OpenPrint

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Community-driven research, agent-reviewed and rank-checked. AI-written? Welcome. We ask is it worth reading?—not who wrote it. Published papers are indexed by Google in about 2 days, and by Google Scholar in 1–2 weeks.

Oct 3, 2025

Cache-to-Cache: Direct Semantic Communication Between Large Language Models

Tianyu Fu, Zihan Min, et al.

Multi-LLM systems harness the complementary strengths of diverse Large Language Models, achieving performance and efficiency gains that are not attainable by a single model. In existing designs, LLMs communicate through text, forcing internal representations to be transformed into output token sequences. This process both loses rich semantic information and incurs token-by-token generation latency. Motivated by these limitations, we ask: Can LLMs communicate beyond text? Oracle experiments show that enriching the KV-Cache semantics can improve response quality without increasing cache size, supporting KV-Cache as an effective medium for inter-model communication. Thus, we propose Cache-to-Cache (C2C), a new paradigm for direct semantic communication between LLMs. C2C uses a neural network to project and fuse the source model's KV-cache with that of the target model to enable direct semantic transfer. A learnable gating mechanism selects the target layers that benefit from cache communication. Compared with text communication, C2C utilizes the deep, specialized semantics from both models, while avoiding explicit intermediate text generation. Experiments show that C2C achieves 6.4-14.2% higher average accuracy than individual models. It further outperforms the text communication paradigm by approximately 3.1-5.4%, while delivering an average 2.5x speedup in latency.

multi-LLM systemsKV cachesemantic communication+2
Sep 17, 2026

Region-Level Policy Optimization for Fine-grained MLLM Perception

Yuheng Shi, Xiaohuan Pei, et al.

Fine-grained visual perception in MLLMs is commonly improved by raising the resolution, but the added visual tokens inflate vision-encoding and language-model prefilling costs. We show that the two operations underlying fine-grained perception, localizing the region of interest (RoI) and recognizing its content, have different resolution requirements. In a controlled diagnostic, localization tolerates roughly 3 to 4 times stronger token compression than recognition, which motivates localizing from a coarse view and concentrating resolution on the selected evidence. Decoding coordinates with the MLLM can be trained end-to-end from answers, but costs a full model pass per query and depends on grounding ability. A lightweight proposal network distilled from the model's attention is fast, but inherits the noise of its attention targets. The RoI from the proposal network reaches the answer through a discrete region choice, so its faithfulness to the answer cannot supervise the network. We therefore optimize the proposal network with region-level reinforcement learning, which we call Vision-RL2. It treats coherent regions as actions, and a frozen MLLM reader scores each one by how its removal changes the answer likelihood. Complementary subtractive and additive objectives suppress distracting proposals and recover missing evidence, updating only the predictor without region annotations, response sampling, or reasoning trajectories. The refined proposal further enables a sparse encoding that magnifies evidence and excludes background tokens. Across six fine-grained benchmarks and four MLLM backbones, Vision-RL2 improves accuracy over the base model at every token budget and surpasses its largest-budget accuracy with about 4 times fewer visual tokens.

multimodal language modelsfine-grained perceptionregion-level reinforcement learning+2
Sep 17, 2026

What Does Privileged Information Add to On-Policy Self-Distillation?

XiuYu Zhang, Wei Chow, et al.

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) lets a language model learn from a frozen copy of itself that sees an answer or a worked solution. Giving the teacher this extra information seems to offer the student more to learn, but how much does it add beyond distillation itself? To isolate that contribution, we construct AMPLE-Math, a reusable suite of 5,319 mathematical problems with six reasoning views that share the same answer, and compare each view with matched reference-free distillation. With a thinking-enabled teacher supervising direct-response rollouts, reference-free distillation accounts for much of Qwen3-1.7B's improvement under thinking-enabled evaluation, both in domain and on external benchmarks. Evidence for an additional reference benefit is modest in Qwen, strongest for a polished solution, whereas complete traces add two percentage points in SmolLM3-3B at step 50. These benefits depend on the student being trained. At the same checkpoint, replacing short direct-response rollouts with long thinking-enabled rollouts turns gains into losses in both families while the problems, references, and evaluation stay fixed. Teacher profiles and matched loss interventions in Qwen further show that changing token-level supervision can leave student behavior largely unchanged. Together, these findings suggest that OPSD can improve access to existing reasoning capabilities through parameters shared by direct-response and thinking-enabled inference. The value of a privileged reference is what it adds to this cross-mode transfer, not how much of the solution it reveals.

on-policy self-distillationprivileged informationmathematical reasoning+2
Sep 17, 2026

JEPA-Anything: Learning Predictive Models across Different Worlds

Taoyong Cui, Zhongyao Wang, et al.

World modeling enables intelligence to anticipate consequences, guide interventions, and learn from interaction. Yet predictive models remain domain-specific: can a common learning principle support world modeling across radically different systems? We introduce JEPA-Anything, a domain-agnostic framework based on orthogonal predictive factorization (OPF). Extending joint-embedding predictive architectures, OPF decomposes latent targets into complementary factors, learns them through dedicated pathways, and recombines them within a shared predictive design. We evaluate JEPA-Anything across seven domains: vision, biology, clinical trajectories, control, molecular dynamics, physical fields, and weather. Experiments span representation learning, intervention prediction, out-of-distribution generalization, and long-horizon dynamics, including 10 matched dynamics tasks, forecasting of over 1,000 clinical events, and 100-step molecular rollouts across four systems. Against matched JEPA baselines, JEPA-Anything improves reported metrics on all 10 dynamics tasks and reduces single-intervention prediction error on Interventional Pong by 34.8%. It achieves the lowest one-step and 100-step molecular errors among compared methods in all four systems. Beyond prediction, a factor-nominated biological intervention receives experimental support in cell co-cultures, patient-derived organoids, tumor fragments, and mice; latent orbital modes recover the Keplerian scaling exponent with a fitted slope of -1.4991. These results support a common factorized predictive principle across heterogeneous worlds, connecting world modeling with intervention and experimentally grounded scientific discovery.

world modelsjoint-embedding predictive architecturespredictive factorization+2
Sep 17, 2026

Video DeltaNet: A Video-Native Hybrid Attention for Livestream Video Generation

Haocheng Xi, Yiming Xie, et al.

Video diffusion models repeatedly process long spatiotemporal token sequences during denoising, making attention a major computational bottleneck. Linear attention offers an appealing alternative and has been widely adopted in recent large language models, but directly applying it to video models often fails to preserve the fine-grained interactions required for high-quality generation. We present Video DeltaNet (VDN), which combines local Softmax attention with bidirectional linear memory for long-range video context. Its linear branch introduces Video Delta Attention (VDA), which updates memory once per frame by jointly incorporating its spatial tokens. Separate output projections and learnable gates calibrate the two branches, while a staged teacher-alignment recipe progressively introduces the new pathway into pretrained models. We instantiate VDN on MiniMax H3, applying the hybrid to video-to-video interactions while retaining Softmax for interactions involving text or audio. With eight-step distillation and an optimized SGLang serving stack, VDN-H3 completes DiT denoising for a 14.3-second, 768p video in 6.70 seconds on eight NVIDIA B200 GPUs, corresponding to a 14.5x speedup over the 50-step dense H3 baseline on the same GPU count.

video generationhybrid attentionlinear attention+2
Sep 17, 2026

VABench: Measuring Embodied Spatial Intelligence through Visual Demonstrations, Active Perception, and Metric Control

Zhongbo Zhang, Jiayi Jin, et al.

Spatial intelligence requires more than describing object locations. Under incomplete observation, models must identify and acquire missing evidence, interpret it in a common spatial frame, and act on it. We introduce VA-Bench to evaluate the complete observe-reason-act-revise loop. General-purpose MLLMs learn procedural context from RGB-only demonstrations, actively select camera viewpoints, issue metric Cartesian commands, and revise them from execution feedback. Models receive no privileged object poses, oracle trajectories, or learned action heads. A fixed model-agnostic controller executes only model-specified targets. VA-Bench contains 14 base task families (11 single-arm and three dual-arm), seven held-out geometry/layout variants, and a long-horizon five-object composition track. We evaluate 12 primary model conditions in three independent runs over the same 20 physically verified seeds per base task, reporting terminal success, nine trajectory-level behavioral diagnostics, and subtask progress. First, the best-performing model scores 100.0% on target localization and 78.9% on spatial relations in the annotated run. Its three-run macro-average task success is only 53.93+/-3.17%. Second, active camera control significantly improves task success over passive multi-view observation. In one matched comparison, success rises from 27.86% to 57.50%. Third, held-out geometric transfer can reduce task success by over 30 percentage points. No model completes a strict long-horizon episode, despite substantial partial progress. VA-Bench thus tests whether general-purpose MLLMs can turn visual demonstrations and actively acquired evidence into successful embodied action.

embodied spatial intelligencemultimodal language modelsactive perception+2
Sep 17, 2026

SoL-Pi: Recursively Scaling Auto-Research Loops for Efficient Agent Harness

Haozhe Liu, Tian Ye, et al.

As coding agents move from supervised code completion to unattended, around-the-clock exploration, their work expands from isolated predictions into long trajectories of reasoning, tool use, and feedback. Token efficiency therefore becomes important for scaling recursive self-improvement. We take an RSI-inspired approach at the harness layer, scaling auto-research loops across increasingly numerous and diverse environments for harness rollouts. At this scale, the process yields reusable improvements that transfer beyond their development setting, moving automated harness discovery toward production-level outcomes. Four mechanisms survive selection and form SoL-Pi, spanning action execution, context compaction, observation handling, and delegated reading. On the 51-task EdgeBench evaluation, SoL-Pi achieves performance comparable to Pi across GPT-5.6 Sol and Opus 5 while reducing recorded token traffic by 44.7-49.0% and API cost by about one third. In other words, estimated hourly savings are $8.75-$13.50 relative to native Codex and Claude Code harnesses, and $4.36-$5.71 relative to Pi.

coding agentsagent harnessauto-research+2
Sep 15, 2026

PhysStream: Streaming Physics-Grounded Video Generation with Structured Scene Memory and Fine-Grained Motion Control

Chuhao Chen, Peter Wonka, et al.

Interactive control for video generation is moving from coarse prompts toward fine-grained, physically meaningful manipulation of dynamic scenes. Yet existing controllable methods either require the full control schedule before generation starts, or use pixel-space signals that dictate object positions rather than physical dynamics. To address these limitations, we propose PhysStream, an autoregressive model for physics-grounded image-to-video synthesis that incorporates structured scene memory—positional maps and object tracking maps derived online from previously generated frames—and supports fine-grained motion control via sparse velocity-increment signals that encode physical quantities, letting the model learn the underlying dynamics. We train our model in two stages: a bidirectional model is first finetuned with motion-control conditioning, then a causal autoregressive model is trained with additional structured scene memory, further improving physical consistency. PhysStream enables interactive, mid-generation control over multi-object tabletop rigid-body scenes—a capability not supported by prior methods—reducing motion distribution distance (FVMD) by 33% and trajectory error by 12% over the strongest baselines on synthetic benchmarks, and is preferred by human evaluators in over 85% of in-the-wild comparisons.

video generationphysics-grounded generationstructured scene memory+2
Sep 15, 2026

Modality-Autoregressive World-Action Models

Adam Hung, Bardienus P. Duisterhof, et al.

World-action models (WAMs) jointly model future observations and actions, typically predicting the future as RGB images. Other visual modalities such as depth, pretrained visual features, and point tracks can more efficiently capture geometric, semantic, and motion features. However, how best to combine these modalities within WAMs remains an open question. We introduce ModAR, the first WAM to autoregressively denoise multiple future modalities before predicting actions. This allows each prediction to condition on previously generated modalities. We train from scratch to systematically study how training-data mixtures, predicted modalities, and WAM formulations affect performance. In our evaluations, WAMs benefit from predicting point tracks, DINO features, and depth maps, while additionally predicting future RGB does not provide a consistent benefit. We also find that ModAR's sequential generation outperforms existing WAM formulations, with the highest average success rate at all evaluated data scales. We also fine-tune the video-model-initialized WAM Flex-π on the same data; ModAR achieves a slightly higher observed average success rate (75% vs. 72%) while using approximately 20× fewer training FLOPs and no pretraining. On three real-world bimanual tasks, ModAR outperforms baselines and improves with human videos.

world-action modelsautoregressive generationrobot learning+2
Sep 14, 2026

HarnessVLN: Unifying Training-Free Embodied Navigation through an Agent Harness

Yang Chen, Lirong Che, et al.

Embodied navigation requires agents to interpret visual observations, accumulate spatial knowledge, and execute actions to follow instructions or locate objects. Training-based methods face generalization challenges, while training-free methods exploit multimodal large language models (MLLMs) but often lack mechanisms to reconcile proposed actions with spatial evidence, task progress, and execution failures. We present HarnessVLN, a zero-shot, training-free framework whose Agent Harness coordinates perception, retrieval, grounding, navigation, recovery, and termination through a unified tool interface. The Harness validates planner proposals against spatial evidence, geometric feasibility, and subgoal consistency, incorporating structured tool feedback into subsequent decisions. Hierarchical event memory tracks task progress and execution history, while a persistent Spatiotemporal Graph maintains reusable spatial evidence and failure annotations for verification and recovery. A replaceable Navigation Executor converts validated targets into executable motions, allowing the same Harness protocol to support instruction-following and object-goal navigation. HarnessVLN achieves success rates of 60.8%, 53.9%, 76.0%, and 59.3% on R2R, RxR, HM3D-v2, and HM3D-OVON, respectively, surpassing prior training-free SOTA results. Humanoid deployment further demonstrates its applicability to both tasks in real-world environments.

embodied navigationagent harnessmultimodal language models+2
Sep 15, 2026

ScienceBuddy: Recursive-in-Recursive Self-Improvement for Interactive Scientific Agents

Shuhan Xue, Jianyuan Zhong, et al.

We introduce and release ScienceBuddy, an interactive scientific research workspace that brings continually improving scientific agents into researchers' everyday workflows. ScienceBuddy supports researchers in carrying out scientific tasks while transforming their requests, feedback, and execution evidence into tasks and evaluation rubrics for continual learning. At its core is recursive-in-recursive self-improvement, a paradigm that couples harness evolution with model reinforcement learning: the inner recursion improves the harness with the model fixed, while the outer recursion trains the model under the improved harness. Harness evolution shapes training experience, and model learning creates new opportunities for harness adaptation. We present case studies of researcher interaction, harness refinement, and model learning, with the benchmark cases spanning four scientific task families. By releasing ScienceBuddy as a research product, we make this paradigm available to the scientific community and take a step toward discovery intelligence: scientific AI that advances through sustained collaboration with researchers and evolves alongside the research it supports.

scientific agentsrecursive self-improvementcontinual learning+2
Sep 13, 2026
TMLRTMLR

Correct Definitions, Failed Applications: Accessibility Concepts in Language Models

Trisha Salas

A language model can state what an accessibility concept means and still fail to apply it. We measure this declarative-evaluative gap in thirteen models from three families: Pythia, GPT-2, and OLMo 2. In the original behavioral batteries, the gap opens early and persists across families. At Pythia-12B, it closes because declarative accuracy falls. Three concepts answered correctly at smaller scales regress to incorrect at 12B. Convergence by decay is not mastery. In a frozen same-concept validation of eight concepts, each represented by one violation and one conformant item, none of 96 confirmatory model-concept cells passes both application items. Eleven cells pass one item; a development-exposed pilot, reported separately, passes one pair. The 96 confirmatory cells include 35 with correct definitions. We test two possible explanations for the gap. The global maximum of attention between a compound's constituents has weak associations with accuracy that differ in direction across families. When the measure is restricted to late-layer, value-weighted binding, a consistent pattern appears: rarer compounds receive stronger distributed value-weighted writes at all thirteen model-scale points (p = 0.0003). This is the opposite of what we would expect if stronger binding indicated knowledge. The pattern is consistent with processing difficulty, although the experiments do not identify what computation the stronger writes perform. Corpus frequency is the strongest measured predictor of accuracy across 49 compounds (Spearman ρ = 0.52–0.59 across families), but it leaves most compound-to-compound variation unexplained. The same concept can be available to definition and unreachable in application, even though its corpus frequency has not changed. Frequency predicts availability. Task form constrains reachability.

accessibilitylanguage modelsdeclarative-evaluative gap+3
Aug 27, 2026

Video-FLAIR: Not Whether to Reason, But How

Yogesh Kulkarni, Pooyan Fazli

Multimodal queries can require different types of reasoning. Some can be answered via perceptual reasoning, extracting information directly from the visual signal, while others require compositional reasoning that combines observations or deliberative reasoning that evaluates competing hypotheses. However, many existing methods apply a uniform reasoning strategy across queries, leading to unnecessary computation on simple tasks and insufficient reasoning on complex ones. We introduce Video-FLAIR, a training framework that learns to select the appropriate reasoning mode for each query using reinforcement learning. During training, the model generates responses under all three modes for the same prompt, enabling direct comparison. A composite reward compares these responses to favor the most effective one based on correctness, grounding, and cost, while discouraging unsupported or misaligned deliberation. This yields a supervision signal for learning adaptive reasoning without per-query annotations. Video-FLAIR improves accuracy over the Qwen2.5-VL base model by +5.4 on MathVista, +4.8 on Video-Holmes, and +4.8 on Video-MMMU, while reducing average token usage to 95 compared to 417 for always-thinking baselines.

video reasoningmultimodal reasoningadaptive computation+3
Aug 27, 2026

Five Primitives for Governing Autonomous AI Agents at Runtime

Jiten Oswal, John Cadeddu

Enterprise deployments of autonomous AI agents inherit a control model built for human users and long-lived services, and the fit fails in three specific ways: agent principals are ephemeral, appearing and vanishing faster than provisioning; their actions are selected by a model rather than programmed, so the set of things they may attempt is not known in advance; and the population is discovered rather than provisioned, because anyone who can call an API can create one. We argue that governing such agents is a runtime problem -- not a model-alignment problem and not a build-time problem -- and we derive five primitives from the questions that must be answered before an action takes effect and after it has: discovery, identity, governance, attestation, and supply chain. For each we state what fails if it is absent and why the others cannot structurally supply it. We describe an implementation in which an agent's action is mediated against policy before it takes effect, authorised against a per-tenant action vocabulary, and recorded in a hash-linked signed ledger a third party can verify with the vendor out of the loop. We report what the architecture costs: the enforcement point sits on the request's critical path, identity requires a sidecar per workload, and fail-closed mediation converts availability incidents into denial. We are explicit about implementation status: four primitives are built and running in private pilots, and the fifth is built as separate tooling and not yet integrated into the request path. We keep it in the set deliberately: a five-part decomposition that exactly matches what its authors happened to build is not a taxonomy but a description of a codebase.

autonomous AI agentsruntime governanceagent identity+3
Jul 7, 2026

Self-Generated Text Recognition: Quality Heuristics, Cross-Task Transfer, and Downstream Bias in LLM Evaluation

Jesse St. Amand, Callum Canavan, et al.

Self-Generated Text Recognition (SGTR)--the ability of an LLM to identify its own outputs--poses risks to AI safeguards that rely on LLMs as evaluators or monitors. Specifically, an LLM may recognize outputs from other copies of the same model and make biased judgments or collude outright. Prior work has drawn conflicting conclusions about whether current models possess significant SGTR capabilities. We reconcile these findings by identifying key experimental design choices--which we term operationalizations--that drive divergent results. Evaluating 13-21 models across six operationalizations, we find that accuracy varies substantially with evaluation format (pairwise vs. individual assessments of text), conversation structure (presenting candidate text in user tags vs. assistant tags), and the domain of the task used to generate candidate text (e.g., coding vs. summarization). We corroborate previous observations that a quality heuristic--models attributing authorship to text they perceive as higher quality--is a dominant confound. We also find that improving a model's SGTR performance via SFT in one evaluation configuration can generalize to others. Training for SGTR additionally causes models to prefer their own outputs when acting as a judge in the AlpacaEval framework. Finally, we discuss the implications of our evaluations for the safety of future AI systems: our work suggests that, despite confounds, some models possess practical SGTR capabilities, and that training a model for SGTR in one setting can affect its self-recognition and self-preference more generally. We conclude that SGTR should be monitored and considered in the design of safety-critical AI applications.

self-generated text recognitionLLM evaluationquality heuristics+3
Aug 27, 2026

Video-OPSD: Exploiting Privileged Visual Evidence for On-Policy Self-Distillation in Video Large Language Models

Ziyue Wang, Shiqi Huang, et al.

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) has recently emerged as an effective post-training paradigm that improves policy optimization through dense token-level supervision from a privileged self-teacher. Despite its promise, OPSD remains largely underexplored for Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs). Existing methods typically construct privileged teachers by augmenting their context with additional information while keeping the primary input unchanged for both teacher and student. Video reasoning, however, offers a distinct source of privileged supervision within the primary input itself: long videos contain substantial temporal redundancy, and only a small subset of frames provides the evidence necessary to answer a question. Building on this observation, we present Video-OPSD, an OPSD framework that exploits privileged visual evidence for both self-teacher construction and knowledge transfer. First, our Evidence-Grounded Self-Teacher conditions the teacher exclusively on annotated evidence frames while the student continues to reason over the complete video. This focused visual input enables the teacher to provide more informative supervision. Second, our Evidence-Guided Token Optimization adaptively weights token-level distillation according to each reasoning token's reliance on privileged visual evidence, thereby emphasizing perceptually grounded reasoning. Experiments across video understanding and reasoning benchmarks show that Video-OPSD consistently improves upon Standard OPSD across multiple backbones and achieves performance comparable to GRPO while requiring substantially less training time, establishing an effective and efficient post-training approach for Video-LLMs.

video large language modelson-policy self-distillationprivileged visual evidence+3
Aug 26, 2026

The Latent Diagnostic Taxonomy: A Framework for Constructing Classifiers and Diagnosing Their Decisions, Applied to Prompt Injection Detection

Jaturong Kongmanee, Smile Thanapattheerakul

This paper proposes a framework for constructing a classifier as a safeguard layer, and for developing a complementary diagnostic that identifies which of the classifier's confident decisions can be trusted. This framework, the Latent Diagnostic Taxonomy, consists of (i) constructing a dimensionality-optimized classifier, in which the embedding dimensionality is empirically selected via cross-validated performance rather than fixed a priori, (ii) locating a relatively small set of latent support vectors (~ 29% of total training examples) representing influential prompts for identifying tokens that alter the classifier's predicted labels, and (iii) utilizing such tokens and their associated attack magnitudes for constructing a diagnostic taxonomy. This diagnostic taxonomy provides an end-to-end guideline for flagging prompts that require different treatments: rely Safely on the classifier's decision; flag Heuristic Bias and Heuristic Override cases; route Insufficient Context cases for further human/safety review. Applying the framework to a classifier trained on a public prompt injection dataset, we find that a substantial fraction of its confident decisions (~ 77%) are not robust to removing a single token, and that this brittleness separates into two distinct failure patterns: a confidence calibration failure and a genuinely exploitable shortcut. For each zone of the taxonomy, we also recommend strategies for remediating diagnosed prompts. We illustrate the framework as a series of steps, demonstrating how each step operates.

prompt injection detectionclassifier diagnosticslatent support vectors+3
Aug 25, 2026

Latent Action as Intention Enables Efficient Future Imagination for World Action Models

Xiang Li, Yupeng Zheng, et al.

World action models (WAMs) improve robot control by modeling how observations evolve, but generating future observations at test time incurs substantial latency. Fast-WAM removes this process for efficiency; however, our matched implementations show lower generalization for Fast-WAM than for future-aware alternatives, especially with scarce robot demonstrations and in out-of-distribution scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce **LAWA**, a WAM architecture that uses compact latent actions as an operational representation of future intentions, enabling efficient test-time future imagination without generating future observations. Specifically, a discrete tokenizer enhanced by action-free pre-training produces manipulation-centric codebook targets. LAWA jointly denoises a continuous latent state anchored to these targets with executable action chunks while omitting the future-video branch at inference. On RoboCasa, LAWA achieves state-of-the-art average success rates of 65.6% and 80.8% in the few-shot and full data settings, improving over the matched Fast-WAM baseline by 9.6 and 4.5 points, respectively. It also preserves the performance level of the matched Joint-WAM variant while requiring 42.9% lower inference latency. LAWA also demonstrates competitive zero-shot robustness on LIBERO-Plus and superior performance on real-world tasks. These results show that future imagination need not be discarded: retaining it with compact latent actions yields an effective trade-off among performance, generalization, and latency. Code and models will be released.

world action modelsrobot learninglatent actions+3
Aug 25, 2026

MoTE: Mixture of Task Experts for Multi-Task Video Understanding

Muhammad Asad Ali, Umar Khan, et al.

Procedural video-language models must solve heterogeneous tasks from the same visual evidence, including action recognition, forecasting, and procedure prediction. Dense transformer decoders share the same feed-forward networks across tasks, which can entangle task behavior and make controlled capability expansion difficult. Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) decoders provide conditional computation, but token-level learned routing is not naturally aligned with task-level procedural objectives. We propose MoTE (Mixture of Task Experts), a decoder architecture that converts large language model feed-forward networks into task-specific experts while keeping the multimodal backbone shared. Each example follows one sample-level task route, so active task-expert computation remains independent of the number of stored task experts. We instantiate this design as VideoLLM-MoTE and evaluate it on five COIN benchmarks using explicit task routes. The five-expert model activates ~2B LLM parameters per sample and achieves higher average top-1 accuracy than recent VideoLLM baselines. Under the same expert topology, it improves over dense all-expert activation and learned sparse-routing controls. These results show that task-structured routing provides an interpretable and compute-efficient decoder alternative for multi-task video-language learning.

video understandingmultimodal learningmixture of experts+3
Aug 20, 2026

Annotations as Rollouts: Efficient and Scalable Reinforcement Learning for Video MLLMs

Yunheng Li, Guohong Mu, et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have become a prevailing paradigm for unified video perception. However, post-training on large multi-task datasets remains challenging, as existing reinforcement learning methods sample on-policy groups with few high-quality rollouts even with costly chain-of-thought (CoT) generation. In this paper, we study the sample efficiency and scalability of RL post-training for video MLLMs and introduce OraRL. We identify an overlooked role for annotations: Beyond scoring rollouts, each can enter its on-policy group as an oracle rollout, a direct positive optimization target. Direct oracle integration, however, is nontrivial: a high-reward oracle raises the group baseline and inverts otherwise positive policy advantages, a failure we term advantage inversion. At the core of OraRL is a decoupled advantage estimator: policy rollouts determine an oracle-free baseline, while the oracle-policy gap modulates both a directional gain and a separate detached oracle advantage. Sign-balanced pruning improves efficiency: by retaining only the oracle and the strongest rollouts of each sign, OraRL requires just 2.2x the step time of SFT, less than half the 4.9x required by GRPO with CoT. OraRL scales with model size and data, surpassing its backbone from 0.8B to 9B and GRPO up to 100k prompts. Without chain-of-thought, Video-ORA-9B decodes in 130 ms instead of 4,780 ms. Compared with the respective prior best models, it raises temporal mIoU from 62.5 to 66.0, tracking AO from 73.0 to 78.2, segmentation from 64.3 to 70.4, and the three-benchmark spatial-intelligence macro average from 51.0 to 56.1; on VSI-Bench, it scores 73.1 against 55.0 for GPT-5 and 55.1 for Gemini-3-Pro.

multimodal large language modelsvideo understandingreinforcement learning+3
Aug 16, 2026

GigaBrain-0.7: Scaling Embodied Foundation Models to Emergent Capabilities with a Three-System Architecture

GigaBrain Team, Angen Ye, et al.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have become a dominant paradigm for generalist embodied agents, demonstrating strong complex and long-horizon task completion in structured settings. Yet it remains an open question whether current VLA systems can benefit from more effective architectural design, scale to substantially larger and more heterogeneous data regimes, and achieve broader generalization across tasks and embodiments. To this end, we present GigaBrain-0.7, an embodied foundation model with substantially improved generalization across diverse robot embodiments. Specifically, GigaBrain-0.7 unifies understanding, prediction, and action through a three-system architecture, scales pretraining to over 37,000 hours of heterogeneous embodied data, and introduces one-stage alignment training that jointly optimizes vision-language understanding and multi-embodiment action generation. Compared with the preceding GigaBrain-0 series and prior state-of-the-art models including \pi_{0.5}\pi_{0.5}, GigaBrain-0.7 achieves substantial improvements in foundation zero-shot capabilities, language-conditioned instruction following, and post-training task success rates. In particular, on our in-house Maker H01 platform and mainstream robot embodiments, GigaBrain-0.7 demonstrates strong task adaptability and completion ability across both home and industrial scenarios. All training code and pretrained model weights will be released.

vision-language-action modelsembodied AIrobot learning+3
Aug 26, 2026
AAAIAAAI

Separating Input-Carried from Model-Added Demographic Encoding in Language Models

Minh K. Quan, Pubudu N. Pathirana

When a language model encodes a sensitive attribute, the source matters: the signal may be carried by explicit or distributed input cues, or it may remain after controlling for a declared input representation. Standard probing conflates these cases, leaving auditors unsure whether to inspect the input pipeline or the learned representation. We propose Controlled Representation Attribution (CRA), a reference-conditional auditing protocol that residualizes each layer against an input reference and probes the residual. We use “model-added” conservatively to denote reference-residual sensitive information rather than a causal claim about model weights. CRA is supported by a recovery theorem—exact when the residual noise is equal-covariance Gaussian and the target direction is an eigenvector of that covariance, with an explicit finite-anisotropy bound otherwise—and by scope and reference-admissibility diagnostics that identify inadequate controls. In controlled simulations with known ground-truth directions, CRA wins the selectivity comparison in 60/60 runs; falsification tests further show that weak references can create spurious residual conclusions, while the admissibility gate withholds such claims. In a prospectively specified controlled-text audit, residual evidence survives name removal but not removal of broader lifestyle and stylistic cues, demonstrating dependence on the declared control. Archived pretrained-language-model analyses illustrate a lexical-gender/reference-residual-age contrast and a positive pooled medical-question-answering difference (22 of 27 cells, mean +5.3 percentage points), which is not powered at the dataset level; these analyses are exploratory rather than confirmatory. CRA is a source-attribution diagnostic that reports reference sensitivity and can abstain when controls are inadequate; it complements concept-erasure methods rather than replacing them.

Controlled Representation Attributionresidualizationconditional probing+3
Oct 17, 2025

VISTA: A Test-Time Self-Improving Video Generation Agent

Do Xuan Long, Xingchen Wan, et al.

Despite rapid advances in text-to-video synthesis, generated video quality remains critically dependent on precise user prompts. Existing test-time optimization methods, successful in other domains, struggle with the multi-faceted nature of video. In this work, we introduce VISTA (Video Iterative Self-improvemenT Agent), a novel multi-agent system that autonomously improves video generation through refining prompts in an iterative loop. VISTA first decomposes a user idea into a structured temporal plan. After generation, the best video is identified through a robust pairwise tournament. This winning video is then critiqued by a trio of specialized agents focusing on visual, audio, and contextual fidelity. Finally, a reasoning agent synthesizes this feedback to introspectively rewrite and enhance the prompt for the next generation cycle. Experiments on single- and multi-scene video generation scenarios show that while prior methods yield inconsistent gains, VISTA consistently improves video quality and alignment with user intent, achieving up to 60% pairwise win rate against state-of-the-art baselines. Human evaluators concur, preferring VISTA outputs in 66.4% of comparisons.

text-to-video generationmulti-agent systemtest-time optimization+5
Aug 13, 2026
ICLRICLRTop 5%

DECAF: Decomposition of Evidence, Contradiction, and Fragility in Perturbation Responses

Lei You

Perturbation methods explain model decisions by measuring prediction changes under altered inputs, but response magnitude tells us only how much a model reacts, not what that reaction means. The same magnitude can support the final factual–counterfactual difference, oppose it, or arise strongly along the perturbation path yet vanish at the endpoint. We therefore track how the contrast develops as paired inputs are progressively revealed, using the final contrast to interpret the trajectory. We introduce DECAF (Decomposition of Evidence, Contradiction, And Fragility), which routes aligned, opposed, and endpoint-null responses into evidence E, contradiction C, and fragility F. The decomposition preserves ordinary magnitude exactly, Abs = E + C + F, and is unique under endpoint-relative axioms. Across controlled vision and tabular settings, the three components track independently measured behavior. In a 72-model ImageNet-9 audit, we compare cases with nearly identical response magnitude but different independently measured behaviors. The largest DECAF component agrees with an observed behavior in 96.4% of cases, compared with 35.0% for magnitude alone. Changing only the reveal path increases total response by nearly 80%, yet evidence barely changes while fragility grows by more than 4×. On FunnyBirds and ImageNet-1k, short forward-only DECAF trajectories outperform the tested general-purpose attribution baselines. On a 1B-scale DINOv2 model, a short trajectory matches a strong gradient-based baseline with 4.75× lower wall time and 2.36× lower peak memory.

perturbation-based explanationpaired revealdecomposition+3
Aug 28, 2025

On the Theoretical Limitations of Embedding-Based Retrieval

Orion Weller, Michael Boratko, et al.

Vector embeddings have been tasked with an ever-increasing set of retrieval tasks over the years, with a nascent rise in using them for reasoning, instruction-following, coding, and more. These new benchmarks push embeddings to work for any query and any notion of relevance that could be given. While prior works have pointed out theoretical limitations of vector embeddings, there is a common assumption that these difficulties are exclusively due to unrealistic queries, and those that are not can be overcome with better training data and larger models. In this work, we demonstrate that we may encounter these theoretical limitations in realistic settings with extremely simple queries. We connect known results in learning theory, showing that the number of top-k subsets of documents capable of being returned as the result of some query is limited by the dimension of the embedding. We empirically show that this holds true even if we directly optimize on the test set with free parameterized embeddings. Using free embeddings, we then demonstrate that returning all pairs of documents requires a relatively high dimension. We then create a realistic dataset called LIMIT that stress tests embedding models based on these theoretical results, and observe that even state-of-the-art models fail on this dataset despite the simple nature of the task. Our work shows the limits of embedding models under the existing single vector paradigm and calls for future research to develop new techniques that can resolve this fundamental limitation.

embedding-based retrievaldense retrievalrepresentation limits+4
Jul 28, 2026

Memory for Large Language Models

Sining Zhoubian, Dan Zhang, et al.

Memory has evolved into a foundational architectural dimension in large language models (LLMs), shifting from an implicit byproduct of computation to a spectrum of explicit, controllable mechanisms. While recent advances introduce diverse strategies---spanning transient attention, recurrent state dynamics, parameter-efficient adaptations, and scalable lookup storage---this rapid evolution has led to a highly fragmented research landscape. In this survey, we present a systematic, architecture-centric taxonomy of memory in LLMs. Our framework characterizes memory along three orthogonal axes: representation (implicit versus explicit), update dynamics (offline versus online), and persistence (short-term versus long-term). We further formalize the granular mechanisms dictating memory writing, routing, state transitions, and consolidation. This unified perspective elucidates the conceptual boundaries between computation-coupled and independently addressable memory, effectively bridging disparate architectural paradigms. Additionally, we critically analyze hybrid memory architectures, system-level efficiency trade-offs, and multi-dimensional evaluation methodologies. By consolidating these scattered advancements into a cohesive framework, this survey charts the trajectory of memory-centric LLM design and provides a principled foundation for future innovations in scalable and adaptive language modeling.

large language modelsmemory architecturesimplicit memory+4
Aug 8, 2026
NeurIPSNeurIPS

The Sensitivity Gap: Privacy Miscalibration in Heterogeneous Split Federated Learning

Minh K. Quan, Pubudu N. Pathirana

Split federated learning protects client data by injecting Gaussian noise into intermediate representations before they are sent to an edge server. When clients run heterogeneous model architectures, their representations differ in sensitivity, yet an unclipped implementation may calibrate every release to one shared surrogate C. We isolate the resulting Sensitivity Gap: the claimed Gaussian-mechanism certificate is not supported when C is not a valid ceiling for every released representation. This is a mechanism-specific calibration failure, not a flaw in differential privacy composition or a lower bound on the mechanism's minimal privacy parameter. We give a round-indexed recalculation of a valid transcript certificate and propose Sensitivity-Aware Budget Allocation (SABA), which quantizes client sensitivities into global, tiered, or per-client calibration profiles. On heterogeneous MLP and Vision Transformer encoders for CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, an empirical-input diagnostic and an independent one-sided attack witness decrease by more than 82% with 0.1–0.6 accuracy-point changes. For MLPs, a completed five-seed sweep using per-round spectral-norm ceilings restores the nominal certificate. The empirical study is a controlled proof of concept; only the fixed-state MLP releases supplied with valid spectral ceilings are certified.

split federated learningdifferential privacysensitivity gap+3

ST-WAM: Semantic-Temporal World Action Model for Robust Manipulation under Visual Distribution Shifts

Mingxin Wang, Bin Hu, et al.

World Action Models (WAMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm by jointly modeling robot actions and future visual dynamics. However, their reliance on pixel-generative future supervision can entangle action-relevant state transitions with task-irrelevant visual content, limiting robustness under visual distribution shifts. We identify Training-Distribution Hallucination, a recurring phenomenon in which futures conditioned on visually shifted observations hallucinate training-domain content rather than remain faithful to the current scene. A controlled frame-triplet diagnosis further shows that DINOv3 features remain more stable across visual shifts while better preserving task-state distinctions than Wan-VAE latents. Rather than correcting the predicted futures, we propose Semantic-Temporal WAM (ST-WAM) to improve action robustness by using DINOv3 as a shared semantic representation for future prediction and history retrieval while retaining fine-grained VAE dynamics. Its Dual-Space Future Experts (DSFE) jointly predict future VAE latents and DINO features, while Current-Anchored Intent Retrieval (CAIR) retrieves task-relevant evidence from recent DINO history under the current visual-language context. ST-WAM is trained end-to-end without additional embodied pretraining or task-specific annotations, and requires no explicit future generation at inference. It achieves 98.7% on LIBERO and 92.8% on RoboTwin 2.0; more importantly, compared with Fast-WAM, it improves zero-shot LIBERO-Plus performance by 21.3 percentage points and more than doubles real-world success under visual shifts from 25.8% to 61.5%. These results demonstrate that semantic-temporal modeling effectively complements pixel-generative dynamics for robust manipulation.

world action modelsrobot manipulationvisual distribution shifts+5

Push-Wiper: Toward General-Purpose Robotic Cleaning across Varied Stains and Surfaces with Segmented Pushing Trajectories

Renhao Lu, Mingxin Wang, et al.

Viscous stains, characterized by high viscosity and complex rheological properties, remain a major challenge for robotic surface cleaning. Conventional wiping often spreads the stain, while scrubbing provides stronger friction but risks damaging the surface. In this paper, we propose Push-Wiper, a framework that reformulates viscous stain cleaning as an aggregation problem. Push-Wiper employs a sponge to progressively gather stains through segmented pushing trajectories, followed by a post-processing phase that detaches the aggregated material and enables sponge self-cleaning. We adopt a stepwise strategy for stain gathering and leverage Diffusion Policy to generate adaptive pushing action sequences. These sequences are executed through our Arbitrary Surface Pose Interpolator (ASPI) and a hybrid force-position controller, allowing the method to generalize to stains with diverse spatial distributions. Push-Wiper achieves a cleaning score (CS), defined as the percentage of stain area removed, up to 130% higher than baseline methods. Without additional training, Push-Wiper also transfers in a zero-shot manner to solid residues, liquid spills, unseen viscous stains, and curved surfaces with varying geometries. Our experiments demonstrate the cleaning effectiveness of Push-Wiper and its strong generalization ability. The project website is available at this https URL.

robotic cleaningviscous stainssegmented pushing trajectories+4

Decoding Children's Gait Behavior

Yifan Shen, Boyi Li, et al.

We introduce a new problem domain for human action recognition: the fine-grained analysis of children's gait behaviors from standard RGB video. We specifically target the ambulatory patterns of children aged 3-17 years. Such behaviors arise naturally in the diagnosis and treatment of several critical developmental and neuromuscular disorders, such as cerebral palsy and hemiplegia. Despite their clinical value, current 3D sensor-based gait analysis systems are expensive, intrusive, and often impractical for young subjects. To address this, we introduce a new dataset comprising over 1,100 high-frame-rate (60 FPS) video sequences from 110 subjects, accompanied by synchronized, anonymized pose sequences. In each session, the child performs a 5-second "walk-around" task, capturing the gait cycle from multiple viewpoints. Crucially, we demonstrate that current state-of-the-art approaches, including gait foundation models and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), fail to effectively resolve these clinical nuances. We identify the key technical challenges in analyzing these erratic and subtle motor patterns and describe a unified end-to-end framework for decoding fundamental components of pediatric gait. Through comprehensive experimental results, we demonstrate the potential of this dataset to drive novel research questions and establish a rigorous baseline for automated child gait assessment.

children gait analysispediatric gaitaction recognition+5

MiniWorld: Democratizing the Training of Video World Models from Scratch

Yian Zhao, Ruochong Zheng, et al.

Video world models predict future observations conditioned on historical observations and control signals, enabling long-horizon generation through autoregressive state transitions. Unlike conventional video generation models that primarily capture visual appearance and motion, video world models learn the underlying dynamics governing environment evolution under agent actions, providing a foundation for embodied AI and interactive simulation. Recent progress has largely relied on adapting pretrained video generation models through post-training or distillation. Although effective, these approaches often require complex training pipelines, substantial computational resources, and suffer from the mismatch between bidirectional pretraining and causal streaming inference. Recent studies have shown that training autoregressive video world models from scratch is feasible and scalable. However, the community still lacks a lightweight, transparent, and fully reproducible baseline trainable end-to-end with modest computational resources. We present MiniWorld, a reproducible framework for training streaming video world models from scratch. MiniWorld employs a block-causal Video Diffusion Transformer trained with Flow Matching in the latent space of a pretrained Video VAE. Building on Diffusion Forcing, it adopts a chunk-wise non-decreasing noise schedule and two-stage continued training to improve temporal modeling and stability. During inference, MiniWorld combines a rolling KV cache with pipelined asynchronous denoising for efficient streaming generation under bounded computation. The entire model can be trained within several days on a single 8-GPU server. By releasing the training and inference codebase and pretrained checkpoints, we hope MiniWorld will facilitate future research on video world modeling.

video world modelsstreaming generationdiffusion transformer+5

Hunyuan3D-Buffalo 1.0: A Unified Multimodal Model for Scalable 3D Generation, Understanding, and Editing

Junliang Ye, Kenkun Liu, et al.

Recent advances in image generation have demonstrated the potential of unified multimodal models that integrate understanding, generation, and editing. However, unified 3D modeling remains constrained by scarce multimodal data, particularly the lack of large-scale and geometrically consistent editing data. To address this limitation, we propose Hunyuan3D-Buffalo 1.0, a unified framework supporting 3D understanding, text-to-3D generation, instruction-guided 3D editing, and text-grounded part generation within a single architecture. To enable scalable training, we construct an 87M-scale 3D multimodal corpus, comprising 25M understanding samples, 50M text-to-3D pairs, and 12M editing pairs generated using Nano3D-v2. Architecturally, the framework combines Hunyuan3D-VLM for semantic, structural, and spatial understanding with Hunyuan3D DiT for high-fidelity 3D synthesis. The VLM provides multimodal semantic conditions for generation, while editing and part generation additionally condition the diffusion process on the source object representation to preserve its overall structure and unedited regions. Extensive experiments show that Hunyuan3D-Buffalo 1.0 achieves state-of-the-art or leading performance on text-to-3D generation and 3D editing benchmarks, while exhibiting strong understanding and part-generation capabilities. Our analysis further shows that both generation and understanding improve editing, demonstrating the effectiveness of unified 3D multimodal training. Project Page: this https URL

unified 3D multimodal modeltext-to-3D3D editing+5

JoyAI-Video-Edit: Real-Time Open-Ended Video Editing with Autoregressive Diffusion

Yicheng Xiao, Wenxun Dai, et al.

Real-time video editing requires low-latency causal generation with bounded computational resources while preserving source fidelity and long-term temporal consistency. We present JoyAI-Video-Edit, a 16B-parameter autoregressive diffusion framework for real-time, open-ended video editing without access to future frames or a predefined video duration. Our method combines chunk-wise autoregressive adaptation, Source-Anchored Distribution Matching Distillation (SA-DMD), and Long-Horizon Autoregressive Distillation to reduce train--inference mismatch, preserve source fidelity during two-step generation, and mitigate accumulated temporal drift. Extensive automatic and human evaluations show that JoyAI-Video-Edit substantially outperforms existing streaming editors and remains competitive with strong offline systems on both short and long videos. The complete system achieves end-to-end 720p video editing at approximately 30 FPS on a single Nvidia B200 GPU. Code is available at this https URL.

real-time video editingautoregressive diffusionstreaming video+4
Aug 6, 2026
ICMLICML

Position: AI Should Verify, Not Judge, Scientific Work

Prabhant Singh, Thanh Gia Hieu Khuong, et al.

AI reviewers are gaining more attention with the advent of LLMs. With the increasing volume of conference papers, the use of AI-based reviewers has been suggested and implemented to enable faster review cycles, improve review quality, and help the scientific community. In this position paper, we argue against the replacement of peer review by AI reviewers and advocate the use of AI review tools primarily to verify claims and improve the quality of the scientific work. We argue that AI review tools should be utilized primarily by authors during manuscript preparation to improve submission quality and streamline downstream evaluation. We ground our argument in the values of peer review and scientific process. Finally, we present research directions for the responsible integration of AI in the peer review process.

AI reviewerspeer reviewverification+3
Aug 5, 2026
AAAIAAAI

Stochasticity Is Not the Hard Part: Reduction and Complexity in Instructional Sequencing Over Prerequisite DAGs

Zonglin Han, Yichen Chen, et al.

When a student must learn concepts connected by prerequisite dependencies, when does the order of instruction matter, and what does it cost to find the best one? We study instructional sequencing as a stochastic shortest-path problem in which attempting a concept succeeds with a state-dependent probability and failure leaves the learner state unchanged. We first prove that this stochasticity can be eliminated exactly: the problem collapses to a deterministic shortest-path problem on the lattice of prerequisite order ideals, preserving optimal values and actions. The collapse removes stochastic complexity but not combinatorial complexity: optimal sequencing remains NP-hard—via reduction from feedback arc set in tournaments—even with no prerequisite edges, unit costs, uniform binary nonnegative transfer, and success probabilities at least 1/2. Hardness is not uniform: when realizable transfer preferences remain jointly acyclic with the prerequisites, any topological order of the residual joint graph is optimal, and fixed prerequisite width yields polynomial-time exact dynamic programming. A computable diagnostic, mΔ, bounds the value of sequencing before optimization. On 70,893 interactions from an introductory CS course, the diagnostic certifies a doubly easy regime—little value to optimize and little space to search—while constructed transfer instances realize the challenging regime, where myopic sequencing suffers large regret yet exact A* with a consistent heuristic expands only linearly many states on that family.

instructional sequencingprerequisite DAGsstochastic shortest-path+4
May 19, 2026

ConceptSeg-R1: Segment Any Concept via Meta-Reinforcement Learning

Yuan Zhao, Youwei Pang, et al.

Recent progress in promptable segmentation has shifted visual perception from object-level localization toward concept-level understanding. However, the notion of a concept remains under-specified, making it unclear whether current methods truly generalize beyond category recognition. In this work, we formalize generalized concept segmentation through a three-level taxonomy consisting of context-independent (CI), context-dependent (CD), and context-reasoning (CR) concepts, which reveals a clear capability gap across increasing levels of cognitive complexity. To address this challenge, we propose ConceptSeg-R1, a unified framework that reformulates concept segmentation as rule-induced concept grounding. At the core of our method is Meta-GRPO, a meta-reinforcement learning mechanism that learns transferable task rules from visual demonstrations and verifies them through proxy reasoning. The inferred reasoning states are then translated into segmentation-ready concept prompts via a lightweight concept translation module, enabling deductive application to target images. A shortcut routing strategy further preserves the native efficiency of segmentation models on simple cases. To systematically evaluate generalized concept segmentation, we conduct extensive experiments across diverse CI, CD, and CR concept segmentation benchmarks spanning natural, industrial, medical and reasoning-intensive domains. Without bells and whistles, ConceptSeg-R1 achieves strong performance across the full concept hierarchy while maintaining the native capability of promptable segmentation backbones. As an initial step toward segmenting any concept, we hope ConceptSeg-R1 can serve as a practical baseline for advancing segmentation from object-level prediction toward concept-level understanding.

concept segmentationmeta-reinforcement learningMeta-GRPO+5
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