Efficient Temporal Consistency in Diffusion-Based Video Editing with Adaptor Modules: A Theoretical Framework

Adapter-based methods are commonly used to enhance model performance with minimal additional complexity, especially in video editing tasks that require frame-to-frame consistency. By inserting small, learnable modules into pretrained diffusion models, these adapters can maintain temporal coherence without extensive retraining. Approaches that incorporate prompt learning with both shared and frame-specific tokens are particularly effective in preserving continuity across frames at low training cost. In this work, we want to provide a general theoretical framework for adapters that maintain frame consistency in DDIM-based models under a temporal consistency loss. First, we prove that the temporal consistency objective is differentiable under bounded feature norms, and we establish a Lipschitz bound on its gradient. Second, we show that gradient descent on this objective decreases the loss monotonically and converges to a local minimum if the learning rate is within an appropriate range. Finally, we analyze the stability of modules in the DDIM inversion procedure, showing that the associated error remains controlled. These theoretical findings will reinforce the reliability of diffusion-based video editing methods that rely on adapter strategies and provide theoretical insights in video generation tasks.

Twin Co-Adaptive Dialogue for Progressive Image Generation

Modern text-to-image generation systems have enabled the creation of remarkably realistic and high-quality visuals, yet they often falter when handling the inherent ambiguities in user prompts. In this work, we present Twin-Co, a framework that leverages synchronized, co-adaptive dialogue to progressively refine image generation. Instead of a static generation process, Twin-Co employs a dynamic, iterative workflow where an intelligent dialogue agent continuously interacts with the user. Initially, a base image is generated from the user's prompt. Then, through a series of synchronized dialogue exchanges, the system adapts and optimizes the image according to evolving user feedback. The co-adaptive process allows the system to progressively narrow down ambiguities and better align with user intent. Experiments demonstrate that Twin-Co not only enhances user experience by reducing trial-and-error iterations but also improves the quality of the generated images, streamlining the creative process across various applications.

Feature Alignment and Representation Transfer in Knowledge Distillation for Large Language Models

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a technique for transferring knowledge from complex teacher models to simpler student models, significantly enhancing model efficiency and accuracy. It has demonstrated substantial advancements in various applications including image classification, object detection, language modeling, text classification, and sentiment analysis. Recent innovations in KD methods, such as attention-based approaches, block-wise logit distillation, and decoupling distillation, have notably improved student model performance. These techniques focus on stimulus complexity, attention mechanisms, and global information capture to optimize knowledge transfer. In addition, KD has proven effective in compressing large language models while preserving accuracy, reducing computational overhead, and improving inference speed. This survey synthesizes the latest literature, highlighting key findings, contributions, and future directions in knowledge distillation to provide insights for researchers and practitioners on its evolving role in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

ContrastiveGaussian: High-Fidelity 3D Generation with Contrastive Learning and Gaussian Splatting

Creating 3D content from single-view images is a challenging problem that has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Current approaches typically utilize score distillation sampling (SDS) from pre-trained 2D diffusion models to generate multi-view 3D representations. Although some methods have made notable progress by balancing generation speed and model quality, their performance is often limited by the visual inconsistencies of the diffusion model outputs. In this work, we propose ContrastiveGaussian, which integrates contrastive learning into the generative process. By using a perceptual loss, we effectively differentiate between positive and negative samples, leveraging the visual inconsistencies to improve 3D generation quality. To further enhance sample differentiation and improve contrastive learning, we incorporate a super-resolution model and introduce another Quantity-Aware Triplet Loss to address varying sample distributions during training. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior texture fidelity and improved geometric consistency.

SCORE: Story Coherence and Retrieval Enhancement for AI Narratives

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at generating creative narratives but struggle with long-term coherence and emotional consistency in complex stories. To address this, we propose SCORE (Story Coherence and Retrieval Enhancement), a framework integrating three components: 1) Dynamic State Tracking (monitoring objects/characters via symbolic logic), 2) Context-Aware Summarization (hierarchical episode summaries for temporal progression), and 3) Hybrid Retrieval (combining TF-IDF keyword relevance with cosine similarity-based semantic embeddings). The system employs a temporally-aligned Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline to validate contextual consistency. Evaluations show SCORE achieves 23.6% higher coherence (NCI-2.0 benchmark), 89.7% emotional consistency (EASM metric), and 41.8% fewer hallucinations versus baseline GPT models. Its modular design supports incremental knowledge graph construction for persistent story memory and multi-LLM backend compatibility, offering an explainable solution for industrial-scale narrative systems requiring long-term consistency.

Interpretable Deep Regression Models with Interval-Censored Failure Time Data

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become powerful tools for modeling complex data structures through sequentially integrating simple functions in each hidden layer. In survival analysis, recent advances of DNNs primarily focus on enhancing model capabilities, especially in exploring nonlinear covariate effects under right censoring. However, deep learning methods for interval-censored data, where the unobservable failure time is only known to lie in an interval, remain underexplored and limited to specific data type or model. This work proposes a general regression framework for interval-censored data with a broad class of partially linear transformation models, where key covariate effects are modeled parametrically while nonlinear effects of nuisance multi-modal covariates are approximated via DNNs, balancing interpretability and flexibility. We employ sieve maximum likelihood estimation by leveraging monotone splines to approximate the cumulative baseline hazard function. To ensure reliable and tractable estimation, we develop an EM algorithm incorporating stochastic gradient descent. We establish the asymptotic properties of parameter estimators and show that the DNN estimator achieves minimax-optimal convergence. Extensive simulations demonstrate superior estimation and prediction accuracy over state-of-the-art methods. Applying our method to the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative dataset yields novel insights and improved predictive performance compared to traditional approaches.

SDF-TopoNet: A Two-Stage Framework for Tubular Structure Segmentation via SDF Pre-training and Topology-Aware Fine-Tuning

Accurate segmentation of tubular and curvilinear structures, such as blood vessels, neurons, and road networks, is crucial in various applications. A key challenge is ensuring topological correctness while maintaining computational efficiency. Existing approaches often employ topological loss functions based on persistent homology, such as Betti error, to enforce structural consistency. However, these methods suffer from high computational costs and are insensitive to pixel-level accuracy, often requiring additional loss terms like Dice or MSE to compensate. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{SDF-TopoNet}, an improved topology-aware segmentation framework that enhances both segmentation accuracy and training efficiency. Our approach introduces a novel two-stage training strategy. In the pre-training phase, we utilize the signed distance function (SDF) as an auxiliary learning target, allowing the model to encode topological information without directly relying on computationally expensive topological loss functions. In the fine-tuning phase, we incorporate a dynamic adapter alongside a refined topological loss to ensure topological correctness while mitigating overfitting and computational overhead. We evaluate our method on five benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that SDF-TopoNet outperforms existing methods in both topological accuracy and quantitative segmentation metrics, while significantly reducing training complexity.

The Curse of Depth in Large Language Models

In this paper, we introduce the Curse of Depth, a concept that highlights, explains, and addresses the recent observation in modern Large Language Models(LLMs) where nearly half of the layers are less effective than expected. We first confirm the wide existence of this phenomenon across the most popular families of LLMs such as Llama, Mistral, DeepSeek, and Qwen. Our analysis, theoretically and empirically, identifies that the underlying reason for the ineffectiveness of deep layers in LLMs is the widespread usage of Pre-Layer Normalization (Pre-LN). While Pre-LN stabilizes the training of Transformer LLMs, its output variance exponentially grows with the model depth, which undesirably causes the derivative of the deep Transformer blocks to be an identity matrix, and therefore barely contributes to the training. To resolve this training pitfall, we propose LayerNorm Scaling, which scales the variance of output of the layer normalization inversely by the square root of its depth. This simple modification mitigates the output variance explosion of deeper Transformer layers, improving their contribution. Our experimental results, spanning model sizes from 130M to 1B, demonstrate that LayerNorm Scaling significantly enhances LLM pre-training performance compared to Pre-LN. Moreover, this improvement seamlessly carries over to supervised fine-tuning. All these gains can be attributed to the fact that LayerNorm Scaling enables deeper layers to contribute more effectively during training.

Generative Adversarial Networks Bridging Art and Machine Intelligence

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have greatly influenced the development of computer vision and artificial intelligence in the past decade and also connected art and machine intelligence together. This book begins with a detailed introduction to the fundamental principles and historical development of GANs, contrasting them with traditional generative models and elucidating the core adversarial mechanisms through illustrative Python examples. The text systematically addresses the mathematical and theoretical underpinnings including probability theory, statistics, and game theory providing a solid framework for understanding the objectives, loss functions, and optimisation challenges inherent to GAN training. Subsequent chapters review classic variants such as Conditional GANs, DCGANs, InfoGAN, and LAPGAN before progressing to advanced training methodologies like Wasserstein GANs, GANs with gradient penalty, least squares GANs, and spectral normalisation techniques. The book further examines architectural enhancements and task-specific adaptations in generators and discriminators, showcasing practical implementations in high resolution image generation, artistic style transfer, video synthesis, text to image generation and other multimedia applications. The concluding sections offer insights into emerging research trends, including self-attention mechanisms, transformer-based generative models, and a comparative analysis with diffusion models, thus charting promising directions for future developments in both academic and applied settings.

From Aleatoric to Epistemic: Exploring Uncertainty Quantification Techniques in Artificial Intelligence

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is a critical aspect of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, particularly in high-risk domains such as healthcare, autonomous systems, and financial technology, where decision-making processes must account for uncertainty. This review explores the evolution of uncertainty quantification techniques in AI, distinguishing between aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties, and discusses the mathematical foundations and methods used to quantify these uncertainties. We provide an overview of advanced techniques, including probabilistic methods, ensemble learning, sampling-based approaches, and generative models, while also highlighting hybrid approaches that integrate domain-specific knowledge. Furthermore, we examine the diverse applications of UQ across various fields, emphasizing its impact on decision-making, predictive accuracy, and system robustness. The review also addresses key challenges such as scalability, efficiency, and integration with explainable AI, and outlines future directions for research in this rapidly developing area. Through this comprehensive survey, we aim to provide a deeper understanding of UQ's role in enhancing the reliability, safety, and trustworthiness of AI systems.