Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is sample-efficient but struggles in sparse reward settings. A critical bottleneck arises from the lack of informative gradients in sparse settings, where standard reward models often yield flat landscapes that struggle to guide planning. To address this challenge, we propose Shaping Landscapes with Optimistic Potential Estimates (SLOPE), a novel framework that shifts reward modeling from predicting sparse scalars to constructing informative potential landscapes. SLOPE employs optimistic distributional regression to estimate high-confidence upper bounds, which amplifies rare success signals and ensures sufficient exploration gradients. Evaluations on 30+ tasks across 5 benchmarks and real-world robotic deployments, demonstrate that SLOPE consistently outperforms leading baselines in fully sparse, semi-sparse, and dense rewards. The project code is available at https://github.com/Arya87/SLOPE.
Long-horizon consistency is essential for video world models, yet it becomes difficult to maintain once observed content falls outside the context window. Existing memory mechanisms either retrieve history as implicit context, which remains constrained by context capacity and entangles static and dynamic information or consolidate history into explicit global representations, which struggle to model evolving dynamics and accumulate geometric errors. To overcome these limitations, we introduce \textbf{GROME}, a novel factorized memory framework that augments video world models for long-horizon coherence across both static scenes and dynamic entities. GROME operates via three synergistic components: 1)~\emph{Static-Dynamic Factorization} decouples historical evidence into static and dynamic components, preserving static scene geometry and dynamic entity states separately; 2)~\emph{Local Memory Retrieval} selects spatially aligned static history to eliminate geometric drift alongside the latest dynamic entity states to ensure temporal continuity; 3)~\emph{Training-Free Memory Injection} seamlessly grounds the factorized memory into video world models via their native conditioning pathways. Experiments on long-horizon revisit scenarios demonstrate that GROME substantially enhances scene persistence and dynamic entity fidelity over existing methods, all while preserving the visual quality and controllability of the frozen backbone without additional training. Beyond self-rollouts, GROME readily accommodates external observations as plug-and-play memory, unlocking flexible and controllable video continuation and scene exploration.
Recursive self-improvement requires models not only to acquire useful training experience, but also to decide when their current experience has ceased to be useful. Existing methods often focus on what experience to generate next, while paying less attention to when fresh experience should be introduced. Many also construct training targets through self-consistency or majority voting, making supervision depend on the model's own uncertain predictions. We address these two questions separately: training dynamics determine when to acquire new experience, while the answers to new tasks remain independently checkable. A-RSI monitors reward variation and accuracy in training logs to refresh a task pool when its learning signal declines, without consulting validation or test scores. A static library of model-authored programs produces multimodal questions and derives their reference answers; we specify the task-generation contract, automatically verify chosen properties of the reward and refresh rules, and separately audit the generated answers. The training loop uses no external training examples or human-written answer labels. On the primary eleven-benchmark suite, A-RSI raises the performance average from 57.77 to 61.05 with 800 fresh tasks.
Diandian Guo Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Cong Cao Institute of Information Engineering，Chinese Academy of Sciences, Fangfang Yuan Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Pin Xu University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Cheng Hu, Zhicheng Zhang University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy Of Sciences, Yu Liu Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yanbing Liu Institute of Information Engineering，Chinese Academy of Sciences
Multimodal Sarcasm Understanding (MSU) comprises multiple subtasks, demanding both incongruity perception and intent reasoning. However, this progress is impeded by two bottlenecks. First, the lack of a unified benchmark for holistic satirical cognition hinders comprehensive evaluation of MSU. Second, jointly modeling these heterogeneous subtasks often leads to feature entanglement. Specifically, while subtasks share a dependence on incongruity, they diverge in granular focus, causing specific execution patterns to erode the fundamental perception capability. To address these challenges, we make two contributions. First, we introduce DocMSU-PLUS, a comprehensive benchmark covering five cognitive dimensions of MSU. All tasks are reformulated into multiple-choice questions (MCQs), enabling a unified accuracy-based evaluation. Second, we propose the Dual Orthogonal Stream Experts (DOSE) framework. DOSE structurally decouples experts into orthogonal shared perception and private execution streams to physically block gradient interference between tasks. Experiments demonstrate that DOSE achieves superior performance on DocMSU-PLUS, effectively balancing general perception with task-specific adaptation.
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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