LENS: In-Context Search via Latent Evidence Exploration over Dynamic Raw Documents

LLM agents increasingly answer questions over dynamic raw-document collections, where files may change before preprocessing, and relevant evidence (spans, sections, pages, or tables) is query-dependent. Existing retrieval-augmented approaches pre-materialize evidence via fixed chunking, embeddings, or persistent indexes: effective for lookup, yet costly, stale-prone, and committed to a granularity before the query is known. We formulate in-context search as Budgeted Evidence Localization over a latent evidence space induced by dynamic raw documents and propose LENS (Latent Evidence Exploration and Search), an index-free framework. Instead of pre-materializing the evidence space, LENS maintains a query-conditioned belief over candidate units, iteratively selecting candidates via complementary lexical, local, and exploratory proposal policies, updating the belief via an LLM relevance oracle, and narrowing toward high-posterior regions under a controllable budget. Evidence is consolidated into compact, source-grounded regions of interest and compressed into self-organizing knowledge clusters reused across related queries. On a controlled 500-question evaluation with matched corpus snapshots, LENS reaches 62.4% exact match and 84.8% evidence recall vs. 65.2% exact match but 50.4% evidence recall for a ReAct-style baseline. Across scales, LENS gives the strongest supporting-fact localization and answer grounding. On a fixed 150-question fullwiki subset over the raw Wikipedia dump with zero indexing, LENS and ReAct are nearly tied in official answer quality (43.3% vs. 42.7% EM), with LENS grounding more answers in retrieved evidence (84.0% vs. 70.7%). A no-retrieval Closed-Book reference highlights the contribution of model memory. LENS is query-ready after corpus changes, needs no preprocessing or persistent index, and preserves source-grounded evidence localization throughout.

TreeAdapter: Hierarchical Taxonomy-Guided Adapter Composition for Fine-Grained Species Image Generation

Although general text-to-image models excel in open-domain generation, their performance degrades significantly in specialized downstream domains, particularly when generating images of rare biological species. Hindered by long-tailed distributions, general models struggle to capture subtle fine-grained details, while per-species fine-tuning methods over-isolate individual species and consequently ignore the shared visual features among closely related taxa. To address this, we propose TreeAdapter, a novel framework that explicitly leverages hierarchical taxonomic data. Rather than using a monolithic model or independent per-species modules, TreeAdapter attaches lightweight adapters to every node of the taxonomic tree. Specifically, leaf-node adapters capture species-specific visual traits, while internal-node adapters encapsulate shared semantics among descendant taxa. We introduce a two-stage training paradigm where ancestor adapters are optimized to model only the residual visual features unexplained by their descendants. This model architecture and training paradigm enable the model to fully leverage hierarchical information, ensuring the accurate generation of visual features for each species. Extensive experiments across three large-scale biodiversity benchmarks demonstrate that TreeAdapter achieves state-of-the-art fine-grained generation quality, outperforming both general-purpose and domain-specific baselines.

Which Tokens Matter? Adaptive Token Selection for RLVR with the Relative Surprisal Index

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a powerful tool for propelling Large Language Models (LLMs) beyond imitation-based training towards more robust reasoning capabilities. Among existing approaches, RL with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a pivotal paradigm for advancing LLM reasoning. Despite its empirical success, recent studies have offered different insights. One line of inquiry advocates prioritizing high-entropy token positions during training, while another perspective cautions against allowing low-probability tokens to dominate gradient updates. Notably, although high-entropy tokens are usually correlated with low probability, both paradigms empirically yield substantial performance gains. In this work, we argue that evaluating sampled-token probability or entropy in isolation is insufficient to capture the policy optimization dynamics. To resolve this tension, we introduce the Relative Surprisal Index (RSI), a principled, information-theoretic metric that naturally couples the token's entropy with the probability of the selected token. We show that, under mild conditions, RSI is related to the local ratio between the first-order variations of the logit-gradient norm and predictive entropy under a selected-logit perturbation. Building on RSI, we propose RSI Selection (RSI-S), an entropy-adaptive token filtering method that retains tokens within a stable RSI interval. RSI-S successfully reconciles previous contradictory paradigms and filters out both redundant low-surprisal tokens and unstable high-surprisal tail tokens. Empirical evaluations show that RSI-S achieves higher avg@32 accuracy across different model scales (Qwen2.5-1.5B, 3B, and 7B) on AIME and AMC benchmarks: RSI-S improves avg@32 accuracy by 2--3 percentage points over GRPO. Overall, RSI offers a promising perspective for RLVR improvement.

Compressing Image Style Training into a Single Model Forward

Diffusion-based style transfer must balance inference efficiency with stylization fidelity. Adapter-based methods are efficient, but they inject style as an external condition and can either weaken reference-specific appearance or copy reference semantics into the generated image. Optimization-based personalization methods such as LoRA internalize style more effectively, but require a separate training process for every new style. We introduce i2L (image-to-LoRA), a framework that amortizes style LoRA training into a single forward pass. Given one or more reference images, i2L predicts LoRA weights for a text-to-image model, enabling immediate style instantiation without per-style optimization. The architecture combines an image encoder, learnable LoRA queries, and compressed decoding heads that generate adapted matrices. Training on semantically diverse style pairs encourages the predictor to preserve appearance cues while suppressing reference-content copying. Experiments on Z-Image, FLUX.2, and Hidream-O1 show that i2L improves style fidelity, prompt alignment, and perceptual quality over existing baselines. Because i2L produces explicit LoRA weights, it also supports asymmetric classifier-free guidance, multi-reference style fusion, and composition with controllable-generation modules.

Diffusion Templates: A Unified Plugin Framework for Controllable Diffusion

Controllable diffusion methods have substantially expanded the practical utility of diffusion models, but they are typically developed as isolated, backbone-specific systems with incompatible training pipelines, parameter formats, and runtime hooks. This fragmentation makes it difficult to reuse infrastructure across tasks, transfer capabilities across backbones, or compose multiple controls within a single generation pipeline. We present Diffusion Templates, a unified and open plugin framework that decouples base-model inference from controllable capability injection. The framework is organized around three components: Template models that map arbitrary task-specific inputs to an intermediate capability representation, a Template cache that functions as a standardized interface for capability injection, and a Template pipeline that loads, merges, and injects one or more Template caches into the base diffusion runtime. Because the interface is defined at the systems level rather than tied to a specific control architecture, heterogeneous capability carriers such as KV-Cache and LoRA can be supported under the same abstraction. Based on this design, we build a diverse model zoo spanning structural control, brightness adjustment, color adjustment, image editing, super-resolution, sharpness enhancement, aesthetic alignment, content reference, local inpainting, and age control. These case studies show that Diffusion Templates can unify a broad range of controllable generation tasks while preserving modularity, composability, and practical extensibility across rapidly evolving diffusion backbones. All resources will be open sourced, including code, models, and datasets.

Spectral Evolution Search: Efficient Inference-Time Scaling for Reward-Aligned Image Generation

Inference-time scaling offers a versatile paradigm for aligning visual generative models with downstream objectives without parameter updates. However, existing approaches that optimize the high-dimensional initial noise suffer from severe inefficiency, as many search directions exert negligible influence on the final generation. We show that this inefficiency is closely related to a spectral bias in generative dynamics: model sensitivity to initial perturbations diminishes rapidly as frequency increases. Building on this insight, we propose Spectral Evolution Search (SES), a plug-and-play framework for initial noise optimization that executes gradient-free evolutionary search within a low-frequency subspace. Theoretically, we derive the Spectral Scaling Prediction from perturbation propagation dynamics, which explains the systematic differences in the impact of perturbations across frequencies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SES significantly advances the Pareto frontier of generation quality versus computational cost, consistently outperforming strong baselines under equivalent budgets.

VIRAL: Visual In-Context Reasoning via Analogy in Diffusion Transformers

Replicating In-Context Learning (ICL) in computer vision remains challenging due to task heterogeneity. We propose \textbf{VIRAL}, a framework that elicits visual reasoning from a pre-trained image editing model by formulating ICL as conditional generation via visual analogy ($x_s : x_t :: x_q : y_q$). We adapt a frozen Diffusion Transformer (DiT) using role-aware multi-image conditioning and introduce a Mixture-of-Experts LoRA to mitigate gradient interference across diverse tasks. Additionally, to bridge the gaps in current visual context datasets, we curate a large-scale dataset spanning perception, restoration, and editing. Experiments demonstrate that VIRAL outperforms existing methods, validating that a unified V-ICL paradigm can handle the majority of visual tasks, including open-domain editing. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/VIRAL-744A

Comprehensive Evaluation and Analysis for NSFW Concept Erasure in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Text-to-image diffusion models have gained widespread application across various domains, demonstrating remarkable creative potential. However, the strong generalization capabilities of diffusion models can inadvertently lead to the generation of not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content, posing significant risks to their safe deployment. While several concept erasure methods have been proposed to mitigate the issue associated with NSFW content, a comprehensive evaluation of their effectiveness across various scenarios remains absent. To bridge this gap, we introduce a full-pipeline toolkit specifically designed for concept erasure and conduct the first systematic study of NSFW concept erasure methods. By examining the interplay between the underlying mechanisms and empirical observations, we provide in-depth insights and practical guidance for the effective application of concept erasure methods in various real-world scenarios, with the aim of advancing the understanding of content safety in diffusion models and establishing a solid foundation for future research and development in this critical area.

Nexus-Gen: A Unified Model for Image Understanding, Generation, and Editing

Unified multimodal large language models (MLLMs) aim to integrate multimodal understanding and generation abilities through a single framework. Despite their versatility, existing open-source unified models exhibit performance gaps against domain-specific architectures. To bridge this gap, we present Nexus-Gen, a unified model that synergizes the language reasoning capabilities of LLMs with the image synthesis power of diffusion models. To align the embedding space of the LLM and diffusion model, we conduct a dual-phase alignment training process. (1) The autoregressive LLM learns to predict image embeddings conditioned on multimodal inputs, while (2) the vision decoder is trained to reconstruct high-fidelity images from these embeddings. During training the LLM, we identified a critical discrepancy between the autoregressive paradigm's training and inference phases, where error accumulation in continuous embedding space severely degrades generation quality. To avoid this issue, we introduce a prefilled autoregression strategy that prefills input sequence with position-embedded special tokens instead of continuous embeddings. Through dual-phase training, Nexus-Gen has developed the integrated capability to comprehensively address the image understanding, generation and editing tasks. All models, datasets, and codes are published at https://github.com/modelscope/Nexus-Gen.git to facilitate further advancements across the field.

Breaking the Modality Barrier: Universal Embedding Learning with Multimodal LLMs

The Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) framework has become a widely used approach for multimodal representation learning, particularly in image-text retrieval and clustering. However, its efficacy is constrained by three key limitations: (1) text token truncation, (2) isolated image-text encoding, and (3) deficient compositionality due to bag-of-words behavior. While recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant advances in generalized vision-language understanding, their potential for learning transferable multimodal representations remains underexplored.In this work, we present UniME (Universal Multimodal Embedding), a novel two-stage framework that leverages MLLMs to learn discriminative representations for diverse downstream tasks. In the first stage, we perform textual discriminative knowledge distillation from a powerful LLM-based teacher model to enhance the embedding capability of the MLLM\'s language component. In the second stage, we introduce hard negative enhanced instruction tuning to further advance discriminative representation learning. Specifically, we initially mitigate false negative contamination and then sample multiple hard negatives per instance within each batch, forcing the model to focus on challenging samples. This approach not only improves discriminative power but also enhances instruction-following ability in downstream tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on the MMEB benchmark and multiple retrieval tasks, including short and long caption retrieval and compositional retrieval. Results demonstrate that UniME achieves consistent performance improvement across all tasks, exhibiting superior discriminative and compositional capabilities.