FLUX-Makeup: High-Fidelity, Identity-Consistent, and Robust Makeup Transfer via Diffusion Transformer

Makeup transfer aims to apply the makeup style from a reference face to a target face and has been increasingly adopted in practical applications. Existing GAN-based approaches typically rely on carefully designed loss functions to balance transfer quality and facial identity consistency, while diffusion-based methods often depend on additional face-control modules or algorithms to preserve identity. However, these auxiliary components tend to introduce extra errors, leading to suboptimal transfer results. To overcome these limitations, we propose FLUX-Makeup, a high-fidelity, identity-consistent, and robust makeup transfer framework that eliminates the need for any auxiliary face-control components. Instead, our method directly leverages source-reference image pairs to achieve superior transfer performance. Specifically, we build our framework upon FLUX-Kontext, using the source image as its native conditional input. Furthermore, we introduce RefLoRAInjector, a lightweight makeup feature injector that decouples the reference pathway from the backbone, enabling efficient and comprehensive extraction of makeup-related information. In parallel, we design a robust and scalable data generation pipeline to provide more accurate supervision during training. The paired makeup datasets produced by this pipeline significantly surpass the quality of all existing datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FLUX-Makeup achieves state-of-the-art performance, exhibiting strong robustness across diverse scenarios.

Distributed Oscillatory Guidance for Formation Flight of Fixed-Wing Drones

The autonomous formation flight of fixed-wing drones is hard when the coordination requires the actuation over their speeds since they are critically bounded and aircraft are mostly designed to fly at a nominal airspeed. This paper proposes an algorithm to achieve formation flights of fixed-wing drones without requiring any actuation over their speed. In particular, we guide all the drones to travel over specific paths, e.g., parallel straight lines, and we superpose an oscillatory behavior onto the guiding vector field that drives the drones to the paths. This oscillation enables control over the average velocity along the path, thereby facilitating inter-drone coordination. Each drone adjusts its oscillation amplitude distributively in a closed-loop manner by communicating with neighboring agents in an undirected and connected graph. A novel consensus algorithm is introduced, leveraging a non-negative, asymmetric saturation function. This unconventional saturation is justified since negative amplitudes do not make drones travel backward or have a negative velocity along the path. Rigorous theoretical analysis of the algorithm is complemented by validation through numerical simulations and a real-world formation flight.

Off-Policy Evaluation Under Nonignorable Missing Data

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) aims to estimate the value of a target policy using offline data collected from potentially different policies. In real-world applications, however, logged data often suffers from missingness. While OPE has been extensively studied in the literature, a theoretical understanding of how missing data affects OPE results remains unclear. In this paper, we investigate OPE in the presence of monotone missingness and theoretically demonstrate that the value estimates remain unbiased under ignorable missingness but can be biased under nonignorable (informative) missingness. To retain the consistency of value estimation, we propose an inverse probability weighted value estimator and conduct statistical inference to quantify the uncertainty of the estimates. Through a series of numerical experiments, we empirically demonstrate that our proposed estimator yields a more reliable value inference under missing data.

Efficient $Q$-Learning and Actor-Critic Methods for Robust Average Reward Reinforcement Learning

We present the first $Q$-learning and actor-critic algorithms for robust average reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with non-asymptotic convergence under contamination, TV distance and Wasserstein distance uncertainty sets. We show that the robust $Q$ Bellman operator is a strict contractive mapping with respect to a carefully constructed semi-norm with constant functions being quotiented out. This property supports a stochastic approximation update, that learns the optimal robust $Q$ function in $\tilde{\cO}(\epsilon^{-2})$ samples. We also show that the same idea can be used for robust $Q$ function estimation, which can be further used for critic estimation. Coupling it with theories in robust policy mirror descent update, we present a natural actor-critic algorithm that attains an $\epsilon$-optimal robust policy in $\tilde{\cO}(\epsilon^{-3})$ samples. These results advance the theory of distributionally robust reinforcement learning in the average reward setting.

Deep regularization networks for inverse problems with noisy operators

A supervised learning approach is proposed for regularization of large inverse problems where the main operator is built from noisy data. This is germane to superresolution imaging via the sampling indicators of the inverse scattering theory. We aim to accelerate the spatiotemporal regularization process for this class of inverse problems to enable real-time imaging. In this approach, a neural operator maps each pattern on the right-hand side of the scattering equation to its affiliated regularization parameter. The network is trained in two steps which entails: (1) training on low-resolution regularization maps furnished by the Morozov discrepancy principle with nonoptimal thresholds, and (2) optimizing network predictions through minimization of the Tikhonov loss function regulated by the validation loss. Step 2 allows for tailoring of the approximate maps of Step 1 toward construction of higher quality images. This approach enables direct learning from test data and dispenses with the need for a-priori knowledge of the optimal regularization maps. The network, trained on low-resolution data, quickly generates dense regularization maps for high-resolution imaging. We highlight the importance of the training loss function on the network's generalizability. In particular, we demonstrate that networks informed by the logic of discrepancy principle lead to images of higher contrast. In this case, the training process involves many-objective optimization. We propose a new method to adaptively select the appropriate loss weights during training without requiring an additional optimization process. The proposed approach is synthetically examined for imaging damage evolution in an elastic plate. The results indicate that the discrepancy-informed regularization networks not only accelerate the imaging process, but also remarkably enhance the image quality in complex environments.

Autonomous Flights inside Narrow Tunnels

Multirotors are usually desired to enter confined narrow tunnels that are barely accessible to humans in various applications including inspection, search and rescue, and so on. This task is extremely challenging since the lack of geometric features and illuminations, together with the limited field of view, cause problems in perception; the restricted space and significant ego airflow disturbances induce control issues. This paper introduces an autonomous aerial system designed for navigation through tunnels as narrow as 0.5 m in diameter. The real-time and online system includes a virtual omni-directional perception module tailored for the mission and a novel motion planner that incorporates perception and ego airflow disturbance factors modeled using camera projections and computational fluid dynamics analyses, respectively. Extensive flight experiments on a custom-designed quadrotor are conducted in multiple realistic narrow tunnels to validate the superior performance of the system, even over human pilots, proving its potential for real applications. Additionally, a deployment pipeline on other multirotor platforms is outlined and open-source packages are provided for future developments.

Lookahead Q-Cache: Achieving More Consistent KV Cache Eviction via Pseudo Query

Large language models (LLMs) rely on key-value cache (KV cache) to accelerate decoding by reducing redundant computations. However, the KV cache memory usage grows substantially with longer text sequences, posing challenges for efficient deployment. Existing KV cache eviction methods prune tokens using prefilling-stage attention scores, causing inconsistency with actual inference queries, especially under tight memory budgets. In this paper, we propose Lookahead Q-Cache (LAQ), a novel eviction framework that generates low-cost pseudo lookahead queries to better approximate the true decoding-stage queries. By using these lookahead queries as the observation window for importance estimation, LAQ achieves more consistent and accurate KV cache eviction aligned with real inference scenarios. Experimental results on LongBench and Needle-in-a-Haystack benchmarks show that LAQ outperforms existing methods across various budget levels, achieving a 1 $\sim$ 4 point improvement on LongBench under limited cache budget. Moreover, LAQ is complementary to existing approaches and can be flexibly combined to yield further improvements.

Think Before You Accept: Semantic Reflective Verification for Faster Speculative Decoding

Large language models (LLMs) suffer from high inference latency due to the auto-regressive decoding process. Speculative decoding accelerates inference by generating multiple draft tokens using a lightweight model and verifying them in parallel. However, existing verification methods rely heavily on distributional consistency while overlooking semantic correctness, thereby limiting the potential speedup of speculative decoding. While some methods employ additional models for relaxed verification of draft tokens, they often fail to generalize effectively to more diverse or open-domain settings. In this work, we propose Reflective Verification, a training-free and semantics-aware approach that achieves a better trade-off between correctness and efficiency. Specifically, we leverage the inherent reflective capacity of LLMs to semantically assess the correctness of draft tokens in parallel during verification. Using prompt-based probing, we obtain both the original and reflective distributions of draft tokens in a single forward pass. The fusion of these distributions enables semantic-level verification of draft tokens that incorporates both consistency and correctness. Experiments across multiple domain benchmarks and model scales demonstrate that our method significantly increases the acceptance length of draft tokens without compromising model performance. Furthermore, we find that the proposed Reflective Verification is orthogonal to existing statistical verification methods, and their combination yields additional 5$\sim$15\% improvements in decoding speed.

Global Convergence for Average Reward Constrained MDPs with Primal-Dual Actor Critic Algorithm

This paper investigates infinite-horizon average reward Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with general parametrization. We propose a Primal-Dual Natural Actor-Critic algorithm that adeptly manages constraints while ensuring a high convergence rate. In particular, our algorithm achieves global convergence and constraint violation rates of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/\sqrt{T})$ over a horizon of length $T$ when the mixing time, $\tau_{\mathrm{mix}}$, is known to the learner. In absence of knowledge of $\tau_{\mathrm{mix}}$, the achievable rates change to $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/T^{0.5-\epsilon})$ provided that $T \geq \tilde{\mathcal{O}}\left(\tau_{\mathrm{mix}}^{2/\epsilon}\right)$. Our results match the theoretical lower bound for Markov Decision Processes and establish a new benchmark in the theoretical exploration of average reward CMDPs.

Self-Learning Hyperspectral and Multispectral Image Fusion via Adaptive Residual Guided Subspace Diffusion Model

Hyperspectral and multispectral image (HSI-MSI) fusion involves combining a low-resolution hyperspectral image (LR-HSI) with a high-resolution multispectral image (HR-MSI) to generate a high-resolution hyperspectral image (HR-HSI). Most deep learning-based methods for HSI-MSI fusion rely on large amounts of hyperspectral data for supervised training, which is often scarce in practical applications. In this paper, we propose a self-learning Adaptive Residual Guided Subspace Diffusion Model (ARGS-Diff), which only utilizes the observed images without any extra training data. Specifically, as the LR-HSI contains spectral information and the HR-MSI contains spatial information, we design two lightweight spectral and spatial diffusion models to separately learn the spectral and spatial distributions from them. Then, we use these two models to reconstruct HR-HSI from two low-dimensional components, i.e, the spectral basis and the reduced coefficient, during the reverse diffusion process. Furthermore, we introduce an Adaptive Residual Guided Module (ARGM), which refines the two components through a residual guided function at each sampling step, thereby stabilizing the sampling process. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that ARGS-Diff outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of both performance and computational efficiency in the field of HSI-MSI fusion. Code is available at https://github.com/Zhu1116/ARGS-Diff.