Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
Abstract:Block-wise decoding effectively improves the inference speed and quality in diffusion language models (DLMs) by combining inter-block sequential denoising and intra-block parallel unmasking. However, existing block-wise decoding methods typically partition blocks in a rigid and fixed manner, which inevitably fragments complete semantic or syntactic constituents, leading to suboptimal performance. Inspired by the entropy reduction hypothesis (ERH), we recognize that constituent boundaries offer greater opportunities for uncertainty reduction, which motivates us to employ entropy analysis for identifying constituent boundaries. Therefore, we propose Swordsman, an entropy-driven adaptive block-wise decoding framework for DLMs. Swordsman adaptively partitions blocks by identifying entropy shifts between adjacent tokens to better align with semantic or syntactic constituent boundaries. In addition, Swordsman dynamically adjusts unmasking thresholds conditioned on the real-time unmasking status within a block, further improving both efficiency and stability. As a training-free framework, supported by KV Cache, Swordsman demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across extensive evaluations.
Abstract:Visual AutoRegressive modeling (VAR) suffers from substantial computational cost due to the massive token count involved. Failing to account for the continuous evolution of modeling dynamics, existing VAR token reduction methods face three key limitations: heuristic stage partition, non-adaptive schedules, and limited acceleration scope, thereby leaving significant acceleration potential untapped. Since entropy variation intrinsically reflects the transition of predictive uncertainty, it offers a principled measure to capture modeling dynamics evolution. Therefore, we propose NOVA, a training-free token reduction acceleration framework for VAR models via entropy analysis. NOVA adaptively determines the acceleration activation scale during inference by online identifying the inflection point of scale entropy growth. Through scale-linkage and layer-linkage ratio adjustment, NOVA dynamically computes distinct token reduction ratios for each scale and layer, pruning low-entropy tokens while reusing the cache derived from the residuals at the prior scale to accelerate inference and maintain generation quality. Extensive experiments and analyses validate NOVA as a simple yet effective training-free acceleration framework.
Abstract:Recent advances in training-free video editing have enabled lightweight and precise cross-frame generation by leveraging pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models. However, existing methods often rely on heuristic frame selection to maintain temporal consistency during DDIM inversion, which introduces manual bias and reduces the scalability of end-to-end inference. In this paper, we propose~\textbf{VALA} (\textbf{V}ariational \textbf{A}lignment for \textbf{L}atent \textbf{A}nchors), a variational alignment module that adaptively selects key frames and compresses their latent features into semantic anchors for consistent video editing. To learn meaningful assignments, VALA propose a variational framework with a contrastive learning objective. Therefore, it can transform cross-frame latent representations into compressed latent anchors that preserve both content and temporal coherence. Our method can be fully integrated into training-free text-to-image based video editing models. Extensive experiments on real-world video editing benchmarks show that VALA achieves state-of-the-art performance in inversion fidelity, editing quality, and temporal consistency, while offering improved efficiency over prior methods.
Abstract:AutoRegressive (AR) models have demonstrated competitive performance in image generation, achieving results comparable to those of diffusion models. However, their token-by-token image generation mechanism remains computationally intensive and existing solutions such as VAR often lead to limited sample diversity. In this work, we propose a Nested AutoRegressive~(NestAR) model, which proposes nested AutoRegressive architectures in generating images. NestAR designs multi-scale modules in a hierarchical order. These different scaled modules are constructed in an AR architecture, where one larger-scale module is conditioned on outputs from its previous smaller-scale module. Within each module, NestAR uses another AR structure to generate ``patches'' of tokens. The proposed nested AR architecture reduces the overall complexity from $\mathcal{O}(n)$ to $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$ in generating $n$ image tokens, as well as increases image diversities. NestAR further incorporates flow matching loss to use continuous tokens, and develops objectives to coordinate these multi-scale modules in model training. NestAR achieves competitive image generation performance while significantly lowering computational cost.
Abstract:Training-free video editing (VE) models tend to fall back on gender stereotypes when rendering profession-related prompts. We propose \textbf{FAME} for \textit{Fairness-aware Attention-modulated Video Editing} that mitigates profession-related gender biases while preserving prompt alignment and temporal consistency for coherent VE. We derive fairness embeddings from existing minority representations by softly injecting debiasing tokens into the text encoder. Simultaneously, FAME integrates fairness modulation into both temporal self attention and prompt-to-region cross attention to mitigate the motion corruption and temporal inconsistency caused by directly introducing fairness cues. For temporal self attention, FAME introduces a region constrained attention mask combined with time decay weighting, which enhances intra-region coherence while suppressing irrelevant inter-region interactions. For cross attention, it reweights tokens to region matching scores by incorporating fairness sensitive similarity masks derived from debiasing prompt embeddings. Together, these modulations keep fairness-sensitive semantics tied to the right visual regions and prevent temporal drift across frames. Extensive experiments on new VE fairness-oriented benchmark \textit{FairVE} demonstrate that FAME achieves stronger fairness alignment and semantic fidelity, surpassing existing VE baselines.
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) hold significant promise for improving clinical decision support and reducing physician burnout by synthesizing complex, longitudinal cancer Electronic Health Records (EHRs). However, their implementation in this critical field faces three primary challenges: the inability to effectively process the extensive length and multilingual nature of patient records for accurate temporal analysis; a heightened risk of clinical hallucination, as conventional grounding techniques such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) do not adequately incorporate process-oriented clinical guidelines; and unreliable evaluation metrics that hinder the validation of AI systems in oncology. To address these issues, we propose CliCARE, a framework for Grounding Large Language Models in Clinical Guidelines for Decision Support over Longitudinal Cancer Electronic Health Records. The framework operates by transforming unstructured, longitudinal EHRs into patient-specific Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) to capture long-range dependencies, and then grounding the decision support process by aligning these real-world patient trajectories with a normative guideline knowledge graph. This approach provides oncologists with evidence-grounded decision support by generating a high-fidelity clinical summary and an actionable recommendation. We validated our framework using large-scale, longitudinal data from a private Chinese cancer dataset and the public English MIMIC-IV dataset. In these diverse settings, CliCARE significantly outperforms strong baselines, including leading long-context LLMs and Knowledge Graph-enhanced RAG methods. The clinical validity of our results is supported by a robust evaluation protocol, which demonstrates a high correlation with assessments made by expert oncologists.
Abstract:Group recommendation over social media streams has attracted significant attention due to its wide applications in domains such as e-commerce, entertainment, and online news broadcasting. By leveraging social connections and group behaviours, group recommendation (GR) aims to provide more accurate and engaging content to a set of users rather than individuals. Recently, influence-aware GR has emerged as a promising direction, as it considers the impact of social influence on group decision-making. In earlier work, we proposed Influence-aware Group Recommendation (IGR) to solve this task. However, this task remains challenging due to three key factors: the large and ever-growing scale of social graphs, the inherently dynamic nature of influence propagation within user groups, and the high computational overhead of real-time group-item matching. To tackle these issues, we propose an Enhanced Influence-aware Group Recommendation (EIGR) framework. First, we introduce a Graph Extraction-based Sampling (GES) strategy to minimise redundancy across multiple temporal social graphs and effectively capture the evolving dynamics of both groups and items. Second, we design a novel DYnamic Independent Cascade (DYIC) model to predict how influence propagates over time across social items and user groups. Finally, we develop a two-level hash-based User Group Index (UG-Index) to efficiently organise user groups and enable real-time recommendation generation. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework, EIGR, consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both effectiveness and efficiency.
Abstract:Patent similarity evaluation plays a critical role in intellectual property analysis. However, existing methods often overlook the intricate structure of patent documents, which integrate technical specifications, legal boundaries, and application contexts. We introduce PatentMind, a novel framework for patent similarity assessment based on a Multi-Aspect Reasoning Graph (MARG). PatentMind decomposes patents into three core dimensions: technical feature, application domain, and claim scope, to compute dimension-specific similarity scores. These scores are dynamically weighted through a four-stage reasoning process which integrates contextual signals to emulate expert-level judgment. To support evaluation, we construct PatentSimBench, a human-annotated benchmark comprising 500 patent pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that PatentMind achieves a strong correlation ($r=0.938$) with expert annotations, significantly outperforming embedding-based models and advanced prompt engineering methods.These results highlight the effectiveness of modular reasoning frameworks in overcoming key limitations of embedding-based methods for analyzing patent similarity.
Abstract:Current text-to-image diffusion generation typically employs complete-text conditioning. Due to the intricate syntax, diffusion transformers (DiTs) inherently suffer from a comprehension defect of complete-text captions. One-fly complete-text input either overlooks critical semantic details or causes semantic confusion by simultaneously modeling diverse semantic primitive types. To mitigate this defect of DiTs, we propose a novel split-text conditioning framework named DiT-ST. This framework converts a complete-text caption into a split-text caption, a collection of simplified sentences, to explicitly express various semantic primitives and their interconnections. The split-text caption is then injected into different denoising stages of DiT-ST in a hierarchical and incremental manner. Specifically, DiT-ST leverages Large Language Models to parse captions, extracting diverse primitives and hierarchically sorting out and constructing these primitives into a split-text input. Moreover, we partition the diffusion denoising process according to its differential sensitivities to diverse semantic primitive types and determine the appropriate timesteps to incrementally inject tokens of diverse semantic primitive types into input tokens via cross-attention. In this way, DiT-ST enhances the representation learning of specific semantic primitive types across different stages. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed DiT-ST in mitigating the complete-text comprehension defect.
Abstract:Natural language generation (NLG) metrics play a central role in evaluating generated texts, but are not well suited for the structural and legal characteristics of patent documents. Large language models (LLMs) offer strong potential in automating patent generation, yet research on evaluating LLM-generated patents remains limited, especially in evaluating the generation quality of patent claims, which are central to defining the scope of protection. Effective claim evaluation requires addressing legal validity, technical accuracy, and structural compliance. To address this gap, we introduce PatentScore, a multi-dimensional evaluation framework for assessing LLM-generated patent claims. PatentScore incorporates: (1) hierarchical decomposition for claim analysis; (2) domain-specific validation patterns based on legal and technical standards; and (3) scoring across structural, semantic, and legal dimensions. Unlike general-purpose NLG metrics, PatentScore reflects patent-specific constraints and document structures, enabling evaluation beyond surface similarity. We evaluate 400 GPT-4o-mini generated Claim 1s and report a Pearson correlation of $r = 0.819$ with expert annotations, outperforming existing NLG metrics. Furthermore, we conduct additional evaluations using open models such as Claude-3.5-Haiku and Gemini-1.5-flash, all of which show strong correlations with expert judgments, confirming the robustness and generalizability of our framework.