Event cameras offering high dynamic range and low latency have emerged as disruptive technologies in imaging. Despite growing research on leveraging these benefits for different imaging tasks, a comprehensive study of recently advances and challenges are still lacking. This limits the broader understanding of how to utilize events in universal imaging applications. In this survey, we first introduce a physical model and the characteristics of different event sensors as the foundation. Following this, we highlight the advancement and interaction of image/video enhancement tasks with events. Additionally, we explore advanced tasks, which capture richer light information with events, \eg~light field estimation, multi-view generation, and photometric. Finally, we discuss new challenges and open questions offering a perspective for this rapidly evolving field. More continuously updated resources are at this link: https://github.com/yunfanLu/Awesome-Event-Imaging
Sheng Wang, Jialu Yao, Maria V. Rossi, Shunsuke Koga, Esther Baranov, MacLean P. Nasrallah, Songhao Li, Jonathan Xu 等 25 位作者
Medical AI learns from the answers doctors record, but rarely from how they interpret the evidence to reach them. Here we introduce PathCowork, a framework that turns pathologists' narrated examinations into supervision for visual grounding and procedures that guide diagnostic AI agents. Synchronized gaze, narration and navigation link visual findings to the process of interpreting them. Across 48 sessions from 16 pathologists, the platform captured 1,028 minutes of slide review. Using these data, we trained PathCowork-1T for server deployment and PathCowork-27B for local deployment, with improved visual grounding. Across five organ-specific evaluations, agents combining this grounding with recorded diagnostic procedures achieved primary task scores averaging 17.9 and 24.1 percentage points higher than Claude Code and Codex, respectively, with shorter processing times and lower inference costs. Compared to the state-of-the-art multiple-instance learning AIs, the PathCowork agent-proposed regions achieved higher prostate-grading scores with limited slide labels. PathCowork can also help construct pathology AI benchmarks where questions derived from the recordings identified difficulties in recognizing viewing context and rejecting inapplicable premises. In summary, PathCowork proposes a new paradigm to scale up the data collection and train pathology AI through transparent reasoning from diagnostic sessions, opening a path towards systems that learn directly from routine clinical practice.
Predicting future physical states stands as a central challenge in embodied intelligence. Existing video world models leave 3D dynamics implicit, action-based formulations remain tied to specific robot configurations, and 3D motion prediction models use flow-only supervision, providing a limited learning signal for physical dynamics. To circumvent these limitations, we introduce \method{}, a generative world model that jointly predicts future video and query-based 3D trajectories. By parameterizing 3D motion as continuous displacement tokens aligned with the video grid, a unified Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) backbone jointly denoises both modalities under a rectified-flow objective. This formulation couples explicit geometric dynamics with visual evolution, effectively unlocking the physical commonsense embedded within pretrained video models. To empirically scale and validate this unified architecture, we train \method{} on a heterogeneous mixture of 1.44 million object-level samples spanning simulated and real-world domains. We further introduce WorldFlowBench, comprising 1,678 evaluation samples from 11 data sources across simulated and real-world interactions, including spatial reasoning tasks. Across all three evaluation sets, WorldFlow achieves the lowest average displacement error (ADE) and final displacement error (FDE) among the evaluated learning-based methods. Notably, on the challenging SpatialCog set, WorldFlow achieves an ADE of 0.060 m, a 54.2\% reduction compared with the strongest external baseline. It also reduces ADE and FDE by 55.9\% and 68.5\%, respectively, compared with its flow-only variant. Project page: https://worldflow-rbs.github.io/.
Embodied world models should not only imagine plausible futures, but also perceive the geometric, semantic, and motion structure of the evolving world. We present GenSight, a unified embodied world model that brings future video generation and dense perception into a single pretrained video diffusion transformer. GenSight uses a unified spatiotemporal representation for video, depth, embodiment segmentation, and first-frame-relative 2D flow. Built on a shared DiT backbone, GenSight uses lightweight task modulation to predict all modalities within the same architecture. All tasks are jointly optimized within a unified velocity prediction space. At inference, GenSight supports two complementary modes: multi-step future video generation with aligned dense predictions and single-step dense perception from an observed video. By unifying modality representation, model architecture, and prediction space, GenSight avoids separate modality-specific pipelines and couples appearance, geometry, semantics, and motion in a shared representation. It promotes cross-modal consistency and allows dense perception to benefit from the spatiotemporal priors learned through video generation. Trained on embodied manipulation data spanning multiple robot embodiments and human-hand interactions, GenSight demonstrates strong performance in both video generation and dense 4D perception, highlighting the effectiveness of unifying seeing and imagining for embodied world modeling.
Sparse-view cone-beam computed tomography is widely used for fast, low-dose volumetric imaging and lesion localization in dentistry and image-guided interventions, but it introduces severe artifacts. Feed-forward Gaussian methods transfer the reconstruction cost to training and decode each coordinate from projection-aligned features and neighboring anchors. However, information from the whole scan is written only when the field is constructed and cannot be retrieved during coordinate decoding, leaving the volume inconsistent within the scan. This is a common limitation of such methods: once the field is fixed, decoding uses only local features and reconstruction quality drops substantially. We propose SparseTokenGS, a Gaussian-based method for sparse-view cone-beam computed tomography reconstruction via a reusable token pool. Anchor Token Fusion and Point-Token Attention query this shared pool at the anchors and at the query coordinates, respectively. The local Gaussian prior is retained, and the volume is reconstructed in one forward pass, without per-scan optimization or a projection-domain loss. On three public chest and dental datasets, SparseTokenGS achieves the highest reconstruction performance among the compared methods. On clinical dental scans, reconstruction from only six projections reaches 29.51 decibels in peak signal-to-noise ratio and a structural similarity of 0.842 against the full-view reference, and off-the-shelf tooth-and-pulp segmentation keeps these structures separable for root-canal localization. Experiments on volcanic rock and chicken show performance after same-object adaptation. A reusable token pool gives feed-forward reconstruction a mechanism that keeps scan-wide context available through decoding and can benefit future rapid clinical lesion localization and analysis. The code is available at: https://github.com/FrankDengAI/SparseTokenGS.
Fine-grained visual perception remains a bottleneck during post-training of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as perceptual errors can constrain gains from reasoning-focused optimization. Although image-caption pre-training improves perception, its influence can weaken as subsequent stages change data mixtures and objectives. Continuing caption supervision during post-training is challenging because subjective, information-dense descriptions complicate verifiable reward design. We present PerceptRL, which strengthens perception at two complementary levels. Perception RL uses a multi-agent pipeline to extract verified errors from dense image captions and convert the corresponding visual facts into QA pairs with fixed answer labels and rule-based rewards. Chain QA links correlated errors, while multiple-choice QA combines unrelated errors. A specialized route targets high-error domains with tailored verification, and a domain-agnostic general route covers errors beyond these domains. Perception Agentic RL addresses fine-grained and dense cases unresolved by single-turn Perception RL through multi-turn inspection with visual tools. We observe coordinate drift even in models trained to use tools, where incorrect crops or annotations distort evidence and propagate errors. Coordinate Injection corrects spatial operations in cold-start trajectories, while a grounding-aware process reward supervises intermediate spatial fidelity alongside final-answer correctness. Training proceeds through shared cold-start SFT, single-turn Perception RL, and multi-turn Perception Agentic RL. Across seven benchmarks under a shared tool-use protocol, PerceptRL achieves 71.6% average accuracy, surpassing the base model with the same tools and the strongest evaluated frontier VLM by 15.7 and 5.2 percentage points, respectively.
We present OctWorld, a video diffusion framework with persistent 3D memory for generating explorable, world-consistent, and high-fidelity visual scenes. Given a single image, OctWorld performs stable autoregressive world generation along user-specified camera trajectories. We focus on long-range generation, characterized by extended camera paths and wide viewpoint coverage, where preserving spatial consistency is particularly challenging when previously generated regions are revisited. To address this problem, we introduce OctMap, an extensible and spatially adaptive 3D memory that progressively fuses generated visual observations and their corresponding depth maps into a global representation. OctMap employs TSDF fusion within a dynamic sparse octree whose spatial resolution adapts to image evidence. This design preserves geometric and appearance details across diverse scene scales while maintaining low memory overhead. Experiments demonstrate that OctWorld generates long-range, spatially consistent videos and outperforms prior methods on both existing benchmarks and challenging long-range generation settings. OctMap also provides clear advantages over point-based caches and fixed-resolution TSDF volumes. Project page: https://github.com/microsoft/OctWorld
Qiaoling Chen, Jiaxiang Cheng, Xueqing Deng, Tiankai Hang, Ji Hou, Jiaqi Li, Yifan Liu, Tao Lu 等 38 位作者
Interactive world generation requires models to follow successive commands while preserving relevant history and action consequences. We present Hy-Nomas, a video world model with an 8B diffusion backbone that supports free-form text instructions and continuous camera control across multiple interaction turns. It generates variable-length segments conditioned on current inputs and cached history. Our central design aligns structured video captions with action-aware causal attention: descriptive context remains accessible across segments, while action instructions are restricted to their intended temporal windows. A vision-language Prompt Enhancer (PE) translates user requests and multimodal interaction histories into structured conditions for the next segment. A multi-stage curriculum progressively introduces causal generation, text interaction, camera control, and training on model-generated histories, followed by diffusion distillation. In human evaluation, Hy-Nomas shows superior performance over existing world models. We release model weights, code and benchmarks, together with a lightweight adaptation workflow, to support reproducible research on interactive world generation.
Multimodal intelligence can be viewed as human-guided co-evolution between worlds and agents through interaction. However, scaling this process faces two bottlenecks: constructing heterogeneous, verifiable environments is costly, and manual Harness iteration cannot keep pace with growing task diversity and complexity. A key insight is that tasks with different modalities and surface forms can share the same underlying capability requirements. We therefore introduce The Trinity, a recursive self-improvement framework coupling world generation with Harness evolution through three roles: Creator, Explorer, and Evolver. Drawing on verified execution trajectories, Evolver shifts the basis of task organization from surface categories to shared requirements, reorganizing the original task tree into a hierarchical capability tree. We introduce Capability-Driven Real2Sim2Real: for heterogeneous tasks at the same node, Creator abstracts their common requirements into simplified, verifiable simulated worlds for capability learning, while evaluation on original tasks measures transfer. Along this capability tree, Explorer progressively evolves reusable capability modules through selective inheritance, forming a Harness tree whose validated updates accumulate across iterations within a fixed topology. The resulting Harnesses specialize in different capabilities, motivating a Capability-Aware Harness Router that uses public task information to select compatible module configurations from the tree. Our evolved Harnesses improve mean performance by 34 points across 28 training benchmarks and 26 points across 18 unseen benchmarks, including two real-world embodied tasks.
Hao Yang, Zhuo Ma, Yang Liu, Yilong Yang, Guancheng Wang, JianFeng Ma
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for multimodal intelligence, but their growing deployment also expands the attack surface of prompt injection. Despite this growing concern, existing attacks still suffer from a critical limitation: the injected prompt for one modality only steers the model's interpretation of that singular input. Alternatively, these attacks remain multimodal but fail to achieve cross-modal prompt perturbation. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel cross-modal prompt injection attack CrossMPI, which can steer the model's interpretation of both textual and visual inputs via image-only prompt injection. Our design is underpinned by the following key breakthroughs. First, we turn the focus of the injected prompt perturbation optimization from the visual embedding space (typically with only $10^5$ parameters) to the model hidden state space (for multimodal information integration and with $10^7$ parameters). Then, two strategies are adopted to mitigate the optimization challenges posed by the larger parameter space. To constrain the optimized model parameter space, we introduce a layer selection strategy that identifies the layers most critical to multimodal integration. Interestingly, deviating from the past experience, our analysis reveals that the optimal layers for LVLM prompt perturbation reside in the middle of the model rather than the last. To constrain the image perturbation space, we propose a new distance-decremental perturbation budget assignment strategy that allocates budgets decrementally as the pixel distance to semantic-critical regions increases. Extensive experiments across multiple LVLMs and datasets show that our method significantly outperforms baseline approaches.
Long-video generators increasingly retrieve past visual observations to prevent identity drift. The intuition is compelling: more access to history should make future video more consistent. But an image can be faithful to the past and wrong for the present. Does visual memory always improve the generated story? We investigate this question through VMem-Bench, a two-track diagnostic study. Track-A measures which references are selected from 92 real films (16,548 segments), before generation and without generator confounds. Track-B compares four retrieval policies with no-memory and gold-informed last-seen controls on 30 causally generated stories (2,824 segments) using a shared generator. Retrieval increases entity recall from 0.559 to 0.628-0.693 and improves similarity to past appearances, but decreases precision from 0.977 to 0.915-0.938 and forbidden-entity avoidance from 0.968 to 0.845-0.898. It can also reinforce obsolete appearances after the story changes them. Conversely, high long-gap recall can arise without memory when the prompt itself supplies the appearance; an appearance-stripping analysis exposes this confound. These results distinguish historical fidelity from current-story correctness and show why retrieval relevance or final-video consistency alone does not establish memory utility.
Kuan Zhang, Dongchen Liu, Qiyue Zhao, Tianyu Xin, Yue Su, Haisheng Wang, Han Yin, Hongbo Ma 等 15 位作者
The real world unfolds along a single set of physics laws, yet human intelligence demonstrates a remarkable capacity to generalize experiences from this singular physical existence into a multiverse of games, each governed by entirely different rules, aesthetics, physics, and objectives. This omni-reality adaptability is a hallmark of general intelligence. As Artificial Intelligence progresses towards Artificial General Intelligence, the multiverse of games has evolved from mere entertainment into the ultimate ground for training and evaluating AGI. The pursuit of this generality has unfolded across four eras: from environment-specific symbolic and reinforcement learning agents, to current large foundation models acting as generalist players, and toward a future creator stage where agent both creates new game worlds and continually evolves within them. We trace the full lifecycle of a generalist game player along four interdependent pillars: Dataset, Model, Harness, and Benchmark. Every advance across these pillars can be read as an attempt to break one of five fundamental trade-offs that currently bound the whole system. Building on this end-to-end view, we chart a five-step roadmap, progressing from single-game mastery to the ultimate creator stage in which the agent simultaneously creates and evolves within theoretical game multiverse. Taken together, our work offers a unified lens onto a rapidly shifting field, and a principled path toward the omnipotent generalist agent capable of seamlessly mastering any challenge within the multiverse of games, thereby paving the way for AGI.
Yingheng Wang, Yair Schiff, Aaron Gokaslan, Weishen Pan, Fei Wang, Christopher De Sa, Volodymyr Kuleshov
While diffusion models excel at generating high-quality samples, their latent variables typically lack semantic meaning and are not suitable for representation learning. Here, we propose InfoDiffusion, an algorithm that augments diffusion models with low-dimensional latent variables that capture high-level factors of variation in the data. InfoDiffusion relies on a learning objective regularized with the mutual information between observed and hidden variables, which is designed to improve latent space quality and to prevent the latents from being ignored by expressive diffusion-based decoders. Empirically, we find that InfoDiffusion learns disentangled and human-interpretable latent representations that are competitive with state-of-the-art generative and contrastive methods, while retaining the high sample quality of diffusion models. Our method enables manipulating the attributes of generated images and has the potential to assist tasks that require exploring a learned latent space to generate quality samples, e.g., generative design.
Jiahuan Zhang, Shunwen Bai Zhejiang University, Tianheng Wang Hangzhou Institute of Medicine Chinese Academy of Science, KaiWen Guo Westlake University, Zijia Song National University of Defense Technology, Hanqing WU, Guozheng Rao Tianjin University, Kai Han The University of Hong Kong 等 9 位作者
Humans naturally possess the spatial reasoning ability to form and manipulate images and structures of objects in space. There is an increasing effort to endow Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with similar spatial reasoning capabilities. However, it remains unclear whether these models truly understand and manipulate spatial objects or not. To address this question, we propose a new evaluation framework aimed at assessing the performance of VLMs in spatial deformation reasoning tasks. Specifically, we construct a benchmark for spatial deformation reasoning from 2D to 3D. We explore whether the model can effectively perform spatial deformation reasoning from two directions: forward reasoning (given the operations, find the final state) and reverse reasoning (given the final state, determine the operations). We adopt a ladder competition format, using the number of deformation steps as the level classification criterion, with the goal of exploring the boundaries of the model’s deformation reasoning capabilities. Interestingly, the benchmarking results reveal that almost no model demonstrates plausible spatial deformation reasoning abilities. Furthermore, even after applying targeted training and mainstream reasoning enhancement methods, the models are still unable to perform well on 3D spatial deformation reasoning.
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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
Chi-Hsiang Hsiao National Taiwan University, Yi-Cheng Wang National Taiwan University, Tzung-Sheng Lin National Taiwan University, Yi-Ren Yeh, Chu-song Chen National Taiwan University
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to dynamically access external information, which is powerful for answering questions over previously unseen documents. Nonetheless, they struggle with high-level conceptual understanding and holistic comprehension due to limited context windows, which constrain their ability to perform deep reasoning over long-form, domain-specific content such as full-length books. To solve this problem, knowledge graphs (KGs) have been leveraged to provide entity-centric structure and hierarchical summaries, offering more structured support for reasoning. However, existing KG-based RAG solutions remain restricted to text-only inputs and fail to leverage the complementary insights provided by other modalities such as vision. On the other hand, reasoning from visual documents requires textual, visual, and spatial cues into structured, hierarchical concepts. To address this issue, we introduce a multimodal knowledge graph-based RAG that enables cross-modal reasoning for better content understanding. Our method incorporates visual cues into the construction of knowledge graphs, the retrieval phase, and the answer generation process. Experimental results across both global and fine-grained question answering tasks show that our approach consistently outperforms existing approaches on both textual and multimodal benchmarks.
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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
Zhen Fang University of Science and Technology of China, Ruiyan Han, XinYu Sun, Yuchen Ma, Ziheng Wang, Yu Zeng, Zehui Chen, Lin Chen University of Science and Technology of China 等 12 位作者
While Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) have achieved remarkable success in cross-modal comprehension, a significant gap persists in their ability to leverage such internal knowledge for high-quality generation. We formalize this discrepancy as Conduction Aphasia, a phenomenon where models accurately interpret multimodal inputs but struggle to translate that understanding into faithful and controllable synthesis. To address this, we propose UniCorn, a simple yet elegant self-improvement framework that eliminates the need for external data or teacher supervision. By partitioning a single UMM into three collaborative roles: Proposer, Solver, and Judge, UniCorn generates high-quality interactions via self-play and employs cognitive pattern reconstruction to distill latent understanding into explicit generative signals. To validate the restoration of multimodal coherence, we introduce UniCycle, a cycle-consistency benchmark based on a Text to Image to Text reconstruction loop. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniCorn achieves comprehensive and substantial improvements over the base model across six general image generation benchmarks. Notably, it achieves SOTA performance on TIIF(73.8), DPG(86.8), CompBench(88.5), and UniCycle while further delivering substantial gains of +5.0 on WISE and +6.5 on OneIG. These results highlight that our method significantly enhances T2I generation while maintaining robust comprehension, demonstrating the scalability of fully self-supervised refinement for unified multimodal intelligence.
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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