Tianhao Peng, Ho Man Kwan, Fan Zhang, Shan Liu, David Bull
Scalable video coding (SVC) encodes a video into a layered bitstream of a base layer and one or more enhancement layers, enabling decoding at different bitrate/quality/resolution operating points for diverse devices and network conditions. SVC has been incorporated into major video coding standards and has recently attracted growing interest for both scene-agnostic and scene-adaptive neural video codecs. Among the latter, implicit neural representation (INR) based codecs overfit a compact neural network to an individual video, offering fast decoding and competitive coding efficiency. However, research on scalable INR-based compression remains in its infancy: existing methods introduce additional network layers, which couple the bitrate with the decoding complexity and cannot match strong scalable/non-scalable codecs. This paper proposes S-NVRC, a scalable INR-based video codec that jointly supports fine-grained bitrate and decoding complexity scalability from a single embedded bitstream. It adopts a coarse-to-fine prefix for feature grids and a nested prefix for network layers, which scale bitrate and decoding complexity, respectively. With a single encoding, S-NVRC spans a wide range of bitrate and decoding complexity and outperforms SHM-12.4 and the multi-layer VTM-20.0 by 43.7% and 5.6% in BD-rate on the UVG dataset.
Yang Qu, Qiang Fu, Zonghao Ying, Jiayi Zhao, Yaoyuan Zhang, Jinyang Guo, Jian Yang, Aishan Liu 等 10 位作者
Embodied agents are increasingly deployed in open-world environments, yet current robustness evaluations remain biased toward hazardous instructions and jailbreak vulnerabilities. A more fundamental issue is largely overlooked: agents are rarely tested under semantically sufficient but contextually minimal instructions (i.e., common in real-world human communication), where auxiliary contextual cues are absent. For the first, we identify a novel phenomenon termed Ambient Context Illusion, where agents fail to execute tasks correctly when non-essential contextual details are omitted, despite unchanged task semantics. To systematically study this, we establish VagueBench, a benchmark built upon the AI2-THOR interactive simulation environment for the evaluation of context dependency in embodied agents. We systematically consider key semantic components of instructions (entities, procedures, constraints, and prior knowledge) and derive a unified taxonomy with four categories and nine subtypes to reduce auxiliary information. VagueBench contains 1,303 instruction pairs across diverse indoor environments, constructed via a human-agent co-generation framework that integrates semantic redundancy estimation, taxonomy-guided transformation, and rigorous semantic-invariance verification. Through extensive evaluation on 6 state-of-the-art embodied agents, we observe significant degradation on VagueBench in both task performance and executability (relatively -19.65% in task success rate and relatively +54.10% in empty plan rate) revealing a strong reliance on auxiliary linguistic signals rather than core task semantics. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this phenomenon persists in real-world robotic systems, where it can lead to incorrect decisions and potential safety risks.
CLIP-based Vision-Language Models have become cornerstones of modern multimodal systems. The cross-modal contrastive objective equips the CLIP vision encoder to both see objects and read text. These two abilities induce an entanglement between the encoding of lexical and semantic shapes, creating a distinctive vulnerability to typographic attacks, in which rendered text overrides an image's semantic content with its literal meaning. The black-box nature of these encoders has prevented a mechanistic interpretation of such entanglement. We introduce a head-decomposed Sparse Dictionary Learning (SDL) architecture that, by design, decomposes individual attention heads into interpretable, head-specific latents. Based on this inductive disentanglement, we re-purpose Clarity Score and propose normalized Text Attribution Score, which are both label-free, to identify attention heads that carry typographic information. As a causal validation of successful circuit separation, we perform a mechanistic intervention that reweighs attention away from the patch tokens in the identified lexical heads at test-time. Experiments show that the intervention effectively recovers object classification under typographic attack and, across five CLIP variants and four typographic benchmarks, achieves up to 46.9% improvement while incurring up to 1% accuracy loss in general image perception, outperforming prior supervised and training-free methods. Expanding on the mechanistic intervention, we propose a test-time adaptive attention head routing to further reduce the impact on performance at matched robustness, pushing beyond the Pareto frontier of current robustness-perception tradeoff.
Guo Ye, Zexi Zhang, Xu Zhao, Shang Wu, Haoran Lu, Shihan Lu, Han Liu
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable generalization by mapping web-scale knowledge to robotic control, yet they remain blind to physical contact. Consequently, they struggle with contact-rich manipulation tasks that require reasoning about force, texture, and slip. While some approaches incorporate low-dimensional tactile signals, they fail to capture the high-resolution dynamics essential for such interactions. To address this limitation, we introduce DreamTacVLA, a framework that grounds VLA models in contact physics by learning to feel the future. Our model adopts a hierarchical perception scheme in which high-resolution tactile images serve as micro-vision inputs coupled with wrist-camera local vision and third-person macro vision. To reconcile these multi-scale sensory streams, we first train a unified policy with a Hierarchical Spatial Alignment (HSA) loss that aligns tactile tokens with their spatial counterparts in the wrist and third-person views. To further deepen the model's understanding of fine-grained contact dynamics, we finetune the system with a tactile world model that predicts future tactile signals. To mitigate tactile data scarcity and the wear-prone nature of tactile sensors, we construct a hybrid large-scale dataset sourced from both high-fidelity digital twin and real-world experiments. By anticipating upcoming tactile states, DreamTacVLA acquires a rich model of contact physics and conditions its actions on both real observations and imagined consequences. Across contact-rich manipulation tasks, it outperforms state-of-the-art VLA baselines, achieving up to 95% success, highlighting the importance of understanding physical contact for robust, touch-aware robotic agents.
Minghe Shen, Zhuo Zhi, Chonghan Liu, Shuo Xing Google and Texas A&M University - College Station, Zhengzhong Tu Texas A&M University - College Station, Che Liu
Recent studies posit that Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) primarily amplifies behaviors inherent to the pre-training distribution rather than inducing new capabilities, but these insights are predominantly limited to language-only domains, leaving the dynamics of visual-centric spatial reasoning under-explored. To examine the impact of RLVR on the capability boundaries of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), we introduce Ariadne, a controlled framework based on synthetic maze navigation where the reasoning difficulty is precisely regulated by path length and the number of turns. We demonstrate that applying RLVR extends the spatial reasoning boundary, achieving success on problems where the base policy VLM consistently attains 0% accuracy despite increasing pass@k sampling budgets, indicating that the optimized policy successfully navigates search spaces that were effectively unreachable by the base distribution. Furthermore, despite being trained exclusively on synthetic mazes, we evaluate the model on two real-world navigation benchmarks (MapBench and ReasonMap) in a zero-shot setting. The observed improvements in these out-of-domain tasks suggest genuine spatial reasoning capability expansion rather than mere sampling efficiency. Our code is available at: https://github.com/MingheShen/Ariadne
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Jianshu Zhang, Chengxuan Qian University of California, Santa Barbara, Haosen Sun, Haoran Lu Northwestern University, Dingcheng Wang Northwestern University, Letian Xue Northwestern University, Northwestern University, Han Liu Northwestern University
Estimating task progress requires long-horizon and dynamic reasoning, going beyond static visual perception. Although Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at describing what is visible in a single observation, it remains unclear whether they can infer how far a task has progressed from partial information. To study this question, we introduce Progress-Bench, a benchmark with over 3K instances for evaluating progress reasoning from a single observation. We further examine a human-inspired two-stage paradigm that combines episodic retrieval with mental simulation. We instantiate this paradigm through both training-free prompting and a training-based approach using the automatically curated ProgressLM-45K dataset. Experiments on 14 VLMs show that most models struggle with reliable progress estimation, and that training-free reasoning provides only limited and model-dependent benefits. In contrast, the training-based ProgressLM-3B achieves consistent improvements in accuracy, robustness to viewpoint variation, and handling of unanswerable cases, despite its small scale. Additional analyses reveal common failure patterns in existing VLMs and clarify when and why progress reasoning succeeds or fails.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Yubo Wang, Juntian Zhang, Yichen Wu, Yankai Lin Renmin University of China, Nils Lukas Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Yuhan Liu Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
While Chain-of-Thought empowers Large Vision-Language Models with multi-step reasoning, explicit textual rationales suffer from an information bandwidth bottleneck, where continuous visual details are discarded during discrete tokenization. Recent latent reasoning methods attempt to address this challenge, but often fall prey to premature semantic collapse due to rigid autoregressive objectives. In this paper, we propose Laser, a novel paradigm that reformulates visual deduction via Dynamic Windowed Alignment Learning. Instead of forcing a point-wise prediction, Laser aligns the latent state with a dynamic validity window of future semantics. This mechanism enforces a “Forest-before-Trees” cognitive hierarchy, enabling the model to maintain a probabilistic superposition of global features before narrowing down to local details. Crucially, Laser maintains interpretability via decodable trajectories while stabilizing unconstrained learning via Self-Refined Superposition. Extensive experiments on 6 benchmarks demonstrate that Laser achieves state-of-the-art performance among latent reasoning methods, surpassing the strong baseline Monet by 5.03% on average. Notably, it achieves these gains with extreme efficiency, reducing inference tokens by more than 97%, while demonstrating robust generalization to out-of-distribution domains.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表