Normalizing flows (NFs) provide exact likelihoods and deterministic invertible sampling, but have historically lagged behind diffusion models for large-scale image generation. We identify a key obstacle: NFs are required to learn a single invertible transport over the full ambient space, making them highly sensitive to high-dimensional representations. This leads to a semantic-capacity mismatch in modern visual representation spaces, where semantic information is compact but encoded in overcomplete features. We propose SRC-Flow, which introduces a Semantic Representation Compressor (SRC) to compact high-dimensional RAE features into a low-dimensional semantic space before flow modeling and preserve reconstruction through the frozen RAE decoder. This compact space reduces the modeling burden of NFs and enables effective likelihood-based generation in semantic representation space. We further adopt constant noise regularization tailored to the fixed unconditional bijection learned by flows. On ImageNet 256x256 and 512x512, SRC-Flow achieves state-of-the-art generation quality among normalizing flow methods, with gFID scores of 1.65 and 2.07 under classifier-free guidance, while retaining exact likelihood computation in the compact semantic representation space and deterministic invertible sampling at the flow level. Codes and models will be released in the future.
Interactive video world models aim to follow user actions while maintaining scene consistency over extended interactions. History-based methods reuse generated latents to preserve scene content, but three limitations of this reuse contribute to error recirculation. 1) The latent generated at each interaction is retained as history, potentially containing blurred details, geometric distortions, or semantic drift. 2) Although retrieved historical content matches the current scene, it can still contain errors that are carried into the next chunk. 3) New outputs then become history for later interactions, potentially reinforcing the same errors through repeated reuse. To limit this cycle, we aim to predict the future scene state from the current generated latent and the next action before generating the next interaction's video chunk. This future-state prior provides guidance for the next chunk, with the aim of reducing the errors carried forward from history. To this end, we propose a plug-and-play Causal Next-Chunk Predictor (C-NCP) with cross-model adaptability and prediction-guided modulation. We integrate C-NCP into four base generators and evaluate the augmented models across three benchmarks for interactive long-video generation and action-conditioned world modeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate reduced error accumulation and improved long-horizon consistency across diverse generation settings. The project page is at https://GuangYuanKK.github.io/futureworld.
Xing Liu, Yifan Guo, Hongtai Lv, Lei Lou, Yuyi Tan, Jiang Du, Xijia Zhang, Ming Zhang 等 21 位作者
Intraoperative frozen-section diagnosis of central nervous system (CNS) lesions guides surgical decisions but is challenged by artefacts, diagnostic complexity and time constraints. Most pathology foundation models have limited exposure to CNS frozen tissue. Here we present FOCUS, a subspecialty foundation model pretrained on 27,930 frozen-section whole-slide images enriched for CNS tissue. FOCUS ranked first across all 11 diagnostic and 12 biomarker-prediction tasks in the internal test cohort, achieving mean AUCs of 0.969 and 0.877, respectively. This advantage was retained in the temporal and external test cohorts. We further organized a WHO-aligned diagnostic hierarchy, where FOCUS also outperformed comparator models. In a reader study, FOCUS assistance enabled junior readers to approach or exceed unassisted senior readers in hierarchical diagnostic accuracy and granularity. More importantly, FOCUS assistance enabled readers to correctly identify a mean of 63.0% of initially missed lymphoma cases (73.2% among junior readers), potentially avoiding unnecessary extensive resection. These findings highlight the potential of FOCUS to provide clinically actionable support for intraoperative CNS pathology and inform surgical decisions.
Recent efforts to accelerate inference in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have largely focused on visual token compression. The effectiveness of these methods is commonly evaluated by measuring the accuracy drop on existing MLLM benchmarks before and after compression. However, these benchmarks are originally designed to assess general perception and reasoning abilities, rather than the specific challenges posed by visual token compression, leading to a fundamental task mismatch. In this work, we uncover a counterintuitive yet consistent phenomenon: simple image downsampling outperforms many advanced visual token compression methods across multiple widely used benchmarks. Through a comprehensive empirical study spanning eight popular benchmarks and multiple state-of-the-art compression techniques, we show that (i) current benchmarks contain substantial noise (task-irrelevant samples) for evaluating visual token compression, and (ii) downsampling can act as an effective data filter that distinguishes between simple and difficult samples with respect to compression sensitivity. Motivated by these findings, we propose VTC-Bench, an evaluation framework that explicitly leverages downsampling as a discriminator to denoise existing benchmarks, enabling a fairer and more meaningful additional assessment of visual token compression methods.
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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