RFMI: Estimating Mutual Information on Rectified Flow for Text-to-Image Alignment

Rectified Flow (RF) models trained with a Flow matching framework have achieved state-of-the-art performance on Text-to-Image (T2I) conditional generation. Yet, multiple benchmarks show that synthetic images can still suffer from poor alignment with the prompt, i.e., images show wrong attribute binding, subject positioning, numeracy, etc. While the literature offers many methods to improve T2I alignment, they all consider only Diffusion Models, and require auxiliary datasets, scoring models, and linguistic analysis of the prompt. In this paper we aim to address these gaps. First, we introduce RFMI, a novel Mutual Information (MI) estimator for RF models that uses the pre-trained model itself for the MI estimation. Then, we investigate a self-supervised fine-tuning approach for T2I alignment based on RFMI that does not require auxiliary information other than the pre-trained model itself. Specifically, a fine-tuning set is constructed by selecting synthetic images generated from the pre-trained RF model and having high point-wise MI between images and prompts. Our experiments on MI estimation benchmarks demonstrate the validity of RFMI, and empirical fine-tuning on SD3.5-Medium confirms the effectiveness of RFMI for improving T2I alignment while maintaining image quality.

Learning to Match Unpaired Data with Minimum Entropy Coupling

Multimodal data is a precious asset enabling a variety of downstream tasks in machine learning. However, real-world data collected across different modalities is often not paired, which is a significant challenge to learn a joint distribution. A prominent approach to address the modality coupling problem is Minimum Entropy Coupling (MEC), which seeks to minimize the joint Entropy, while satisfying constraints on the marginals. Existing approaches to the MEC problem focus on finite, discrete distributions, limiting their application for cases involving continuous data. In this work, we propose a novel method to solve the continuous MEC problem, using well-known generative diffusion models that learn to approximate and minimize the joint Entropy through a cooperative scheme, while satisfying a relaxed version of the marginal constraints. We empirically demonstrate that our method, DDMEC, is general and can be easily used to address challenging tasks, including unsupervised single-cell multi-omics data alignment and unpaired image translation, outperforming specialized methods.

INFO-SEDD: Continuous Time Markov Chains as Scalable Information Metrics Estimators

Information-theoretic quantities play a crucial role in understanding non-linear relationships between random variables and are widely used across scientific disciplines. However, estimating these quantities remains an open problem, particularly in the case of high-dimensional discrete distributions. Current approaches typically rely on embedding discrete data into a continuous space and applying neural estimators originally designed for continuous distributions, a process that may not fully capture the discrete nature of the underlying data. We consider Continuous-Time Markov Chains (CTMCs), stochastic processes on discrete state-spaces which have gained popularity due to their generative modeling applications. In this work, we introduce INFO-SEDD, a novel method for estimating information-theoretic quantities of discrete data, including mutual information and entropy. Our approach requires the training of a single parametric model, offering significant computational and memory advantages. Additionally, it seamlessly integrates with pretrained networks, allowing for efficient reuse of pretrained generative models. To evaluate our approach, we construct a challenging synthetic benchmark. Our experiments demonstrate that INFO-SEDD is robust and outperforms neural competitors that rely on embedding techniques. Moreover, we validate our method on a real-world task: estimating the entropy of an Ising model. Overall, INFO-SEDD outperforms competing methods and shows scalability to high-dimensional scenarios, paving the way for new applications where estimating MI between discrete distribution is the focus. The promising results in this complex, high-dimensional scenario highlight INFO-SEDD as a powerful new estimator in the toolkit for information-theoretical analysis.

In Praise of Stubbornness: The Case for Cognitive-Dissonance-Aware Knowledge Updates in LLMs

Despite remarkable capabilities, large language models (LLMs) struggle to continually update their knowledge without catastrophic forgetting. In contrast, humans effortlessly integrate new information, detect conflicts with existing beliefs, and selectively update their mental models. This paper introduces a cognitive-inspired investigation paradigm to study continual knowledge updating in LLMs. We implement two key components inspired by human cognition: (1) Dissonance and Familiarity Awareness, analyzing model behavior to classify information as novel, familiar, or dissonant; and (2) Targeted Network Updates, which track neural activity to identify frequently used (stubborn) and rarely used (plastic) neurons. Through carefully designed experiments in controlled settings, we uncover a number of empirical findings demonstrating the potential of this approach. First, dissonance detection is feasible using simple activation and gradient features, suggesting potential for cognitive-inspired training. Second, we find that non-dissonant updates largely preserve prior knowledge regardless of targeting strategy, revealing inherent robustness in LLM knowledge integration. Most critically, we discover that dissonant updates prove catastrophically destructive to the model's knowledge base, indiscriminately affecting even information unrelated to the current updates. This suggests fundamental limitations in how neural networks handle contradictions and motivates the need for new approaches to knowledge updating that better mirror human cognitive mechanisms.

Latent Abstractions in Generative Diffusion Models

In this work we study how diffusion-based generative models produce high-dimensional data, such as an image, by implicitly relying on a manifestation of a low-dimensional set of latent abstractions, that guide the generative process. We present a novel theoretical framework that extends NLF, and that offers a unique perspective on SDE-based generative models. The development of our theory relies on a novel formulation of the joint (state and measurement) dynamics, and an information-theoretic measure of the influence of the system state on the measurement process. According to our theory, diffusion models can be cast as a system of SDE, describing a non-linear filter in which the evolution of unobservable latent abstractions steers the dynamics of an observable measurement process (corresponding to the generative pathways). In addition, we present an empirical study to validate our theory and previous empirical results on the emergence of latent abstractions at different stages of the generative process.

Information Theoretic Text-to-Image Alignment

Diffusion models for Text-to-Image (T2I) conditional generation have seen tremendous success recently. Despite their success, accurately capturing user intentions with these models still requires a laborious trial and error process. This challenge is commonly identified as a model alignment problem, an issue that has attracted considerable attention by the research community. Instead of relying on fine-grained linguistic analyses of prompts, human annotation, or auxiliary vision-language models to steer image generation, in this work we present a novel method that relies on an information-theoretic alignment measure. In a nutshell, our method uses self-supervised fine-tuning and relies on point-wise mutual information between prompts and images to define a synthetic training set to induce model alignment. Our comparative analysis shows that our method is on-par or superior to the state-of-the-art, yet requires nothing but a pre-trained denoising network to estimate MI and a lightweight fine-tuning strategy.

S$Ω$I: Score-based O-INFORMATION Estimation

The analysis of scientific data and complex multivariate systems requires information quantities that capture relationships among multiple random variables. Recently, new information-theoretic measures have been developed to overcome the shortcomings of classical ones, such as mutual information, that are restricted to considering pairwise interactions. Among them, the concept of information synergy and redundancy is crucial for understanding the high-order dependencies between variables. One of the most prominent and versatile measures based on this concept is O-information, which provides a clear and scalable way to quantify the synergy-redundancy balance in multivariate systems. However, its practical application is limited to simplified cases. In this work, we introduce S$\Omega$I, which allows for the first time to compute O-information without restrictive assumptions about the system. Our experiments validate our approach on synthetic data, and demonstrate the effectiveness of S$\Omega$I in the context of a real-world use case.

MINDE: Mutual Information Neural Diffusion Estimation

In this work we present a new method for the estimation of Mutual Information (MI) between random variables. Our approach is based on an original interpretation of the Girsanov theorem, which allows us to use score-based diffusion models to estimate the Kullback Leibler divergence between two densities as a difference between their score functions. As a by-product, our method also enables the estimation of the entropy of random variables. Armed with such building blocks, we present a general recipe to measure MI, which unfolds in two directions: one uses conditional diffusion process, whereas the other uses joint diffusion processes that allow simultaneous modelling of two random variables. Our results, which derive from a thorough experimental protocol over all the variants of our approach, indicate that our method is more accurate than the main alternatives from the literature, especially for challenging distributions. Furthermore, our methods pass MI self-consistency tests, including data processing and additivity under independence, which instead are a pain-point of existing methods.

Multi-modal Latent Diffusion

Multi-modal data-sets are ubiquitous in modern applications, and multi-modal Variational Autoencoders are a popular family of models that aim to learn a joint representation of the different modalities. However, existing approaches suffer from a coherence-quality tradeoff, where models with good generation quality lack generative coherence across modalities, and vice versa. We discuss the limitations underlying the unsatisfactory performance of existing methods, to motivate the need for a different approach. We propose a novel method that uses a set of independently trained, uni-modal, deterministic autoencoders. Individual latent variables are concatenated into a common latent space, which is fed to a masked diffusion model to enable generative modeling. We also introduce a new multi-time training method to learn the conditional score network for multi-modal diffusion. Our methodology substantially outperforms competitors in both generation quality and coherence, as shown through an extensive experimental campaign.

One-Line-of-Code Data Mollification Improves Optimization of Likelihood-based Generative Models

Generative Models (GMs) have attracted considerable attention due to their tremendous success in various domains, such as computer vision where they are capable to generate impressive realistic-looking images. Likelihood-based GMs are attractive due to the possibility to generate new data by a single model evaluation. However, they typically achieve lower sample quality compared to state-of-the-art score-based diffusion models (DMs). This paper provides a significant step in the direction of addressing this limitation. The idea is to borrow one of the strengths of score-based DMs, which is the ability to perform accurate density estimation in low-density regions and to address manifold overfitting by means of data mollification. We connect data mollification through the addition of Gaussian noise to Gaussian homotopy, which is a well-known technique to improve optimization. Data mollification can be implemented by adding one line of code in the optimization loop, and we demonstrate that this provides a boost in generation quality of likelihood-based GMs, without computational overheads. We report results on image data sets with popular likelihood-based GMs, including variants of variational autoencoders and normalizing flows, showing large improvements in FID score.