Anh H. D. Nguyen

Anh Nguyen, Ngan Nguyen, Duc Vu et al.

Modern one-step diffusion models achieve impressive quality through distribution-based timestep distillation. Yet, they rely on a critical assumption: Teacher and Student must inhabit the same latent space. This Shared-Space constraint prevents knowledge transfer from modern high-capacity Teachers (e.g., SD 3.5 and Flux) into compact, deployment-friendly Students such as SD 1.5, whose latent resolution and VAE parameterization differ from the Teacher. We formalize this overlooked regime as Cross-Space Distillation, where Teacher and Student differ in both latent resolution and VAE space. To enable distillation under this mismatch, we introduce the Bridge, a lightweight latent interface that maps Student latents into the Teacher space without modifying the Student backbone. Bridge combines a frozen Student VAE decoder as a spatial prior with a compact learnable projector, and is trained with latent reconstruction and attention fidelity objectives for stable Teacher-space alignment. Across diverse modern Teachers, Bridge enables substantial gains for compact one-step Students; for example, it improves SD 1.5 from 5.4 to 9.4 HPSv3 while preserving one-step inference, low latency, and broad ecosystem compatibility. These results show that heterogeneous large Teachers can be distilled into efficient, deployable backbones through a lightweight latent-space interface.

Huy Q. Tran, Dang H. Vu, Tuyen N. Dinh et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently achieved strong performance in code generation. However, due to knowledge cut-off and the rapid evolution of software libraries, they often generate deprecated API usages that lead to unreliable and incompatible code. Existing fine-tuning methods lack selectivity when only a small portion of model knowledge requires modification. Recent model-level approaches, such as machine unlearning and model editing, offer a promising direction for modifying parametric knowledge. However, their use for deprecated API mitigation remains largely unexplored. Moreover, existing methods primarily suppress outdated APIs, but do not explicitly steer models toward correct replacements, often leading to mismatched or incomplete generations. To address this limitation, we developed CURE, a contrastive unlearning approach that shifts unlearning from purely suppressing outdated knowledge to explicitly promoting correct API replacements. Concretely, CURE jointly discourages deprecated APIs while encouraging their valid alternatives, enabling more reliable adaptation to evolving software libraries. The experiments on recent deprecated API benchmark dataset show that CURE not only reduces deprecated API usage but also improves correct API replacement, while preserving general code generation performance. CURE substantially outperforms two SOTA baselines with respect to different quality metrics. These findings highlight the importance of combining suppression with replacement when adapting LLMs to evolving software ecosystems.