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Feature caching has recently emerged as a promising method for diffusion model acceleration. It effectively alleviates the inefficiency problem caused by high computational requirements by caching similar features in the inference process of the diffusion model. In this paper, we analyze existing feature caching methods from the perspective of information utilization, and point out that relying solely on historical information will lead to constrained accuracy and speed performance. And we propose a novel paradigm that introduces future information via self-speculation based on the information similarity at the same time step across different iteration times. Based on this paradigm, we present \textit{SpecDiff}, a training-free multi-level feature caching strategy including a cached feature selection algorithm and a multi-level feature classification algorithm. (1) Feature selection algorithm based on self-speculative information. \textit{SpecDiff} determines a dynamic importance score for each token based on self-speculative information and historical information, and performs cached feature selection through the importance score. (2) Multi-level feature classification algorithm based on feature importance scores. \textit{SpecDiff} classifies tokens by leveraging the differences in feature importance scores and introduces a multi-level feature calculation strategy.
Extensive experiments show that \textit{SpecDiff} achieves average 2.80×, 2.74×, and 3.17× speedup with negligible quality loss in Stable Diffusion 3, 3.5, and FLUX compared to RFlow on NVIDIA A800-80GB GPU. By merging speculative and historical information, \textit{SpecDiff} overcomes the speedup-accuracy trade-off bottleneck, pushing the Pareto frontier of speedup and accuracy in the efficient diffusion model inference.

AAAI 2026

SpecDiff: Accelerating Diffusion Model Inference with Self-Speculation

diffusion models;speculation;feature caching

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
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Visual Place Recognition (VPR) aims to determine the geographic location of a query image by retrieving its most visually similar counterpart from a geo-tagged reference database. Recently, the emergence of the powerful visual foundation model, DINOv2, trained in a self-supervised manner on massive datasets, has significantly improved VPR performance. This improvement stems from DINOv2’s exceptional feature generalization capabilities but is often accompanied by increased model complexity and computational overhead that impede deployment on resource-constrained devices. To address this challenge, we propose $D^{2}$-VPR, a $D$istillation- and $D$eformable-based framework that retains the strong feature extraction capabilities of visual foundation models while significantly reducing model parameters and achieving a more favorable performance-efficiency trade-off. Specifically, first, we employ a two-stage training strategy that integrates knowledge distillation and fine-tuning. Additionally, we introduce a Distillation Recovery Module (DRM) to better align the feature spaces between the teacher and student models, thereby minimizing knowledge transfer losses to the greatest extent possible. Second, we design a Top-Down-attention-based Deformable Aggregator (TDDA) that leverages global semantic features to dynamically and adaptively adjust the Regions of Interest (ROI) used for aggregation, thereby improving adaptability to irregular structures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive and even superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Meanwhile, it reduces the parameter count by approximately 64.2\% and FLOPs by about 62.6\% (compared to CricaVPR).

D²-VPR: A Parameter-efficient Visual-foundation-model-based Visual Place Recognition Method via Knowledge Distillation and Deformable Aggregation

This work presents Insert Anything, a unified framework for reference-based image insertion that seamlessly integrates objects from reference images into target scenes under flexible, user-specified control guidance. Instead of training separate models for individual tasks, our approach is trained once on our new AnyInsertion dataset, the first open-source large-scale dataset specifically designed for reference image–based image editing, comprising 120K prompt-image pairs covering diverse tasks such as person, object, and garment insertion--and effortlessly generalizes to a wide range of insertion scenarios. Such a challenging setting requires capturing both identity features and fine-grained details, while allowing versatile local adaptations in style, color, and texture. To this end, we propose to leverage the multimodal attention of the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) to support both mask- and text-guided editing. Furthermore, we introduce an in-context editing mechanism that treats the reference image as contextual information, employing two prompting strategies to harmonize the inserted elements with the target scene while faithfully preserving their distinctive features. Extensive experiments on AnyInsertion, DreamBooth, and VTON-HD benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing alternatives, underscoring its great potential in real-world applications such as creative content generation, virtual try-on, and scene composition.

Insert Anything: Image Insertion via In-Context Editing in DiT

As automated attack techniques rapidly advance, CAPTCHAs remain a critical defense mechanism against malicious bots. However, existing CAPTCHA
schemes encompass a diverse range of modalities—from static distorted text and
obfuscated images to interactive clicks, sliding puzzles, and logic-based questions—yet the community still lacks a unified, large-scale, multimodal benchmark to rigorously evaluate their security robustness. To address this gap, we
introduce MCA-Bench, a comprehensive and reproducible benchmarking suite
that integrates heterogeneous CAPTCHA types into a single evaluation protocol.
Leveraging a shared vision–language model backbone, we fine-tune specialized
cracking agents for each CAPTCHA category, enabling consistent, cross-modal
assessments. Extensive experiments reveal that MCA-Bench effectively maps
the vulnerability spectrum of modern CAPTCHA designs under varied attack
settings, and—crucially—offers the first quantitative analysis of how challenge
complexity, interaction depth, and model solvability interrelate. Based on these
findings, we propose three actionable design principles and identify key open
challenges, laying the groundwork for systematic CAPTCHA hardening, fair
benchmarking, and broader community collaboration.

MCA-Bench: A Multimodal Benchmark for Evaluating CAPTCHA Robustness Against VLM-based Attacks

One crucial factor behind the success of deep learning lies in the implicit bias induced by noise inherent in gradient-based training algorithms. Motivated by empirical observations that training with noisy labels improves model generalization, we delve into the underlying mechanisms behind stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with label noise. Focusing on a two-layer over-parameterized linear network, we analyze the learning dynamics of label noise SGD, unveiling a two-phase learning behavior. In Phase I, the magnitudes of model weights progressively diminish, and the model escapes the lazy regime; enters the rich regime. In Phase II, the alignment between model weights and the ground-truth interpolator increases, and the model eventually converges. Our analysis highlights the critical role of label noise in driving the transition from the lazy to the rich regime and minimally explains its empirical success. Extensive experiments, conducted under both synthetic and real-world setups, strongly support our theory.

On the Learning Dynamics of Two-layer Linear Networks with Label Noise SGD

Long-term Time Series Forecasting is crucial across numerous critical domains, yet its accuracy remains fundamentally constrained by the receptive field bottleneck in existing models. Mainstream Transformer- and Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP)-based methods mainly rely on finite look-back windows, limiting their ability to model long-term dependencies and hurting forecasting performance. Naively extending the look-back window proves ineffective, as it not only introduces prohibitive computational complexity, but also drowns vital long-term dependencies in historical noise. To address these challenges, we propose CometNet, a novel Contextual Motif-guided Long-term Time Series Forecasting framework. CometNet first introduces a Contextual Motif Extraction module that identifies recurrent, dominant contextual motifs from complex historical sequences, providing extensive temporal dependencies far exceeding limited look-back windows; Subsequently, a Motif-guided Forecasting module is proposed, which integrates the extracted dominant motifs into forecasting. By dynamically mapping the look-back window to its relevant motifs, CometNet effectively harnesses their contextual information to strengthen long-term forecasting capability. Extensive experimental results on eight real-world datasets have demonstrated that CometNet significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, particularly on extended forecast horizons.

CometNet: Contextual Motif-guided Long-term Time Series Forecasting

Dataset Condensation (DC) distills knowledge from large datasets into smaller ones, accelerating training and reducing storage requirements. However, despite notable progress, prior methods have largely overlooked the potential of quantization for further reducing storage costs. In this paper, we take the first step to explore post-training quantization in dataset condensation, demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing storage size while maintaining representation quality without requiring expensive training cost. However, we find that at extremely low bit-widths (e.g., 2-bit), conventional quantization leads to substantial degradation in representation quality, negatively impacting the networks trained on these data.
To address this, we propose a novel \emph{patch-based post-training quantization} approach that ensures localized quantization with minimal loss of information. To reduce the overhead of quantization parameters, especially for small patch sizes, we employ quantization-aware clustering to identify similar patches and subsequently aggregate them for efficient quantization. Furthermore, we introduce a refinement module to align the distribution between original images and their dequantized counterparts, compensating for quantization errors.
Our method is a plug-and-play framework that can be applied to synthetic images generated by various DC methods. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks including CIFAR-10/100, Tiny ImageNet, and ImageNet subsets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms prior works under the same storage constraints. Notably, our method nearly \textbf{doubles the test accuracy} of existing methods at extreme compression regimes (e.g., 26.0\% $\rightarrow$ 54.1\% for DM at IPC=1), while operating directly on 2-bit images without additional distillation.

Post Training Quantization for Efficient Dataset Condensation

Selective deletion of data from deep models, known as unlearning, has become crucial for enforcing the right to be forgotten, while also mitigating the negative impact of flawed training data. Retraining deep models is often impractical due to data access restrictions and computational overhead. Existing retraining-free methods are typically based on the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM), which quantifies the importance of model parameters with respect to forgetting classes, applying equal dampening to these parameters. This approach implicitly assumes a semantically uniform representation space, where all retained classes are equidistant from the forgetting classes. However, this assumption often fails in real-world cross-modal retrieval scenarios characterized by multi-label and non-orthogonal semantics.
To overcome this limitation, we propose Prior-Prototype guided Partitioned dampening (PPP), an effective strategy for selective forgetting in cross-modal retrieval. First, PPP defines prior prototypes, which are semantic centers derived from well-trained models, to identify neighbor classes semantically close to the forgetting set. 
Then, PPP uses Fisher information to identify parameters sensitive to forgetting and partitions them into buffer and core regions based on their relative importance to the neighbor and retained sets.
Finally, PPP applies a hierarchical dampening strategy, where core parameters receive stronger suppression guided by prototype-based semantic disparities.
Comprehensive evaluations on four large-scale benchmarks show that PPP performs competitively with retraining-based baselines, highlighting its effectiveness and generalizability in selective unlearning for cross-modal retrieval.

Unlearning in Cross-Modal Retrieval via Prior-Prototype Guided Partitioned Dampening

Neural Speech Codecs face a fundamental trade-off at low bitrates: preserving acoustic fidelity often compromises semantic richness. To address this, we introduce SACodec, a novel codec built upon an asymmetric dual-quantizer that employs our proposed $\textbf{S}$emantic $\textbf{A}$nchoring mechanism. This design strategically decouples the quantization of $\textbf{S}$emantic and $\textbf{A}$coustic details. The semantic anchoring is achieved via a lightweight projector that aligns acoustic features with a frozen, large-scale mHuBERT codebook, injecting linguistic priors while guaranteeing full codebook utilization. Sequentially, for acoustic details, a residual activation module with SimVQ enables a single-layer quantizer (acoustic path) to faithfully recover fine-grained information. At just 1.5\,kbps, SACodec establishes a new state of the art by excelling in both fidelity and semantics: subjective listening tests confirm that its reconstruction quality is perceptually highly comparable to ground-truth audio,
while its tokens demonstrate substantially improved semantic richness in downstream tasks. This work suggests that assigning specialized semantic quantizers to distinct information streams offers an effective path to reconcile the long-standing trade-off between fidelity, semantics, and modeling simplicity in low-bitrate speech tokenization.

SACodec: Asymmetric Quantization with Semantic Anchoring for Low-Bitrate High-Fidelity Neural Speech Codecs

Drug discovery is a very time-consuming and costly endeavour due to its huge design space and to the lengthy and failure-fraught process of bringing a product to market. Automating the generation of candidate molecules exhibiting some of the desired properties can help. Among the standard formats to encode molecules, SMILES is a widespread string representation. We propose a constraint programming model showcasing the grammar constraint to express the design space of organic molecules using the SMILES notation. We show how some common physicochemical properties --- such as molecular weight and lipophilicity --- and structural features can be expressed as constraints in the model. We also contribute a weighted counting algorithm for the grammar constraint, allowing us to use a belief propagation heuristic to guide the generation. Our experiments indicate that such a heuristic is key to driving the search towards desired molecules.

Constrained Molecule Generation Modelled Using the Grammar Constraint

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant advances in natural language processing, yet their potential for high-stake political decision-making remains largely unexplored. This paper addresses the gap by focusing on the application of LLMs to the United Nations (UN) decision-making process, where the stakes are particularly high and political decisions can have far-reaching consequences. We introduce a novel dataset comprising publicly available UN Security Council (UNSC) records from 1994 to 2024, including draft resolutions, voting records, and diplomatic speeches. Using this dataset, we propose the United Nations Benchmark (UNBench), the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs across four interconnected political science tasks: co-penholder judgment, representative voting simulation, draft adoption prediction, and representative statement generation. These tasks span the three stages of the UN decision-making process—drafting, voting, and discussing—and aim to assess LLMs' ability to understand and simulate political dynamics. Our experimental analysis demonstrates the potential and challenges of applying LLMs in this domain, providing insights into their strengths and limitations in political science. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first benchmark to systematically evaluate LLMs in UN decision-making, contributing to the growing intersection of AI and political science. The dataset is available in the supplementary materials.

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D²-VPR: A Parameter-efficient Visual-foundation-model-based Visual Place Recognition Method via Knowledge Distillation and Deformable Aggregation

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