Martingale Foresight Sampling: A Principled Approach to Inference-Time LLM Decoding

Standard autoregressive decoding in large language models (LLMs) is inherently short-sighted, often failing to find globally optimal reasoning paths due to its token-by-token generation process. While inference-time strategies like foresight sampling attempt to mitigate this by simulating future steps, they typically rely on ad-hoc heuristics for valuing paths and pruning the search space. This paper introduces Martingale Foresight Sampling (MFS), a principled framework that reformulates LLM decoding as a problem of identifying an optimal stochastic process. By modeling the quality of a reasoning path as a stochastic process, we leverage Martingale theory to design a theoretically-grounded algorithm. Our approach replaces heuristic mechanisms with principles from probability theory: step valuation is derived from the Doob Decomposition Theorem to measure a path's predictable advantage, path selection uses Optional Stopping Theory for principled pruning of suboptimal candidates, and an adaptive stopping rule based on the Martingale Convergence Theorem terminates exploration once a path's quality has provably converged. Experiments on six reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that MFS surpasses state-of-the-art methods in accuracy while significantly improving computational efficiency. Code will be released at https://github.com/miraclehetech/EACL2026-Martingale-Foresight-Sampling.

Break Stylistic Sophon: Are We Really Meant to Confine the Imagination in Style Transfer?

In this pioneering study, we introduce StyleWallfacer, a groundbreaking unified training and inference framework, which not only addresses various issues encountered in the style transfer process of traditional methods but also unifies the framework for different tasks. This framework is designed to revolutionize the field by enabling artist level style transfer and text driven stylization. First, we propose a semantic-based style injection method that uses BLIP to generate text descriptions strictly aligned with the semantics of the style image in CLIP space. By leveraging a large language model to remove style-related descriptions from these descriptions, we create a semantic gap. This gap is then used to fine-tune the model, enabling efficient and drift-free injection of style knowledge. Second, we propose a data augmentation strategy based on human feedback, incorporating high-quality samples generated early in the fine-tuning process into the training set to facilitate progressive learning and significantly reduce its overfitting. Finally, we design a training-free triple diffusion process using the fine-tuned model, which manipulates the features of self-attention layers in a manner similar to the cross-attention mechanism. Specifically, in the generation process, the key and value of the content-related process are replaced with those of the style-related process to inject style while maintaining text control over the model. We also introduce query preservation to mitigate disruptions to the original content. Under such a design, we have achieved high-quality image-driven style transfer and text-driven stylization, delivering artist-level style transfer results while preserving the original image content. Moreover, we achieve image color editing during the style transfer process for the first time.

FastHDRNet: A new efficient method for SDR-to-HDR Translation

Modern displays nowadays possess the capability to render video content with a high dynamic range (HDR) and an extensive color gamut (WCG).However, the majority of available resources are still in standard dynamic range(SDR). Therefore, we need to identify an effective methodology for this objective.The existing deep neural network (DNN) based SDR(Standard dynamic range) to HDR (High dynamic range) conversion methods outperform conventional methods, but they are either too large to implement or generate some terrible artifacts. We propose a neural network for SDRTV to HDRTV conversion, termed "FastHDRNet". This network includes two parts, Adaptive Universal Color Transformation and Local Enhancement.The architecture is designed as a lightweight network that utilizes global statistics and local information with super high efficiency. After the experiment, we find that our proposed method achieve state-of-the-art performance in both quantitative comparisons and visual quality with a lightweight structure and a enhanced infer speed.