this touches a deeper aspect of current AI research: if the same core theory is applied to study different questions, does that count as plagiarism? I'd probably say no, especially in this case. The XM paper cites IMLE right before introducing its core objective (Eq. 1), and Appendix E.3 argues that IMLE is a specific instance of end-to-end Forward XM. It also pushes back on IMLE's theory, arguing the working mechanism was never implicit maximum likelihood but the multi-candidate search itself. In this case I think novelty (or contribution) lives more in the question, not just the method. IMLE asked how to avoid mode collapse in conditional image synthesis. XM asks whether the same best-of-K objective (sample K candidates, backprop only through the one closest to the data) works as a third pre-training axis, with gains that grow with scale rather than saturate. The IMLE line of work never pursued these questions. Probably @AlexiGlad should have called out IMLE more in Section 3 and said plainly that Eq. 1 is the conditional IMLE objective (which I personally would also find it a bit odd). But this does not make it plagiarism. If reusing a core mechanism to answer new questions were plagiarism, much of modern ML would be guilty.