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Received — 11 March 2026 ⏭ cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

TDM-R1: Reinforcing Few-Step Diffusion Models with Non-Differentiable Reward

arXiv:2603.07700v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While few-step generative models have enabled powerful image and video generation at significantly lower cost, generic reinforcement learning (RL) paradigms for few-step models remain an unsolved problem. Existing RL approaches for few-step diffusion models strongly rely on back-propagating through differentiable reward models, thereby excluding the majority of important real-world reward signals, e.g., non-differentiable rewards such as humans' binary likeness, object counts, etc. To properly incorporate non-differentiable rewards to improve few-step generative models, we introduce TDM-R1, a novel reinforcement learning paradigm built upon a leading few-step model, Trajectory Distribution Matching (TDM). TDM-R1 decouples the learning process into surrogate reward learning and generator learning. Furthermore, we developed practical methods to obtain per-step reward signals along the deterministic generation trajectory of TDM, resulting in a unified RL post-training method that significantly improves few-step models' ability with generic rewards. We conduct extensive experiments ranging from text-rendering, visual quality, and preference alignment. All results demonstrate that TDM-R1 is a powerful reinforcement learning paradigm for few-step text-to-image models, achieving state-of-the-art reinforcement learning performances on both in-domain and out-of-domain metrics. Furthermore, TDM-R1 also scales effectively to the recent strong Z-Image model, consistently outperforming both its 100-NFE and few-step variants with only 4 NFEs. Project page: https://github.com/Luo-Yihong/TDM-R1

FedMomentum: Preserving LoRA Training Momentum in Federated Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2603.08014v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) offers a communication-efficient and privacy-preserving solution for task-specific adaptation. Naive aggregation of LoRA modules introduces noise due to mathematical incorrectness when averaging the downsampling and upsampling matrices independently. However, existing noise-free aggregation strategies inevitably compromise the structural expressiveness of LoRA, limiting its ability to retain client-specific adaptations by either improperly reconstructing the low-rank structure or excluding partially trainable components. We identify this problem as loss of training momentum, where LoRA updates fail to accumulate effectively across rounds, resulting in slower convergence and suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose FedMomentum, a novel framework that enables structured and momentum-preserving LoRA aggregation via singular value decomposition (SVD). Specifically, after aggregating low-rank updates in a mathematically correct manner, FedMomentum applies SVD to extract the dominant components that capture the main update directions. These components are used to reconstruct the LoRA modules with the same rank, while residual components can be retained and later merged into the backbone to preserve semantic information and ensure robustness. Extensive experiments across multiple tasks demonstrate that FedMomentum consistently outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods in convergence speed and final accuracy.

Exploring Diffusion Models' Corruption Stage in Few-Shot Fine-tuning and Mitigating with Bayesian Neural Networks

arXiv:2405.19931v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Few-shot fine-tuning of Diffusion Models (DMs) is a key advancement, significantly reducing training costs and enabling personalized AI applications. However, we explore the training dynamics of DMs and observe an unanticipated phenomenon: during the training process, image fidelity initially improves, then unexpectedly deteriorates with the emergence of noisy patterns, only to recover later with severe overfitting. We term the stage with generated noisy patterns as corruption stage. To understand this corruption stage, we begin by theoretically modeling the one-shot fine-tuning scenario, and then extend this modeling to more general cases. Through this modeling, we identify the primary cause of this corruption stage: a narrowed learning distribution inherent in the nature of few-shot fine-tuning. To tackle this, we apply Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) on DMs with variational inference to implicitly broaden the learned distribution, and present that the learning target of the BNNs can be naturally regarded as an expectation of the diffusion loss and a further regularization with the pretrained DMs. This approach is highly compatible with current few-shot fine-tuning methods in DMs and does not introduce any extra inference costs. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly mitigates corruption, and improves the fidelity, quality and diversity of the generated images in both object-driven and subject-driven generation tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Nicholas0228/BNN-Finetuning-DMs.
Received — 5 March 2026 ⏭ cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

MemSifter: Offloading LLM Memory Retrieval via Outcome-Driven Proxy Reasoning

arXiv:2603.03379v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for long-duration tasks, maintaining effective long-term memory has become a critical challenge. Current methods often face a trade-off between cost and accuracy. Simple storage methods often fail to retrieve relevant information, while complex indexing methods (such as memory graphs) require heavy computation and can cause information loss. Furthermore, relying on the working LLM to process all memories is computationally expensive and slow. To address these limitations, we propose MemSifter, a novel framework that offloads the memory retrieval process to a small-scale proxy model. Instead of increasing the burden on the primary working LLM, MemSifter uses a smaller model to reason about the task before retrieving the necessary information. This approach requires no heavy computation during the indexing phase and adds minimal overhead during inference. To optimize the proxy model, we introduce a memory-specific Reinforcement Learning (RL) training paradigm. We design a task-outcome-oriented reward based on the working LLM's actual performance in completing the task. The reward measures the actual contribution of retrieved memories by mutiple interactions with the working LLM, and discriminates retrieved rankings by stepped decreasing contributions. Additionally, we employ training techniques such as Curriculum Learning and Model Merging to improve performance. We evaluated MemSifter on eight LLM memory benchmarks, including Deep Research tasks. The results demonstrate that our method meets or exceeds the performance of existing state-of-the-art approaches in both retrieval accuracy and final task completion. MemSifter offers an efficient and scalable solution for long-term LLM memory. We have open-sourced the model weights, code, and training data to support further research.

CAPT: Confusion-Aware Prompt Tuning for Reducing Vision-Language Misalignment

arXiv:2603.02557v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models like CLIP have achieved remarkable progress in cross-modal representation learning, yet suffer from systematic misclassifications among visually and semantically similar categories. We observe that such confusion patterns are not random but persistently occur between specific category pairs, revealing the model's intrinsic bias and limited fine-grained discriminative ability. To address this, we propose CAPT, a Confusion-Aware Prompt Tuning framework that enables models to learn from their own misalignment. Specifically, we construct a Confusion Bank to explicitly model stable confusion relationships across categories and misclassified samples. On this basis, we introduce a Semantic Confusion Miner (SEM) to capture global inter-class confusion through semantic difference and commonality prompts, and a Sample Confusion Miner (SAM) to retrieve representative misclassified instances from the bank and capture sample-level cues through a Diff-Manner Adapter that integrates global and local contexts. To further unify confusion information across different granularities, a Multi-Granularity Difference Expert (MGDE) module is designed to jointly leverage semantic- and sample-level experts for more robust confusion-aware reasoning. Extensive experiments on 11 benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method significantly reduces confusion-induced errors while enhancing the discriminability and generalization of both base and novel classes, successfully resolving 50.72 percent of confusable sample pairs. Code will be released at https://github.com/greatest-gourmet/CAPT.
Received — 25 February 2026 ⏭ cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

Diversity-Incentivized Exploration for Versatile Reasoning

arXiv:2509.26209v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a crucial paradigm for incentivizing reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs). Due to vast state-action spaces and reward sparsity in reasoning tasks, existing methods often struggle with deficient exploration and poor sample efficiency. In the paper, we propose \textbf{DIVER} (\textbf{D}iversity-\textbf{I}ncentivized Exploration for \textbf{V}ersatil\textbf{E} \textbf{R}easoning), an innovative framework that highlights the pivotal role of global sequence-level diversity to incentivize deep exploration for versatile reasoning. We first conduct a primary empirical study to reveal a strong positive correlation between global diversity and reasoning capacity. Building on this insight, we introduce global diversity incentives as an intrinsic reward to promote deep exploration in a semantically structured space. Incorporating the intrinsic reward, we develop a potential-based reward shaping mechanism to preserve optimal policy invariance and design simple heuristics to mitigate possible reward hacking. Experimental results show that DIVER outperforms competitive RLVR baselines with various exploration strategies on both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks, excelling in both Pass@1 and Pass@k evaluations. Our code is available at https://github.com/NJU-RL/DIVER.
Received — 17 February 2026 ⏭ cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

pFedNavi: Structure-Aware Personalized Federated Vision-Language Navigation for Embodied AI

arXiv:2602.14401v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation VLN requires large-scale trajectory instruction data from private indoor environments, raising significant privacy concerns. Federated Learning FL mitigates this by keeping data on-device, but vanilla FL struggles under VLNs' extreme cross-client heterogeneity in environments and instruction styles, making a single global model suboptimal. This paper proposes pFedNavi, a structure-aware and dynamically adaptive personalized federated learning framework tailored for VLN. Our key idea is to personalize where it matters: pFedNavi adaptively identifies client-specific layers via layer-wise mixing coefficients, and performs fine-grained parameter fusion on the selected components (e.g., the encoder-decoder projection and environment-sensitive decoder layers) to balance global knowledge sharing with local specialization. We evaluate pFedNavi on two standard VLN benchmarks, R2R and RxR, using both ResNet and CLIP visual representations. Across all metrics, pFedNavi consistently outperforms the FedAvg-based VLN baseline, achieving up to 7.5% improvement in navigation success rate and up to 7.8% gain in trajectory fidelity, while converging 1.38x faster under non-IID conditions.
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