#01Nov 7, 2026
cs.CV
Split and Bridge: Multimodal Generation via Diffusion Bridging
Ahmad Arrabi, Xiaohan Zhang, Xingyu Li and 1 more
Visual data are often expressed through multiple complementary modalities (e.g., images and segmentation masks), each capturing different aspects of the same underlying structure. Most existing multimodal methods adopt a top-down paradigm, learning a shared latent variable through joint training from scratch, which limits scalability. We propose Split and Bridge (SnB), a bottom-up framework for multimodal generation that couples pretrained unimodal diffusion models at sampling time. Rather than learning a unified latent space, SnB generates coherent multimodal samples by following a shared diffusion trajectory up to a split point and then branching into modality-specific trajectories guided by a bridge module. This design enables plug-and-play reuse of powerful pretrained models without joint training, making it scalable and easily adaptable. Across standard benchmarks (PolyMNIST, CelebAMask-HQ) and more complex settings (PIE-Bench++, ROCO), SnB achieves a strong balance between sample quality and coherence. We show that SnB naturally extends to downstream zero-shot tasks such as interleaved co-generation, image editing, and style coupling/decoupling. Our results demonstrate that bottom-up generation provides a practical framework that complements existing top-down multimodal approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/AhmadArrabi/SnB
#02Nov 7, 2026
math.OC
GEAR: A GPU-Accelerated Global Solver for Bounded Continuous Nonlinear Programs via Linear Bound Propagation
Duo Zhou, Hesun Chen, Xiangru Zhong and 2 more
We present a novel GPU-accelerated global solver for constrained nonlinear programming (NLP) inspired by the efficient linear bound propagation framework in neural network (NN) verification. Existing work on NN verification, a problem that can be cast as feasibility detection for a nonlinear objective, demonstrated orders-of-magnitude speedups with the linear bound propagation-based framework when compared to traditional solvers. Extending this paradigm to global nonlinear programming requires addressing many challenges: a global constrained NLP solver must effectively exploit all, possibly unstructured, nonlinear constraints to improve the objective, whereas NN verification typically handles simple input box constraints over a well-structured NN and does not directly optimize an objective function. We address these challenges by fully exploiting the linear bounds produced by bound propagation: these linear bounds can be viewed as relaxations of nonlinear constraints and used to provide lower bounds, check infeasibility, and guide the search for a primal solution. In addition, we propose tighter linear relaxations for bilinear, quotient, and other commonly used nonlinear functions in NLP problems, and a projected augmented Lagrangian method tightly coupled to our dual solving procedure to produce primal solutions. Our method solves 421 of 505 bounded and continuous NLP problems in the GAMS and MINLPLib benchmarks under a 180-second limit, more than each of the six global solvers we compare with, including Gurobi and BARON (commercial), and SCIP (open-source). Sixteen of these problems are certified by none of the six global solvers; all of them contain exponential, logarithmic, or trigonometric terms, which are often challenging for traditional approaches. Project webpage is at https://verified-intelligence.github.io/GEAR.
#03Nov 7, 2026
cs.CL
LongCapHarness: Capability-Guided Auto-Harnessing for Long-Context Reasoning
Tao Zhang, Yuhang He
Existing methods enhancing an LLM's long-context reasoning capability often rely on data synthesis and follow-up LLM post-training. However, the data synthesis strategy and the post-training recipes are empirically driven and computationally intensive. In this work, we propose a new framework, dubbed LongCapHarness, to instead harness the underlying capabilities for long-context reasoning. The harnessing process recursively revises and updates capability primitive implementation, capability state and control logic through recursive self-improvement on the development set. With neither data synthesis nor LLM post-training, LongCapHarness is applied to Llama3-8B and transferred to Qwen2.5-3B. LongCapHarness substantially outperforms recent data-synthesis-based baselines on HELMET and RULER benchmarks; its estimated development cost is less than 50% of the estimated training costs of NExtLong and PolicyLong. We hope these results motivate further research into harnessing the latent capabilities of LLMs to solve tasks beyond their explicit training.
#04Nov 7, 2026
cs.CL
Hibana: Fast Agentic Inference on Unified-Memory Devices
Yahya Emara, Chi-Chih Chang, Anthony Fei and 5 more
Local AI promises capable personal assistants that run on users' own devices, keeping data and computation under their control. Open-weight models that fit on local devices can now handle practical tasks such as coding. Yet current inference engines fall short. Popular engines such as vLLM and SGLang target datacenter GPUs with dedicated host memory, while local engines underuse the memory hierarchy of unified-memory devices. We present Hibana, an inference engine for unified-memory devices that co-optimizes model representation, memory management, and decoding strategy. Model surgery, the process of editing a trained model's architecture to suit its hardware, changes how the model computes, shrinking its memory footprint and data movement. Unified-memory management preserves each agent's state across turns, so long-running agents can resume instantly instead of recomputing their state. Adaptive speculation generates several tokens per step. Hibana codesigns these features around the shared memory capacity and limited bandwidth of unified-memory systems-on-chip to support local multi-agent workloads. On a single DGX Spark serving Qwen and Nemotron models of up to 125B parameters, Hibana completes up to 3.4$\times$ more agentic tasks per hour and delivers up to 3.9$\times$ higher decoding throughput than other established frameworks such as vLLM, NVIDIA Flare, llama.cpp, and TensorFold. Code is available at https://github.com/sharar-project/hibana.
#05Nov 7, 2026
cs.LG
The Fast Tree Transform
Paul Burchard
The Fast Tree Transform is a locally-aggregated transform defined for arbitrary graph geometries that generalizes both the Hadamard frequency transform and the Haar wavelet transform on the circle. The pure frequency part of the transform approximately diagonalizes the graph Laplacian; this fact makes it useful as a preconditioner in geometric optimization problems. The full transform provides an only slightly-redundant representation of signals on the graph that allows sparse representation of signals that include both edges and textures.