NVIDIA, :, Anis Ahmad, Jon Allen, Malik Aqeel Anwar, Jesse Archer, Maciej Bala, Piotr Barejko 等 90 位作者
We present a shared framework that adapts Cosmos world foundation models for real-time interactive world simulation in Physical AI. By streaming visual observations in response to actions and scene controls, the framework enables users and embodied agents to interact with evolving virtual environments. It supports both predicting the visual consequences of actions and generating observations from physical state maintained by an external simulator. We demonstrate this approach across camera navigation and robot manipulation, controllable video transfer, and multi-view autonomous vehicle (AV) simulation. These examples provide a shared foundation for developing interactive virtual environments for Physical AI training and evaluation. Our code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/nvidia/cosmos and https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/cosmos3-examples. The project website is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/cosmos-lab/cosmos-simulation.
Lirong Che, Peidong Wang, Yimeng Su, Jiong Wang, Yang Chen, Wenbo Fu, Zhenyu Huang, Tiancheng Xu 等 14 位作者
Embodied agents are usually organized around individual tasks, yet the physical world keeps changing between tasks and during execution. We introduce LIFE (Lifelong Intelligence from Experience), a framework in which a robot observes continuously, remembers selectively, and turns experience into new capabilities. RoboBeats, a family of lightweight streaming gates, tracks conditions set by the agent and discovers new events, deciding when an observation warrants a response or a memory write. Selected observations enter Plastic Memory, a flat store of images and structured records that keeps the source evidence, so new fields and indexes can be added when later questions need them. When existing tools fall short, Explore-Distill-Mount (EDM) turns solutions found during problem solving into validated, reusable tools and skills. Under matched protocols, RoboBeats substantially improves condition tracking over its base models and, at the same writing budget, retains more useful evidence for memory question answering than uniform sampling. A case study of limited scale, replaying 24 hours of continuous video recorded by a real robot, illustrates how the integrated system builds memory from a day of experience and uses it to answer everyday questions. LIFE takes a step toward robots that become more familiar with their surroundings and more capable through experience: learning not only to complete tasks, but to live in the world.
Ziao Li, Jianxiong Ye, Biao Tang, Leping Zhang, Kun Zuo, Siyu Huang, Mengtang Li, Deyu Meng 等 9 位作者
Perception from a single unmanned surface vehicle (USV) is limited by sensing range, field of view, and occlusions caused by islands, port infrastructure, and nearby vessels. Multi-USV cooperative perception can alleviate these limitations by integrating complementary observations from distributed viewpoints. However, progress is constrained by the high cost of coordinated sea trials, the scarcity of multi-USV datasets, and the lack of integrated maritime simulation and evaluation tools. We present MMUSV-Sim, a perception-oriented maritime simulation and data-generation platform built on Unreal Engine 5 and Project AirSim. It supports configurable maritime scenarios, synchronized multimodal acquisition across multiple USVs, and consistent 3D annotations in a shared world frame. Using MMUSV-Sim, we construct MarU2U-200m, a synchronized multi-USV RGB--LiDAR dataset with 341 sequences and 14,385 scene frames. We establish a cooperative bird's-eye-view (BEV) vessel detection benchmark with LiDAR and RGB--LiDAR inputs. Experimental results show that Early Fusion improves LiDAR detection AP@0.5 from 64.26 to 81.46 compared with the single-USV baseline. RGB features further improve intermediate fusion, increasing AP@0.5 by up to 4.55 percentage points. LiDAR and RGB transfer experiments also show the value of the generated data as a pretraining source for real maritime detection. The project are available at https://github.com/lizaowo/MMUSV-Sim
We identify a fundamental mismatch in empathetic reinforcement learning: support priorities evolve with the dialogue state, yet existing methods typically optimize predefined reward specifications that remain fixed across turns. To model these evolving support priorities, we organize empathetic support along cognitive, affective, and proactive empathy, and propose Context-Adaptive Rubric Evolution (CARE). At each turn, CARE generates a context-adaptive rubric by adjusting both the weights of these three empathy dimensions and their fine-grained evaluation criteria. The rubric generator is trained with turn-level rubric supervision and human preference data through supervised fine-tuning followed by preference-based reinforcement learning, and then serves as an adaptive reward interface for online empathetic RL. Integrated with both RLVER and MICA, CARE achieves state-of-the-art performance across SentientBench, EQBench3, and EMPA under three independent LLM judges. Notably, on EMPA, CARE improves EPM-Idx over the strongest baseline by at least 13 points under all three judges, including an increase from 28.11 to 83.54 under Gemini-2.5-Pro. Further analyses show that learned rubric priorities systematically vary across dialogue stages and user emotions, demonstrating that CARE adapts what is rewarded as support needs evolve. Code is available at https://asa13opp.github.io/CARE-project-page.
Zhengyu Hu, Jianxun Lian, Zheyuan Xiao, Max Xiong, Tianfu Wang, Teng Xiao, Yuxuan Lei, Fengqing Jiang 等 13 位作者
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled large-scale, high-fidelity social simulations, creating new opportunities for computational social science. However, constructing persona sets that faithfully reflect real-world population diversity remains a key challenge. Existing studies often emphasize agentic frameworks and simulation environments, while paying less attention to persona generation and the biases introduced by unrepresentative persona sets. In this paper, we propose a systematic framework for synthesizing high-quality, population-aligned persona sets for LLM-driven social simulation. Our approach begins by leveraging LLMs to generate narrative personas from long-term social media data, followed by rigorous quality assessment to filter out low-fidelity profiles. We then apply importance sampling to achieve global alignment with reference psychometric distributions, such as the Big Five personality traits. To address the needs of specific simulation contexts, we further introduce a task-specific module that adapts the globally aligned persona set to targeted subpopulations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly reduces population-level bias and enables accurate, flexible social simulation for a wide range of research and policy applications.
Identity-preserving video generation aims to synthesize high-quality and visually realistic videos from textual and visual conditions while faithfully maintaining the subject's identity across diverse motions. Prior methods have extensively introduced reference-guided control signals and identity-aware conditioning to improve facial alignment from reference images. However, improving static identity alignment alone creates a fundamental tension between identity fidelity and temporal controllability, which frequently causes identity drift or motion suppression under large pose variations and multi-segment sequential actions. To address this, we propose Chronos, a framework that unifies single-segment facial identity preservation and multi-segment sequential action generation under a common temporal formulation. Specifically, Chronos integrates Semantic Prompt Anchoring to adaptively refine the user prompt, Visual Frame Anchoring to transform conditions into visually grounded keyframe anchors for visual guidance, and Metric-Guided Candidate Routing to select the highest-quality videos from heterogeneous generators via multi-dimensional evaluation. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our approach, which achieved first place in both Track 1 and Track 2 of the ACM MM 2026 Identity-Preserving Video Generation Challenge, demonstrating its effectiveness across both facial identity preservation and sequential action generation settings.
AI 速览：作者提出统一测试框架 uni-robot-agent，使开放权重模型可开展机器人使用智能体研究并支持后续训练，报告开箱即用的 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next 在 RoboDojo 上取得 31.39 分。
Robot-use Agents (RUAs) have shown promising zero-shot manipulation capabilities, but reliance on frontier, proprietary models limits research into further training. To democratize RUA research, we introduce uni-robot-agent, a unified harness for competitive open-weight robot use that supports further training. Without privileged inputs, an out-of-the-box Qwen3.8-Flash-Next achieves a RoboDojo Score of 31.39, surpassing the published GPT-6 Astra-RoboProbe result of 28.97 and many VLA/WAM baselines, and performs competitively on 19 real-world tasks. Our analysis across model generations, families, and sizes links effective robot use to four general capabilities, suggesting that future RUA training should develop them jointly.
Context parallelism (CP) partitions long sequences across GPUs for LLM training and inference. For variable-length training and full prefill, attention-balanced placement can leave token loads uneven, while ring execution repeats overhead at each computation and communication step. In stage-serialized decode CP (DCP), long-running tasks delay dependent work and leave substantial GPU hardware idle. We propose LiquidCP, which unifies training and inference through a common model of Transfer, Compute, and Reduction tasks with tile-level dependencies, decoupling attention tasks from communication and kernel boundaries. For training and full prefill, MegaRing incorporates BuddyRing placement to balance attention and token loads, and coalesces ready KV regions during forward attention to amortize overhead. For decoding and mixed batches, MegaDCP selects history-KV splits by jointly modeling the completion of attention and its dependent reductions. A shared persistent GPU-resident engine executes both designs. Compared with the fastest baseline per configuration on eight H100 GPUs, MegaRing achieves geometric-mean core-attention speedups of $1.23\times$ forward and $1.18\times$ backward, and accelerates a Transformer layer by $1.08$--$1.16\times$. MegaDCP achieves geometric-mean core-attention speedups of $1.20\times$ for decode-only and $1.35\times$ for mixed batches. In vLLM serving with KV prefix cache, it achieves an average time-to-first-token speedup of $1.22\times$.
Yanchao Li, Yusu Zhang, Jiaqing Xie, Yi Ban, Ben Gao, Zhongyu Huang, Tianfan Fu, Yuqiang Li
Parallel decoding speeds up masked diffusion language models by writing several tokens per forward pass. Published commit rules choose these tokens by testing the predicted distributions. Under sampling the written tokens are drawn, and these tests do not see them. We find that answer quality follows the reliability of the tokens actually written. An answer's log probability splits into this reliability and the dependence within each step. We propose PACT, a training-free commit rule that draws the tokens first, certifies the set it will write and spaces the positions of each step apart. This certificate holds at every temperature, and we show that no rule with the same guarantee commits more positions. Experiments use four models of the LLaDA and Dream families and HumanEval, MBPP, GSM8K, MATH500 and IFEval benchmarks. PACT reaches the quality of published commit rules with fewer forward passes. Spacing removes positions from each step, yet it usually lowers the total cost because later steps then write more tokens. At the same speed, published decoders also write a word twice in a row far more often than PACT. These results suggest that commit rules should certify the tokens they write. Code is available at https://github.com/LiZaiyuan0619/PACT.
Knowledge is how understanding accumulates across people and generations: durable records that outlive their producers and that others can check, combine, teach, and correct. AI agents are now built and run by many independent users and organizations, and each agent is upgraded, replaced, or retired within months. Yet what an agent learns stays trapped in model parameters, a transient context window, or a system-specific memory store that is appended to and retrieved from rather than processed. We argue that the next generation of AI should be knowledge-centric, built around an explicit, continuously evolving knowledge layer independent of any single agent. In this loop, agents discover knowledge from their environments and trajectories; the layer internalizes it by turning fragmented, heterogeneous records and experience into composable, revisable understanding; and agents across systems and generations use the result and return new outcomes for revision. While discovery and use have advanced rapidly with large language model agents, internalization remains the bottleneck. We argue that internalization should become a persistent object of training and maintenance-centered on condition-preserving conceptualization of events and deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning across noisy, heterogeneous representations (text, tables, graphs, rules, and programs). To power this layer, we call for knowledge foundation models that provide shared neural capacity for knowledge computation, and outline a research agenda showing how an explicit knowledge layer delivers reuse, cost efficiency, auditability, and continuity across agent generations.
Humanoid rigging for modern characters with complex garments remains challenging due to the need for dense auxiliary skeletons and precise skinning control. Existing automatic methods primarily recover rigs from geometry, providing limited artist control over auxiliary articulation and often lacking explicit semantic or kinematic-chain structure for dense garment bones, leading to instability and weight bleeding. We present TailorRig, a framework that reformulates garment-aware humanoid rigging as a structured, controllable full-rig generation problem. This formulation shifts the goal from automatic rig recovery to artist-driven rig authoring, where both body-template compatibility and auxiliary articulation are explicit design choices. TailorRig exposes two explicit axes of artist control within a unified framework: a user-specified body skeleton template that preserves body-rig compatibility, and artist-provided semantic labels that drive an autoregressive generator to synthesize requested category-specific auxiliary bone chains. To robustly assign skinning weights under dense skeletal configurations, we further introduce a hierarchical chain-to-bone formulation: vertices are first associated to a kinematic chain, and bone weights are then refined within that chain, reducing weight bleeding between spatially adjacent but semantically unrelated structures. We evaluate TailorRig on a diverse set of characters and introduce Human-Mix, a large-scale dataset of over 38,000 humanoid models curated for garment-aware rigging. Experiments show that TailorRig improves skeleton accuracy, deformation stability, controllability, and practical usability over existing methods.
Qian Cheng, Ruize Tang, Saad Mohammad Rafid Pial, Zhizhen Cathy Cai, Yiming Su, Jackson Clark, Munim Thahmid, Mahdiya Rahman Sukanya 等 16 位作者
TLAPS-Bench is a benchmark and execution harness for constructing machine-checked proofs for real-world system specifications in TLA+ with agentic AI. Proving correctness of complex system specifications requires discovering inductive invariants, reasoning about intricate state transitions, and decomposing proofs into tractable obligations. TLAPS-Bench provides a proof harness that supports iterative proof development atop the TLA+ Proof System (TLAPS), where agents are equipped with proof tools and libraries, with safeguards against reward hacking. Using the harness, we have employed AI agents to prove desired properties for important system specifications that were not proved before, spanning cache coherence, Byzantine consensus, and write-ahead logs. TLAPS-Bench contains 265 proof targets (each encodes a property to prove) from 95 TLA+ specifications of real-world systems. We evaluated frontier AI agents, represented by Codex with GPT models, on a subset of 70 proof targets across 12 specifications. The highest-scoring model, GPT-6.1 Sol (max), proved 31 (44.3%) proof targets. The results show challenges and opportunities in end-to-end proof development.
Zhiyu Huang, Chen Sun, Guyue Li, Guanghui Wen, Xianbin Wang
Physical-layer key generation (PLKG) exploits reciprocal channel dynamics to generate symmetric keys, addressing the key distribution problem in wireless communications. However, strong temporal correlation in slow-fading environments limits fresh randomness and results in low key generation rates. Movable antennas (MAs) introduce spatial degrees of freedom through antenna repositioning, providing a new approach to addressing the limitation. This paper investigates MA-assisted PLKG over temporally correlated channels. A first-order Gauss-Markov process is utilized to characterize the temporal correlation of multipath gains. We characterize the full-sequence mutual information (MI) over temporally correlated channels. For fixed antenna positions and beamforming, we establish a finite-horizon approximation error bound that vanishes as both effective signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) increase. We derive a closed-form expression for the one-step conditional MI and adopt it as a tractable key-information metric. A nonconvex problem is formulated to jointly optimize antenna positions and per-slot beamforming under transmit-power and minimum-spacing constraints. We develop an alternating optimization algorithm, combining an exact principal-eigenvector beamforming solution with feasible SCA-based projected gradient position updates. Simulation results demonstrate that the MA-assisted scheme outperforms the fixed-position antenna baseline. At a high temporal correlation coefficient, position optimization achieves approximately $51\%$ higher rates than fixed antennas. Joint position and beamforming optimization provides a further $106\%$ gain over position optimization alone, demonstrating more pronounced gains under strong temporal correlation.
Mingchuan Ma, Dongqi Cai, Daqian Yang, Zhenyan Lu, Chen Chen, Teresa Lv, Yan Gao, Shangguang Wang 等 11 位作者
LLM pretraining is increasingly compute-intensive, while substantial inference serving compute remains idle during off-peak periods. However, such serving hardware is difficult to use for conventional first-order training due to its memory, networking and other system requirements. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization offers a natural interface to this forward-only compute resource, but its gradient estimates break down in pretraining. Unlike fine-tuning, which can confine updates to a small parameter subspace, pretraining must update every parameter, and the alignment of a ZO gradient estimate with the true gradient shrinks as the number of updated parameters grows. We make a different observation: noisy ZO estimates can still provide useful curvature information, even when they are too inaccurate to serve as gradients. Based on this insight, we propose ZO-Curv, which leverages idle forward-only devices to estimate curvature and uses it to adapt and refine the update used during first-order training, thereby accelerating the process. We provide convergence guarantees that characterize the effect of finite-query curvature estimation. Experiments on LLMs from 125M to 1.5B parameters show that ZO-Curv consistently accelerates pretraining. At 770M parameters, ZO-Curv reaches AdamW's 20K-step validation loss in 3.9 hours instead of 7.5 hours, while achieving a lower final loss of 2.70 versus 2.84 under the same step budget. These results show that idle model serving compute can accelerate LLM pretraining when zeroth-order queries are used to estimate curvature rather than gradients directly.
Current medical artificial intelligence (AI) systems are often task-specific, poorly integrated, and difficult to interpret, limiting support for multimodal clinical workflows. We developed and evaluated EyeAgent for ophthalmic decision support. EyeAgent comprises three layers including 54 task-specific EyeTools, 32 clinical skills, and a modular large language model reasoning core with interchangeable backbones. A multi-level evaluation distinguished this scope from empirical system-level validation. Component-level evaluation assessed newly developed models on held-out splits of datasets totaling 871,862 samples. System-level evaluation included illustrative cases of workflow breadth, a 200-case expert-rating study of output quality, and an exploratory multicenter reader study comparing unassisted and EyeAgent-assisted performance among 27 ophthalmologists from 11 centers. Skill-level and backbone ablations further assessed orchestration and robustness. In illustrative cases, EyeAgent showed task-specific advantages over GPT-5.5 in lesion quantitation, cross-modality synthesis, and uncertainty-aware reporting. In the expert-rating study, EyeAgent achieved an F1 score of 0.84 for skill selection, with 82.7%-92.0% of outputs rated acceptable or better across six clinical dimensions. In the exploratory multicenter reader study, diagnostic accuracy increased from 72.8% unassisted to 91.9% assisted (difference, 19.1 percentage points (pp); 95% CI, 13.6-24.7; Holm-adjusted P<0.001). Report completeness increased from 55.8% to 75.6% (difference, 19.8 pp; 95% CI, 14.8-24.7; Holm-adjusted P<0.001). Across the evaluated settings, EyeAgent supported interpretable, evidence-guided reasoning and showed potential for human-AI collaboration. Broader real-world effectiveness and generalizability require prospective and cross-population validation.
Estimating scene illumination from images is challenging as lighting is inherently spatially varying, depending on geometry, occlusion, and light sources. Existing methods incorporate geometric cues by deriving local environment maps or probe-based representations, but largely rely on regression or parametric models, resulting in over-smoothed lighting and limited realism. We revisit spatially-varying illumination estimation from a generative perspective and introduce LUMEN, a geometry-conditioned diffusion framework for synthesizing high-dynamic-range (HDR) environment maps at arbitrary spatial locations from single or multi-view images. Specifically, we reconstruct a coarse 3D scene from input images and render partial environment maps at arbitrary locations to encode visibility and spatial structure. These signals are fused with multi-view image features and fed into a diffusion transformer to generate full HDR environment maps. To train the model, we build a synthetic dataset of 700 indoor scenes with dense spatial supervision, including multi-view RGB images, depth, and HDR illumination at multiple sampled locations. This dataset enables the model to learn spatially consistent lighting distributions across diverse scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LUMEN significantly improves visual fidelity and spatial coherence compared to prior approaches.
This paper presents a multimodal generative model designed to simulate a solar energy plant system for predictive maintenance and fault prediction. We propose a novel approach to enhance system generation through conditional generation by leveraging both event sequences and time-series data and improve next event prediction. The framework employs a Transformer Hawkes Process (THP) to encode event data and an iTransformer to encode time-series data, integrated via a co-attention mechanism that effectively captures cross-modal dependencies between discrete events and continuous signals. From these integrated representations, we employ two specialized decoders for simulation: a Conditional Latent Diffusion Model (CLDM) for modeling future sensor trajectories and the Score Matching-based UnceRtainty quantiFication for Transformer Hawkes Process (SMURF-THP) for high-fidelity event prediction. This dual-decoder strategy supports uncertainty-aware, history-conditioned simulation by rolling the model forward for a specified number of generation iterations, producing finite stochastic scenarios rather than deterministic extrapolations over the full observational record. Evaluated on a comprehensive dataset from the Red Rock Solar Site in Arizona, our approach improves aggregate event-prediction F1 relative to baselines and supports applications in predictive maintenance, fault detection, and energy optimization for solar power systems.
Leming Shen, Qiang Yang, Xinyu Huang, Zijing Ma, Yuanqing Zheng, Chris Xiaoxuan Lu
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit powerful code generation abilities, fostering agentic systems to automate edge AI application development. However, existing agents typically operate via fixed agentic workflows and predefined design spaces, struggling to handle rapidly evolving demands of real-world scenarios (e.g., heterogeneous data modalities, diverse task pipelines). Unlike prior systems that treat LLMs mainly as code generators following rigid workflows, we fully exploit their reasoning capabilities to allow agents to determine their own workflows on the fly. To this end, we propose SE2, a self-exploring and self-evolving paradigm for adaptive edge AI development. Inspired by human learning processes, we distill development into four atomic operations (retrieve, reason, code, test), and empower agents to explore workflows by dynamically and adaptively selecting an appropriate next operation based on the current context. Extensive evaluations show that, with adaptive workflows, the synthesized programs achieve up to 26% higher accuracy and consume 28% lower resources than state-of-the-art baselines, while maintaining superior adaptability to unforeseen edge AI scenarios. This highlights the potential of reasoning-driven adaptive agentic workflow in edge AI development.
LucidLyra: Feed-Forward Generative 3D Scene Reconstruction and Joint Understanding via Multi-Task Distillation
Oliver Hahn, Rodrigo Marcuzzi, Sangeetha Grama Srinivasan, Alessandro Burzio, Sherwin Bahmani, Jiahui Huang, Stefan Roth, Shengyu Huang 等 10 位作者
AI 速览：LucidLyra 从视频潜变量出发，以前馈方式生成可查询语义与实例的三维高斯场景，无需逐场景优化。
We present LucidLyra, a framework that makes generatively reconstructed 3D scenes directly queryable for semantics and instances in a feed-forward manner from video latents. While generative 3D reconstruction can synthesize virtual environments from a single image, downstream applications in robotics and physical AI require not only visual realism but also access to scene semantics and object identities. Existing 3D understanding approaches, however, require captured multi-view scenes, have limited generalization capabilities, or rely on expensive per-scene processing and optimization. To bridge this gap, our method distills complementary knowledge from a camera-controlled video diffusion model and frozen 2D vision foundation models into a unified model to jointly infer 3D Gaussians encoding geometry, appearance, open-vocabulary semantics, and class-agnostic instance cues. The resulting scenes support novel-view rendering, open-vocabulary segmentation, and object grouping without per-scene optimization, while training requires neither manual 3D annotations nor captured multi-view data. Our method outperforms baselines combining state-of-the-art 3DGS segmentation approaches with generative 3D scene reconstruction on curated synthetic and real-image-conditioned benchmarks, while preserving reconstruction quality. Furthermore, our latent formulation naturally extends to monocular video, reconstructing structured dynamic 3D scenes across time. By turning renderable but unstructured outputs into queryable 3D worlds, LucidLyra enables downstream applications including 3D scene editing, 3D asset mining, and robotic simulation.
LLM-based assistants on web-scale service platforms increasingly address local-service needs through multi-step planning and tool use. Under dynamic business conditions and evolving user needs, outcome-level evaluation offers limited evidence of where execution fails or how service drifts across continued interaction. We present ATLAS, a dual-horizon diagnostic evaluation framework for industrial tool-use agents. Within-turn evaluation uses trajectory-wise signals across thinking and reflection, tool and skill execution, and response generation to identify execution failures and unmet capability requirements. Across-turn evaluation uses user-wise signals spanning multiple lifecycles to diagnose failures in maintaining or updating user intent, constraints, and corrections. Fine-grained signals use rule-based checks and LLM judgments with explicit evidence scopes and decision boundaries. To support reliable diagnosis at production scale, LLM judges are calibrated against dynamically maintained references from business logs, and selected judges are distilled into compact diagnostic models. The resulting diagnostic profiles help developers attribute failures, prioritize targeted interventions, and reassess improvements. Applied in Meituan Xiaotuan, a million-scale DAU local-services assistant, ATLAS achieves high diagnostic fidelity across calibrated judges and distilled models. Blinded human auditing and a 14-day online A/B test with nearly two million users per arm confirm that the ATLAS-guided agent improves recommendation relevance, factual reliability, user engagement (+2.84% answer read-through rate), and order volume (+6.13% paid orders), leading to full production deployment.
Online vectorized map construction provides autonomous vehicles with essential, real-time semantic and geometric scene understanding. While leveraging prior maps presents an opportunity to improve accuracy, they are often biased due to outdated information or temporary road changes. Existing methods, which typically treat priors as fully reliable or only consider limited noise patterns, suffer severe performance degradation when these priors are imperfect. To address this, we propose PriorMaskMap, a robust framework for prior-guided vectorized map construction. Its first innovation is a Prior-Aware Confidence Estimator (PACE) that evaluates the input rasterized map against current visual observations. It assigns confidence scores to regions classified as reliable, erroneous, or blank, creating a foundational mask that guides two subsequent branches. In one branch, the Dual-Prior Query Generator (DPQG) selectively filters and embeds both rasterized and vectorized priors to initialize informative queries from trustworthy map structures. In the other, the Confidence-Guided Prior Fusion (CGPF) module spatially propagates and refines the mask, using the refined version to govern the fusion of BEV features with the prior map, thereby providing rich contextual representations for the map decoder. Evaluation on the nuScenes dataset shows that PriorMaskMap achieves superior mapping precision over existing approaches and exhibits marked robustness when provided with priors containing apparent errors. Our code is released at https://github.com/healenrens/PriorMaskMap.
Rotation equivariance is an important structural prior for a broad range of vision tasks, particularly in domains such as remote sensing and medical imaging where objects have no canonical orientation, yet it remains notably absent from current Mamba-based vision architectures. Despite the success of Mamba in natural language processing and its growing adoption in computer vision, existing visual Mamba models fail to account for rotational symmetry in their design. This omission renders them sensitive to image rotations, thereby constraining their robustness and cross-task generalization. To address this limitation, we incorporate rotation symmetry, an important geometric prior in many visual domains, into Mamba-based architectures. Specifically, we introduce EQ-VMamba, the first rotation equivariant visual Mamba architecture for vision tasks. The core components of EQ-VMamba include a carefully designed rotation equivariant cross-scan strategy and group Mamba blocks. Moreover, we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis of the intrinsic equivariance error, demonstrating that the proposed architecture enforces end-to-end rotation equivariance under the p4 rotation group. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks---including high-level image classification, mid-level semantic segmentation, and low-level image super-resolution---demonstrate that EQ-VMamba consistently improves rotation robustness and achieves superior or competitive performance compared to non-equivariant baselines on most benchmarks, while requiring 40-70% fewer parameters. These results indicate that embedding rotation equivariance not only effectively bolsters the robustness of visual Mamba models against rotation transformations, but also improves accuracy on data exhibiting rotational symmetry, with substantially improved parameter efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/zhongchenzhao/EQ-VMamba.
As AI accelerator architectures become increasingly diverse, integrating different architectures into a unified system is emerging as a new heterogeneous computing paradigm. GPUs and WSEs differ substantially in compute, memory, and communication organization, creating both architectural complementarity and additional overheads, yet how to translate this heterogeneity into practical performance gains remains unclear. To address this gap, we propose a hierarchical benchmarking methodology to characterize GPU--WSE heterogeneous execution and the conditions for exploiting complementarity, together with an analytical performance model that identifies when heterogeneity becomes a bottleneck and when it yields system-level performance gains.
Haoyu Hu, Xuandong Zhao, Xuhai "Orson'' Xu, Nori Jacoby
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) generates hundreds of thousands of tokens per training step, with rollout generation dominating the computational cost. The overall token budget can be controlled along two main dimensions: (i) deciding which prompts to allocate rollouts to, and (ii) deciding how long each rollout should be. Prior work has generally controlled only one of these dimensions at a time. We show that jointly tuning both decisions under a shared compute budget improves both reasoning quality and wall-clock training time. We instantiate this view as \textbf{DU}al-controlled tok\textbf{E}n alloca\textbf{T}ion (DUET), a computationally efficient layer over GRPO that uses a lightweight pre-rollout surrogate of prompt informativeness to set how many rollouts each prompt receives, and a marker-gated abort rule with importance reweighting to set when to stop them. On Qwen3-1.7B trained on MATH, DUET outperforms full-budget GRPO and the other three budget-aware baseline methods. DUET's advantage further generalizes to other benchmarks across math and coding, and is on par with the best baseline on the scientific Q\&A domain, while also achieving a $1.62\times$ wall-clock speedup. More notably, using only 50\% of the token budget, DUET still outperforms all baseline methods at their full budget, achieving an even higher $2.51\times$ speedup over full-budget GRPO. We verify the high performance of DUET on other backbone LLMs, including Qwen3-4B to 14B and Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct. Notably, the gap between DUET and the strongest baseline \emph{widens} as the budget tightens, contrary to the usual pattern in which efficient methods trade off quality as compute decreases. More broadly, these results suggest that DUET budget-aware control strategies are valuable not only for accelerating training, but also for improving the quality of the learning signal.
Ziwei Zhang, Tianyin Liao, Chunyu Hu, Ge Lan, Nuo Xu, Yi Huang, Qingyun Sun, Xingxuan Zhang 等 10 位作者
Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for learning transferable representations across different graphs and domains. However, existing GFMs face notable limitations, including limited pre-training scale or reliance on aligning with textual information in Large Language Models (LLMs). To overcome these limitations, recent studies have drawn inspiration from prior-data fitted networks (PFNs), which learn from large synthetic datasets and support multi-domain prediction backed by causal learning. However, existing graph PFNs encounter severe difficulties in modeling causal relationships within and across node and edge sets, generating diverse graph structures, and designing suitable architectures that can learn from complex synthetic datasets. To address these challenges, we propose **GSCM-PFN** (Graph SCM-based Prior-Data Fitted Network), a graph PFN pre-trained on synthetic data generated from an SCM-based prior that jointly models nodes and graph topology. Specifically, we (1) design a joint feature-edge-label structural causal model (SCM) to guide synthetic graph generation and capture causal relationships within and across node and edge sets; (2) introduce prior-guided node-edge dependency modeling to instantiate diverse graph generation strategies, and prove that our SCM-based generation prior is more expressive than existing priors; and (3) propose a feature-permutation-invariant dual-path graph network with theoretical guarantees for learning from diverse synthetic graphs. Experiments on 23 real-world benchmarks show that GSCM-PFN outperforms both conventional GFMs and PFN-based GFMs, without utilizing real-world graph data for pre-training. Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GSCM-PFN-A3A3/
Chenyi Li, Haoyu Hu, Raja Marjieh, Katherine M Collins, Max Kreminski, Ilia Sucholutsky, Dalton Conley, Nori Jacoby
As AI agents increasingly participate in creative teamwork, writing emerges from hybrid human-AI teams. Although AI can improve the creativity of individual outputs, these gains may come at the cost of homogenization. What is the best role for human intervention? We introduce a transmission-chain paradigm inspired by cognitive models of writing, with four stages: Plan, Write, Review, and Revise. Each stage receives the previous output and passes its own forward. Using data from 333 participants across 427 stories, we compared creativity, diversity, and enjoyment across human, AI, and hybrid chains. Consistent with prior work, all-AI chains produced more creative but less diverse stories than all-human chains. Introducing a single human into an otherwise all-AI chain increased diversity depending on role. Human planning provided the best balance: it preserved AI-level creativity, increased diversity that persisted through downstream AI stages, and maintained enjoyment. We discuss implications for designing human-in-the-loop creative pipelines.
We propose a multimodal transformer framework for efficiently modeling long1 financial documents that combine structured tabular data with noisy, unstructured2 textual disclosures. The framework represents financial tables as semantically3 enriched token sequences and integrates them with long-form text through a cross-4 attention mechanism that explicitly captures cross-modal dependencies. In par-5 ticular, we augment each numerical variable with a semantic embedding derived6 from its textual definition, enabling the model to encode both numerical magnitude7 and economic meaning. This design yields a more expressive and parameter-8 efficient representation of tabular data compared to value-only embeddings. Using9 a large-scale dataset of financial statements and MD&A disclosures, we show that10 structured numerical features remain the dominant source of predictive signal;11 however, textual information provides consistent incremental gains when incor-12 porated via cross-attention rather than simple concatenation. Our results further13 demonstrate that noisy textual disclosures are most useful when conditioned on a14 stable, semantically structured tabular representation. In particular, using frozen15 variable-level tabular representations as cross-attention queries enables the model16 to weight MD&A chunks differently for each financial variable and observation.17 These findings suggest that cross-attention provides an efficient mechanism for18 table-conditioned aggregation of long-form narrative evidence.
My Chiffon Nguyen, Tianyi Hu, Vinod Anbalagan, Henry Gagnier, Pouya Sadeghi, Farah Abdou, Tidor-Vlad Pricope, Diego MMS Oliveira 等 164 位作者
As LLMs expand their language coverage, evaluating how well they understand and represent diverse cultures becomes increasingly important. However, many benchmarks remain English-centric, with limited cultural coverage and a focus on factual knowledge over its application in real-world cultural contexts. We propose CulturalRiddles, a benchmark of original, culturally grounded riddles created entirely by humans through a participatory community effort, spanning 62 cultures (45 countries, 51 languages). These riddles are deeply rooted in their respective cultures and require abductive and compositional reasoning, alongside detailed factual and social knowledge, language skills, and an understanding of culturally specific associations. We benchmark 28 LLM configurations using both automatic and large-scale human evaluation. Even frontier models achieve at most 22% accuracy in some communities. We publicly release all artifacts alongside an open contribution process to expand the benchmark's linguistic and cultural coverage.
Zihan Fang, Ron Asoulin-Handelman, Helen Wu, Yu Huang, Gina R. Bai
Recent advances in generative AI have enabled assistants to generate increasingly sophisticated executable unit tests. However, novices may accept these outputs without independently identifying what to test, evaluating test-suite completeness, or verifying correctness, potentially limiting opportunities to develop essential testing skills. Although prior work has explored AI-assisted test generation and feedback-oriented programming tutors, little is known about whether AI can support novices' testing practices without generating tests for them. To investigate this, we introduce TestCompass, a generative AI tutor that provides targeted feedback on weaknesses in students' test suites without generating executable tests. In a classroom study with 18 students, we compared TestCompass with a general AI assistant across two Java unit-testing tasks, examining students' testing behaviors, test-suite quality, and subjective experiences. We found that participants using the general-purpose AI assistant produced more tests, whereas TestCompass participants spent more time developing and verifying tests themselves. However, most test-suite quality measures were comparable between conditions, and TestCompass participants achieved similar requirement coverage with significantly fewer test methods ($p=0.012$) in one task. Neither group reported short-term improvements in perceived testing knowledge or confidence. These findings suggest that feedback-oriented AI can support meaningful testing outcomes while preserving opportunities for hands-on testing practice, offering a complementary approach to AI-assisted testing education.
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise for training multimodal agents to reason and use tools. However, it remains unclear when fine-grained credit assignment improves learning and when it fails to improve task performance. Video editing provides a useful testbed for this question, combining multimodal perception, long-horizon planning, and tool use with delayed outcome feedback. We construct four movie-trailer editing task types---Content Selection, Narrative Sequencing, Rough Cut, and Fine Cut---that reflect real-world editing workflows and span different levels of task complexity and interaction horizon. Decaying process rewards provides the largest benefit on Fine Cut, with a 45.4% relative gain over outcome-only GRPO on tasks averaging more than 60 turns under outcome-only GRPO. On the three shorter-horizon task types averaging 30--40 turns under the same baseline, outcome-only GRPO remains competitive, with decaying process rewards yielding at most a 10.4% relative gain. Process rewards from an LLM judge initially improve tool use and encourage visual inspection. As training progresses, however, GRPO+PRM with a fixed process-reward weight increasingly exhibits excessive reasoning and redundant tool calls: process rewards continue to rise while task completion rates and outcome scores decline. Decaying the process-reward weight to zero mitigates this reward-hacking behavior while preserving the early gains. Despite dense token-level supervision, on-policy self-distillation (OPSD) yields little improvement or substantial degradation and is highly sensitive to the choice of privileged information. Our analysis reveals differences in teacher--student disagreement and gradient magnitudes, and suggests possible dilution of informative signals over long trajectories.