Ali Subhan

Ali Subhan, Ashir Raza

DragDiffusion is a diffusion-based method for interactive point-based image editing that enables users to manipulate images by directly dragging selected points. The method claims that accurate spatial control can be achieved by optimizing a single diffusion latent at an intermediate timestep, together with identity-preserving fine-tuning and spatial regularization. This work presents a reproducibility study of DragDiffusion using the authors' released implementation and the DragBench benchmark. We reproduce the main ablation studies on diffusion timestep selection, LoRA-based fine-tuning, mask regularization strength, and UNet feature supervision, and observe close agreement with the qualitative and quantitative trends reported in the original work. At the same time, our experiments show that performance is sensitive to a small number of hyperparameter assumptions, particularly the optimized timestep and the feature level used for motion supervision, while other components admit broader operating ranges. We further evaluate a multi-timestep latent optimization variant and find that it does not improve spatial accuracy while substantially increasing computational cost. Overall, our findings support the central claims of DragDiffusion while clarifying the conditions under which they are reliably reproducible. Code is available at https://github.com/AliSubhan5341/DragDiffusion-TMLR-Reproducibility-Challenge.

Kainat Riaz, Muhammad Ahmed Mohsin, Ahsan Bilal et al.

Automated scientific discovery using large language models relies on identifying genuinely novel solutions. Standard reinforcement learning penalizes high-variance mutations, which leads the policy to prioritize familiar patterns. As a result, the maximum reward plateaus even as the average reward increases. Overcoming this limitation requires a signal that distinguishes unexplored regions from intrinsically difficult problems. This necessitates measuring disagreement across independently adapted weight hypotheses rather than relying on a single network's confidence. UG-TTT addresses this challenge by maintaining a small ensemble of low-rank adapters over a frozen base model. The per-token disagreement, quantified as the mutual information between ensemble predictions and weight hypotheses, isolates epistemic uncertainty and identifies positions where insufficient coverage leads to adapter divergence rather than intrinsic problem difficulty. This measure is incorporated as an exploration bonus into the policy gradient, directing the policy toward positions where persistent adapter disagreement signals low training coverage, the same frontier where genuine discovery is possible. A nuclear norm regularizer ensures the adapters remain distinct from one another, thereby preserving the exploration signal throughout training. Across four scientific discovery benchmarks, UG-TTT increases the maximum reward on three tasks, maintains substantially higher solution diversity, and an ablation study confirms that the regularizer is essential for sustaining this behavior.

Ahsan Bilal, Ahmed Mohsin, Muhammad Umer et al.

Test-time compute scaling allocates inference computation uniformly, uses fixed sampling strategies, and applies verification only for reranking. In contrast, we propose a verifier-guided adaptive framework treating reasoning as iterative trajectory generation and selection. For each problem, the agent runs multiple inference iterations. In each iteration, it optionally produces a high-level plan, selects a set of reasoning tools and a compute strategy together with an exploration parameter, and then generates a candidate reasoning trajectory. A process reward model (PRM) serves as a unified control signal: within each iteration, step-level PRM scores are aggregated to guide pruning and expansion during generation, and across iterations, aggregated trajectory rewards are used to select the final response. Across datasets, our dynamic, PRM-guided approach consistently outperforms direct test-time scaling, yielding large gains on MATH-500 and several-fold improvements on harder benchmarks such as AIME24 and AMO-Bench. We characterize efficiency using theoretical FLOPs and a compute intensity metric penalizing wasted generation and tool overhead, demonstrating that verification-guided allocation concentrates computation on high-utility reasoning paths.