. Existing methods for computing Lipschitz constants either produce relatively loose upper bounds or are limited to small networks. In this paper, we develop an efficient framework for computing the ell_infty local Lipschitz constant of a neural network by tightly upper bounding the norm of Clarke Jacobian via linear bound propagation. We formulate the computation of local Lipschitz constants with a linear bound propagation process on a high-order backward graph induced by the chain rule of Clarke Jacobian. To enable linear bound propagation, we derive tight linear relaxations for specific nonlinearities in Clarke Jacobian. This formulate unifies existing ad-hoc approaches such as RecurJac, which can be seen as a special case of ours with weaker relaxations. The bound propagation framework also allows us to easily borrow the popular Branch-and-Bound (BaB) approach from neural network verification to further tighten Lipschitz constants. Experiments show that on tiny models, our method produces comparable bounds compared to exact methods that cannot scale to slightly larger models; on larger models, our method efficiently produces tighter results than existing relaxed or naive methods, and our method scales to much larger practical models that previous works could not handle. We also demonstrate an application on provable monotonicity analysis. Code is available at https://github.com/shizhouxing/Local-Lipschitz-Constants.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 13, 2022

Improved high-dimensional estimation with Langevin dynamics and stochastic weight averaging

Significant recent work has studied the ability of gradient descent to recover a hidden planted direction θ^star in S^{d-1} in different high-dimensional settings, including tensor PCA and single-index models. The key quantity that governs the ability of gradient descent to traverse these landscapes is the information exponent k^star (Ben Arous et al., (2021)), which corresponds to the order of the saddle at initialization in the population landscape. Ben Arous et al., (2021) showed that n gtrsim d^{max(1, k^star-1)} samples were necessary and sufficient for online SGD to recover θ^star, and Ben Arous et al., (2020) proved a similar lower bound for Langevin dynamics. More recently, Damian et al., (2023) showed it was possible to circumvent these lower bounds by running gradient descent on a smoothed landscape, and that this algorithm succeeds with n gtrsim d^{max(1, k^star/2)} samples, which is optimal in the worst case. This raises the question of whether it is possible to achieve the same rate without explicit smoothing. In this paper, we show that Langevin dynamics can succeed with n gtrsim d^{ k^star/2 } samples if one considers the average iterate, rather than the last iterate. The key idea is that the combination of noise-injection and iterate averaging is able to emulate the effect of landscape smoothing. We apply this result to both the tensor PCA and single-index model settings. Finally, we conjecture that minibatch SGD can also achieve the same rate without adding any additional noise.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 6

A Nearly-Optimal Bound for Fast Regression with ell_infty Guarantee

Given a matrix Ain R^{ntimes d} and a vector bin R^n, we consider the regression problem with ell_infty guarantees: finding a vector x'in R^d such that |x'-x^*|_infty leq epsilon{d}cdot |Ax^*-b|_2cdot |A^dagger| where x^*=argmin_{xin R^d}|Ax-b|_2. One popular approach for solving such ell_2 regression problem is via sketching: picking a structured random matrix Sin R^{mtimes n} with mll n and SA can be quickly computed, solve the ``sketched'' regression problem argmin_{xin R^d} |SAx-Sb|_2. In this paper, we show that in order to obtain such ell_infty guarantee for ell_2 regression, one has to use sketching matrices that are dense. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first user case in which dense sketching matrices are necessary. On the algorithmic side, we prove that there exists a distribution of dense sketching matrices with m=epsilon^{-2}dlog^3(n/delta) such that solving the sketched regression problem gives the ell_infty guarantee, with probability at least 1-delta. Moreover, the matrix SA can be computed in time O(ndlog n). Our row count is nearly-optimal up to logarithmic factors, and significantly improves the result in [Price, Song and Woodruff, ICALP'17], in which a super-linear in d rows, m=Omega(epsilon^{-2}d^{1+gamma}) for gamma=Theta(frac{loglog n{log d}}) is required. We also develop a novel analytical framework for ell_infty guarantee regression that utilizes the Oblivious Coordinate-wise Embedding (OCE) property introduced in [Song and Yu, ICML'21]. Our analysis is arguably much simpler and more general than [Price, Song and Woodruff, ICALP'17], and it extends to dense sketches for tensor product of vectors.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 1, 2023

Approximating Uniform Random Rotations by Two-Block Structured Hadamard Rotations in High Dimensions

Uniform random rotations are a useful primitive in applications such as fast Johnson-Lindenstrauss embeddings, kernel approximation, communication-efficient learning, and recent AI compression pipelines, but they are computationally expensive to generate and apply in high dimensions. A common practical replacement is repeated structured random rotations built from Walsh-Hadamard transforms and random sign diagonals. Applying the structured random rotation twice has been shown empirically to be useful, but the supporting theory is still limited. In this paper we study the approximation quality achieved when using this two-block structured Hadamard rotation. Our results are both positive and negative. On the positive side, we prove that every fixed coordinate of the two-block transform converges uniformly, over all inputs, to the corresponding coordinate of a uniformly rotated vector, with an explicit Kolmogorov-distance bound of order d^{-1/5}. On the negative side, we prove an explicit lower bound on the Wasserstein distance between the full vector distributions, showing that the two-block transform is not a globally accurate surrogate for a uniform random rotation in the worst case. For the extremal input used in the lower bound, we also prove a matching asymptotic upper bound, showing that the lower-bound scale is sharp for that input. Taken together, the results identify a clear separation between one-dimensional marginal behavior, where approximation improves with dimension, and full high-dimensional geometry, where a nonvanishing discrepancy remains. This provides a partial theoretical explanation for the empirical success of structured Hadamard rotations in some algorithms, while also clarifying the limitations of treating them as drop-in replacements for true uniform random rotations.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 24

Complexity of counting points on curves and the factor P_1(T) of the zeta function of surfaces

This article concerns the computational complexity of a fundamental problem in number theory: counting points on curves and surfaces over finite fields. There is no subexponential-time algorithm known and it is unclear if it can be NP-hard. Given a curve, we present the first efficient Arthur-Merlin protocol to certify its point-count, its Jacobian group structure, and its Hasse-Weil zeta function. We extend this result to a smooth projective surface to certify the factor P_{1}(T), corresponding to the first Betti number, of the zeta function; by using the counting oracle. We give the first algorithm to compute P_{1}(T) that is poly(log q)-time if the degree D of the input surface is fixed; and in quantum poly(Dlog q)-time in general. Our technique in the curve case, is to sample hash functions using the Weil and Riemann-Roch bounds, to certify the group order of its Jacobian. For higher dimension varieties, we first reduce to the case of a surface, which is fibred as a Lefschetz pencil of hyperplane sections over P^{1}. The formalism of vanishing cycles, and the inherent big monodromy, enable us to prove an effective version of Deligne's `theoreme du pgcd' using the hard-Lefschetz theorem and an equidistribution result due to Katz. These reduce our investigations to that of computing the zeta function of a curve, defined over a finite field extension F_{Q}/F_{q} of poly-bounded degree. This explicitization of the theory yields the first nontrivial upper bounds on the computational complexity.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 4, 2025

A fast and memoryless numerical method for solving fractional differential equations

The numerical solution of implicit and stiff differential equations by implicit numerical integrators has been largely investigated and there exist many excellent efficient codes available in the scientific community, as Radau5 (based on a Runge-Kutta collocation method at Radau points) and Dassl, based on backward differentiation formulas, among the others. When solving fractional ordinary differential equations (ODEs), the derivative operator is replaced by a non-local one and the fractional ODE is reformulated as a Volterra integral equation, to which these codes cannot be directly applied. This article is a follow-up of the article by the authors (Guglielmi and Hairer, SISC, 2025) for differential equations with distributed delays. The main idea is to approximate the fractional kernel t^{α-1}/ Γ(α) (α>0) by a sum of exponential functions or by a sum of exponential functions multiplied by a monomial, and then to transform the fractional integral (of convolution type) into a set of ordinary differential equations. The augmented system is typically stiff and thus requires the use of an implicit method. It can have a very large dimension and requires a special treatment of the arising linear systems. The present work presents an algorithm for the construction of an approximation of the fractional kernel by a sum of exponential functions, and it shows how the arising linear systems in a stiff time integrator can be solved efficiently. It is explained how the code Radau5 can be used for solving fractional differential equations. Numerical experiments illustrate the accuracy and the efficiency of the proposed method. Driver examples are publicly available from the homepages of the authors.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 25, 2025

Parabolic-elliptic and indirect-direct simplifications in chemotaxis systems driven by indirect signalling

Singular limits for the following indirect signalling chemotaxis system align* \left\{ array{lllllll} \partial_t n = \Delta n - \nabla \cdot (n \nabla c ) & in \Omega\times(0,\infty) , \varepsilon \partial_t c = \Delta c - c + w & in \Omega\times(0,\infty), \varepsilon \partial_t w = \tau \Delta w - w + n & in \Omega\times (0,\infty), \partial_\nu n = \partial_\nu c = \partial_\nu w = 0, &on \partial\Omega\times (0,\infty) %(n,c,w)_{t=0} = (n_0,c_0,w_0) & on \Omega, array \right. align* are investigated. More precisely, we study parabolic-elliptic simplification, or PES, varepsilonto 0^+ with fixed tau>0 up to the critical dimension N=4, and indirect-direct simplification, or IDS, (varepsilon,tau)to (0^+,0^+) up to the critical dimension N=2. These are relevant in biological situations where the signalling process is on a much faster time scale compared to the species diffusion and all interactions. Showing singular limits in critical dimensions is challenging. To deal with the PES, we carefully combine the entropy function, an Adam-type inequality, the regularisation of slow evolution, and an energy equation method to obtain strong convergence in representative spaces. For the IDS, a bootstrap argument concerning the L^p-energy function is devised, which allows us to obtain suitable uniform bounds for the singular limits. Moreover, in both scenarios, we also present the convergence rates, where the effect of the initial layer and the convergence to the critical manifold are also revealed.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 2, 2025

On Kinetic Optimal Probability Paths for Generative Models

Recent successful generative models are trained by fitting a neural network to an a-priori defined tractable probability density path taking noise to training examples. In this paper we investigate the space of Gaussian probability paths, which includes diffusion paths as an instance, and look for an optimal member in some useful sense. In particular, minimizing the Kinetic Energy (KE) of a path is known to make particles' trajectories simple, hence easier to sample, and empirically improve performance in terms of likelihood of unseen data and sample generation quality. We investigate Kinetic Optimal (KO) Gaussian paths and offer the following observations: (i) We show the KE takes a simplified form on the space of Gaussian paths, where the data is incorporated only through a single, one dimensional scalar function, called the data separation function. (ii) We characterize the KO solutions with a one dimensional ODE. (iii) We approximate data-dependent KO paths by approximating the data separation function and minimizing the KE. (iv) We prove that the data separation function converges to 1 in the general case of arbitrary normalized dataset consisting of n samples in d dimension as n/drightarrow 0. A consequence of this result is that the Conditional Optimal Transport (Cond-OT) path becomes kinetic optimal as n/drightarrow 0. We further support this theory with empirical experiments on ImageNet.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 11, 2023