Daily Papers

We propose a quantum repeater architecture that can operate under ambient conditions. Our proposal builds on recent progress towards non-cryogenic spin-photon interfaces based on nitrogen-vacancy centers, which have excellent spin coherence times even at room temperature, and optomechanics, which allows to avoid phonon-related decoherence and also allows the emitted photons to be in the telecom band. We apply the photon number decomposition method to quantify the fidelity and the efficiency of entanglement established between two remote electron spins. We describe how the entanglement can be stored in nuclear spins and extended to long distances via quasi-deterministic entanglement swapping operations involving the electron and nuclear spins. We furthermore propose schemes to achieve high-fidelity readout of the spin states at room temperature using the spin-optomechanics interface. Our work shows that long-distance quantum networks made of solid-state components that operate at room temperature are within reach of current technological capabilities.

A k-clique is a dense graph, consisting of k fully-connected nodes, that finds numerous applications, such as community detection and network analysis. In this paper, we study a new problem, that finds a maximum set of disjoint k-cliques in a given large real-world graph with a user-defined fixed number k, which can contribute to a good performance of teaming collaborative events in online games. However, this problem is NP-hard when k geq 3, making it difficult to solve. To address that, we propose an efficient lightweight method that avoids significant overheads and achieves a k-approximation to the optimal, which is equipped with several optimization techniques, including the ordering method, degree estimation in the clique graph, and a lightweight implementation. Besides, to handle dynamic graphs that are widely seen in real-world social networks, we devise an efficient indexing method with careful swapping operations, leading to the efficient maintenance of a near-optimal result with frequent updates in the graph. In various experiments on several large graphs, our proposed approaches significantly outperform the competitors by up to 2 orders of magnitude in running time and 13.3\% in the number of computed disjoint k-cliques, which demonstrates the superiority of the proposed approaches in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.

In this paper, we explore the potential for quantum annealing to solve realistic routing problems. We focus on two NP-Hard problems, including the Traveling Salesman Problem with Time Windows and the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows. We utilize D-Wave's Quantum Annealer and Constrained Quadratic Model (CQM) solver within a hybrid framework to solve these problems. We demonstrate that while the CQM solver effectively minimizes route costs, it struggles to maintain time window feasibility as the problem size increases. To address this limitation, we implement a heuristic method that fixes infeasible solutions through a series of swapping operations. Testing on benchmark instances shows our method achieves promising results with an average optimality gap of 3.86%.

With the rapid progress of video generation, demand for customized video editing is surging, where subject swapping constitutes a key component yet remains under-explored. Prevailing swapping approaches either specialize in narrow domains--such as human-body animation or hand-object interaction--or rely on some indirect editing paradigm or ambiguous text prompts that compromise final fidelity. In this paper, we propose DreamSwapV, a mask-guided, subject-agnostic, end-to-end framework that swaps any subject in any video for customization with a user-specified mask and reference image. To inject fine-grained guidance, we introduce multiple conditions and a dedicated condition fusion module that integrates them efficiently. In addition, an adaptive mask strategy is designed to accommodate subjects of varying scales and attributes, further improving interactions between the swapped subject and its surrounding context. Through our elaborate two-phase dataset construction and training scheme, our DreamSwapV outperforms existing methods, as validated by comprehensive experiments on VBench indicators and our first introduced DreamSwapV-Benchmark.

Effective editing of personal content holds a pivotal role in enabling individuals to express their creativity, weaving captivating narratives within their visual stories, and elevate the overall quality and impact of their visual content. Therefore, in this work, we introduce SwapAnything, a novel framework that can swap any objects in an image with personalized concepts given by the reference, while keeping the context unchanged. Compared with existing methods for personalized subject swapping, SwapAnything has three unique advantages: (1) precise control of arbitrary objects and parts rather than the main subject, (2) more faithful preservation of context pixels, (3) better adaptation of the personalized concept to the image. First, we propose targeted variable swapping to apply region control over latent feature maps and swap masked variables for faithful context preservation and initial semantic concept swapping. Then, we introduce appearance adaptation, to seamlessly adapt the semantic concept into the original image in terms of target location, shape, style, and content during the image generation process. Extensive results on both human and automatic evaluation demonstrate significant improvements of our approach over baseline methods on personalized swapping. Furthermore, SwapAnything shows its precise and faithful swapping abilities across single object, multiple objects, partial object, and cross-domain swapping tasks. SwapAnything also achieves great performance on text-based swapping and tasks beyond swapping such as object insertion.

Video body-swapping aims to replace the body in an existing video with a new body from arbitrary sources, which has garnered more attention in recent years. Existing methods treat video body-swapping as a composite of multiple tasks instead of an independent task and typically rely on various models to achieve video body-swapping sequentially. However, these methods fail to achieve end-to-end optimization for the video body-swapping which causes issues such as variations in luminance among frames, disorganized occlusion relationships, and the noticeable separation between bodies and background. In this work, we define video body-swapping as an independent task and propose three critical consistencies: identity consistency, motion consistency, and environment consistency. We introduce an end-to-end model named SwapAnyone, treating video body-swapping as a video inpainting task with reference fidelity and motion control. To improve the ability to maintain environmental harmony, particularly luminance harmony in the resulting video, we introduce a novel EnvHarmony strategy for training our model progressively. Additionally, we provide a dataset named HumanAction-32K covering various videos about human actions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) performance among open-source methods while approaching or surpassing closed-source models across multiple dimensions. All code, model weights, and the HumanAction-32K dataset will be open-sourced at https://github.com/PKU-YuanGroup/SwapAnyone.

Facial parts swapping aims to selectively transfer regions of interest from the source image onto the target image while maintaining the rest of the target image unchanged. Most studies on face swapping designed specifically for full-face swapping, are either unable or significantly limited when it comes to swapping individual facial parts, which hinders fine-grained and customized character designs. However, designing such an approach specifically for facial parts swapping is challenged by a reasonable multiple reference feature fusion, which needs to be both efficient and effective. To overcome this challenge, FuseAnyPart is proposed to facilitate the seamless "fuse-any-part" customization of the face. In FuseAnyPart, facial parts from different people are assembled into a complete face in latent space within the Mask-based Fusion Module. Subsequently, the consolidated feature is dispatched to the Addition-based Injection Module for fusion within the UNet of the diffusion model to create novel characters. Extensive experiments qualitatively and quantitatively validate the superiority and robustness of FuseAnyPart. Source codes are available at https://github.com/Thomas-wyh/FuseAnyPart.

Recently, an intriguing class of non-convex optimization problems has emerged in the context of learning directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). These problems involve minimizing a given loss or score function, subject to a non-convex continuous constraint that penalizes the presence of cycles in a graph. In this work, we delve into the optimization challenges associated with this class of non-convex programs. To address these challenges, we propose a bi-level algorithm that leverages the non-convex constraint in a novel way. The outer level of the algorithm optimizes over topological orders by iteratively swapping pairs of nodes within the topological order of a DAG. A key innovation of our approach is the development of an effective method for generating a set of candidate swapping pairs for each iteration. At the inner level, given a topological order, we utilize off-the-shelf solvers that can handle linear constraints. The key advantage of our proposed algorithm is that it is guaranteed to find a local minimum or a KKT point under weaker conditions compared to previous work and finds solutions with lower scores. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of achieving a better score. Additionally, our method can also be used as a post-processing algorithm to significantly improve the score of other algorithms. Code implementing the proposed method is available at https://github.com/duntrain/topo.

Despite promising progress in face swapping task, realistic swapped images remain elusive, often marred by artifacts, particularly in scenarios involving high pose variation, color differences, and occlusion. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach that better harnesses diffusion models for face-swapping by making following core contributions. (a) We propose to re-frame the face-swapping task as a self-supervised, train-time inpainting problem, enhancing the identity transfer while blending with the target image. (b) We introduce a multi-step Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM) sampling during training, reinforcing identity and perceptual similarities. (c) Third, we introduce CLIP feature disentanglement to extract pose, expression, and lighting information from the target image, improving fidelity. (d) Further, we introduce a mask shuffling technique during inpainting training, which allows us to create a so-called universal model for swapping, with an additional feature of head swapping. Ours can swap hair and even accessories, beyond traditional face swapping. Unlike prior works reliant on multiple off-the-shelf models, ours is a relatively unified approach and so it is resilient to errors in other off-the-shelf models. Extensive experiments on FFHQ and CelebA datasets validate the efficacy and robustness of our approach, showcasing high-fidelity, realistic face-swapping with minimal inference time. Our code is available at https://github.com/Sanoojan/REFace.

This study addresses the challenge of inaccurate gradients in computing the empirical Fisher Information Matrix during neural network pruning. We introduce SWAP, a formulation of Entropic Wasserstein regression (EWR) for pruning, capitalizing on the geometric properties of the optimal transport problem. The ``swap'' of the commonly used linear regression with the EWR in optimization is analytically demonstrated to offer noise mitigation effects by incorporating neighborhood interpolation across data points with only marginal additional computational cost. The unique strength of SWAP is its intrinsic ability to balance noise reduction and covariance information preservation effectively. Extensive experiments performed on various networks and datasets show comparable performance of SWAP with state-of-the-art (SoTA) network pruning algorithms. Our proposed method outperforms the SoTA when the network size or the target sparsity is large, the gain is even larger with the existence of noisy gradients, possibly from noisy data, analog memory, or adversarial attacks. Notably, our proposed method achieves a gain of 6% improvement in accuracy and 8% improvement in testing loss for MobileNetV1 with less than one-fourth of the network parameters remaining.

Model merging, such as model souping, is the practice of combining different models with the same architecture together without further training. In this work, we present a model merging methodology that addresses the difficulty of fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for target tasks in non-English languages, where task-specific data is often unavailable. We focus on mathematical reasoning and without in-language math data, facilitate cross-lingual transfer by composing language and math capabilities. Starting from the same pretrained model, we fine-tune separate "experts" on math instruction data in English and on generic instruction data in the target language. We then replace the top and bottom transformer layers of the math expert directly with layers from the language expert, which consequently enhances math performance in the target language. The resulting merged models outperform the individual experts and other merging methods on the math benchmark, MGSM, by 10% across four major languages where math instruction data is scarce. In addition, this layer swapping is simple, inexpensive, and intuitive, as it is based on an interpretative analysis of the most important parameter changes during the fine-tuning of each expert. The ability to successfully re-compose LLMs for cross-lingual transfer in this manner opens up future possibilities to combine model expertise, create modular solutions, and transfer reasoning capabilities across languages all post hoc.

Face swapping aims to seamlessly transfer a source facial identity onto a target while preserving target attributes such as pose and expression. Diffusion models, known for their superior generative capabilities, have recently shown promise in advancing face-swapping quality. This paper addresses two key challenges in diffusion-based face swapping: the prioritized preservation of identity over target attributes and the inherent conflict between identity and attribute conditioning. To tackle these issues, we introduce an identity-constrained attribute-tuning framework for face swapping that first ensures identity preservation and then fine-tunes for attribute alignment, achieved through a decoupled condition injection. We further enhance fidelity by incorporating identity and adversarial losses in a post-training refinement stage. Our proposed identity-constrained diffusion-based face-swapping model outperforms existing methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, demonstrating superior identity similarity and attribute consistency, achieving a new state-of-the-art performance in high-fidelity face swapping.

Sorting is a fundamental operation of all computer systems, having been a long-standing significant research topic. Beyond the problem formulation of traditional sorting algorithms, we consider sorting problems for more abstract yet expressive inputs, e.g., multi-digit images and image fragments, through a neural sorting network. To learn a mapping from a high-dimensional input to an ordinal variable, the differentiability of sorting networks needs to be guaranteed. In this paper we define a softening error by a differentiable swap function, and develop an error-free swap function that holds a non-decreasing condition and differentiability. Furthermore, a permutation-equivariant Transformer network with multi-head attention is adopted to capture dependency between given inputs and also leverage its model capacity with self-attention. Experiments on diverse sorting benchmarks show that our methods perform better than or comparable to baseline methods.

Image-based head swapping task aims to stitch a source head to another source body flawlessly. This seldom-studied task faces two major challenges: 1) Preserving the head and body from various sources while generating a seamless transition region. 2) No paired head swapping dataset and benchmark so far. In this paper, we propose a semantic-mixing diffusion model for head swapping (HS-Diffusion) which consists of a latent diffusion model (LDM) and a semantic layout generator. We blend the semantic layouts of source head and source body, and then inpaint the transition region by the semantic layout generator, achieving a coarse-grained head swapping. Semantic-mixing LDM can further implement a fine-grained head swapping with the inpainted layout as condition by a progressive fusion process, while preserving head and body with high-quality reconstruction. To this end, we propose a semantic calibration strategy for natural inpainting and a neck alignment for geometric realism. Importantly, we construct a new image-based head swapping benchmark and design two tailor-designed metrics (Mask-FID and Focal-FID). Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our framework. The code will be available: https://github.com/qinghew/HS-Diffusion.

Attention mechanism has been widely believed as the key to success of vision transformers (ViTs), since it provides a flexible and powerful way to model spatial relationships. However, is the attention mechanism truly an indispensable part of ViT? Can it be replaced by some other alternatives? To demystify the role of attention mechanism, we simplify it into an extremely simple case: ZERO FLOP and ZERO parameter. Concretely, we revisit the shift operation. It does not contain any parameter or arithmetic calculation. The only operation is to exchange a small portion of the channels between neighboring features. Based on this simple operation, we construct a new backbone network, namely ShiftViT, where the attention layers in ViT are substituted by shift operations. Surprisingly, ShiftViT works quite well in several mainstream tasks, e.g., classification, detection, and segmentation. The performance is on par with or even better than the strong baseline Swin Transformer. These results suggest that the attention mechanism might not be the vital factor that makes ViT successful. It can be even replaced by a zero-parameter operation. We should pay more attentions to the remaining parts of ViT in the future work. Code is available at github.com/microsoft/SPACH.

Face swapping transfers the identity of a source face to a target face while retaining the attributes like expression, pose, hair, and background of the target face. Advanced face swapping methods have achieved attractive results. However, these methods often inadvertently transfer identity information from the target face, compromising expression-related details and accurate identity. We propose a novel method DynamicFace that leverages the power of diffusion models and plug-and-play adaptive attention layers for image and video face swapping. First, we introduce four fine-grained facial conditions using 3D facial priors. All conditions are designed to be disentangled from each other for precise and unique control. Then, we adopt Face Former and ReferenceNet for high-level and detailed identity injection. Through experiments on the FF++ dataset, we demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results in face swapping, showcasing superior image quality, identity preservation, and expression accuracy. Our framework seamlessly adapts to both image and video domains. Our code and results will be available on the project page: https://dynamic-face.github.io/

Enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) remains a key challenge, especially for tasks that require complex, multi-step decision-making. Humans excel at these tasks by leveraging deliberate planning with an internal world model to simulate the potential outcomes of various actions. Inspired by this, we propose a novel multi-step reasoning framework for LLMs, referred to as Structure-aware Planning with Accurate World Model (SWAP). Unlike previous approaches that rely solely on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning in natural language, SWAP incorporates structural information to guide the reasoning process via a world model and provides a soft verification mechanism over the steps. Moreover, SWAP overcomes the challenge of accurate world state predictions in complex reasoning tasks by introducing a Generator-Discriminator architecture, which enables more reliable world modeling. Specifically, the generator predicts the next state, and the discriminator ensures alignment with the logical consistency required by the problem context. SWAP also encourages the policy model to explore a broad range of potential actions to prevent premature convergence. By resolving the bottlenecks of generation diversity for both actions and states using diversity-based modeling (DBM) and improving discrimination accuracy through contrastive ranking (CR), SWAP significantly enhances the reasoning performance of LLMs. We evaluate SWAP across diverse reasoning-intensive benchmarks including math reasoning, logical reasoning, and coding tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SWAP achieves substantial improvements over the baselines and consistently outperforms existing LLMs of similar sizes.

Clustering non-Euclidean data is difficult, and one of the most used algorithms besides hierarchical clustering is the popular algorithm Partitioning Around Medoids (PAM), also simply referred to as k-medoids clustering. In Euclidean geometry the mean-as used in k-means-is a good estimator for the cluster center, but this does not exist for arbitrary dissimilarities. PAM uses the medoid instead, the object with the smallest dissimilarity to all others in the cluster. This notion of centrality can be used with any (dis-)similarity, and thus is of high relevance to many domains and applications. A key issue with PAM is its high run time cost. We propose modifications to the PAM algorithm that achieve an O(k)-fold speedup in the second ("SWAP") phase of the algorithm, but will still find the same results as the original PAM algorithm. If we relax the choice of swaps performed (while retaining comparable quality), we can further accelerate the algorithm by eagerly performing additional swaps in each iteration. With the substantially faster SWAP, we can now explore faster initialization strategies, because (i) the classic ("BUILD") initialization now becomes the bottleneck, and (ii) our swap is fast enough to compensate for worse starting conditions. We also show how the CLARA and CLARANS algorithms benefit from the proposed modifications. While we do not study the parallelization of our approach in this work, it can easily be combined with earlier approaches to use PAM and CLARA on big data (some of which use PAM as a subroutine, hence can immediately benefit from these improvements), where the performance with high k becomes increasingly important. In experiments on real data with k=100,200, we observed a 458x respectively 1191x speedup compared to the original PAM SWAP algorithm, making PAM applicable to larger data sets, and in particular to higher k.

Face swapping is a task that changes a facial identity of a given image to that of another person. In this work, we propose a novel face-swapping framework called Megapixel Facial Identity Manipulation (MFIM). The face-swapping model should achieve two goals. First, it should be able to generate a high-quality image. We argue that a model which is proficient in generating a megapixel image can achieve this goal. However, generating a megapixel image is generally difficult without careful model design. Therefore, our model exploits pretrained StyleGAN in the manner of GAN-inversion to effectively generate a megapixel image. Second, it should be able to effectively transform the identity of a given image. Specifically, it should be able to actively transform ID attributes (e.g., face shape and eyes) of a given image into those of another person, while preserving ID-irrelevant attributes (e.g., pose and expression). To achieve this goal, we exploit 3DMM that can capture various facial attributes. Specifically, we explicitly supervise our model to generate a face-swapped image with the desirable attributes using 3DMM. We show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance through extensive experiments. Furthermore, we propose a new operation called ID mixing, which creates a new identity by semantically mixing the identities of several people. It allows the user to customize the new identity.

We address the problem of synthesizing multi-view optical illusions: images that change appearance upon a transformation, such as a flip or rotation. We propose a simple, zero-shot method for obtaining these illusions from off-the-shelf text-to-image diffusion models. During the reverse diffusion process, we estimate the noise from different views of a noisy image, and then combine these noise estimates together and denoise the image. A theoretical analysis suggests that this method works precisely for views that can be written as orthogonal transformations, of which permutations are a subset. This leads to the idea of a visual anagram--an image that changes appearance under some rearrangement of pixels. This includes rotations and flips, but also more exotic pixel permutations such as a jigsaw rearrangement. Our approach also naturally extends to illusions with more than two views. We provide both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrating the effectiveness and flexibility of our method. Please see our project webpage for additional visualizations and results: https://dangeng.github.io/visual_anagrams/

Current face reenactment and swapping methods mainly rely on GAN frameworks, but recent focus has shifted to pre-trained diffusion models for their superior generation capabilities. However, training these models is resource-intensive, and the results have not yet achieved satisfactory performance levels. To address this issue, we introduce Face-Adapter, an efficient and effective adapter designed for high-precision and high-fidelity face editing for pre-trained diffusion models. We observe that both face reenactment/swapping tasks essentially involve combinations of target structure, ID and attribute. We aim to sufficiently decouple the control of these factors to achieve both tasks in one model. Specifically, our method contains: 1) A Spatial Condition Generator that provides precise landmarks and background; 2) A Plug-and-play Identity Encoder that transfers face embeddings to the text space by a transformer decoder. 3) An Attribute Controller that integrates spatial conditions and detailed attributes. Face-Adapter achieves comparable or even superior performance in terms of motion control precision, ID retention capability, and generation quality compared to fully fine-tuned face reenactment/swapping models. Additionally, Face-Adapter seamlessly integrates with various StableDiffusion models.

Code-switching (CSW) is the act of alternating between two or more languages within a single discourse. This phenomenon is widespread in multilingual communities, and increasingly prevalent in online content, where users naturally mix languages in everyday communication. As a result, Large Language Models (LLMs), now central to content processing and generation, are frequently exposed to code-switched inputs. Given their widespread use, it is crucial to understand how LLMs process and reason about such mixed-language text. This paper presents a systematic evaluation of LLM comprehension under code-switching by generating CSW variants of established reasoning and comprehension benchmarks. While degradation is evident when foreign tokens disrupt English textx2013even under linguistic constraintsx2013embedding English into other languages often improves comprehension. Though prompting yields mixed results, fine-tuning offers a more stable path to degradation mitigation.

As a direct consequence of the no-cloning theorem, the deterministic amplification as in classical communication is impossible for quantum states. This calls for more advanced techniques in a future global quantum network, e.g. for cloud quantum computing. A unique solution is the teleportation of an entangled state, i.e. entanglement swapping, representing the central resource to relay entanglement between distant nodes. Together with entanglement purification and a quantum memory it constitutes a so-called quantum repeater. Since the aforementioned building blocks have been individually demonstrated in laboratory setups only, the applicability of the required technology in real-world scenarios remained to be proven. Here we present a free-space entanglement-swapping experiment between the Canary Islands of La Palma and Tenerife, verifying the presence of quantum entanglement between two previously independent photons separated by 143 km. We obtained an expectation value for the entanglement-witness operator, more than 6 standard deviations beyond the classical limit. By consecutive generation of the two required photon pairs and space-like separation of the relevant measurement events, we also showed the feasibility of the swapping protocol in a long-distance scenario, where the independence of the nodes is highly demanded. Since our results already allow for efficient implementation of entanglement purification, we anticipate our assay to lay the ground for a fully-fledged quantum repeater over a realistic high-loss and even turbulent quantum channel.

Differentiable sorting algorithms allow training with sorting and ranking supervision, where only the ordering or ranking of samples is known. Various methods have been proposed to address this challenge, ranging from optimal transport-based differentiable Sinkhorn sorting algorithms to making classic sorting networks differentiable. One problem of current differentiable sorting methods is that they are non-monotonic. To address this issue, we propose a novel relaxation of conditional swap operations that guarantees monotonicity in differentiable sorting networks. We introduce a family of sigmoid functions and prove that they produce differentiable sorting networks that are monotonic. Monotonicity ensures that the gradients always have the correct sign, which is an advantage in gradient-based optimization. We demonstrate that monotonic differentiable sorting networks improve upon previous differentiable sorting methods.

In an era where images and visual content dominate our digital landscape, the ability to manipulate and personalize these images has become a necessity. Envision seamlessly substituting a tabby cat lounging on a sunlit window sill in a photograph with your own playful puppy, all while preserving the original charm and composition of the image. We present Photoswap, a novel approach that enables this immersive image editing experience through personalized subject swapping in existing images. Photoswap first learns the visual concept of the subject from reference images and then swaps it into the target image using pre-trained diffusion models in a training-free manner. We establish that a well-conceptualized visual subject can be seamlessly transferred to any image with appropriate self-attention and cross-attention manipulation, maintaining the pose of the swapped subject and the overall coherence of the image. Comprehensive experiments underscore the efficacy and controllability of Photoswap in personalized subject swapping. Furthermore, Photoswap significantly outperforms baseline methods in human ratings across subject swapping, background preservation, and overall quality, revealing its vast application potential, from entertainment to professional editing.

Training-free metrics (a.k.a. zero-cost proxies) are widely used to avoid resource-intensive neural network training, especially in Neural Architecture Search (NAS). Recent studies show that existing training-free metrics have several limitations, such as limited correlation and poor generalisation across different search spaces and tasks. Hence, we propose Sample-Wise Activation Patterns and its derivative, SWAP-Score, a novel high-performance training-free metric. It measures the expressivity of networks over a batch of input samples. The SWAP-Score is strongly correlated with ground-truth performance across various search spaces and tasks, outperforming 15 existing training-free metrics on NAS-Bench-101/201/301 and TransNAS-Bench-101. The SWAP-Score can be further enhanced by regularisation, which leads to even higher correlations in cell-based search space and enables model size control during the search. For example, Spearman's rank correlation coefficient between regularised SWAP-Score and CIFAR-100 validation accuracies on NAS-Bench-201 networks is 0.90, significantly higher than 0.80 from the second-best metric, NWOT. When integrated with an evolutionary algorithm for NAS, our SWAP-NAS achieves competitive performance on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet in approximately 6 minutes and 9 minutes of GPU time respectively.

Clustering non-Euclidean data is difficult, and one of the most used algorithms besides hierarchical clustering is the popular algorithm Partitioning Around Medoids (PAM), also simply referred to as k-medoids. In Euclidean geometry the mean-as used in k-means-is a good estimator for the cluster center, but this does not hold for arbitrary dissimilarities. PAM uses the medoid instead, the object with the smallest dissimilarity to all others in the cluster. This notion of centrality can be used with any (dis-)similarity, and thus is of high relevance to many domains such as biology that require the use of Jaccard, Gower, or more complex distances. A key issue with PAM is its high run time cost. We propose modifications to the PAM algorithm to achieve an O(k)-fold speedup in the second SWAP phase of the algorithm, but will still find the same results as the original PAM algorithm. If we slightly relax the choice of swaps performed (at comparable quality), we can further accelerate the algorithm by performing up to k swaps in each iteration. With the substantially faster SWAP, we can now also explore alternative strategies for choosing the initial medoids. We also show how the CLARA and CLARANS algorithms benefit from these modifications. It can easily be combined with earlier approaches to use PAM and CLARA on big data (some of which use PAM as a subroutine, hence can immediately benefit from these improvements), where the performance with high k becomes increasingly important. In experiments on real data with k=100, we observed a 200-fold speedup compared to the original PAM SWAP algorithm, making PAM applicable to larger data sets as long as we can afford to compute a distance matrix, and in particular to higher k (at k=2, the new SWAP was only 1.5 times faster, as the speedup is expected to increase with k).

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is an encryption scheme that allows for computation to be performed directly on encrypted data, effectively closing the loop on secure and outsourced computing. Data is encrypted not only during rest and transit, but also during processing. However, FHE provides a limited instruction set: SIMD addition, SIMD multiplication, and cyclic rotation of 1-D vectors. This restriction makes performing multi-dimensional tensor operations challenging. Practitioners must pack these tensors into 1-D vectors and map tensor operations onto this one-dimensional layout rather than their traditional nested structure. And while prior systems have made significant strides in automating this process, they often hide critical packing decisions behind layers of abstraction, making debugging, optimizing, and building on top of these systems difficult. In this work, we approach multi-dimensional tensor operations in FHE through Einstein summation (einsum) notation. Einsum notation explicitly encodes dimensional structure and operations in its syntax, naturally exposing how tensors should be packed and transformed. We decompose einsum expressions into a fixed set of FHE-friendly operations. We implement our design and present EinHops, a minimalist system that factors einsum expressions into a fixed sequence of FHE operations. EinHops enables developers to perform encrypted tensor operations using FHE while maintaining full visibility into the underlying packing strategy. We evaluate EinHops on a range of tensor operations from a simple transpose to complex multi-dimensional contractions. We show that the explicit nature of einsum notation allows us to build an FHE tensor system that is simple, general, and interpretable. We open-source EinHops at the following repository: https://github.com/baahl-nyu/einhops.

Video head swapping aims to replace the entire head of a video subject, including facial identity, head shape, and hairstyle, with that of a reference image, while preserving the target body, background, and motion dynamics. Due to the lack of ground-truth paired swapping data, prior methods typically train on cross-frame pairs of the same person within a video and rely on mask-based inpainting to mitigate identity leakage. Beyond potential boundary artifacts, this paradigm struggles to recover essential cues occluded by the mask, such as facial pose, expressions, and motion dynamics. To address these issues, we prompt a video editing model to synthesize new heads for existing videos as fake swapping inputs, while maintaining frame-synchronized facial poses and expressions. This yields HeadSwapBench, the first cross-identity paired dataset for video head swapping, which supports both training ( videos) and benchmarking ( videos) with genuine outputs. Leveraging this paired supervision, we propose DirectSwap, a mask-free, direct video head-swapping framework that extends an image U-Net into a video diffusion model with a motion module and conditioning inputs. Furthermore, we introduce the Motion- and Expression-Aware Reconstruction (MEAR) loss, which reweights the diffusion loss per pixel using frame-difference magnitudes and facial-landmark proximity, thereby enhancing cross-frame coherence in motion and expressions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DirectSwap achieves state-of-the-art visual quality, identity fidelity, and motion and expression consistency across diverse in-the-wild video scenes. We will release the source code and the HeadSwapBench dataset to facilitate future research.

We propose an efficient framework, called Simple Swap (SimSwap), aiming for generalized and high fidelity face swapping. In contrast to previous approaches that either lack the ability to generalize to arbitrary identity or fail to preserve attributes like facial expression and gaze direction, our framework is capable of transferring the identity of an arbitrary source face into an arbitrary target face while preserving the attributes of the target face. We overcome the above defects in the following two ways. First, we present the ID Injection Module (IIM) which transfers the identity information of the source face into the target face at feature level. By using this module, we extend the architecture of an identity-specific face swapping algorithm to a framework for arbitrary face swapping. Second, we propose the Weak Feature Matching Loss which efficiently helps our framework to preserve the facial attributes in an implicit way. Extensive experiments on wild faces demonstrate that our SimSwap is able to achieve competitive identity performance while preserving attributes better than previous state-of-the-art methods. The code is already available on github: https://github.com/neuralchen/SimSwap.

This paper focuses on the construction of a general parametric model that can be implemented executing multiple swap tests over few qubits and applying a suitable measurement protocol. The model turns out to be equivalent to a two-layer feedforward neural network which can be realized combining small quantum modules. The advantages and the perspectives of the proposed quantum method are discussed.

We introduce Dream2Real, a robotics framework which integrates vision-language models (VLMs) trained on 2D data into a 3D object rearrangement pipeline. This is achieved by the robot autonomously constructing a 3D representation of the scene, where objects can be rearranged virtually and an image of the resulting arrangement rendered. These renders are evaluated by a VLM, so that the arrangement which best satisfies the user instruction is selected and recreated in the real world with pick-and-place. This enables language-conditioned rearrangement to be performed zero-shot, without needing to collect a training dataset of example arrangements. Results on a series of real-world tasks show that this framework is robust to distractors, controllable by language, capable of understanding complex multi-object relations, and readily applicable to both tabletop and 6-DoF rearrangement tasks.