Read, Allocate, Route: Role-Coupled Tokenization for Pixel-Space Generative Transformers
Jiongfan Yang, Weichen Fan, Haiwen Diao, Zhongang Cai, Ziwei Liu
AI 速览：SpecSlot通过将每个空间锚点拆成多个按DCT频带分工的slot，让全局注意力只处理低频slot、高频细节在局部交互，从而在不加长全局序列的前提下提升像素空间生成式Transformer的细节建模能力。
Pixel-space generative Transformers typically use one token per image patch, so capturing finer detail requires more tokens and makes global attention increasingly expensive. We observe that finer detail does not necessarily require more global communication: low-frequency structure benefits from global exchange, while high-frequency detail can be modeled locally. Based on this insight, we introduce SpecSlot, a pixel-space rectified-flow Transformer that decouples output detail from the length of the global attention sequence. SpecSlot expands each spatial anchor into multiple slots, each assigned a disjoint band of DCT coefficients; this separates anchor density from spectral subdivision. Only the lowest-frequency slot from each anchor participates in global attention, while all slots interact locally. This allows the model to increase spectral detail without enlarging the global sequence. A spatial head further adds a local correction to the spectral prediction, while the generative state, target, and loss remain in pixel space. On ImageNet-256, SpecSlot achieves a comparable final FID to a FLOPs-matched JiT control while converging faster. On ImageNet-512, it improves FID by 2.84 over the control with 3.9% fewer FLOPs, and comes within only 0.69 FID of JiT-B/16 at 38.2% lower cost. On text-to-image generation, SpecSlot surpasses JiT-B/8 on DPG-Bench by 1.06 at 40.6% lower forward cost.
In this paper, we propose Concentrate and Concentrate (CaC), a coarse-to-fine anomaly reward model based on Vision-Language Models. During inference, it first conducts a global temporal scan to anchor anomalous time windows, then performs fine-grained spatial grounding within the localized interval, and finally derives robust judgments via structured spatiotemporal Chain-of-Thought reasoning. To equip the model with these capabilities, we construct the first large-scale generated video anomaly dataset with per-frame bounding-box annotations, temporal anomaly windows, and fine-grained attribution labels. Building on this dataset, we design a three-stage progressive training paradigm. The model initially learns spatial and temporal anchoring through single- and multi-frame supervised fine-tuning, and then is optimized by a reinforcement learning strategy based on two-turn Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Beyond conventional accuracy rewards, we introduce Temporal and Spatial IoU rewards to supervise the intermediate localization process, effectively guiding the model toward more grounded and interpretable spatiotemporal reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CaC can stably concentrate on subtle anomalies, achieving a 25.7% accuracy improvement on fine-grained anomaly benchmarks and, when used as a reward signal, CaC reduces generated-video anomalies by 11.7% while improving overall video quality.
Diverse optimizations spanning model architecture, inference runtime, and hardware acceleration have been proposed for on-device vision-language model (VLM) deployment on edge NPUs. Still, cross-layer coordination of VLM execution on edge NPUs remains largely underexplored. This paper presents an empirical measurement study across six representative VLMs, three real-world edge platforms, and ten multimodal benchmarks. Our evaluation drills down from end-to-end application-level latency and thermal traces down to low-level kernel-scale execution behaviors, challenging several widely held community assumptions. First, softmax dominates attention costs; even lookup-table-based softmax optimizations cannot eliminate pipeline bubbles that severely underutilize NPU matrix units. Second, theoretical speedups from linear attention vanish under real-NPU execution due to prohibitive tensor-rearrangement overhead. Third, no hardware backend universally dominates autoregressive decoding: attention-tensor-shaped parallelism dictates NPU efficiency and shifts the CPU-NPU performance balance. We further find task-specific Sweet Resolutions for VLMs, which deliver meaningful accuracy gains at only modest latency overhead. Complementing these findings, we provide actionable cross-layer recommendations for hardware architects, runtime developers, and model designers.
Jianghan Zhu, Cong Zhang, Ni Zhang, Yifan Yang, Yew Soon Ong, Zhiguang Cao
Automatic operator design (AOD) has increasingly adopted large language models (LLMs) to generate problem-specific search and variation operators for multi-objective combinatorial optimization (MOCO). Yet most methods evolve the operators while leaving the process that discovers them fixed. This limits adaptation as new Pareto trade-offs and operator interactions change where and how the search should proceed. We introduce HEMO, which makes the AOD harness itself a self-evolving optimization target. HEMO maintains a persistent harness state and updates one module at a time, revising the logic that determines which experience to retrieve, which operators to improve, which parents to select, and how to formulate the orchestration of search steps. Downstream solution quality and runtime guide these updates, while a discounted UCB scheduler directs adaptation toward promising modules as their utility changes. A persistent memory filesystem preserves candidate outcomes and diagnostic feedback across harness states, enabling successive states to build on accumulated optimization experience. Experiments across eight MOCO tasks and two structurally distinct evolutionary backbones demonstrate strong performance against conventional evolutionary, neural, and LLM-based AOD baselines, together with effective transfer to related tasks. HEMO extends automatic operator design beyond evolving individual operators to improving the search process that discovers them.
Weixin Chen, Shuchang Liu, Hailan Yang, Yuhan Zhao, Li Kang, Xuefeng Zhang, Chenghao Zhang, Xinyuan Wang 等 16 位作者
Query-based recommendation separates expressing user needs from locating matching items. Its central learning problem is how to turn item interactions into effective retrieval requests when interaction logs do not annotate queries. We present R2QRec, which uses a fixed retrieval system to construct query supervision and evaluate recommendation outcomes. Retrieval verification first selects generated expressions that recover observed items as supervised fine tuning targets, allowing retrieval behavior to determine the target wording. Policy refinement then evaluates generated query sets by the observed item's rank in their fused recommendation list. Log-rank feedback distinguishes outcomes beyond the recommendation cutoff, while a KL penalty constrains policy change relative to the supervised reference. The stages have distinct roles: verification identifies expressions to imitate, and policy refinement improves the combined ranking produced by newly generated queries. Only the query generator is trained; the retriever and item index remain fixed, and no query annotations or learned reward model are required. Across three public datasets, R2QRec achieves state-of-the-art overall recommendation performance among the evaluated methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design and its generalization across generators and domains.
Yunpeng Gong, Can Yang, Qingyuan Zeng, Dejun Xu, Zhiming Luo, Zhenzhong Wang, Min Jiang
Cross-modal person re-identification (ReID) adversarial attacks face a transferability challenge: existing methods may exhibit source-pair overfitting, where learned perturbations become overly dependent on the feature statistics of the source modality pair, thereby limiting their transferability under heterogeneous domain shifts. We argue that a key challenge is reducing source-pair-specific bias while maintaining attack effectiveness. To address this, we propose Multiform Attack (MA). The framework first learns a universal perturbation via Mahalanobis-guided gradient optimization. Since this perturbation may still retain source-pair-specific bias, the second stage performs sparse refinement through attention-shift-filtered multi-objective evolutionary search, leveraging heterogeneous source distributions in transfer settings. By separating universal perturbation learning from sparse evolutionary refinement, MA aims to reduce reliance on source-pair-specific patterns and improve transferability to unseen domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong attack effectiveness on cross-modal ReID benchmarks and improved transferability in the evaluated held-out-domain settings, with additional evaluations across model architectures.
Qianliang Wu, Yaqing Ding, Guangwei Gao, Weiping Ding, Jin Xie, Jian Yang
Non-rigid point cloud registration depends on accurate correspondences under deformation and partial visibility. Existing coarse-to-fine methods use coarse matches to select regions for fine matching, but incorrect selection can remove valid correspondences before refinement. We introduce \paper, a conditional transport framework that connects coarse correspondence estimation to high-resolution matching. A diffusion model first estimates a coarse matching matrix. We lift the complete estimate to a fine-level source matrix and refine its scores with a geometry-conditioned bridge. We consider two bridge formulations: a deterministic endpoint-parameterized flow and a stochastic paired Brownian bridge with endpoint and noise prediction. At each step, the current matrix provides an alignment for the next prediction. Both models reuse backbone features throughout inference. Experiments on 4DMatch and 4DLoMatch show improved correspondence and non-rigid registration accuracy. The models also transfer to CAPE and DeepDeform without target-domain training. Ablations examine the roles of candidate coverage, source initialization, and refinement budget.
Hidden rounding carries dependencies through integer memory. We study finite-memory feedback with predictable inputs that differ by one on at most $C$ releases and with every output public. A shared preparation constrains future branches until a sequence of common-input releases synchronizes the conditional registers. Preserving those constraints yields exact finite-law compilation, polynomial in support width for fixed memory and participation budgets, with constructive discrete-Gaussian transfer and calibration. A commitment hierarchy quantifies the loss from releasing dependencies early and becomes exact at depth $mC$ for memory $m$. Strict examples include three levels with one participation and a discrete-Gaussian calibration gap exceeding 0.23. Charging actual preparation time gives a privacy resource law with a square-root remainder and a leading coefficient computable in polynomial bit cost at fixed parameters. Lean refinements cover the first-order privacy analysis and binary value algorithm; separate lemmas check finite-memory algebra and paths. Certificates establish multi-memory calibration and resource effects; workload comparisons include a finite-memory prefix-error lower bound.
Xinyu Chen, Song Wu, Dingbao Shao, Jiahang Li, Jiang Lin, Yuhang Liu, Duo Li, Jiaxin Hu 等 15 位作者
Instruction-guided video editing requires executing a requested change while preserving the source video's appearance and temporal structure. We present SemantiScene-Edit, a video editor that couples a multimodal encoder with a pretrained video diffusion transformer. The encoder jointly processes source frames and the editing instruction, and learnable queries convey their semantic context to the generator through a trainable connector and cross-attention. A complementary visual pathway concatenates source-video latents with noisy target latents before patch embedding, supplying dense spatial and temporal information for content preservation. We train the model with flow matching and a three-stage image--video curriculum comprising semantic alignment, joint adaptation, and high-resolution refinement. To support training, we construct over 1.2 million instruction-conditioned video-editing records covering object addition, removal, replacement, and attribute modification. We also construct a 100-case benchmark for evaluating instruction execution, source preservation, temporal consistency, and visual quality. Comparative experiments show that SemantiScene-Edit effectively follows editing instructions while retaining source content. At inference, the model requires only a source video and a natural-language instruction.
Noel D'souza, Zhijian Yang, Nishank Singla, Pranay Doshi, Krisztian Koos, Fei Tan, Bruno Nunes, Laszlo Rusko 等 18 位作者
Recent advances in large-scale foundation models have enabled strong generalization across a wide range of clinical and research tasks in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, existing vision-language MRI models remain limited in anatomy-specific localization and pathology-aware representation, particularly in real-world settings. We introduce A4-MR, a 3D vision-language foundation model trained on approximately 50,000 MRI studies comprising 491,000 series, roughly half of which are paired with radiology reports. A4-MR is designed to: (1) learn anatomy localization through large-scale pretraining with noisy labels; (2) align image and text representations at the anatomical level; and (3) learn distinct representations of healthy and abnormal anatomy. Across a diverse set of downstream tasks, A4-MR outperforms existing foundation models, including a +1.7 AUROC improvement over MedSigLIP for abnormality detection. Using a frozen encoder, A4-MR also surpasses an end-to-end task-specific MedNeXt model for knee segmentation by +1.4 Dice and performs comparably to the best task-specific model for abdominal organ segmentation on AMOS, within 0.4 Dice. Finally, without anatomical prompts, A4-MR localizes 3D anatomy comparably to MedSAM2 provided with ground-truth bounding boxes. Together, these results demonstrate that anatomy-level multimodal alignment and abnormality-aware representation learning can enable a single MRI foundation model to support localization, segmentation, and pathology-related tasks.
We present Youtu-Parsing-Omni, an omni-modal parser that converts documents, images, audio, and video into structured records grounded in space and time, providing a perception layer for agents that read, locate, and cite evidence across modalities. Its design rests on one encoder for every modality and one schema for every task. Youtu-Omni-Encoder, initialized from a pre-trained language model to strengthen text reading, encodes all modalities with shared weights in a unified space-time coordinate system, and a few fusion layers let video frames attend to concurrent audio, bringing cross-modal fusion and temporal alignment into perception itself. OmniSchema unifies the outputs of all ten parsing tasks, allowing a single self-evolving post-training procedure, OmniSchema-Aware On-Policy Distillation (OSAD), to provide a shared token-role-based objective across tasks. In each round, the model is trained on its own rollouts against token-level targets from a reference-conditioned copy of itself, which is then refreshed with the trained weights, so that the parser and its supervision co-evolve. With a single 5 B-parameter checkpoint, Youtu-Parsing-Omni achieves state-of-the-art performance on OmniDocBench v1.6 (96.96 Overall) and leads all open-weight models on OmniParsingBench (75.08 Avg.), with its advantage concentrated on audio and video. It also achieves the best overall chart-parsing score (95.02) and the highest exact chemical-fingerprint agreement among compared systems, and matches a dedicated optical-music model in character-level transcription of typeset sheet music while staying far ahead of general-purpose systems. Code and model weights are publicly available.
Discounted regret measures the performance of an online learner by assigning exponentially decaying weights to past losses, reflecting the greater importance of recent losses in non-stationary online learning. While previous work obtains uniform discounted regret bounds over a continuous range of discount factors using a specialized meta-algorithm, its results are limited to convex functions. In this paper, we demonstrate that strongly adaptive regret bounds can directly imply uniform discounted regret guarantees for convex, strongly convex, and exp-concave loss functions. Our key observation is that discounted regret against a fixed comparator admits an exact decomposition into a convex combination of interval regrets. For convex functions, this reduction yields an $O(\sqrt{\log T/(1-λ)})$ discounted regret bound for all discount factors $λ\in(0,1)$, matching the previous rate over a broader range of discount factors. For strongly convex and exp-concave functions, we provide regret bounds of $O\left(\log T\left(1+\log\frac{1}{1-λ}\right)\right)$.
Generalist robot policies increasingly learn from data collected across diverse tasks and embodiments, yet typically assume a single controller for each robot. This assumption limits transfer because different controllers can assign different physical meanings to the same action and may require different strategies to complete a task. We study how to transfer robot data across both embodiments and controllers without allowing conflicting action interpretations to interfere with learning. Our setting spans six controller types as well as variations in controller gains and compliance. We propose a framework that encodes behavioral interaction under a controller through examples of commanded actions and the resulting robot motions. A transformer context encoder summarizes these interactions, allowing a single policy to adapt in context. Across real-world experiments, our method improves average success by 33 percentage points over naive data pooling, achieves 50\% success on unseen controller modes and 52\% on unseen controller gains, and transfers to tasks with limited controller-specific data. On contact-rich tasks such as USB insertion and surface wiping, behavioral interaction context enables the policy to adapt not only its actions but also its strategy. Our results provide a path toward generalist robot policies that can leverage data collected across diverse action interpretations. For more information, visit \href{https://controller-transfer.github.io}{https://controller-transfer.github.io}.
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/.
Yingyuan Yang, Tian Lan, Yifei Gao, Yimeng Lu, Xuming An, Wenjun He, Meng Wang, Chenghao Liu 等 9 位作者
Time-series anomaly detection (TSAD) requires identifying both immediate Point Anomalies and long-range Context Anomalies. However, existing foundation models face a fundamental trade-off: 1D temporal models provide fine-grained pointwise localization but lack a global contextual perspective, while 2D vision-based models capture global patterns but suffer from information bottlenecks due to a lack of temporal alignment and coarse-grained pointwise detection. To resolve this dilemma, we propose VETime, the first TSAD framework that unifies temporal and visual modalities through fine-grained visual-temporal alignment and dynamic fusion. VETime introduces a Reversible Image Conversion and a Patch-Level Temporal Alignment module to establish a shared visual-temporal timeline, preserving discriminative details while maintaining temporal sensitivity. Furthermore, we design an Anomaly Window Contrastive Learning mechanism and a Task-Adaptive Multi-Modal Fusion to adaptively integrate the complementary perceptual strengths of both modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VETime significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models in zero-shot scenarios, achieving superior localization precision with lower computational overhead than current vision-based approaches. Code available at: https://github.com/yyyangcoder/VETime .
Local deployment of MoE-based LLMs on CPU-GPU nodes is attractive for cost and privacy reasons, yet limited GPU memory forces most experts into CPU memory. Prefill is then compute-bound and benefits from aggressive GPU loading, while decode is I/O-bound and requires conservative PCIe transfers. These demands cannot be amortized under low batching---typical of local assistants and document tools---forcing phase-agnostic schedulers into a seesaw: favoring prefill's aggressive loading injects unmaskable I/O that stalls decode, while favoring decode's conservative transfers starves prefill's GPU of work. We observe that expert routing is predictable in phase-specific ways, allowing us to decouple the two phases and optimize prediction, scheduling, and execution independently for each phase. PDScope predicts expert activations to guide placement and prefetching, adapts these policies to each phase's bottleneck via cross-layer cost modeling, and compiles decisions into overhead-free pipelines using a static computation graph, cache prefetching, and zero-copy asynchronous I/O. On mainstream MoE models, PDScope achieves 2.5-10.3x higher prefill throughput and 2.1-6.1x higher decode throughput than existing systems, showing that phase-aware co-design unlocks efficient MoE inference under memory constraints and extends naturally to multi-batch settings.
Controllable world simulation requires more than visually plausible frames: scenes must retain persistent state, coordinated actions, and editable temporal structure. Generative world models offer flexible visual synthesis, but their outputs do not always expose the objects and transitions needed for precise revision. Graphics engines provide executable state and direct control, yet translating language into valid operations requires specialized knowledge of assets, geometry, and interdependent APIs. We present CineU (Cinematize from Unreal), an agentic system for language-driven world orchestration and cinematic choreography within Unreal Engine. From a code-based world modeling perspective, an Unreal project serves as a persistent, inspectable world representation, while agent-generated code specifies operations whose effects can be executed and verified. CineU combines hierarchical orchestration, cascaded asset retrieval and geometry-constrained placement, capability-aligned code synthesis, and multi-stage verification with localized repair. Shared scene and timeline context coordinates entities, actions, camera trajectories, and shot boundaries while supporting dependency-aware revisions. Experiments on scene construction, selective editing, multi-shot cinematography, and component ablations show how specialized execution knowledge and engine feedback improve task completion and targeted recovery. CineU illustrates how executable world state can complement learned visual generation to support controllable and revisable simulated worlds.
In this paper, we investigate decentralized online convex optimization with compressed communication, where $n$ learners over a network jointly minimize a sequence of global loss functions based only on their local losses and compressed messages from their neighbors. The best known regret bounds for this problem are $O(ω^{-1/2}nρ^{-1}\sqrt{T\ln n})$ and $O(ω^{-1}nρ^{-2}\ln n\ln T)$ for convex and strongly convex loss functions, respectively, where $ρ\in(0,1)$ is the spectral gap of the communication matrix and $ω\in(0,1]$ is the compression quality factor. Compared with the corresponding lower bounds of $Ω(ω^{-1/2}nρ^{-1/4}\sqrt{T})$ and $Ω(ω^{-1}nρ^{-1/2}\ln T)$, these upper bounds exhibit polynomial gaps in their dependence on $ρ^{-1}$. To close these gaps, we first develop Ascent-gossip, which combines an online compression strategy with a Chebyshev recursion and attains a faster consensus rate than existing compressed gossip methods. Furthermore, by adopting Ascent-gossip, we propose an online algorithm that achieves optimal regret bounds of $\widetilde O(ω^{-1/2}nρ^{-1/4}\sqrt{T})$ and $\widetilde O(ω^{-1}nρ^{-1/2}\ln T)$ for convex and strongly convex loss functions, respectively. Up to logarithmic factors in $n$ and $ρ^{-1}$, these results match the lower bounds in terms of $T$, $n$, $ρ$, and $ω$.
Offline reinforcement learning seeks to learn decision policies from previously collected data, but deployment environments may differ from the domains in which the data were collected, and logged variables may omit confounders that affected both historical actions and outcomes. We study offline policy learning under the joint challenges of domain discrepancy and unmeasured confounding, where multiple heterogeneous source datasets provide complementary information about a target domain. We develop a causally adjusted transportability framework combining transportability theory with instrumental variables, negative controls, and proxies to identify target-domain causal quantities. For confounded contextual bandits, identification reduces to systems of bridge-function integral equations, enabling minimax estimation from finite samples. Confidence sets for the identified quantities are then used for pessimistic policy optimization, yielding CAT-CCB. We extend the framework to episodic confounded Markov decision processes, where complementary sources identify target reward and transition mechanisms under structural and completeness conditions. Under Gaussian dynamics and linear function approximation, this yields CAT-CMDP. We establish high-probability finite-sample suboptimality guarantees that quantify the effects of approximation, estimation, source-to-target shift, offline coverage, and sample size. For bounded finite-dimensional linear classes, the contextual-bandit guarantee recovers the standard $\widetilde{\mathcal O}(N^{-1/2})$ rate. Numerical experiments support the effectiveness of the framework for learning target-domain policies from heterogeneous confounded data. Together, the results provide a principled approach when no single source dataset suffices for causal identification and policy optimization.
Zhefan Rao, Meng Chu, Xuan Billy Zhang, Jingfan Chen, Guohao Cai, Runyi Li, Shiyi Du, Xu Huang 等 92 位作者
World Models (WMs) can support Multimodal Agents (MAs) through simulated experience, while Agent trajectories can inform World Model refinement. Evaluating this interaction requires separate evidence about action selection and state evolution. We introduce Dual Exam, which tests Agents under fixed environment response mechanisms and World Models under fixed action interventions across physical, digital, social, and scientific domains. The Agent track compares 10 configurations on 1,088 items in 15 reporting categories. The World Model track contains 400 cases across eight scenarios; 15 configurations have full coverage and one covers six scenarios. GPT 6 Astra leads the case-weighted Agent Index at 31.3, and GPT-Image-2 leads the full-coverage WM Overall at 21.7. These scores use different tasks and metrics and are not directly comparable. A 150-case pilot of one coupled pairing records zero task successes and motivates component-level diagnosis. Results reveal uneven task performance and failures to preserve task-relevant state. Their value for predicting coupled success or sustained reciprocal learning remains to be established.
Agent skills package instructions, scripts, and resources for specialized tasks and are increasingly distributed through public Web repositories. However, existing skill benchmarks primarily focus on downstream task execution, insufficiently assessing specification quality, behavioral robustness, semantic alignment, and responsibility boundaries. Their reliance on task-specific tools, environments, and repeated executions limits scalability and pre-deployment assessment. To address these challenges, we introduce SkillCT, a benchmark that broadens skill assessment from downstream utility to a multidimensional characterization of skill quality. SkillCT evaluates skills across nine complementary dimensions spanning three aspects: Static Assessment, which captures intrinsic properties of the skill specification; Dynamic Assessment, which measures whether the induced behavior remains stable across backbone models and request variations; and Human-Assisted Assessment, which examines behavior-chain consistency and task granularity. These dimensions provide a broader view of skill quality than execution success. Applying SkillCT to a public skill corpus establishes a reference benchmark for analyzing quality weaknesses and relationships across dimensions. Building on this benchmark, we propose an execution-free quality evaluation baseline that predicts the multidimensional quality profiles of unseen skills by retrieving and leveraging similar reference skills, without executing the skills under evaluation. This reduces token consumption and evaluation time, while preserving consistency with the full assessment. Furthermore, SkillCT-guided optimization improves downstream task success and execution efficiency, demonstrating its value for skill refinement. These findings highlight the effectiveness of SkillCT in supporting scalable skill assessment, optimization, and repository maintenance.
Sihan Yang, Weichen Bai, Ruichuan An, Yiming Cheng, Zhiyuan Feng, Tianyi Jiang, Renye Yan, Ning Ding 等 12 位作者
As executable environments for language agents scale, generating and verifying their rollouts becomes increasingly expensive. Under finite rollout budgets, this raises an important question: can data management at the environment level make agentic reinforcement learning (RL) more efficient by organizing, evaluating, and scheduling task instances together with the environments that determine their tools, states, transitions, and verification? To address this question, we introduce EnvSched (Environment-aware Scheduling), an online scheduler that learns from rollout history. EnvSched assigns scheduling value through two complementary modeling choices: exploitation prioritizes tasks likely to provide informative reward differences, while coverage spreads each batch across underobserved environments and interaction patterns. EnvSched organizes environment--task pairs as nodes in a dual-relation graph, with within-environment edges capturing task semantics and shared tool, state, and verifier structure, and cross-environment edges capturing abstract execution and reward topology. By propagating historical rollout statistics along both edge types, it predicts within-task reward variance. These predictions guide a scheduler that allocates each batch to tasks with high predicted reward variance and underobserved environments and tasks. Environment quotas and a similarity penalty further limit concentration and redundancy, yielding informative and diverse batches without additional pilot rollouts. In RL on Qwen3-8B, EnvSched achieves an average score of 48.81 across BFCL-v3, tau-Bench, and ACEBench-Agent after 40 training steps, exceeding the highest score attained by random task selection after 120 steps. It also improves downstream performance across model sizes at the same training budget.
Hanqing Wang, Zhaotian Cai, Ruichuan An, Bohan Zeng, Tao Zhang, Yilin Chen, Xu Jiang, Kaiquan Chen 等 15 位作者
Vision--Language--Action (VLA) models generate robot actions from visual observations and language instructions, but their understanding of physical dynamics remains limited. Video world models can capture scene dynamics, yet generating future videos introduces high latency into the control loop. We introduce PDRVLA, whose lightweight Physical Dynamics Module extracts physical tokens from vision--language features to condition action generation without online video generation. The module learns through direct prediction of future RGB, depth, and optical-flow features, with auxiliary supervision through a frozen pretrained video world model. Training relies entirely on publicly available data, expanded through human-to-robot synthesis, subtask annotation, and embodied chain-of-thought (ECoT) annotation. Across four simulation benchmarks, PDRVLA achieves success rates of 99.3% on LIBERO, 89.9% on LIBERO-Plus, 93.6% on RoboTwin~2.0, and 81.5% on SimplerEnv. Ablations show improved future prediction with world-model supervision and evaluate how subtask conditioning, future object-pose supervision, and ECoT training affect action success.
Chong Wang, Zixuan Fu, Hao Cheng, Siyuan Yang, Alex C. Kot, Bihan Wen
Recent advances in diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in restoring high-quality images in a zero-shot manner. Unfortunately, extending this success to video restoration is challenging due to the substantial computational resources required to pre-train video diffusion models. A rising trend seeks to address video restoration by utilizing a pre-trained image diffusion model, initiating restoration from either frame-wise independent or identical Gaussian noise. Yet, these approaches often fall short, as such simple noise initiations fail to capture and utilize the inherent temporal correlations within degraded video frames. In this work, we propose taming noise initialization for zero-shot video restoration, which preserves the intrinsic temporal correlations by generating initial noises directly using DDIM inversion on the corrupted video frames themselves. Building on this, we introduce an adaptive noise blending strategy that suppresses degradation patterns encoded during DDIM inversion while gradually steering the noise toward a Gaussian distribution. To further emphasize temporal consistency, we propose measurement-guided trajectory attention to better align features across frames. Extensive experiments on multiple video restoration tasks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing zero-shot approaches, consistently achieving superior results on the DAVIS, REDS4, and Set8 datasets.
Scientific reasoning in specialized engineering fields depends on knowledge scattered across the literature, often proprietary and absent from frontier LLM training data. In such domains, frontier models tend to give generic answers. Knowledge graphs (KGs) can ground LLM reasoning. Because a graph is too large to provide in full, typical LLM+KG systems preselect a portion, deciding relevance before reasoning begins. Here we train a compact model, Prospector, to reason over a domain knowledge graph by traversing it step by step, seeking evidence in light of what it has already found. Prospector calls a small set of tools one at a time to progressively build its context, and answers with a chain of evidence that can be checked edge by edge against what its tools retrieved from the graph. On a knowledge graph built from the semiconductor-manufacturing literature, Prospector approaches the strongest off-the-shelf models given the same graph and tools, and it far exceeds off-the-shelf models answering closed-book or from a pre-selected portion of the graph. Although trained only on the semiconductor graph, Prospector transfers to unseen knowledge graphs from three other distinct fields: bio-inspired materials, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and materials properties. Served on a single GPU, Prospector answers faster and at a fraction of the cost of a hosted service, while keeping proprietary data on the owner's hardware. We find that the policy's latent state is indicative of its next move on both seen and unseen graphs, and modulating the latent state can steer the policy from one behavior mode to another. These results suggest a practical LLM + KG paradigm for scientific and engineering reasoning over private data, in which a compact model trained on a graph from published literature transfers its traversal to unseen graphs that stay with their owners.
Manthan Patel, Jonas Frey, Mayank Mittal, Fan Yang, Alexander Hansson, Amir Bar, Cesar Cadena, Marco Hutter
Depth sensors are widely deployed across robotic platforms, and advances in fast, high-fidelity depth simulation have enabled robotic policies trained on depth observations to achieve robust sim-to-real transfer for a wide range of tasks. Despite this, representation learning for depth modality remains underexplored compared to RGB, where large-scale foundation models now define the state of the art. To address this gap, we present DeFM, a self-supervised foundation model trained entirely on depth images for robotic applications. Using a DINO-style self-distillation objective on a curated dataset of 60M depth images, DeFM learns geometric and semantic representations that generalize to diverse environments, tasks, and sensors. To retain metric awareness across multiple scales, we introduce a novel input normalization strategy. We further distill DeFM into compact models suitable for resource-constrained robotic systems. When evaluated on depth-based classification, segmentation, navigation, locomotion, and manipulation benchmarks, DeFM achieves state-of-the-art performance and demonstrates strong generalization from simulation to real-world environments. We release all our pretrained models, which can be adopted off-the-shelf for depth-based robotic learning without task-specific fine-tuning. Webpage: https://de-fm.github.io/
Realistic guitar synthesis requires both audio fidelity and interpretable control over how notes are performed. The input timed MIDI events decide what is played but not how, leaving the continuous within-note decisions of guitar performance--such as pitch inflection and per-string articulation--unspecified. A model that directly maps MIDI to audio must therefore realize the performance implicitly, and users are left with limited control over the synthesized performance. We therefore propose a two-stage guitar synthesis pipeline that predicts editable, per-string $f_0$ and amplitude trajectories from timed note events and note-level dynamics, and renders them into audio using latent flow matching. Experimental results show that the proposed system outperforms a matched single-stage counterpart and DDSP-Guitar in control fidelity and perceived quality, while keeping the controls editable. Sound examples can be found online.
Additive codes over $\Ffour$ that are self-orthogonal under the trace inner product correspond to binary quantum stabilizer codes. We study 1-generator $(1,2)$-quasi-cyclic (QC) additive codes and their exact quantum distances. For composite lengths $n=\ell m$, an ancestor-lifting theorem transports dual words of the folded ancestor to the length-$n$ code. A two-layer decomposition for $\ell=2$ and a CRT splitting for odd $\ell$ yield dimension laws and explain equality, escape, and mixed-branch behavior in the certified examples. A palindromic criterion ensures symplectic self-orthogonality, while reversal pairing and a symplectic Gram rank formula describe broader construction families. Exact distances are established by information-set decoding screening, Brouwer--Zimmermann computation on the additive dual, and independent witness verification. We certify twenty-one record-breaking binary quantum codes across twenty entries of Grassl's code table, with twenty-eight certified members in total. Propagation improves thirty-four further entries, and explicit constructions are supplied for three table-tying GV entries marked Code Missing Construction. Six additional candidates are reported only with rigorous upper bounds and heuristic screening evidence. The results connect divisor-lattice structure in additive quasi-cyclic codes with reproducible certification of exact quantum distances.
Ao Zhang, Haochuan Li, Boya Du, Jian Yang, Qihang Fang, Yulin Xu
Large-scale industrial ranking models must jointly capture heterogeneous feature interactions, long-term user behaviors, and multi-scenario dependencies under stringent online serving constraints. Existing architectures typically process sequential and non-sequential features with separate modules, limiting bidirectional information exchange. Directly applying homogeneous self-attention to all semantic tokens can also be inefficient when sequential and non-sequential signals exhibit different effective-ranks (eRanks). Meanwhile, shared representations can overlook scenario-specific patterns and induce negative transfer between scenarios. In this paper, we propose HiRank, a unified framework for multi-scenario recommendation that jointly models Heterogeneous feature Interactions via effective-Rank scaling. HiRank integrates gated sequential attention with heterogeneous feature interaction within a unified backbone, enabling bidirectional fusion between sequential and non-sequential representations. HiRank further uses scenario-aware aggregation to compress heterogeneous low-order tokens into a compact representation. Distinct learned projections transform the full compact representation into scenario-aware composite tokens with complementary global feature views and more uniform information density, enabling more effective high-order self-attention. Extensive experiments on industrial-scale datasets demonstrate favorable performance scaling with parameter count and consistent improvements over competitive baselines. Online A/B tests further show a 2.27% increase in orders per user.
Many everyday tasks require controlling contact force as well as motion. On a humanoid, this force must often be coordinated across both hands and the whole body, and cannot be specified by kinematic trajectories alone. Therefore, we present FLORE, a framework for learning force-reactive humanoid loco-manipulation. We collect robot-free demonstrations using two force-sensing UMI-style handheld grippers for hand motion and contact wrenches, and wearable trackers for body motion. A force-reactive diffusion policy takes vision, proprioception, and measured wrenches as input, then predicts actions and per-hand force commands. A hybrid compliance whole-body controller with force tracking executes these commands while maintaining balance: an integral of the force error measured by real force/torque (F/T) sensors lets each hand track force accurately along the commanded direction and remain compliant along the others. In simulation, the controller tracks per-hand force commands of varied magnitude and direction, with little loss in whole-body motion accuracy. Across three contact-rich tasks on the robot, the force-reactive policy succeeds in 80% of rollouts, compared with 26.7% for a position-only policy trained on the same demonstrations and executed by the same controller. For more details, please visit our website: https://louis-leee.github.io/FLoRe/.