Nan Chen, Yiyang Cai, Weinan Jia, Zhuowei Chen, Wen Zhou, Wenhan Luo
Open domain subject-driven text-to-video (S2V) generation has drawn significant interest in academia and industry. Open domain S2V mainly involves two scenarios: in-domain, which requires retaining the reference subject features as much as possible, and cross-domain, which preserves the intrinsic features of the subject while allowing subject-irrelevant properties to vary flexibly according to the text prompt. Existing methods primarily focus on maximizing subject fidelity in in-domain scenarios, which limits their editability and adaptability in cross-domain scenarios, such as novel styles, semantic combinations, or domain attributes. In this study, we propose that an ideal S2V method should flexibly shuttle between different domains, achieving strong performance in both in-domain and cross-domain scenarios. To this end, we propose DomainShuttle, which could achieve high fidelity and generative flexibility for open domain video personalization. Specifically, we introduce Domain-MoT, which decouples videos and reference features and introduces the domain-aware AdaLN for domain-specific modeling of reference images. We then introduce the Video-Reference DualRoPE scheme, which places reference image tokens and video tokens in separate RoPE spaces to enable precise subject-level spatial modeling, and Cross-Pair Consistent Loss, which aims to extract intrinsic subject features unaffected by irrelevant features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DomainShuttle achieves significant performance improvements over existing methods, exhibiting high subject fidelity and generative flexibility across diverse open domain application scenarios.
Jingwen Yu, Pengyu Wang, Jin Wu, Weinan Chen, Ping Tan, Hong Zhang
Loop closure detection conventionally cascades separate models for global retrieval, geometric verification, and relative pose estimation, leading to redundant computation and disconnected visual representations. We propose UniLoop, a unified framework that reuses the hierarchical representations of the pretrained geometric foundation model throughout this pipeline. A shared image encoder produces features for compact global descriptors; the same features are passed to the cross-view decoder for pairwise verification; and the original geometric predictions provide relative camera constraints for pose-graph optimization. Experiments on place recognition, loop verification, and relative pose estimation show that UniLoop improves loop-closure robustness and accuracy while reducing redundant backbone computation relative to modular pipelines. UniLoop achieves the best Recall@10 on MSLS (96.6) and Pitts30k (99.3) among the compared methods, while its verification branch reaches 95.63 AP and 96.29 ROC-AUC, surpassing the existing geometric verification baselines.
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.
AI 速览：作者提出首个面向多模态有状态交互的大规模多轮对话数据集 YANAMI-400K 与评测基准 YANAMI-Bench，并报告微调 BAGEL 后在图像编辑、生成与有状态交互上均有提升。
Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) integrate visual understanding, generation, and editing within a single unified framework. However, existing unified multimodal datasets and benchmarks remain dominated by single-turn tasks. Even in recent multi-turn datasets, many turns can be solved independently without tracking information across turns. Consequently, they provide limited supervision and evaluation for multimodal stateful interaction, which requires models to understand, maintain, update, and faithfully realize evolving dialogue states across turns. To address this gap, we introduce YANAMI, the first large-scale multimodal dialogue dataset and benchmark for stateful interaction, comprising YANAMI-400K and YANAMI-Bench. YANAMI-400K contains 400K multi-turn multimodal dialogues, with more than 2M images and 2.6M dialogue turns. The dialogues span four representative scenarios: Multi-Image Fusion, Image Editing, World Modeling, and Visual Reasoning, and require models to continuously track, preserve, and revise evolving multimodal dialogue states across turns. YANAMI-Bench comprises 400 multi-turn dialogues for systematically evaluating multimodal stateful interaction. It jointly evaluates Dialogue State Understanding and Visual Realization, characterizing the gap between models' ability to understand evolving dialogue states and their ability to faithfully realize them in visual outputs. Experiments show that fine-tuning BAGEL on YANAMI-400K improves image editing, generation, and multimodal stateful interaction by 10.3%, 2.0%, and 13.23%, respectively, while preserving its general visual understanding capabilities. Evaluations on YANAMI-Bench further reveal that existing UMMs still struggle to maintain, update, and visually realize evolving multimodal dialogue states.
Zhiwei Zhang, Wenxuan Yuan, Xiaoyuan Cheng, Pouria Behnoudfar, Chuanqi Chen, Charlotte Moser, Yuta Tarumi, Jin-Long Wu 等 13 位作者
Koopman representations describe nonlinear dynamics through linear evolution in a transformed space, offering an attractive framework for their linear simplicity and generality. Yet these advantages do not necessarily translate into improved performance in deep latent data assimilation (LDA). We systematically compare seven representative methods and structural baselines across five systems spanning approximately periodic to strongly chaotic dynamics and a broad range of state dimensions. We evaluate forecast and assimilation accuracy, physical state recovery, latent-trajectory behavior, and dynamical consistency, and assess Gaussian error assumptions, objective convexity, and uniqueness of analysis solutions. Our results reveal a trade-off between representational flexibility and optimization tractability. Linear evolution of the latent state can stabilize short-term forecasts but restrict expressiveness in strongly chaotic and high-dimensional systems, without consistently improving assimilation accuracy. Parameterized linear operators offer greater flexibility, yet their joint optimization with the encoder--decoder remains nonconvex. Methods with closed-form analysis updates generally perform better and exhibit greater robustness in our experiments, although matrix inversion remains a computational bottleneck. These findings show that the practical benefits of Koopman structure depend on both sufficient observational information and the choice of assimilation procedure.
An image that is hard to classify on its own may have a helpful neighbor in the same unlabeled batch. Zero-shot vision-language models (VLMs) score images independently and leave this evidence unused. We study small unlabeled query batches with no labeled examples. Visual similarity can reflect pose or background, so it may connect images from different classes. Each image's scores over the class vocabulary offer another way to choose neighbors. We introduce Behavioral Affinity Transduction (BAT), which builds a sparse graph from these class-response profiles. The graph supplies neighbor evidence during prediction. For EM-Dirichlet, it also screens candidate classes and initializes assignments. BAT plugs into direct and iterative readouts of a frozen VLM. Across diverse datasets, BAT improves the mean accuracy of every tested readout. In the main RN50 comparison, soft and hard EM-Dirichlet gain $4.22$ and $2.72$ percentage points.
Liangwei Wang, Nan Chen, Luna K. Qiu, Zilong Wang, Fugee Tsung, Yuyu Luo, Yuqing Yang
Handwriting and sketching help people develop ideas around information. As this work unfolds, users may seek assistance with finding, understanding, and organizing materials. We investigate how ink can initiate and steer agent assistance in this process. An eight-participant formative study explored desired assistance and interaction expectations, informing three connected activities: bringing materials in, thinking with materials, and shaping the space. We present Inkitiate, a spatial workspace for ink-based agent assistance in knowledge work. Through ink, users retrieve external materials, build on accumulated content and results, and reorganize the canvas, while inspecting and guiding agent actions. In a study with eighteen participants, users reported favorable usability and low perceived workload, and used retained ink and materials to develop further ink queries. An ink-query vocabulary and cases reveal how users combine linguistic and graphical expressions to direct agents. These findings inform ink-based agent interaction design for expressive requests and continued work with materials.
Word-level emphasis conveys meaning that text alone cannot express and is therefore essential for a practical text-to-speech (TTS) system. In this work, we study how to add emphasis control post hoc to a pretrained TTS model that has never been trained with emphasis annotations. We present EmpDPO, a simple, efficient, and effective two-stage recipe that adds emphasis control to a multilingual zero-shot diffusion TTS model through supervised fine-tuning followed by direct preference optimization (DPO). The training signals for both stages come from an off-the-shelf multilingual emphasis detector, so that no manual emphasis annotation or task-specific reward design is needed. We find that DPO can substantially strengthen emphasis control with only a few thousand preference pairs and training steps. Objective and subjective evaluations against strong public systems show that our model produces perceptible emphasis while preserving naturalness and overall quality.
Bisimulation is a concept that captures behavioural equivalence of states in a variety of types of transition systems. It has been widely studied in discrete-time settings where a key notion is the bisimulation metric which quantifies "how similar two states are". In [ 11], we generalized the concept of bisimulation metric in order to metrize the behaviour of continuous-time Markov processes. Similarly to the discrete-time case, we constructed a pseudometric following two iterative approaches - through a functional and through a real-valued logic, and showed that the outcomes coincide: the pseudometric obtained from the logic is a specific fixpoint of the functional which yields our first pseudometric. However, different from the discrete-time setting, in which the process has a step-by-step dynamics, the behavioural pseudometric we constructed applies to Markov processes that evolve continuously through time, such as diffusions and jump diffusions. While our treatment of the pseudometric in [11] relied on the time-indexed Markov kernels, in [ 8 , 9, 10 ], we showed the importance of trajectories in the consideration of behavioural equivalences for true continuous-time Markov processes. In this paper, we take the work from [11 ] further and propose a second behavioural pseudometric for diffusions based on trajectories. We conduct a similar study of this pseudometric from both the perspective of a functional and the viewpoint of a real-valued logic. We also compare this pseudometric with the first pseudometric obtained in [11].
Vision-language-action (VLA) policies can learn to follow execution preferences, such as where to grasp an object or how to move around an obstacle, from demonstrations annotated with preference labels. Providing these annotations for every new task, however, is costly. We study whether learned preference control can transfer to new tasks whose demonstrations contain the desired behaviors but lack preference annotations. We find that a policy trained with preference annotations can follow preferences on a new task before adaptation but achieves limited task success. Fine-tuning on target demonstrations without these annotations improves task success while weakening preference control. Motivated by this finding, we introduce Self-Labeled Preference Transfer (SPT). SPT jointly trains a shared vision-language backbone for preference-conditioned action prediction and preference recognition on annotated source demonstrations. It then freezes the recognizer to preserve its cross-task preference recognition capability and uses it to self-label target demonstrations for policy fine-tuning. Across five types of execution preferences in simulation, the recognizer achieves 96.4% accuracy, and SPT reaches 84.8% preference following and 89.2% task success, compared with 59.4% and 88.0% for naive finetuning. We further extend to multiple preferences, achieving 93.8% preference following compared with 42.5% of baselines. In real-world experiments, SPT increases preference following from 52.5% to 92.5% relative to naive finetuning across two task transfers. These results show that SPT can support preference adaptation across tasks and objects while maintaining success, without additional manual preference annotations.
Yannan Chen, Beichen Huang, Licheng Zhao, Chris Ding, Kaiming Shen
The normalized cut (NCut) problem is a fundamental one in the area of data clustering. Despite its fractional structure, the NCut problem is seldom considered from a fractional programming (FP) perspective in the existing literature. The main reason is that the conventional FP method is inadequate for this problem case: the classical Dinkelbach's transform can only handle a single ratio and hence is limited to the two-class clustering, whereas the multi-class clustering involves multiple ratio terms. This work proposes a novel so-called multidimensional quadratic transform that is capable of dealing with the multi-ratio case; it recasts the NCut problem into a bipartite matching problem---which can be immediately solved by linear search. Furthermore, we explore the connection between the proposed FP method and the minorization-maximization (MM) theory, and in turn characterize the convergence behavior of our algorithm. Finally, we conduct experiments to numerically demonstrate the advantages of the proposed FP-based algorithm in a variety of data clustering and image segmentation tasks.
Swapnil Bhosale, Prem Seetharaman, Ke Chen, Haonan Chen, Justin Salamon, Zeyu Jin
Real-world audio applications require precise, queryable representations grounded in physical time. Yet modern Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) increasingly favor conversational generation, producing free-form descriptions that conflate acoustic perception with higher-level reasoning and lack precise temporal grounding. We introduce TAC2, a foundation model that casts timestamped audio captioning as composable functions to construct granular, speaker-attributed acoustic timelines directly from in-the-wild audio. To avoid prohibitively expensive manual annotation, we programmatically fuse complementary predictions from specialized weak teachers through time-registered IoU matching. We model the resulting multi-granularity schema of timestamped events, speaker turns, and fine-grained speech attributes using an Instruction-Input-Output (IIO) completion format, in which each task is a function of the audio, an instruction, and an optional input. A single call decodes the full description autonomously, while composing calls lets earlier outputs or external priors, such as a reference transcript, condition later ones. We further extend TAC2 with expressive speech attributes to obtain TAC2-S, using parameter-efficient specialists to elicit latent paralinguistic capabilities from the pre-trained backbone and distill them into a unified model. We validate the resulting representation in two complementary settings. Paired with frozen text-only LLMs, it yields strong spoken audio understanding across diverse reasoning backends, demonstrating the utility of decoupling fine-grained acoustic perception from downstream reasoning. Used as paired supervision for text-to-audio generation, it supports semantically and temporally grounded reconstruction, together with explicit zero-shot control over event timing, speaker attributes, and word-level emphasis.
Xiucheng Wang, Nan Cheng, Zhisheng Yin, Conghao Zhou, Ruijin Sun
Dense low-Earth-orbit (LEO) networks increasingly reuse spectrum across moving satellites and overlapping beams, making a spatial radio map essential for interference diagnosis and coordination. Constructing such a map from sparse ground power measurements is difficult because the active satellite subset and its cardinality are unknown, candidate footprints can be highly coherent, and beam pointing, width, effective power, Doppler, and background must be inferred jointly. Known ephemerides do more than enumerate visible candidates. Propagated positions determine candidate-specific ranges, viewing geometry, and spatial footprints, while radial velocities induce distinct time-frequency signatures. Their joint spatial--Doppler structure rejects candidates whose geometry or time--frequency signature conflicts with the observations before continuous beam inference. SateBeam therefore screens all candidates through Doppler-resolved nonnegative fitting. GPU-accelerated grid correlations initialize continuous off-grid refinement; a Gamma-likelihood Bayesian information criterion (BIC) selects model cardinality, and backward deletion and exchange repair greedy support errors. Across paired real-ephemeris scenarios, SateBeam recovers the exact support in every case and reduces independent-query RMSE from $0.655$ to $0.050$ dB relative to orthogonal matching pursuit, with consistent advantages under model mismatch and larger candidate sets. The code is available at https://github.com/UNIC-Lab/SateBeam.
Shuai Zhen Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Yanhua Yu Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Ruopei Guo, Nan Cheng, Yang Deng Singapore Management University
Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in complex interactive decision-making tasks. However, existing LLM agents typically rely on increasingly long interaction histories, resulting in high computational cost and limited scalability. In this paper, we propose STEP-HRL, a hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) framework that enables step-level learning by conditioning only on single-step transitions rather than full interaction histories. STEP-HRL structures tasks hierarchically, using completed subtasks to represent global progress of overall task. By introducing a local progress module, it also iteratively and selectively summarizes interaction history within each subtask to produce a compact summary of local progress. Together, these components yield augmented step-level transitions for both high-level and low-level policies. Experimental results on ScienceWorld and ALFWorld benchmarks consistently demonstrate that STEP-HRL substantially outperforms baselines in terms of performance and generalization while reducing token usage. Our code is available at https://github.com/TonyStark042/STEP-HRL.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Haonan Chen, Hong Liu, Yuping Luo, Liang Wang Microsoft Research, Nan Yang Microsoft Research Asia, Furu Wei Microsoft Research, Zhicheng Dou Renmin University of China
Multimodal embedding models, built upon causal Vision Language Models (VLMs), have shown promise in various tasks. However, current approaches face three limitations: causal attention in VLM backbones is suboptimal for embedding tasks; scalability issues due to reliance on high-quality labeled paired data for contrastive learning; and limited diversity in training objectives and data. To address these issues, we propose MoCa, a two-stage framework for transforming pre-trained VLMs into bidirectional multimodal embedding models. The first stage, Modality-aware Continual Pre-training, introduces a joint reconstruction objective that simultaneously denoises interleaved texts and images, enhancing bidirectional context-aware reasoning. The second stage, Heterogeneous Contrastive Fine-tuning, leverages diverse, semantically rich multimodal data beyond simple image-caption pairs to enhance generalization and alignment. Our method addresses the stated limitations by introducing bidirectional attention through continual pre-training, scaling effectively with massive unlabeled datasets via joint reconstruction objectives, and utilizing diverse multimodal data for enhanced representation robustness. Experiments demonstrate that MoCa consistently improves performance across MMEB and ViDoRe-v2 benchmarks, achieving new state-of-the-arts, and exhibits strong scalability with both model size and training data on MMEB.We have released the model weights and data on our project page https://haon-chen.github.io/MoCa/.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
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