Hanqing Wang, Zhaotian Cai, Ruichuan An, Bohan Zeng, Tao Zhang, Yilin Chen, Xu Jiang, Kaiquan Chen 等 16 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.
Audio language models are meant to answer questions from the audio itself, but an hour-long recording rarely fits in their context, and the answer often depends on a few seconds of it. Transcribing the recording first makes it fit but discards sounds and voices, while systems that return to the audio must be trained for this behavior. We propose ReListen, a training-free method in which a frozen audio language model finds its own evidence before answering. In a Jev-style scan, the model scores each 20-second window by the probability that it helps answer the question, and it then answers from the highest-scoring minute. This minute overlaps the annotated evidence far more often than transcript retrieval, for 88.5% of VoiceGiraffe questions. Without any change, the same scan also grounds events on LAT-Bench as well as a model trained for temporal grounding. Answering from it matches or exceeds hearing the whole recording with a small fraction of the audio, and on VoiceGiraffe it exceeds a transcript of the whole recording by 9.2 points. The selected evidence is also worth hearing rather than reading. Given the same excerpts, reading their transcript matches listening on speech content, but listening is clearly more accurate on questions about sounds and voices. Moreover, ReListen answers faster than every transcript-based system, and its memory stays constant even for recordings too long to hear whole on one GPU. Therefore, a frozen audio language model can search hour-long recordings by itself, without a transcript or additional training.
Large language agents for literary role-playing are typically modeled around dialogue generation, leaving characters' non-dialogue behaviors and their dynamic evolution over story time underrepresented. In this paper, we propose ACTOR (Action-Centered Temporal Organization for Literary Role-Playing Agents), an automated framework for constructing such behavior trajectories from raw novel texts. ACTOR extracts dialogue and persona-relevant non-dialogue behaviors, represents each behavior using a Thought-Action-Observation structure, and organizes behavior trajectories according to the internal temporal order of the story. We build a behavior dataset from 143 diverse literary works. For each source behavior, we generate counterfactual behaviors that are contextually plausible yet inconsistent with the character's persona. We find that existing models struggle to reliably infer character-consistent actions from historical behaviors and evolving character states. Using these behavior pairs, we train models with Regularized Preference Optimization (RPO), which augments DPO with a negative log-likelihood loss on the source behavior to jointly optimize behavior preference and generation. We further design a four-way next-behavior selection task to evaluate the model's ability to faithfully mimic character actions. Across 17,560 evaluation instances, the model trained on ACTOR's preference pairs achieves substantially improved accuracy. This result demonstrates that structured, temporally organized supervision enables models to leverage character profiles and prior behaviors to infer subsequent actions, greatly advancing literary role-playing beyond mere dialogue imitation. Code and data are available at https://github.com/SilentStar233/ACTOR.
Zheng Wu, Xinbei Ma, Yao Yao, Zhaoyuan Huang, Haowen Hu, Yijie Lu, Taolei Wang, Yifei Yang 等 11 位作者
Personal AI agents are increasingly capable of handling long-horizon tasks across applications, yet users often need to invest substantial effort in specifying goals, resolving ambiguity, and verifying outcomes. We argue that progress should be measured by how effectively agents amplify human agency: enabling people to pursue their goals with less routine supervision while retaining control over consequential decisions. We advocate Avatar Intelligence, a paradigm of persistent personal agents that represent users' goals, values, and constraints through sustained decision delegation across contexts and time. We describe a maturity roadmap from human-directed execution to autonomous operation within delegated domains, and introduce the Agentic Oversight Index (AOI) as a framework for evaluating delivered value against agent-side operational cost and human oversight burden. We identify three core research challenges: identity-continuous personalization that carries user preferences across tasks, user-situated evolution through Rehearsal Engineering, and safety mechanisms that combine technical control with accountability and recourse. These directions define a research agenda for reliable decision delegation to personal agents across tasks and over time.
Zixuan Liu, Fangzheng Wu, Brian Summa, Zizhan Zheng
Reward-robust RL typically models misspecification by specifying an uncertainty set that constrains the discrepancy of plausible rewards from a base reward. However, such reward space discrepancies can be behaviorally irrelevant: under potential-based reward shaping (PBRS), many distinct rewards preserve policy ordering. This can introduce substantial redundancy into standard uncertainty sets and degrade optimization performance. We propose Shaping-Aware Reward-Robust RL, which constructs uncertainty sets over PBRS equivalence classes by projecting each reward to a canonical representative, ensuring that the resulting set contains only rewards that induce behaviorally distinct policy rankings. We prove that this projection preserves the optimal robust value while shrinking the uncertainty set and improving empirical performance. Using the connection between robustness and regularization, we obtain a practical algorithm to solve the shaping-aware reward-robust RL problem and enjoy convergence guarantees under standard assumptions. Experiments on benchmarks spanning diverse task domains and levels of complexity show consistent improvements over representative robust RL baselines and exhibit improved robustness to reward perturbations.
Chaoren Wang, Heng Lu, Xueyao Zhang The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Shujie Liu, Yan Lu Microsoft Research Asia, Jinyu Li Microsoft, Zhizheng Wu Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Although Speech Large Language Models have achieved notable progress, a substantial modality reasoning gap remains: their reasoning performance on speech inputs is markedly weaker than on text. This gap could be associated with representational drift across Transformer layers and behavior deviations in long-chain reasoning. To address this issue, we introduce TARS, a reinforcement-learning framework that aligns text-conditioned and speech-conditioned trajectories through an asymmetric reward design. The framework employs two dense and complementary signals: representation alignment, which measures layer-wise hidden-state similarity between speech- and text-conditioned trajectories, and behavior alignment, which evaluates semantic consistency between generated outputs and reference text completions. Experiments on challenging reasoning benchmarks, including MMSU and OBQA, show that our approach significantly narrows the modality reasoning gap and achieves state-of-the-art performance among 7B-scale Speech LLMs.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表