Medical world models offer a framework for extending medical artificial intelligence beyond static prediction by representing evolving patient states and modelling how they change over time and in response to clinical interventions. This Review uses structured narrative synthesis and reproducible evidence mapping to define conceptual boundaries, technical foundations, application domains, and clinical evidence requirements. We screened 1,455 unique records and assembled a corpus of 300 sources, including 14 studies that met a strict empirical definition of a medical world model. The field is organized around four capabilities: patient state representation, temporal dynamics modelling, intervention-conditioned simulation, and clinician-supervised planning. Evidence spans medical imaging, longitudinal electronic health records, treatment response modelling, physiological and multimodal state modelling, ultrasound and surgical interaction, and population and health-system simulation; clinical digital twins are treated as a cross-cutting integration framework. Studies provide early evidence of technical feasibility for trajectory forecasting and comparison of candidate interventions, but most remain retrospective, task-specific, or preclinical. We distinguish functional capability from clinical evidence maturity and specify evidence needed to support progressively stronger clinical claims, from temporal forecasting to intervention comparison and planning-oriented decision support. These requirements include precise intervention representations, robust causal and mechanistic grounding, calibrated trajectory-level uncertainty, safety-constrained planning, external validation, and prospective multicentre evaluation against clinically meaningful endpoints. This framework aims to distinguish technically plausible simulation from clinically supportable prediction and decision support.
End-to-end autonomous driving policies require effective visual representations that capture both spatial scene structure and temporal dynamics. Video latent prediction has emerged as an effective paradigm for learning spatiotemporal visual representations, yet it remains unclear whether scaling this objective with action-free driving videos can yield representations that benefit end-to-end planning. We study action-free video latent prediction as a scalable pretraining objective and introduce ScaleDrive, a driving-oriented framework pretrained exclusively on large-scale internet open-world driving videos, without action annotations or benchmark-specific data. We keep the pretrained video encoder frozen during downstream end-to-end planning training to isolate the transferability of representations learned from internet driving videos. Ego-motion and depth probes show that scaling action-free video pretraining progressively strengthens the temporal and geometric information encoded in the frozen representation. We systematically study the visual representation transfer across different end-to-end driving policies and closed-loop benchmarks, where ScaleDrive consistently improves downstream performance and demonstrates that scaling action-free video latent prediction yields representations that generalize across both planning policy architectures and evaluation scenarios and protocols.
Li Kang, Yutao Fan, Rui Li, Heng Zhou, Yiran Qin, Zhemeng Zhang, Songtao Huang, Xiufeng Song 等 14 位作者
General-purpose coding agents can now write, debug, and refine entire robot programs, but only if they have somewhere to practice. Physical hardware is a poor practice ground: exploratory rollouts are slow to reset and, when several arms share a workspace, unsafe. Generic simulation benchmarks are safe but do not match the geometry, assets, or viewpoints of the workspace where the robot must actually work. We present CoEx (Code-driven Exploration), which lets the agent practice in an executable digital twin of its own deployment workspace. The twin is built by CoEnv, our real-to-sim framework, which reconstructs the physical scene from multi-view RGBD into a physics simulation. Inside it, a centralized code agent explores at the program level, writing a complete multi-arm program, running it in the twin, and refining it against grounded verification (privileged state checks, checkpoint predicates on risky steps, and adaptive viewpoints against inter-arm occlusion). Verified programs transfer to hardware through collision-checked deployment. On five real-world multi-arm tasks with up to three heterogeneous robots, CoEx reaches 70% average success, against 50% for the same system without the code agent (where a VLM must choose every primitive step by step), outperforms two prior VLM-planning frameworks, and produces verified episodes at 3.8-11.7x the ablated rate. Because every verified rollout is also a demonstration, exploration leaves reusable experience behind: a $π_{0.5}$ policy fine-tuned purely on 200 agent-generated rollouts reaches 100% and 70% real-robot success on two tasks, with no human demonstrations.
Guoyi Zhang, Yanjin Du, Guangsheng Xu, Zhengyao Zhao, Siyang Chen, Jingjing Gao, Yuezheng Zhou, Yiyang Wu 等 19 位作者
Small uncrewed underwater vehicles are proliferating and threaten maritime security, yet evade sonar and magnetic sensors built for larger submarines. Infrared thermal wakes, generated by hydrodynamic displacement that modulates the cold-skin layer, offer a non-acoustic, non-magnetic alternative even without cooling-water discharge. Existing studies, however, rely on idealized simulations that fail to capture real-world backgrounds, offering limited guidance for target-background discrimination. We establish AVP-IR-Wake, the first large-scale, real-world, physically diverse benchmark of 161,485 frames collected over three years. We show that thermal wakes are extended structures of discrete vortices, violating the compactness assumption of conventional targets. We reveal local indistinguishability: individual wake vortices are statistically identical to wind-induced background vortices in temporal, frequency, and sparse domains, sharing low-frequency information and long-range correlations. This challenges the assumptions of compact, transient, high-frequency targets in conventional detection. Yet we establish global morphological separability: although locally inseparable, the wake as a whole is organized by vehicle trajectory, whereas background clutter is organized by wind-driven thermal fronts. This explains why representative detectors fail and shows that reliable detection must shift from local feature extraction to global trajectory-constrained physical modeling. Because the cold-skin layer varies globally and seasonally, forecasting wake observability will require integrating physical oceanography and atmospheric science, linking underwater surveillance to the changing ocean surface.
Chenglin Wang East China Normal University, Yucheng Zhou University of Macau, Shuang Chen, Tao Wang Imaging Algorithm Center, vivo Mobile Communication Co., Ltd., Kai Zhang East China Normal University
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 \times 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.
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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
Yucheng Zhou University of Macau, Dubing Chen, Huan Zheng University of Macau, Jianbing Shen University of Macau
Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have enabled visually coherent image synthesis from descriptions, but generating images containing multiple given subjects remains challenging. As the number of reference identities increases, existing methods often suffer from subject missing and semantic drift. To address this problem, we propose MUSIC, the first MLLM specifically designed for MUlti-Subject In-Context image generation. To overcome the data scarcity, we introduce an automatic and scalable data generation pipeline that eliminates the need for manual annotation. Furthermore, we enhance the model’s understanding of multi-subject semantic relationships through a vision chain-of-thought (CoT) mechanism, guiding step-by-step reasoning from subject images to semantics and generation. To mitigate identity entanglement and manage visual complexity, we develop a novel semantics-driven spatial layout planning method and demonstrate its test-time scalability. By incorporating complex subject images during training, we improve the model’s capacity for chained reasoning. In addition, we curate MSIC, a new benchmark tailored for multi-subject in-context generation. Experimental results demonstrate that MUSIC significantly surpasses other methods in both multi- and single-subject scenarios.
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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