Discrete Diffusion Language Models have emerged as a compelling paradigm for unified multimodal generation, yet their deployment is hindered by high inference latency arising from iterative decoding. Existing acceleration strategies often require expensive re-training or fail to leverage the 2D spatial redundancy inherent in visual data. To address this, we propose Locality-Aware Dynamic Rescue (LADR), a training-free method that expedites inference by exploiting the spatial Markov property of images. LADR prioritizes the recovery of tokens at the “generation frontier”, regions spatially adjacent to observed pixels, thereby maximizing information gain. Specifically, our method integrates morphological neighbor identification to locate candidate tokens, employs a risk-bounded filtering mechanism to prevent error propagation, and utilizes manifold-consistent inverse scheduling to align the diffusion trajectory with the accelerated mask density. Extensive experiments on four text-to-image generation benchmarks demonstrate that our LADR achieves an approximate 4 × speedup over standard baselines. Remarkably, it maintains or even enhances generative fidelity, particularly in spatial reasoning tasks, offering a state-of-the-art trade-off between efficiency and quality.

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for large language models (LLMs) has achieved significant success in various domains. So far, most algorithms in the LoRA-family rely on global low-rank factors spanning the entire update weight matrix (𝛥 𝐖). Through careful analysis, however, we observe that the 𝛥 𝐖 during fine-tuning typically exhibit heterogeneous subspace clusters, each corresponding to specific sub-sets of rows and columns. This structural heterogeneity suggests that global low-rank factors may not optimally capture the local variations needed for effective model adaptation. To address this limitation, we propose LoRA within Clustered Parameter Subspaces, or CPS-LoRA, which performs independent low-rank updates within clustered blocks of parameter matrices. The key idea is to group the rows/columns of the update matrix into locally coherent, and maximally uncorrelated subspaces, perform low-rank adaptations in each subspace, and iteratively update the partition and local adaptations. This allows adapting to local structures more precisely while preserving high efficiency. Theoretical analysis reveals that in case 𝛥 𝐖 can be partitioned into subspace blocks with non-overlapping basis, CPS-LoRA have superior parameter efficiency than global adaptations. Empirical evaluations further demonstrate better rank utilization of CPS-LoRA and its consistent improvements against LoRA (and variants) by up to 3.0% in absolute accuracy in various benchmarks.

Role-playing agents (RPAs) are garnering increasing interests as a novel form of conversational AI. While previous research has predominantly concentrated on their ability to portray specified characters, we argue from a user-centered perspective that RPAs’ capability to advance the plot requires substantial improvements to deliver more engaging interaction. To bridge this gap, we propose RolePlot, a role-playing framework specifically designed to evaluate and enhance the plot-progression capabilities of RPAs. RolePlot begins by constructing a plot-progression dataset extended from human-written literary scripts and specially designed synthetic data, followed by narrative theory-driven manual annotation and automated labeling validated through human verification. We then exploit the over-parameterized embedding space of LLMs to detect a “trigger subspace” that identifies dialogue segments catalyzing plot transitions. When user’s inputs align with this subspace, we explicitly prompt RPAs to advance the plot. For evaluation, we simulate User-RPA interactions and track both the conversation longevity (measured in dialogue turns before disengagement) and users’ arousal levels across different stages. Empirically, our method improves RPAs’ capability to time plot developments, and more importantly, yielding a significant increase in conversation turns and sustained higher arousal levels, thereby confirming that users experience more immersive engagements.