diff --git a/feed_weekly.xml b/feed_weekly.xml index 1594b27..938b1d7 100644 --- a/feed_weekly.xml +++ b/feed_weekly.xml @@ -7,741 +7,671 @@ http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification python-feedgen en - Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:12:55 +0000 + Mon, 25 Aug 2025 00:11:40 +0000 - UI-AGILE: Advancing GUI Agents with Effective Reinforcement Learning and Precise Inference-Time Grounding - https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22025 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2507.22025.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Shuquan Lian, Yuhang Wu, Jia Ma, Zihan Song, Bingqi Chen, Xiawu Zheng, Hui Li</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The emergence of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has driven significant advances in Graphical User Interface (GUI) agent capabilities. Nevertheless, existing GUI agent training and inference techniques still suffer from a dilemma for reasoning designs, ineffective reward, and visual noise. To address these issues, we introduce UI-AGILE, a comprehensive framework enhancing GUI agents at both the training and inference stages. For training, we propose a suite of improvements to the Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) process: 1) a Continuous Reward function to incentivize high-precision grounding; 2) a "Simple Thinking" reward to balance planning with speed and grounding accuracy; and 3) a Cropping-based Resampling strategy to mitigate the sparse reward problem and improve learning on complex tasks. For inference, we present Decomposed Grounding with Selection, a novel method that dramatically improves grounding accuracy on high-resolution displays by breaking the image into smaller, manageable parts. Experiments show that UI-AGILE achieves the state-of-the-art performance on two benchmarks ScreenSpot-Pro and ScreenSpot-v2. For instance, using both our proposed training and inference enhancement methods brings 23% grounding accuracy improvement over the best baseline on ScreenSpot-Pro.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22025 - Tue, 29 Jul 2025 17:22:07 +0000 + INTIMA: A Benchmark for Human-AI Companionship Behavior + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09998 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09998.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Lucie-Aimée Kaffee, Giada Pistilli, Yacine Jernite</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> AI companionship, where users develop emotional bonds with AI systems, has emerged as a significant pattern with positive but also concerning implications. We introduce Interactions and Machine Attachment Benchmark (INTIMA), a benchmark for evaluating companionship behaviors in language models. Drawing from psychological theories and user data, we develop a taxonomy of 31 behaviors across four categories and 368 targeted prompts. Responses to these prompts are evaluated as companionship-reinforcing, boundary-maintaining, or neutral. Applying INTIMA to Gemma-3, Phi-4, o3-mini, and Claude-4 reveals that companionship-reinforcing behaviors remain much more common across all models, though we observe marked differences between models. Different commercial providers prioritize different categories within the more sensitive parts of the benchmark, which is concerning since both appropriate boundary-setting and emotional support matter for user well-being. These findings highlight the need for more consistent approaches to handling emotionally charged interactions.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09998 + Mon, 04 Aug 2025 08:25:38 +0000 - UserBench: An Interactive Gym Environment for User-Centric Agents - https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22034 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2507.22034.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Cheng Qian, Zuxin Liu, Akshara Prabhakar, Zhiwei Liu, Jianguo Zhang, Haolin Chen, Heng Ji, Weiran Yao, Shelby Heinecke, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong, Huan Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 29</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Models (LLMs)-based agents have made impressive progress in reasoning and tool use, enabling them to solve complex tasks. However, their ability to proactively collaborate with users, especially when goals are vague, evolving, or indirectly expressed, remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce UserBench, a user-centric benchmark designed to evaluate agents in multi-turn, preference-driven interactions. UserBench features simulated users who start with underspecified goals and reveal preferences incrementally, requiring agents to proactively clarify intent and make grounded decisions with tools. Our evaluation of leading open- and closed-source LLMs reveals a significant disconnect between task completion and user alignment. For instance, models provide answers that fully align with all user intents only 20% of the time on average, and even the most advanced models uncover fewer than 30% of all user preferences through active interaction. These results highlight the challenges of building agents that are not just capable task executors, but true collaborative partners. UserBench offers an interactive environment to measure and advance this critical capability.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22034 - Tue, 29 Jul 2025 17:34:12 +0000 + ZARA: Zero-shot Motion Time-Series Analysis via Knowledge and Retrieval Driven LLM Agents + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04038 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.04038.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zechen Li, Baiyu Chen, Hao Xue, Flora D. Salim</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Motion sensor time-series are central to human activity recognition (HAR), with applications in health, sports, and smart devices. However, existing methods are trained for fixed activity sets and require costly retraining when new behaviours or sensor setups appear. Recent attempts to use large language models (LLMs) for HAR, typically by converting signals into text or images, suffer from limited accuracy and lack verifiable interpretability. We propose ZARA, the first agent-based framework for zero-shot, explainable HAR directly from raw motion time-series. ZARA integrates an automatically derived pair-wise feature knowledge base that captures discriminative statistics for every activity pair, a multi-sensor retrieval module that surfaces relevant evidence, and a hierarchical agent pipeline that guides the LLM to iteratively select features, draw on this evidence, and produce both activity predictions and natural-language explanations. ZARA enables flexible and interpretable HAR without any fine-tuning or task-specific classifiers. Extensive experiments on 8 HAR benchmarks show that ZARA achieves SOTA zero-shot performance, delivering clear reasoning while exceeding the strongest baselines by 2.53x in macro F1. Ablation studies further confirm the necessity of each module, marking ZARA as a promising step toward trustworthy, plug-and-play motion time-series analysis. Our codes are available at https://github.com/zechenli03/ZARA.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04038 + Wed, 06 Aug 2025 02:57:57 +0000 - MeshLLM: Empowering Large Language Models to Progressively Understand and Generate 3D Mesh - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01242 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.01242.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Shuangkang Fang, I-Chao Shen, Yufeng Wang, Yi-Hsuan Tsai, Yi Yang, Shuchang Zhou, Wenrui Ding, Takeo Igarashi, Ming-Hsuan Yang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 9</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present MeshLLM, a novel framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to understand and generate text-serialized 3D meshes. Our approach addresses key limitations in existing methods, including the limited dataset scale when catering to LLMs' token length and the loss of 3D structural information during mesh serialization. We introduce a Primitive-Mesh decomposition strategy, which divides 3D meshes into structurally meaningful subunits. This enables the creation of a large-scale dataset with 1500k+ samples, almost 50 times larger than previous methods, which aligns better with the LLM scaling law principles. Furthermore, we propose inferring face connectivity from vertices and local mesh assembly training strategies, significantly enhancing the LLMs' ability to capture mesh topology and spatial structures. Experiments show that MeshLLM outperforms the state-of-the-art LLaMA-Mesh in both mesh generation quality and shape understanding, highlighting its great potential in processing text-serialized 3D meshes.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01242 - Sat, 02 Aug 2025 07:37:37 +0000 + TempFlow-GRPO: When Timing Matters for GRPO in Flow Models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04324 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.04324.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xiaoxuan He, Siming Fu, Yuke Zhao, Wanli Li, Jian Yang, Dacheng Yin, Fengyun Rao, Bo Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 9</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent flow matching models for text-to-image generation have achieved remarkable quality, yet their integration with reinforcement learning for human preference alignment remains suboptimal, hindering fine-grained reward-based optimization. We observe that the key impediment to effective GRPO training of flow models is the temporal uniformity assumption in existing approaches: sparse terminal rewards with uniform credit assignment fail to capture the varying criticality of decisions across generation timesteps, resulting in inefficient exploration and suboptimal convergence. To remedy this shortcoming, we introduce TempFlow-GRPO (Temporal Flow GRPO), a principled GRPO framework that captures and exploits the temporal structure inherent in flow-based generation. TempFlow-GRPO introduces two key innovations: (i) a trajectory branching mechanism that provides process rewards by concentrating stochasticity at designated branching points, enabling precise credit assignment without requiring specialized intermediate reward models; and (ii) a noise-aware weighting scheme that modulates policy optimization according to the intrinsic exploration potential of each timestep, prioritizing learning during high-impact early stages while ensuring stable refinement in later phases. These innovations endow the model with temporally-aware optimization that respects the underlying generative dynamics, leading to state-of-the-art performance in human preference alignment and standard text-to-image benchmarks.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04324 + Wed, 06 Aug 2025 11:10:39 +0000 - Decentralized Aerial Manipulation of a Cable-Suspended Load using Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01522 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.01522.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jack Zeng, Andreu Matoses Gimenez, Eugene Vinitsky, Javier Alonso-Mora, Sihao Sun</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> This paper presents the first decentralized method to enable real-world 6-DoF manipulation of a cable-suspended load using a team of Micro-Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). Our method leverages multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to train an outer-loop control policy for each MAV. Unlike state-of-the-art controllers that utilize a centralized scheme, our policy does not require global states, inter-MAV communications, nor neighboring MAV information. Instead, agents communicate implicitly through load pose observations alone, which enables high scalability and flexibility. It also significantly reduces computing costs during inference time, enabling onboard deployment of the policy. In addition, we introduce a new action space design for the MAVs using linear acceleration and body rates. This choice, combined with a robust low-level controller, enables reliable sim-to-real transfer despite significant uncertainties caused by cable tension during dynamic 3D motion. We validate our method in various real-world experiments, including full-pose control under load model uncertainties, showing setpoint tracking performance comparable to the state-of-the-art centralized method. We also demonstrate cooperation amongst agents with heterogeneous control policies, and robustness to the complete in-flight loss of one MAV. Videos of experiments: https://autonomousrobots.nl/paper_websites/aerial-manipulation-marl</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01522 - Sat, 02 Aug 2025 23:52:33 +0000 + Radiance Fields in XR: A Survey on How Radiance Fields are Envisioned and Addressed for XR Research + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04326 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.04326.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ke Li, Mana Masuda, Susanne Schmidt, Shohei Mori</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The development of radiance fields (RF), such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), has revolutionized interactive photorealistic view synthesis and presents enormous opportunities for XR research and applications. However, despite the exponential growth of RF research, RF-related contributions to the XR community remain sparse. To better understand this research gap, we performed a systematic survey of current RF literature to analyze (i) how RF is envisioned for XR applications, (ii) how they have already been implemented, and (iii) the remaining research gaps. We collected 365 RF contributions related to XR from computer vision, computer graphics, robotics, multimedia, human-computer interaction, and XR communities, seeking to answer the above research questions. Among the 365 papers, we performed an analysis of 66 papers that already addressed a detailed aspect of RF research for XR. With this survey, we extended and positioned XR-specific RF research topics in the broader RF research field and provide a helpful resource for the XR community to navigate within the rapid development of RF research.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04326 + Wed, 06 Aug 2025 11:14:06 +0000 - VLM4D: Towards Spatiotemporal Awareness in Vision Language Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02095 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.02095.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Shijie Zhou, Alexander Vilesov, Xuehai He, Ziyu Wan, Shuwang Zhang, Aditya Nagachandra, Di Chang, Dongdong Chen, Xin Eric Wang, Achuta Kadambi</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 6</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Vision language models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in integrating linguistic and visual reasoning but remain fundamentally limited in understanding dynamic spatiotemporal interactions. Humans effortlessly track and reason about object movements, rotations, and perspective shifts-abilities essential for robust dynamic real-world understanding yet notably lacking in current VLMs. In this paper, we introduce VLM4D, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the spatiotemporal reasoning capabilities of VLMs. Our benchmark comprises diverse real-world and synthetic videos accompanied by carefully curated question-answer pairs emphasizing translational and rotational motions, perspective awareness, and motion continuity. Through comprehensive evaluations of state-of-the-art open and closed-source VLMs, we identify significant performance gaps compared to human baselines, highlighting fundamental deficiencies in existing models. Extensive analysis reveals that VLMs struggle particularly with integrating multiple visual cues and maintaining temporal coherence. We further explore promising directions, such as leveraging 4D feature field reconstruction and targeted spatiotemporal supervised fine-tuning, demonstrating their effectiveness in enhancing spatiotemporal comprehension. Our work aims to encourage deeper exploration into improving VLMs' spatial and temporal grounding, paving the way towards more capable and reliable visual intelligence for dynamic environments.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02095 - Mon, 04 Aug 2025 06:06:06 +0000 + Chain-of-Agents: End-to-End Agent Foundation Models via Multi-Agent Distillation and Agentic RL + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13167 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.13167.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Weizhen Li, Jianbo Lin, Zhuosong Jiang, Jingyi Cao, Xinpeng Liu, Jiayu Zhang, Zhenqiang Huang, Qianben Chen, Weichen Sun, Qiexiang Wang, Hongxuan Lu, Tianrui Qin, Chenghao Zhu, Yi Yao, Shuying Fan, Xiaowan Li, Tiannan Wang, Pai Liu, King Zhu, He Zhu, Dingfeng Shi, Piaohong Wang, Yeyi Guan, Xiangru Tang, Minghao Liu, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Jian Yang, Jiaheng Liu, Ge Zhang, Wangchunshu Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 104</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and multi-agent systems have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex problem-solving tasks such as deep research, vibe coding, and mathematical reasoning. However, most existing multi-agent systems are built upon manual prompt/workflow engineering with sophisticated agent frameworks, making them computationally inefficient, less capable, and can not benefit from data-centric learning. In this work, we introduce Chain-of-Agents (CoA), a novel paradigm of LLM reasoning that enables native end-to-end complex problem-solving in the same way as a multi-agent system (i.e., multi-turn problem solving with multiple tools and multiple agents) within one model. In chain-of-agents problem-solving, the model dynamically activates different tool agents and role-playing agents to simulate multi-agent collaboration in an end-to-end fashion. To elicit end-to-end chain-of-agents problem-solving abilities in LLMs, we introduce a multi-agent distillation framework to distill state-of-the-art multi-agent systems into chain-of-agents trajectories for agentic supervised fine-tuning. We then use agentic reinforcement learning on verifiable agentic tasks to further improve the models' capabilities on chain-of-agents problem solving. We call the resulting models Agent Foundation Models (AFMs). Our empirical studies demonstrate that AFM establishes new state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks in both web agent and code agent settings. We make the entire research, including the model weights, code for training and evaluation, and the training data, fully open-sourced, which offers a solid starting point for future research on agent models and agentic RL.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13167 + Wed, 06 Aug 2025 17:01:02 +0000 - GENIE: Gaussian Encoding for Neural Radiance Fields Interactive Editing - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02831 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.02831.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Mikołaj Zieliński, Krzysztof Byrski, Tomasz Szczepanik, Przemysław Spurek</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 11</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and Gaussian Splatting (GS) have recently transformed 3D scene representation and rendering. NeRF achieves high-fidelity novel view synthesis by learning volumetric representations through neural networks, but its implicit encoding makes editing and physical interaction challenging. In contrast, GS represents scenes as explicit collections of Gaussian primitives, enabling real-time rendering, faster training, and more intuitive manipulation. This explicit structure has made GS particularly well-suited for interactive editing and integration with physics-based simulation. In this paper, we introduce GENIE (Gaussian Encoding for Neural Radiance Fields Interactive Editing), a hybrid model that combines the photorealistic rendering quality of NeRF with the editable and structured representation of GS. Instead of using spherical harmonics for appearance modeling, we assign each Gaussian a trainable feature embedding. These embeddings are used to condition a NeRF network based on the k nearest Gaussians to each query point. To make this conditioning efficient, we introduce Ray-Traced Gaussian Proximity Search (RT-GPS), a fast nearest Gaussian search based on a modified ray-tracing pipeline. We also integrate a multi-resolution hash grid to initialize and update Gaussian features. Together, these components enable real-time, locality-aware editing: as Gaussian primitives are repositioned or modified, their interpolated influence is immediately reflected in the rendered output. By combining the strengths of implicit and explicit representations, GENIE supports intuitive scene manipulation, dynamic interaction, and compatibility with physical simulation, bridging the gap between geometry-based editing and neural rendering. The code can be found under (https://github.com/MikolajZielinski/genie)</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02831 - Mon, 04 Aug 2025 18:59:23 +0000 + SPARSE Data, Rich Results: Few-Shot Semi-Supervised Learning via Class-Conditioned Image Translation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06429 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.06429.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Guido Manni, Clemente Lauretti, Loredana Zollo, Paolo Soda</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Deep learning has revolutionized medical imaging, but its effectiveness is severely limited by insufficient labeled training data. This paper introduces a novel GAN-based semi-supervised learning framework specifically designed for low labeled-data regimes, evaluated across settings with 5 to 50 labeled samples per class. Our approach integrates three specialized neural networks -- a generator for class-conditioned image translation, a discriminator for authenticity assessment and classification, and a dedicated classifier -- within a three-phase training framework. The method alternates between supervised training on limited labeled data and unsupervised learning that leverages abundant unlabeled images through image-to-image translation rather than generation from noise. We employ ensemble-based pseudo-labeling that combines confidence-weighted predictions from the discriminator and classifier with temporal consistency through exponential moving averaging, enabling reliable label estimation for unlabeled data. Comprehensive evaluation across eleven MedMNIST datasets demonstrates that our approach achieves statistically significant improvements over six state-of-the-art GAN-based semi-supervised methods, with particularly strong performance in the extreme 5-shot setting where the scarcity of labeled data is most challenging. The framework maintains its superiority across all evaluated settings (5, 10, 20, and 50 shots per class). Our approach offers a practical solution for medical imaging applications where annotation costs are prohibitive, enabling robust classification performance even with minimal labeled data. Code is available at https://github.com/GuidoManni/SPARSE.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06429 + Fri, 08 Aug 2025 16:16:43 +0000 - Compressing Chain-of-Thought in LLMs via Step Entropy - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03346 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.03346.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zeju Li, Jianyuan Zhong, Ziyang Zheng, Xiangyu Wen, Zhijian Xu, Yingying Cheng, Fan Zhang, Qiang Xu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 7</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Models (LLMs) using Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting excel at complex reasoning but generate verbose thought processes with considerable redundancy, leading to increased inference costs and reduced efficiency. We introduce a novel CoT compression framework based on step entropy, a metric that quantifies the informational contribution of individual reasoning steps to identify redundancy. Through theoretical analysis and extensive empirical validation on mathematical reasoning benchmarks, we demonstrate that steps with low entropy are indeed highly redundant. Our experiments reveal that an astonishing 80\% of low-entropy intermediate steps can be pruned with minor degradation in the final answer accuracy across DeepSeek-R1-7B, 14B and Qwen3-8B. This finding sharply contrasts with random or high-entropy pruning, which severely impairs reasoning performance. Building on this, we propose a novel two-stage training strategy combining Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) reinforcement learning. This approach enables LLMs to autonomously learn to generate compressed COTs during inference by strategically incorporating [SKIP] tokens. Our method significantly enhances LLM inference efficiency while rigorously preserving accuracy, offering profound implications for practical LLM deployment and a deeper understanding of reasoning structures.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03346 - Tue, 05 Aug 2025 11:48:18 +0000 + MultiRef: Controllable Image Generation with Multiple Visual References + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06905 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.06905.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ruoxi Chen, Dongping Chen, Siyuan Wu, Sinan Wang, Shiyun Lang, Petr Sushko, Gaoyang Jiang, Yao Wan, Ranjay Krishna</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 19</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Visual designers naturally draw inspiration from multiple visual references, combining diverse elements and aesthetic principles to create artwork. However, current image generative frameworks predominantly rely on single-source inputs -- either text prompts or individual reference images. In this paper, we focus on the task of controllable image generation using multiple visual references. We introduce MultiRef-bench, a rigorous evaluation framework comprising 990 synthetic and 1,000 real-world samples that require incorporating visual content from multiple reference images. The synthetic samples are synthetically generated through our data engine RefBlend, with 10 reference types and 33 reference combinations. Based on RefBlend, we further construct a dataset MultiRef containing 38k high-quality images to facilitate further research. Our experiments across three interleaved image-text models (i.e., OmniGen, ACE, and Show-o) and six agentic frameworks (e.g., ChatDiT and LLM + SD) reveal that even state-of-the-art systems struggle with multi-reference conditioning, with the best model OmniGen achieving only 66.6% in synthetic samples and 79.0% in real-world cases on average compared to the golden answer. These findings provide valuable directions for developing more flexible and human-like creative tools that can effectively integrate multiple sources of visual inspiration. The dataset is publicly available at: https://multiref.github.io/.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06905 + Sat, 09 Aug 2025 09:36:21 +0000 - Speech-to-LaTeX: New Models and Datasets for Converting Spoken Equations and Sentences - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03542 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.03542.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Dmitrii Korzh, Dmitrii Tarasov, Artyom Iudin, Elvir Karimov, Matvey Skripkin, Nikita Kuzmin, Andrey Kuznetsov, Oleg Y. Rogov, Ivan Oseledets</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Conversion of spoken mathematical expressions is a challenging task that involves transcribing speech into a strictly structured symbolic representation while addressing the ambiguity inherent in the pronunciation of equations. Although significant progress has been achieved in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and language models (LM), the problem of converting spoken mathematics into LaTeX remains underexplored. This task directly applies to educational and research domains, such as lecture transcription or note creation. Based on ASR post-correction, prior work requires 2 transcriptions, focuses only on isolated equations, has a limited test set, and provides neither training data nor multilingual coverage. To address these issues, we present the first fully open-source large-scale dataset, comprising over 66,000 human-annotated audio samples of mathematical equations and sentences in both English and Russian, drawn from diverse scientific domains. In addition to the ASR post-correction models and few-shot prompting, we apply audio language models, demonstrating comparable character error rate (CER) results on the MathSpeech benchmark (28% vs. 30%) for the equations conversion. In contrast, on the proposed S2L-equations benchmark, our models outperform the MathSpeech model by a substantial margin of more than 40 percentage points, even after accounting for LaTeX formatting artifacts (27% vs. 64%). We establish the first benchmark for mathematical sentence recognition (S2L-sentences) and achieve an equation CER of 40%. This work lays the groundwork for future advances in multimodal AI, with a particular focus on mathematical content recognition.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03542 - Tue, 05 Aug 2025 15:11:37 +0000 + Evaluating Podcast Recommendations with Profile-Aware LLM-as-a-Judge + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08777 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.08777.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Francesco Fabbri, Gustavo Penha, Edoardo D'Amico, Alice Wang, Marco De Nadai, Jackie Doremus, Paul Gigioli, Andreas Damianou, Oskar Stal, Mounia Lalmas</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 14</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Evaluating personalized recommendations remains a central challenge, especially in long-form audio domains like podcasts, where traditional offline metrics suffer from exposure bias and online methods such as A/B testing are costly and operationally constrained. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) as offline judges to assess the quality of podcast recommendations in a scalable and interpretable manner. Our two-stage profile-aware approach first constructs natural-language user profiles distilled from 90 days of listening history. These profiles summarize both topical interests and behavioral patterns, serving as compact, interpretable representations of user preferences. Rather than prompting the LLM with raw data, we use these profiles to provide high-level, semantically rich context-enabling the LLM to reason more effectively about alignment between a user's interests and recommended episodes. This reduces input complexity and improves interpretability. The LLM is then prompted to deliver fine-grained pointwise and pairwise judgments based on the profile-episode match. In a controlled study with 47 participants, our profile-aware judge matched human judgments with high fidelity and outperformed or matched a variant using raw listening histories. The framework enables efficient, profile-aware evaluation for iterative testing and model selection in recommender systems.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08777 + Tue, 12 Aug 2025 09:23:35 +0000 - Hidden Dynamics of Massive Activations in Transformer Training - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03616 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.03616.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jorge Gallego-Feliciano, S. Aaron McClendon, Juan Morinelli, Stavros Zervoudakis, Antonios Saravanos</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 17</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Massive activations are scalar values in transformer hidden states that achieve values orders of magnitude larger than typical activations and have been shown to be critical for model functionality. While prior work has characterized these phenomena in fully trained models, the temporal dynamics of their emergence during training remain poorly understood. We present the first comprehensive analysis of massive activation development throughout transformer training, using the Pythia model family as our testbed. Through systematic analysis of various model sizes across multiple training checkpoints, we demonstrate that massive activation emergence follows predictable mathematical patterns that can be accurately modeled using an exponentially-modulated logarithmic function with five key parameters. We develop a machine learning framework to predict these mathematical parameters from architectural specifications alone, achieving high accuracy for steady-state behavior and moderate accuracy for emergence timing and magnitude. These findings enable architects to predict and potentially control key aspects of massive activation emergence through design choices, with significant implications for model stability, training cycle length, interpretability, and optimization. Our findings demonstrate that the emergence of massive activations is governed by model design and can be anticipated, and potentially controlled, before training begins.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03616 - Tue, 05 Aug 2025 16:29:51 +0000 + Training-Free Text-Guided Color Editing with Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09131 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09131.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zixin Yin, Xili Dai, Ling-Hao Chen, Deyu Zhou, Jianan Wang, Duomin Wang, Gang Yu, Lionel M. Ni, Lei Zhang, Heung-Yeung Shum</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 14</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Text-guided color editing in images and videos is a fundamental yet unsolved problem, requiring fine-grained manipulation of color attributes, including albedo, light source color, and ambient lighting, while preserving physical consistency in geometry, material properties, and light-matter interactions. Existing training-free methods offer broad applicability across editing tasks but struggle with precise color control and often introduce visual inconsistency in both edited and non-edited regions. In this work, we present ColorCtrl, a training-free color editing method that leverages the attention mechanisms of modern Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformers (MM-DiT). By disentangling structure and color through targeted manipulation of attention maps and value tokens, our method enables accurate and consistent color editing, along with word-level control of attribute intensity. Our method modifies only the intended regions specified by the prompt, leaving unrelated areas untouched. Extensive experiments on both SD3 and FLUX.1-dev demonstrate that ColorCtrl outperforms existing training-free approaches and achieves state-of-the-art performances in both edit quality and consistency. Furthermore, our method surpasses strong commercial models such as FLUX.1 Kontext Max and GPT-4o Image Generation in terms of consistency. When extended to video models like CogVideoX, our approach exhibits greater advantages, particularly in maintaining temporal coherence and editing stability. Finally, our method also generalizes to instruction-based editing diffusion models such as Step1X-Edit and FLUX.1 Kontext dev, further demonstrating its versatility.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09131 + Tue, 12 Aug 2025 17:57:04 +0000 - Putnam-AXIOM: A Functional and Static Benchmark - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08292 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.08292.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Aryan Gulati, Brando Miranda, Eric Chen, Emily Xia, Kai Fronsdal, Bruno Dumont, Elyas Obbad, Sanmi Koyejo</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Current mathematical reasoning benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are approaching saturation, with some achieving > 90% accuracy, and are increasingly compromised by training-set contamination. We introduce Putnam-AXIOM, a benchmark of 522 university-level competition problems drawn from the prestigious William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, and Putnam-AXIOM Variation, an unseen companion set of 100 functional variants generated by programmatically perturbing variables and constants. The variation protocol produces an unlimited stream of equally difficult, unseen instances -- yielding a contamination-resilient test bed. On the Original set, OpenAI's o1-preview -- the strongest evaluated model -- scores 41.9%, but its accuracy drops by 19.6% (46.8% relative decrease) on the paired Variations. The remaining eighteen models show the same downward trend, ten of them with non-overlapping 95% confidence intervals. These gaps suggest memorization and highlight the necessity of dynamic benchmarks. We complement "boxed" accuracy with Teacher-Forced Accuracy (TFA), a lightweight metric that directly scores reasoning traces and automates natural language proof evaluations. Putnam-AXIOM therefore provides a rigorous, contamination-resilient evaluation framework for assessing advanced mathematical reasoning of LLMs. Data and evaluation code are publicly available at https://github.com/brando90/putnam-axiom.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08292 - Tue, 05 Aug 2025 17:57:50 +0000 + Describe What You See with Multimodal Large Language Models to Enhance Video Recommendations + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09789 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09789.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Marco De Nadai, Andreas Damianou, Mounia Lalmas</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Existing video recommender systems rely primarily on user-defined metadata or on low-level visual and acoustic signals extracted by specialised encoders. These low-level features describe what appears on the screen but miss deeper semantics such as intent, humour, and world knowledge that make clips resonate with viewers. For example, is a 30-second clip simply a singer on a rooftop, or an ironic parody filmed amid the fairy chimneys of Cappadocia, Turkey? Such distinctions are critical to personalised recommendations yet remain invisible to traditional encoding pipelines. In this paper, we introduce a simple, recommendation system-agnostic zero-finetuning framework that injects high-level semantics into the recommendation pipeline by prompting an off-the-shelf Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to summarise each clip into a rich natural-language description (e.g. "a superhero parody with slapstick fights and orchestral stabs"), bridging the gap between raw content and user intent. We use MLLM output with a state-of-the-art text encoder and feed it into standard collaborative, content-based, and generative recommenders. On the MicroLens-100K dataset, which emulates user interactions with TikTok-style videos, our framework consistently surpasses conventional video, audio, and metadata features in five representative models. Our findings highlight the promise of leveraging MLLMs as on-the-fly knowledge extractors to build more intent-aware video recommenders.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09789 + Wed, 13 Aug 2025 13:19:31 +0000 - ASTRA: Autonomous Spatial-Temporal Red-teaming for AI Software Assistants - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03936 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.03936.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xiangzhe Xu, Guangyu Shen, Zian Su, Siyuan Cheng, Hanxi Guo, Lu Yan, Xuan Chen, Jiasheng Jiang, Xiaolong Jin, Chengpeng Wang, Zhuo Zhang, Xiangyu Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 9</p><p><b>Summary:</b> AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot are rapidly transforming software development, but their safety remains deeply uncertain-especially in high-stakes domains like cybersecurity. Current red-teaming tools often rely on fixed benchmarks or unrealistic prompts, missing many real-world vulnerabilities. We present ASTRA, an automated agent system designed to systematically uncover safety flaws in AI-driven code generation and security guidance systems. ASTRA works in three stages: (1) it builds structured domain-specific knowledge graphs that model complex software tasks and known weaknesses; (2) it performs online vulnerability exploration of each target model by adaptively probing both its input space, i.e., the spatial exploration, and its reasoning processes, i.e., the temporal exploration, guided by the knowledge graphs; and (3) it generates high-quality violation-inducing cases to improve model alignment. Unlike prior methods, ASTRA focuses on realistic inputs-requests that developers might actually ask-and uses both offline abstraction guided domain modeling and online domain knowledge graph adaptation to surface corner-case vulnerabilities. Across two major evaluation domains, ASTRA finds 11-66% more issues than existing techniques and produces test cases that lead to 17% more effective alignment training, showing its practical value for building safer AI systems.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03936 - Tue, 05 Aug 2025 21:57:52 +0000 + Speed Always Wins: A Survey on Efficient Architectures for Large Language Models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09834 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09834.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Weigao Sun, Jiaxi Hu, Yucheng Zhou, Jusen Du, Disen Lan, Kexin Wang, Tong Zhu, Xiaoye Qu, Yu Zhang, Xiaoyu Mo, Daizong Liu, Yuxuan Liang, Wenliang Chen, Guoqi Li, Yu Cheng</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 46</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Models (LLMs) have delivered impressive results in language understanding, generation, reasoning, and pushes the ability boundary of multimodal models. Transformer models, as the foundation of modern LLMs, offer a strong baseline with excellent scaling properties. However, the traditional transformer architecture requires substantial computations and poses significant obstacles for large-scale training and practical deployment. In this survey, we offer a systematic examination of innovative LLM architectures that address the inherent limitations of transformers and boost the efficiency. Starting from language modeling, this survey covers the background and technical details of linear and sparse sequence modeling methods, efficient full attention variants, sparse mixture-of-experts, hybrid model architectures incorporating the above techniques, and emerging diffusion LLMs. Additionally, we discuss applications of these techniques to other modalities and consider their wider implications for developing scalable, resource-aware foundation models. By grouping recent studies into the above category, this survey presents a blueprint of modern efficient LLM architectures, and we hope this could help motivate future research toward more efficient, versatile AI systems.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09834 + Wed, 13 Aug 2025 14:13:46 +0000 - OS Agents: A Survey on MLLM-based Agents for General Computing Devices Use - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04482 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.04482.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xueyu Hu, Tao Xiong, Biao Yi, Zishu Wei, Ruixuan Xiao, Yurun Chen, Jiasheng Ye, Meiling Tao, Xiangxin Zhou, Ziyu Zhao, Yuhuai Li, Shengze Xu, Shenzhi Wang, Xinchen Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Zhaokai Wang, Kun Kuang, Tieyong Zeng, Liang Wang, Jiwei Li, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Guoyin Wang, Keting Yin, Zhou Zhao, Hongxia Yang, Fan Wu, Shengyu Zhang, Fei Wu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 9</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The dream to create AI assistants as capable and versatile as the fictional J.A.R.V.I.S from Iron Man has long captivated imaginations. With the evolution of (multi-modal) large language models ((M)LLMs), this dream is closer to reality, as (M)LLM-based Agents using computing devices (e.g., computers and mobile phones) by operating within the environments and interfaces (e.g., Graphical User Interface (GUI)) provided by operating systems (OS) to automate tasks have significantly advanced. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of these advanced agents, designated as OS Agents. We begin by elucidating the fundamentals of OS Agents, exploring their key components including the environment, observation space, and action space, and outlining essential capabilities such as understanding, planning, and grounding. We then examine methodologies for constructing OS Agents, focusing on domain-specific foundation models and agent frameworks. A detailed review of evaluation protocols and benchmarks highlights how OS Agents are assessed across diverse tasks. Finally, we discuss current challenges and identify promising directions for future research, including safety and privacy, personalization and self-evolution. This survey aims to consolidate the state of OS Agents research, providing insights to guide both academic inquiry and industrial development. An open-source GitHub repository is maintained as a dynamic resource to foster further innovation in this field. We present a 9-page version of our work, accepted by ACL 2025, to provide a concise overview to the domain.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04482 - Wed, 06 Aug 2025 14:33:45 +0000 + DINOv3 + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10104 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.10104.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Oriane Siméoni, Huy V. Vo, Maximilian Seitzer, Federico Baldassarre, Maxime Oquab, Cijo Jose, Vasil Khalidov, Marc Szafraniec, Seungeun Yi, Michaël Ramamonjisoa, Francisco Massa, Daniel Haziza, Luca Wehrstedt, Jianyuan Wang, Timothée Darcet, Théo Moutakanni, Leonel Sentana, Claire Roberts, Andrea Vedaldi, Jamie Tolan, John Brandt, Camille Couprie, Julien Mairal, Hervé Jégou, Patrick Labatut, Piotr Bojanowski</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 186</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Self-supervised learning holds the promise of eliminating the need for manual data annotation, enabling models to scale effortlessly to massive datasets and larger architectures. By not being tailored to specific tasks or domains, this training paradigm has the potential to learn visual representations from diverse sources, ranging from natural to aerial images -- using a single algorithm. This technical report introduces DINOv3, a major milestone toward realizing this vision by leveraging simple yet effective strategies. First, we leverage the benefit of scaling both dataset and model size by careful data preparation, design, and optimization. Second, we introduce a new method called Gram anchoring, which effectively addresses the known yet unsolved issue of dense feature maps degrading during long training schedules. Finally, we apply post-hoc strategies that further enhance our models' flexibility with respect to resolution, model size, and alignment with text. As a result, we present a versatile vision foundation model that outperforms the specialized state of the art across a broad range of settings, without fine-tuning. DINOv3 produces high-quality dense features that achieve outstanding performance on various vision tasks, significantly surpassing previous self- and weakly-supervised foundation models. We also share the DINOv3 suite of vision models, designed to advance the state of the art on a wide spectrum of tasks and data by providing scalable solutions for diverse resource constraints and deployment scenarios.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10104 + Wed, 13 Aug 2025 18:00:55 +0000 - GeRe: Towards Efficient Anti-Forgetting in Continual Learning of LLM via General Samples Replay - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04676 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.04676.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yunan Zhang, Shuoran Jiang, Mengchen Zhao, Yuefeng Li, Yang Fan, Xiangping Wu, Qingcai Chen</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The continual learning capability of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for advancing artificial general intelligence. However, continual fine-tuning LLMs across various domains often suffers from catastrophic forgetting, characterized by: 1) significant forgetting of their general capabilities, and 2) sharp performance declines in previously learned tasks. To simultaneously address both issues in a simple yet stable manner, we propose General Sample Replay (GeRe), a framework that use usual pretraining texts for efficient anti-forgetting. Beyond revisiting the most prevalent replay-based practices under GeRe, we further leverage neural states to introduce a enhanced activation states constrained optimization method using threshold-based margin (TM) loss, which maintains activation state consistency during replay learning. We are the first to validate that a small, fixed set of pre-collected general replay samples is sufficient to resolve both concerns--retaining general capabilities while promoting overall performance across sequential tasks. Indeed, the former can inherently facilitate the latter. Through controlled experiments, we systematically compare TM with different replay strategies under the GeRe framework, including vanilla label fitting, logit imitation via KL divergence and feature imitation via L1/L2 losses. Results demonstrate that TM consistently improves performance and exhibits better robustness. Our work paves the way for efficient replay of LLMs for the future. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Qznan/GeRe.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04676 - Wed, 06 Aug 2025 17:42:22 +0000 + mSCoRe: a Multilingual and Scalable Benchmark for Skill-based Commonsense Reasoning + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10137 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.10137.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Nghia Trung Ngo, Franck Dernoncourt, Thien Huu Nguyen</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advancements in reasoning-reinforced Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks. However, the mechanism underlying their utilization of different human reasoning skills remains poorly investigated, especially for multilingual commonsense reasoning that involves everyday knowledge across different languages and cultures. To address this gap, we propose a Multilingual and Scalable Benchmark for Skill-based Commonsense Reasoning (mSCoRe). Our benchmark incorporates three key components that are designed to systematically evaluate LLM's reasoning capabilities, including: (1) a novel taxonomy of reasoning skills that enables fine-grained analysis of models' reasoning processes, (2) a robust data synthesis pipeline tailored specifically for commonsense reasoning evaluation, and (3) a complexity scaling framework allowing task difficulty to scale dynamically alongside future improvements in LLM abilities. Extensive experiments on eights state-of-the-art LLMs of varying sizes and training approaches demonstrate that mSCoRe remains significantly challenging for current models, particularly at higher complexity levels. Our results reveal the limitations of such reasoning-reinforced models when confronted with nuanced multilingual general and cultural commonsense. We further provide detailed analysis on the models' reasoning processes, suggesting future directions for improving multilingual commonsense reasoning capabilities.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10137 + Wed, 13 Aug 2025 18:59:02 +0000 - Voost: A Unified and Scalable Diffusion Transformer for Bidirectional Virtual Try-On and Try-Off - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04825 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.04825.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Seungyong Lee, Jeong-gi Kwak</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 51</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Virtual try-on aims to synthesize a realistic image of a person wearing a target garment, but accurately modeling garment-body correspondence remains a persistent challenge, especially under pose and appearance variation. In this paper, we propose Voost - a unified and scalable framework that jointly learns virtual try-on and try-off with a single diffusion transformer. By modeling both tasks jointly, Voost enables each garment-person pair to supervise both directions and supports flexible conditioning over generation direction and garment category, enhancing garment-body relational reasoning without task-specific networks, auxiliary losses, or additional labels. In addition, we introduce two inference-time techniques: attention temperature scaling for robustness to resolution or mask variation, and self-corrective sampling that leverages bidirectional consistency between tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Voost achieves state-of-the-art results on both try-on and try-off benchmarks, consistently outperforming strong baselines in alignment accuracy, visual fidelity, and generalization.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04825 - Wed, 06 Aug 2025 19:10:58 +0000 + XQuant: Breaking the Memory Wall for LLM Inference with KV Cache Rematerialization + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10395 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.10395.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Aditya Tomar, Coleman Hooper, Minjae Lee, Haocheng Xi, Rishabh Tiwari, Wonjun Kang, Luca Manolache, Michael W. Mahoney, Kurt Keutzer, Amir Gholami</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 39</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Although LLM inference has emerged as a critical workload for many downstream applications, efficiently inferring LLMs is challenging due to the substantial memory footprint and bandwidth requirements. In parallel, compute capabilities have steadily outpaced both memory capacity and bandwidth over the last few decades, a trend that remains evident in modern GPU hardware and exacerbates the challenge of LLM inference. As such, new algorithms are emerging that trade increased computation for reduced memory operations. To that end, we present XQuant, which takes advantage of this trend, enabling an order-of-magnitude reduction in memory consumption through low-bit quantization with substantial accuracy benefits relative to state-of-the-art KV cache quantization methods. We accomplish this by quantizing and caching the layer input activations X, instead of using standard KV caching, and then rematerializing the Keys and Values on-the-fly during inference. This results in an immediate 2times memory savings compared to KV caching. By applying XQuant, we achieve up to sim 7.7times memory savings with <0.1 perplexity degradation compared to the FP16 baseline. Furthermore, our approach leverages the fact that X values are similar across layers. Building on this observation, we introduce XQuant-CL, which exploits the cross-layer similarity in the X embeddings for extreme compression. Across different models, XQuant-CL attains up to 10times memory savings relative to the FP16 baseline with only 0.01 perplexity degradation, and 12.5times memory savings with only 0.1 perplexity degradation. XQuant exploits the rapidly increasing compute capabilities of hardware platforms to eliminate the memory bottleneck, while surpassing state-of-the-art KV cache quantization methods and achieving near-FP16 accuracy across a wide range of models.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10395 + Thu, 14 Aug 2025 06:52:38 +0000 - MoBE: Mixture-of-Basis-Experts for Compressing MoE-based LLMs - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05257 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.05257.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xiaodong Chen, Mingming Ha, Zhenzhong Lan, Jing Zhang, Jianguo Li</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 10</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture has become a predominant paradigm for scaling large language models (LLMs). Despite offering strong performance and computational efficiency, large MoE-based LLMs like DeepSeek-V3-0324 and Kimi-K2-Instruct present serious challenges due to substantial memory requirements in deployment. While recent works have explored MoE compression to address this issue, existing methods often suffer from considerable accuracy drops (e.g., 7-14% relatively) even at modest compression rates. This paper introduces a novel Mixture-of-Basis-Experts (MoBE) method that achieves model compression while incurring minimal accuracy drops. Specifically, each up/gate matrix in an expert is decomposed via a rank decomposition as W = AB, where matrix A is unique to each expert. The relatively larger matrix B is further re-parameterized as a linear combination of basis matrices {Bi} shared across all experts within a given MoE layer. The factorization is learned by minimizing the reconstruction error relative to the original weight matrices. Experiments demonstrate that MoBE achieves notably lower accuracy drops compared to prior works. For instance, MoBE can reduce the parameter counts of Qwen3-235B-A22B-2507, DeepSeek-V3-0324 (671B) and Kimi-K2-Instruct (1T) by 24%-30% with only 1%-2% accuracy drop (about 2% drops when measured relatively).</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05257 - Thu, 07 Aug 2025 10:48:24 +0000 + ComoRAG: A Cognitive-Inspired Memory-Organized RAG for Stateful Long Narrative Reasoning + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10419 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.10419.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Juyuan Wang, Rongchen Zhao, Wei Wei, Yufeng Wang, Mo Yu, Jie Zhou, Jin Xu, Liyan Xu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 69</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Narrative comprehension on long stories and novels has been a challenging domain attributed to their intricate plotlines and entangled, often evolving relations among characters and entities. Given the LLM's diminished reasoning over extended context and high computational cost, retrieval-based approaches remain a pivotal role in practice. However, traditional RAG methods can fall short due to their stateless, single-step retrieval process, which often overlooks the dynamic nature of capturing interconnected relations within long-range context. In this work, we propose ComoRAG, holding the principle that narrative reasoning is not a one-shot process, but a dynamic, evolving interplay between new evidence acquisition and past knowledge consolidation, analogous to human cognition when reasoning with memory-related signals in the brain. Specifically, when encountering a reasoning impasse, ComoRAG undergoes iterative reasoning cycles while interacting with a dynamic memory workspace. In each cycle, it generates probing queries to devise new exploratory paths, then integrates the retrieved evidence of new aspects into a global memory pool, thereby supporting the emergence of a coherent context for the query resolution. Across four challenging long-context narrative benchmarks (200K+ tokens), ComoRAG outperforms strong RAG baselines with consistent relative gains up to 11% compared to the strongest baseline. Further analysis reveals that ComoRAG is particularly advantageous for complex queries requiring global comprehension, offering a principled, cognitively motivated paradigm for retrieval-based long context comprehension towards stateful reasoning. Our code is publicly released at https://github.com/EternityJune25/ComoRAG</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10419 + Thu, 14 Aug 2025 07:52:09 +0000 - SONAR-LLM: Autoregressive Transformer that Thinks in Sentence Embeddings and Speaks in Tokens - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05305 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.05305.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Nikita Dragunov, Temurbek Rahmatullaev, Elizaveta Goncharova, Andrey Kuznetsov, Anton Razzhigaev</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 41</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The recently proposed Large Concept Model (LCM) generates text by predicting a sequence of sentence-level embeddings and training with either mean-squared error or diffusion objectives. We present SONAR-LLM, a decoder-only transformer that "thinks" in the same continuous SONAR embedding space, yet is supervised through token-level cross-entropy propagated via the frozen SONAR decoder. This hybrid objective retains the semantic abstraction of LCM while eliminating its diffusion sampler and restoring a likelihood-based training signal. Across model sizes from 39M to 1.3B parameters, SONAR-LLM attains competitive generation quality. We report scaling trends, ablations, benchmark results, and release the complete training code and all pretrained checkpoints to foster reproducibility and future research.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05305 - Thu, 07 Aug 2025 12:03:44 +0000 + X-Node: Self-Explanation is All We Need + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10461 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.10461.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Prajit Sengupta, Islem Rekik</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 7</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art results in computer vision and medical image classification tasks by capturing structural dependencies across data instances. However, their decision-making remains largely opaque, limiting their trustworthiness in high-stakes clinical applications where interpretability is essential. Existing explainability techniques for GNNs are typically post-hoc and global, offering limited insight into individual node decisions or local reasoning. We introduce X-Node, a self-explaining GNN framework in which each node generates its own explanation as part of the prediction process. For every node, we construct a structured context vector encoding interpretable cues such as degree, centrality, clustering, feature saliency, and label agreement within its local topology. A lightweight Reasoner module maps this context into a compact explanation vector, which serves three purposes: (1) reconstructing the node's latent embedding via a decoder to enforce faithfulness, (2) generating a natural language explanation using a pre-trained LLM (e.g., Grok or Gemini), and (3) guiding the GNN itself via a "text-injection" mechanism that feeds explanations back into the message-passing pipeline. We evaluate X-Node on two graph datasets derived from MedMNIST and MorphoMNIST, integrating it with GCN, GAT, and GIN backbones. Our results show that X-Node maintains competitive classification accuracy while producing faithful, per-node explanations. Repository: https://github.com/basiralab/X-Node.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10461 + Thu, 14 Aug 2025 09:00:45 +0000 - UNCAGE: Contrastive Attention Guidance for Masked Generative Transformers in Text-to-Image Generation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05399 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.05399.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Wonjun Kang, Byeongkeun Ahn, Minjae Lee, Kevin Galim, Seunghyuk Oh, Hyung Il Koo, Nam Ik Cho</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 16</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Text-to-image (T2I) generation has been actively studied using Diffusion Models and Autoregressive Models. Recently, Masked Generative Transformers have gained attention as an alternative to Autoregressive Models to overcome the inherent limitations of causal attention and autoregressive decoding through bidirectional attention and parallel decoding, enabling efficient and high-quality image generation. However, compositional T2I generation remains challenging, as even state-of-the-art Diffusion Models often fail to accurately bind attributes and achieve proper text-image alignment. While Diffusion Models have been extensively studied for this issue, Masked Generative Transformers exhibit similar limitations but have not been explored in this context. To address this, we propose Unmasking with Contrastive Attention Guidance (UNCAGE), a novel training-free method that improves compositional fidelity by leveraging attention maps to prioritize the unmasking of tokens that clearly represent individual objects. UNCAGE consistently improves performance in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations across multiple benchmarks and metrics, with negligible inference overhead. Our code is available at https://github.com/furiosa-ai/uncage.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05399 - Thu, 07 Aug 2025 13:51:17 +0000 + Semantic IDs for Joint Generative Search and Recommendation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10478 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.10478.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Gustavo Penha, Edoardo D'Amico, Marco De Nadai, Enrico Palumbo, Alexandre Tamborrino, Ali Vardasbi, Max Lefarov, Shawn Lin, Timothy Heath, Francesco Fabbri, Hugues Bouchard</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Generative models powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as a unified solution for powering both recommendation and search tasks. A key design choice in these models is how to represent items, traditionally through unique identifiers (IDs) and more recently with Semantic IDs composed of discrete codes, obtained from embeddings. While task-specific embedding models can improve performance for individual tasks, they may not generalize well in a joint setting. In this paper, we explore how to construct Semantic IDs that perform well both in search and recommendation when using a unified model. We compare a range of strategies to construct Semantic IDs, looking into task-specific and cross-tasks approaches, and also whether each task should have its own semantic ID tokens in a joint search and recommendation generative model. Our results show that using a bi-encoder model fine-tuned on both search and recommendation tasks to obtain item embeddings, followed by the construction of a unified Semantic ID space provides an effective trade-off, enabling strong performance in both tasks. We hope these findings spark follow-up work on generalisable, semantically grounded ID schemes and inform the next wave of unified generative recommender architectures.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10478 + Thu, 14 Aug 2025 09:28:49 +0000 - MELLA: Bridging Linguistic Capability and Cultural Groundedness for Low-Resource Language MLLMs - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05502 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.05502.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yufei Gao, Jiaying Fei, Nuo Chen, Ruirui Chen, Guohang Yan, Yunshi Lan, Botian Shi</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 6</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable performance in high-resource languages. However, their effectiveness diminishes significantly in the contexts of low-resource languages. Current multilingual enhancement methods are often limited to text modality or rely solely on machine translation. While such approaches help models acquire basic linguistic capabilities and produce "thin descriptions", they neglect the importance of multimodal informativeness and cultural groundedness, both of which are crucial for serving low-resource language users effectively. To bridge this gap, in this study, we identify two significant objectives for a truly effective MLLM in low-resource language settings, namely 1) linguistic capability and 2) cultural groundedness, placing special emphasis on cultural awareness. To achieve these dual objectives, we propose a dual-source strategy that guides the collection of data tailored to each goal, sourcing native web alt-text for culture and MLLM-generated captions for linguistics. As a concrete implementation, we introduce MELLA, a multimodal, multilingual dataset. Experiment results show that after fine-tuning on MELLA, there is a general performance improvement for the eight languages on various MLLM backbones, with models producing "thick descriptions". We verify that the performance gains are from both cultural knowledge enhancement and linguistic capability enhancement. Our dataset can be found at https://opendatalab.com/applyMultilingualCorpus.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05502 - Thu, 07 Aug 2025 15:36:24 +0000 + MM-BrowseComp: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Browsing Agents + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13186 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.13186.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Shilong Li, Xingyuan Bu, Wenjie Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Jun Dong, Haoyang He, Hao Lu, Haozhe Zhang, Chenchen Jing, Zhen Li, Chuanhao Li, Jiayi Tian, Chenchen Zhang, Tianhao Peng, Yancheng He, Jihao Gu, Yuanxing Zhang, Jian Yang, Ge Zhang, Wenhao Huang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Ruizhe Ding, Shilei Wen</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 16</p><p><b>Summary:</b> AI agents with advanced reasoning and tool use capabilities have demonstrated impressive performance in web browsing for deep search. While existing benchmarks such as BrowseComp evaluate these browsing abilities, they primarily focus on textual information, overlooking the prevalence of multimodal content. To bridge this gap, we introduce MM-BrowseComp, a novel benchmark comprising 224 challenging, hand-crafted questions specifically designed to assess agents' multimodal retrieval and reasoning capabilities. These questions often incorporate images in prompts, and crucial information encountered during the search and reasoning process may also be embedded within images or videos on webpages. Consequently, methods relying solely on text prove insufficient for our benchmark. Additionally, we provide a verified checklist for each question, enabling fine-grained analysis of multimodal dependencies and reasoning paths. Our comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art models on MM-BrowseComp reveals that even top models like OpenAI o3 with tools achieve only 29.02\% accuracy, highlighting the suboptimal multimodal capabilities and lack of native multimodal reasoning in current models.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13186 + Thu, 14 Aug 2025 13:46:47 +0000 - Adapting Vision-Language Models Without Labels: A Comprehensive Survey - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05547 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.05547.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Hao Dong, Lijun Sheng, Jian Liang, Ran He, Eleni Chatzi, Olga Fink</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 11</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization capabilities across a wide range of tasks. However, their performance often remains suboptimal when directly applied to specific downstream scenarios without task-specific adaptation. To enhance their utility while preserving data efficiency, recent research has increasingly focused on unsupervised adaptation methods that do not rely on labeled data. Despite the growing interest in this area, there remains a lack of a unified, task-oriented survey dedicated to unsupervised VLM adaptation. To bridge this gap, we present a comprehensive and structured overview of the field. We propose a taxonomy based on the availability and nature of unlabeled visual data, categorizing existing approaches into four key paradigms: Data-Free Transfer (no data), Unsupervised Domain Transfer (abundant data), Episodic Test-Time Adaptation (batch data), and Online Test-Time Adaptation (streaming data). Within this framework, we analyze core methodologies and adaptation strategies associated with each paradigm, aiming to establish a systematic understanding of the field. Additionally, we review representative benchmarks across diverse applications and highlight open challenges and promising directions for future research. An actively maintained repository of relevant literature is available at https://github.com/tim-learn/Awesome-LabelFree-VLMs.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05547 - Thu, 07 Aug 2025 16:27:37 +0000 + Advances in Speech Separation: Techniques, Challenges, and Future Trends + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10830 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.10830.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Kai Li, Guo Chen, Wendi Sang, Yi Luo, Zhuo Chen, Shuai Wang, Shulin He, Zhong-Qiu Wang, Andong Li, Zhiyong Wu, Xiaolin Hu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 12</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The field of speech separation, addressing the "cocktail party problem", has seen revolutionary advances with DNNs. Speech separation enhances clarity in complex acoustic environments and serves as crucial pre-processing for speech recognition and speaker recognition. However, current literature focuses narrowly on specific architectures or isolated approaches, creating fragmented understanding. This survey addresses this gap by providing systematic examination of DNN-based speech separation techniques. Our work differentiates itself through: (I) Comprehensive perspective: We systematically investigate learning paradigms, separation scenarios with known/unknown speakers, comparative analysis of supervised/self-supervised/unsupervised frameworks, and architectural components from encoders to estimation strategies. (II) Timeliness: Coverage of cutting-edge developments ensures access to current innovations and benchmarks. (III) Unique insights: Beyond summarization, we evaluate technological trajectories, identify emerging patterns, and highlight promising directions including domain-robust frameworks, efficient architectures, multimodal integration, and novel self-supervised paradigms. (IV) Fair evaluation: We provide quantitative evaluations on standard datasets, revealing true capabilities and limitations of different methods. This comprehensive survey serves as an accessible reference for experienced researchers and newcomers navigating speech separation's complex landscape.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10830 + Thu, 14 Aug 2025 16:54:34 +0000 - InfiGUI-G1: Advancing GUI Grounding with Adaptive Exploration Policy Optimization - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05731 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.05731.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yuhang Liu, Zeyu Liu, Shuanghe Zhu, Pengxiang Li, Congkai Xie, Jiasheng Wang, Xueyu Hu, Xiaotian Han, Jianbo Yuan, Xinyao Wang, Shengyu Zhang, Hongxia Yang, Fei Wu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 25</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The emergence of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has propelled the development of autonomous agents that operate on Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) using pure visual input. A fundamental challenge is robustly grounding natural language instructions. This requires a precise spatial alignment, which accurately locates the coordinates of each element, and, more critically, a correct semantic alignment, which matches the instructions to the functionally appropriate UI element. Although Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven to be effective at improving spatial alignment for these MLLMs, we find that inefficient exploration bottlenecks semantic alignment, which prevent models from learning difficult semantic associations. To address this exploration problem, we present Adaptive Exploration Policy Optimization (AEPO), a new policy optimization framework. AEPO employs a multi-answer generation strategy to enforce broader exploration, which is then guided by a theoretically grounded Adaptive Exploration Reward (AER) function derived from first principles of efficiency eta=U/C. Our AEPO-trained models, InfiGUI-G1-3B and InfiGUI-G1-7B, establish new state-of-the-art results across multiple challenging GUI grounding benchmarks, achieving significant relative improvements of up to 9.0% against the naive RLVR baseline on benchmarks designed to test generalization and semantic understanding. Resources are available at https://github.com/InfiXAI/InfiGUI-G1.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05731 - Thu, 07 Aug 2025 17:49:56 +0000 + TexVerse: A Universe of 3D Objects with High-Resolution Textures + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10868 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.10868.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yibo Zhang, Li Zhang, Rui Ma, Nan Cao</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 14</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We introduce TexVerse, a large-scale 3D dataset featuring high-resolution textures. While recent advances in large-scale 3D datasets have enhanced high-resolution geometry generation, creating high-resolution textures end-to-end remains underexplored due to the lack of suitable datasets. TexVerse fills this gap with a curated collection of over 858K unique high-resolution 3D models sourced from Sketchfab, including more than 158K models with physically based rendering (PBR) materials. Each model encompasses all of its high-resolution variants, bringing the total to 1.6M 3D instances. TexVerse also includes specialized subsets: TexVerse-Skeleton, with 69K rigged models, and TexVerse-Animation, with 54K animated models, both preserving original skeleton and animation data uploaded by the user. We also provide detailed model annotations describing overall characteristics, structural components, and intricate features. TexVerse offers a high-quality data resource with wide-ranging potential applications in texture synthesis, PBR material development, animation, and various 3D vision and graphics tasks.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10868 + Thu, 14 Aug 2025 17:43:25 +0000 - Cooper: Co-Optimizing Policy and Reward Models in Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05613 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.05613.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Haitao Hong, Yuchen Yan, Xingyu Wu, Guiyang Hou, Wenqi Zhang, Weiming Lu, Yongliang Shen, Jun Xiao</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 15</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in reasoning tasks, where reinforcement learning (RL) serves as a key algorithm for enhancing their reasoning capabilities. Currently, there are two mainstream reward paradigms: model-based rewards and rule-based rewards. However, both approaches suffer from limitations: rule-based rewards lack robustness, while model-based rewards are vulnerable to reward hacking. To address these issues, we propose Cooper(Co-optimizing Policy Model and Reward Model), a RL framework that jointly optimizes both the policy model and the reward model. Cooper leverages the high precision of rule-based rewards when identifying correct responses, and dynamically constructs and selects positive-negative sample pairs for continued training the reward model. This design enhances robustness and mitigates the risk of reward hacking. To further support Cooper, we introduce a hybrid annotation strategy that efficiently and accurately generates training data for the reward model. We also propose a reference-based reward modeling paradigm, where the reward model takes a reference answer as input. Based on this design, we train a reward model named VerifyRM, which achieves higher accuracy on VerifyBench compared to other models of the same size. We conduct reinforcement learning using both VerifyRM and Cooper. Our experiments show that Cooper not only alleviates reward hacking but also improves end-to-end RL performance, for instance, achieving a 0.54% gain in average accuracy on Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct. Our findings demonstrate that dynamically updating reward model is an effective way to combat reward hacking, providing a reference for better integrating reward models into RL.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05613 - Thu, 07 Aug 2025 17:53:56 +0000 + SSRL: Self-Search Reinforcement Learning + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10874 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.10874.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yuchen Fan, Kaiyan Zhang, Heng Zhou, Yuxin Zuo, Yanxu Chen, Yu Fu, Xinwei Long, Xuekai Zhu, Che Jiang, Yuchen Zhang, Li Kang, Gang Chen, Cheng Huang, Zhizhou He, Bingning Wang, Lei Bai, Ning Ding, Bowen Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 88</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We investigate the potential of large language models (LLMs) to serve as efficient simulators for agentic search tasks in reinforcement learning (RL), thereby reducing dependence on costly interactions with external search engines. To this end, we first quantify the intrinsic search capability of LLMs via structured prompting and repeated sampling, which we term Self-Search. Our results reveal that LLMs exhibit strong scaling behavior with respect to the inference budget, achieving high pass@k on question-answering benchmarks, including the challenging BrowseComp task. Building on these observations, we introduce Self-Search RL (SSRL), which enhances LLMs' Self-Search capability through format-based and rule-based rewards. SSRL enables models to iteratively refine their knowledge utilization internally, without requiring access to external tools. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that SSRL-trained policy models provide a cost-effective and stable environment for search-driven RL training, reducing reliance on external search engines and facilitating robust sim-to-real transfer. We draw the following conclusions: 1) LLMs possess world knowledge that can be effectively elicited to achieve high performance; 2) SSRL demonstrates the potential of leveraging internal knowledge to reduce hallucination; 3) SSRL-trained models integrate seamlessly with external search engines without additional effort. Our findings highlight the potential of LLMs to support more scalable RL agent training.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10874 + Thu, 14 Aug 2025 17:46:01 +0000 - OmniEAR: Benchmarking Agent Reasoning in Embodied Tasks - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05614 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.05614.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zixuan Wang, Dingming Li, Hongxing Li, Shuo Chen, Yuchen Yan, Wenqi Zhang, Yongliang Shen, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 17</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language models excel at abstract reasoning but their capacity for embodied agent reasoning remains largely unexplored. We present OmniEAR, a comprehensive framework for evaluating how language models reason about physical interactions, tool usage, and multi-agent coordination in embodied tasks. Unlike existing benchmarks that provide predefined tool sets or explicit collaboration directives, OmniEAR requires agents to dynamically acquire capabilities and autonomously determine coordination strategies based on task demands. Through text-based environment representation, we model continuous physical properties and complex spatial relationships across 1,500 scenarios spanning household and industrial domains. Our systematic evaluation reveals severe performance degradation when models must reason from constraints: while achieving 85-96% success with explicit instructions, performance drops to 56-85% for tool reasoning and 63-85% for implicit collaboration, with compound tasks showing over 50% failure rates. Surprisingly, complete environmental information degrades coordination performance, indicating models cannot filter task-relevant constraints. Fine-tuning improves single-agent tasks dramatically (0.6% to 76.3%) but yields minimal multi-agent gains (1.5% to 5.5%), exposing fundamental architectural limitations. These findings demonstrate that embodied reasoning poses fundamentally different challenges than current models can address, establishing OmniEAR as a rigorous benchmark for evaluating and advancing embodied AI systems. Our code and data are included in the supplementary materials and will be open-sourced upon acceptance.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05614 - Thu, 07 Aug 2025 17:54:15 +0000 + BeyondWeb: Lessons from Scaling Synthetic Data for Trillion-scale Pretraining + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10975 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.10975.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Pratyush Maini, Vineeth Dorna, Parth Doshi, Aldo Carranza, Fan Pan, Jack Urbanek, Paul Burstein, Alex Fang, Alvin Deng, Amro Abbas, Brett Larsen, Cody Blakeney, Charvi Bannur, Christina Baek, Darren Teh, David Schwab, Haakon Mongstad, Haoli Yin, Josh Wills, Kaleigh Mentzer, Luke Merrick, Ricardo Monti, Rishabh Adiga, Siddharth Joshi, Spandan Das, Zhengping Wang, Bogdan Gaza, Ari Morcos, Matthew Leavitt</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 54</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advances in large language model (LLM) pretraining have shown that simply scaling data quantity eventually leads to diminishing returns, hitting a data wall. In response, the use of synthetic data for pretraining has emerged as a promising paradigm for pushing the frontier of performance. Despite this, the factors affecting synthetic data quality remain poorly understood. In this work, we introduce BeyondWeb, a synthetic data generation framework that produces high-quality synthetic data for pretraining. BeyondWeb significantly extends the capabilities of traditional web-scale datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art synthetic pretraining datasets such as Cosmopedia and Nemotron-CC's high-quality synthetic subset (Nemotron-Synth) by up to 5.1 percentage points (pp) and 2.6pp, respectively, when averaged across a suite of 14 benchmark evaluations. It delivers up to 7.7x faster training than open web data and 2.7x faster than Nemotron-Synth. Remarkably, a 3B model trained for 180B tokens on BeyondWeb outperforms an 8B model trained for the same token budget on Cosmopedia. We also present several insights from BeyondWeb on synthetic data for pretraining: what drives its benefits, which data to rephrase and how, and the impact of model size and family on data quality. Overall, our work shows that there's no silver bullet for generating high-quality synthetic pretraining data. The best outcomes require jointly optimizing many factors, a challenging task that requires rigorous science and practical expertise. Naive approaches can yield modest improvements, potentially at great cost, while well-executed methods can yield transformative improvements, as exemplified by BeyondWeb.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10975 + Thu, 14 Aug 2025 17:55:47 +0000 - Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for GUI Grounding via Region Consistency - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05615 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.05615.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yong Du, Yuchen Yan, Fei Tang, Zhengxi Lu, Chang Zong, Weiming Lu, Shengpei Jiang, Yongliang Shen</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 18</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding, the task of mapping natural language instructions to precise screen coordinates, is fundamental to autonomous GUI agents. While existing methods achieve strong performance through extensive supervised training or reinforcement learning with labeled rewards, they remain constrained by the cost and availability of pixel-level annotations. We observe that when models generate multiple predictions for the same GUI element, the spatial overlap patterns reveal implicit confidence signals that can guide more accurate localization. Leveraging this insight, we propose GUI-RC (Region Consistency), a test-time scaling method that constructs spatial voting grids from multiple sampled predictions to identify consensus regions where models show highest agreement. Without any training, GUI-RC improves accuracy by 2-3% across various architectures on ScreenSpot benchmarks. We further introduce GUI-RCPO (Region Consistency Policy Optimization), which transforms these consistency patterns into rewards for test-time reinforcement learning. By computing how well each prediction aligns with the collective consensus, GUI-RCPO enables models to iteratively refine their outputs on unlabeled data during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate the generality of our approach: GUI-RC boosts Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct from 80.11% to 83.57% on ScreenSpot-v2, while GUI-RCPO further improves it to 85.14% through self-supervised optimization. Our approach reveals the untapped potential of test-time scaling and test-time reinforcement learning for GUI grounding, offering a promising path toward more robust and data-efficient GUI agents.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05615 - Thu, 07 Aug 2025 17:54:27 +0000 + MAESTRO: Masked AutoEncoders for Multimodal, Multitemporal, and Multispectral Earth Observation Data + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10894 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.10894.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Antoine Labatie, Michael Vaccaro, Nina Lardiere, Anatol Garioud, Nicolas Gonthier</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Self-supervised learning holds great promise for remote sensing, but standard self-supervised methods must be adapted to the unique characteristics of Earth observation data. We take a step in this direction by conducting a comprehensive benchmark of fusion strategies and reconstruction target normalization schemes for multimodal, multitemporal, and multispectral Earth observation data. Based on our findings, we propose MAESTRO, a novel adaptation of the Masked Autoencoder, featuring optimized fusion strategies and a tailored target normalization scheme that introduces a spectral prior as a self-supervisory signal. Evaluated on four Earth observation datasets, MAESTRO sets a new state-of-the-art on tasks that strongly rely on multitemporal dynamics, while remaining highly competitive on tasks dominated by a single mono-temporal modality. Code to reproduce all our experiments is available at https://github.com/ignf/maestro.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10894 + Thu, 14 Aug 2025 17:58:45 +0000 - WebWatcher: Breaking New Frontier of Vision-Language Deep Research Agent - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05748 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.05748.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xinyu Geng, Peng Xia, Zhen Zhang, Xinyu Wang, Qiuchen Wang, Ruixue Ding, Chenxi Wang, Jialong Wu, Yida Zhao, Kuan Li, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 111</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Web agents such as Deep Research have demonstrated superhuman cognitive abilities, capable of solving highly challenging information-seeking problems. However, most research remains primarily text-centric, overlooking visual information in the real world. This makes multimodal Deep Research highly challenging, as such agents require much stronger reasoning abilities in perception, logic, knowledge, and the use of more sophisticated tools compared to text-based agents. To address this limitation, we introduce WebWatcher, a multi-modal Agent for Deep Research equipped with enhanced visual-language reasoning capabilities. It leverages high-quality synthetic multimodal trajectories for efficient cold start training, utilizes various tools for deep reasoning, and further enhances generalization through reinforcement learning. To better evaluate the capabilities of multimodal agents, we propose BrowseComp-VL, a benchmark with BrowseComp-style that requires complex information retrieval involving both visual and textual information. Experimental results show that WebWatcher significantly outperforms proprietary baseline, RAG workflow and open-source agents in four challenging VQA benchmarks, which paves the way for solving complex multimodal information-seeking tasks.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05748 - Thu, 07 Aug 2025 18:03:50 +0000 + MedSAMix: A Training-Free Model Merging Approach for Medical Image Segmentation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11032 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.11032.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yanwu Yang, Guinan Su, Jiesi Hu, Francesco Sammarco, Jonas Geiping, Thomas Wolfers</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Universal medical image segmentation models have emerged as a promising paradigm due to their strong generalizability across diverse tasks, showing great potential for a wide range of clinical applications. This potential has been partly driven by the success of general-purpose vision models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), which has inspired the development of various fine-tuned variants for medical segmentation tasks. However, fine-tuned variants like MedSAM are trained on comparatively limited medical imaging data that often suffers from heterogeneity, scarce annotations, and distributional shifts. These challenges limit their ability to generalize across a wide range of medical segmentation tasks. In this regard, we propose MedSAMix, a training-free model merging method that integrates the strengths of both generalist models (e.g., SAM) and specialist models (e.g., MedSAM) for medical image segmentation. In contrast to traditional model merging approaches that rely on manual configuration and often result in suboptimal outcomes, we propose a zero-order optimization method to automatically discover optimal layer-wise merging solutions. Furthermore, for clinical applications, we develop two regimes to meet the demand of domain-specificity and generalizability in different scenarios by single-task optimization and multi-objective optimization respectively. Extensive evaluations on 25 medical segmentation tasks demonstrate that MedSAMix effectively mitigates model bias and consistently improves performance in both domain-specific accuracy and generalization, achieving improvements of 6.67% on specialized tasks and 4.37% on multi-task evaluations.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11032 + Thu, 14 Aug 2025 19:35:57 +0000 - Optimization-Free Style Transfer for 3D Gaussian Splats - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05813 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.05813.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Raphael Du Sablon, David Hart</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The task of style transfer for 3D Gaussian splats has been explored in many previous works, but these require reconstructing or fine-tuning the splat while incorporating style information or optimizing a feature extraction network on the splat representation. We propose a reconstruction- and optimization-free approach to stylizing 3D Gaussian splats. This is done by generating a graph structure across the implicit surface of the splat representation. A feed-forward, surface-based stylization method is then used and interpolated back to the individual splats in the scene. This allows for any style image and 3D Gaussian splat to be used without any additional training or optimization. This also allows for fast stylization of splats, achieving speeds under 2 minutes even on consumer-grade hardware. We demonstrate the quality results this approach achieves and compare to other 3D Gaussian splat style transfer methods. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/davidmhart/FastSplatStyler.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05813 - Thu, 07 Aug 2025 19:35:01 +0000 + PaperRegister: Boosting Flexible-grained Paper Search via Hierarchical Register Indexing + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11116 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.11116.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhuoqun Li, Xuanang Chen, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 22</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Paper search is an important activity for researchers, typically involving using a query with description of a topic to find relevant papers. As research deepens, paper search requirements may become more flexible, sometimes involving specific details such as module configuration rather than being limited to coarse-grained topics. However, previous paper search systems are unable to meet these flexible-grained requirements, as these systems mainly collect paper abstracts to construct index of corpus, which lack detailed information to support retrieval by finer-grained queries. In this work, we propose PaperRegister, consisted of offline hierarchical indexing and online adaptive retrieval, transforming traditional abstract-based index into hierarchical index tree for paper search, thereby supporting queries at flexible granularity. Experiments on paper search tasks across a range of granularity demonstrate that PaperRegister achieves the state-of-the-art performance, and particularly excels in fine-grained scenarios, highlighting the good potential as an effective solution for flexible-grained paper search in real-world applications. Code for this work is in https://github.com/Li-Z-Q/PaperRegister.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11116 + Thu, 14 Aug 2025 23:43:46 +0000 - Spectrum Projection Score: Aligning Retrieved Summaries with Reader Models in Retrieval-Augmented Generation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05909 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.05909.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhanghao Hu, Qinglin Zhu, Siya Qi, Yulan He, Hanqi Yan, Lin Gui</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 20</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown improved generation performance through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) following the retriever-reader paradigm, which supplements model inputs with externally retrieved knowledge. However, prior work often evaluates RAG holistically, assessing the retriever and reader jointly, making it difficult to isolate the true contribution of retrieval, particularly given the prompt sensitivity of LLMs used as readers. We introduce Spectrum Projection Score (SPS), a lightweight, supervision-free metric that allows the reader to gauge the semantic alignment of a retrieved summary with its hidden representation by comparing the area formed by generated tokens from the summary, and the principal directions of subspace in the reader and to measure the relevance. Building on SPS we present xCompress, an inference time controller framework that dynamically samples, ranks, and compresses retrieval summary candidates. Extensive experiments on five QA benchmarks with four open source LLMs show that SPS not only enhances performance across a range of tasks but also provides a principled perspective on the interaction between retrieval and generation.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05909 - Fri, 08 Aug 2025 00:13:48 +0000 + StyleMM: Stylized 3D Morphable Face Model via Text-Driven Aligned Image Translation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11203 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.11203.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Seungmi Lee, Kwan Yun, Junyong Noh</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 9</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We introduce StyleMM, a novel framework that can construct a stylized 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) based on user-defined text descriptions specifying a target style. Building upon a pre-trained mesh deformation network and a texture generator for original 3DMM-based realistic human faces, our approach fine-tunes these models using stylized facial images generated via text-guided image-to-image (i2i) translation with a diffusion model, which serve as stylization targets for the rendered mesh. To prevent undesired changes in identity, facial alignment, or expressions during i2i translation, we introduce a stylization method that explicitly preserves the facial attributes of the source image. By maintaining these critical attributes during image stylization, the proposed approach ensures consistent 3D style transfer across the 3DMM parameter space through image-based training. Once trained, StyleMM enables feed-forward generation of stylized face meshes with explicit control over shape, expression, and texture parameters, producing meshes with consistent vertex connectivity and animatability. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of identity-level facial diversity and stylization capability. The code and videos are available at [kwanyun.github.io/stylemm_page](kwanyun.github.io/stylemm_page).</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11203 + Fri, 15 Aug 2025 04:29:46 +0000 - Bifrost-1: Bridging Multimodal LLMs and Diffusion Models with Patch-level CLIP Latents - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05954 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.05954.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Han Lin, Jaemin Cho, Amir Zadeh, Chuan Li, Mohit Bansal</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 6</p><p><b>Summary:</b> There is growing interest in integrating high-fidelity visual synthesis capabilities into large language models (LLMs) without compromising their strong reasoning capabilities. Existing methods that directly train LLMs or bridge LLMs and diffusion models usually suffer from costly training since the backbone LLMs have not seen image representations during pretraining. We present Bifrost-1, a unified framework that bridges pretrained multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) and diffusion models using patch-level CLIP image embeddings as latent variables, which are natively aligned with the MLLM's CLIP visual encoder. These patch-level image embeddings are integrated into the diffusion model with a lightweight adaptation of its ControlNet. To retain the original multimodal reasoning capabilities of MLLMs, we equip the MLLM with a visual generation branch initialized from the original MLLM parameters when predicting the patch-level image embeddings. By seamlessly integrating pretrained MLLMs and diffusion models with patch-level CLIP latents, our framework enables high-fidelity controllable image generation with significant training efficiency. Our experiments demonstrate that Bifrost-1 achieves comparable or better performance than previous methods in terms of visual fidelity and multimodal understanding, with substantially lower compute during training. We also provide comprehensive ablation studies showing the effectiveness of our design choices.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05954 - Fri, 08 Aug 2025 02:38:47 +0000 + Beyond Solving Math Quiz: Evaluating the Ability of Large Reasoning Models to Ask for Information + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11252 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.11252.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Youcheng Huang, Bowen Qin, Chen Huang, Duanyu Feng, Xi Yang, Wenqiang Lei</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable problem-solving abilities in mathematics, as evaluated by existing benchmarks exclusively on well-defined problems. However, such evaluation setup constitutes a critical gap, since a genuine intelligent agent should not only solve problems (as a math quiz solver), but also be able~to ask for information when the problems lack sufficient information, enabling proactivity in responding users' requests. To bridge such gap, we proposes a new dataset consisting of two types of incomplete problems with diverse contexts. Based on the dataset, our systematical evaluation of LRMs reveals their inability in proactively asking for information. In addition, we uncover the behaviors related to overthinking and hallucination of LRMs, and highlight the potential and challenges of supervised fine-tuning in learning such ability. We hope to provide new insights in developing LRMs with genuine intelligence, rather than just solving problems.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11252 + Fri, 15 Aug 2025 06:42:00 +0000 - Pruning the Unsurprising: Efficient Code Reasoning via First-Token Surprisal - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05988 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.05988.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Wenhao Zeng, Yaoning Wang, Chao Hu, Yuling Shi, Chengcheng Wan, Hongyu Zhang, Xiaodong Gu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 18</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recently, Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code reasoning by scaling up the length of Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, excessively long reasoning traces introduce substantial challenges in terms of training cost, inference latency, and deployment feasibility. While various CoT compression approaches have emerged to address this challenge, they face inherent trade-offs: token-level methods often disrupt syntactic and logical coherence, while step-level methods based on perplexity fail to reliably capture the logically critical reasoning steps. In this paper, we propose ASAP (Anchor-guided, Surprisal-based Pruning), a novel coarse-to-fine framework for CoT compression. ASAP first performs anchor-guided pruning to preserve the core reasoning structure, which efficiently reduces the search space for subsequent processing. It then enables a logic-aware pruning by selecting logically essential reasoning steps based on a novel first-token surprisal metric. Finally, ASAP teaches models to autonomously generate and leverage these concise CoTs at inference time, enabling efficient reasoning in coding tasks. Experiments show that ASAP achieves state-of-the-art accuracy across multiple code generation benchmarks while substantially reducing training and inference costs. On the challenging LiveCodeBench v4_v5 benchmark, our approach reduces token generation by 23.5% and inference latency by 43.5% compared to the strongest baseline, while achieving a competitive accuracy of 36.19% in Pass@1. Our results highlight a promising direction for building powerful and efficient LRMs.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05988 - Fri, 08 Aug 2025 03:46:21 +0000 + FantasyTalking2: Timestep-Layer Adaptive Preference Optimization for Audio-Driven Portrait Animation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11255 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.11255.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> MengChao Wang, Qiang Wang, Fan Jiang, Mu Xu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 10</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advances in audio-driven portrait animation have demonstrated impressive capabilities. However, existing methods struggle to align with fine-grained human preferences across multiple dimensions, such as motion naturalness, lip-sync accuracy, and visual quality. This is due to the difficulty of optimizing among competing preference objectives, which often conflict with one another, and the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality datasets with multidimensional preference annotations. To address these, we first introduce Talking-Critic, a multimodal reward model that learns human-aligned reward functions to quantify how well generated videos satisfy multidimensional expectations. Leveraging this model, we curate Talking-NSQ, a large-scale multidimensional human preference dataset containing 410K preference pairs. Finally, we propose Timestep-Layer adaptive multi-expert Preference Optimization (TLPO), a novel framework for aligning diffusion-based portrait animation models with fine-grained, multidimensional preferences. TLPO decouples preferences into specialized expert modules, which are then fused across timesteps and network layers, enabling comprehensive, fine-grained enhancement across all dimensions without mutual interference. Experiments demonstrate that Talking-Critic significantly outperforms existing methods in aligning with human preference ratings. Meanwhile, TLPO achieves substantial improvements over baseline models in lip-sync accuracy, motion naturalness, and visual quality, exhibiting superior performance in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Ours project page: https://fantasy-amap.github.io/fantasy-talking2/</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11255 + Fri, 15 Aug 2025 06:43:46 +0000 - MathReal: We Keep It Real! A Real Scene Benchmark for Evaluating Math Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06009 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.06009.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jun Feng, Zixin Wang, Zhentao Zhang, Yue Guo, Zhihan Zhou, Xiuyi Chen, Zhenyang Li, Dawei Yin</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 15</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in visual mathematical reasoning across various existing benchmarks. However, these benchmarks are predominantly based on clean or processed multimodal inputs, without incorporating the images provided by real-world Kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12) educational users. To address this gap, we introduce MathReal, a meticulously curated dataset comprising 2,000 mathematical questions with images captured by handheld mobile devices in authentic scenarios. Each question is an image, containing the question text and visual element. We systematically classify the real images into three primary categories: image quality degradation, perspective variation, and irrelevant content interference, which are further delineated into 14 subcategories. Additionally, MathReal spans five core knowledge and ability categories, which encompass three question types and are divided into three difficulty levels. To comprehensively evaluate the multimodal mathematical reasoning abilities of state-of-the-art MLLMs in real-world scenarios, we design six experimental settings that enable a systematic analysis of their performance. Through extensive experimentation, we find that the problem-solving abilities of existing MLLMs are significantly challenged in realistic educational contexts. Based on this, we conduct a thorough analysis of their performance and error patterns, providing insights into their recognition, comprehension, and reasoning capabilities, and outlining directions for future improvements. Data and code: https://github.com/junfeng0288/MathReal.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06009 - Fri, 08 Aug 2025 04:39:16 +0000 + G-CUT3R: Guided 3D Reconstruction with Camera and Depth Prior Integration + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11379 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.11379.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ramil Khafizov, Artem Komarichev, Ruslan Rakhimov, Peter Wonka, Evgeny Burnaev</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 12</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We introduce G-CUT3R, a novel feed-forward approach for guided 3D scene reconstruction that enhances the CUT3R model by integrating prior information. Unlike existing feed-forward methods that rely solely on input images, our method leverages auxiliary data, such as depth, camera calibrations, or camera positions, commonly available in real-world scenarios. We propose a lightweight modification to CUT3R, incorporating a dedicated encoder for each modality to extract features, which are fused with RGB image tokens via zero convolution. This flexible design enables seamless integration of any combination of prior information during inference. Evaluated across multiple benchmarks, including 3D reconstruction and other multi-view tasks, our approach demonstrates significant performance improvements, showing its ability to effectively utilize available priors while maintaining compatibility with varying input modalities.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11379 + Fri, 15 Aug 2025 10:25:58 +0000 - Diffusion LLMs Can Do Faster-Than-AR Inference via Discrete Diffusion Forcing - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09192 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09192.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xu Wang, Chenkai Xu, Yijie Jin, Jiachun Jin, Hao Zhang, Zhijie Deng</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 29</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) LLMs for text generation, with the potential to decode multiple tokens in a single iteration. However, none of the existing open-source dLLMs have achieved superior inference speed over AR LLMs of similar size. This paper breaks this barrier based on a simple and effective strategy named discrete diffusion forcing (D2F). D2F equips dLLMs with two key capabilities: (1) block-wise autoregressive generation to enable KV cache utilization; (2) prediction of following tokens without requiring completion of prior blocks for inter-block parallel decoding. In this way, the vanilla dLLMs are refurbished into an AR-diffusion hybrid paradigm for efficient inference. D2F can be implemented with an asymmetric distillation process based on pre-trained dLLMs. We further propose a pipelined parallel decoding algorithm, which enables a trade-off between efficiency and efficacy. Empirically, D2F dLLMs achieve more than 2.5times inference speed than LLaMA3 and Qwen2.5 on GSM8K. Compared to vanilla dLLMs like LLaDA and Dream, the acceleration can be more than 50times while maintaining comparable output quality. The code is available at https://github.com/zhijie-group/Discrete-Diffusion-Forcing.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09192 - Fri, 08 Aug 2025 04:51:37 +0000 + When Punctuation Matters: A Large-Scale Comparison of Prompt Robustness Methods for LLMs + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11383 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.11383.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Mikhail Seleznyov, Mikhail Chaichuk, Gleb Ershov, Alexander Panchenko, Elena Tutubalina, Oleg Somov</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 38</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Models (LLMs) are highly sensitive to subtle, non-semantic variations in prompt phrasing and formatting. In this work, we present the first systematic evaluation of 5 methods for improving prompt robustness within a unified experimental framework. We benchmark these techniques on 8 models from Llama, Qwen and Gemma families across 52 tasks from Natural Instructions dataset. Our evaluation covers robustness methods from both fine-tuned and in-context learning paradigms, and tests their generalization against multiple types of distribution shifts. Finally, we extend our analysis to GPT-4.1 and DeepSeek V3 to assess frontier models' current robustness to format perturbations. Our findings offer actionable insights into the relative effectiveness of these robustness methods, enabling practitioners to make informed decisions when aiming for stable and reliable LLM performance in real-world applications. Code: https://github.com/AIRI-Institute/when-punctuation-matters.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11383 + Fri, 15 Aug 2025 10:32:50 +0000 - Temporal Self-Rewarding Language Models: Decoupling Chosen-Rejected via Past-Future - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06026 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.06026.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yidong Wang, Xin Wang, Cunxiang Wang, Junfeng Fang, Qiufeng Wang, Jianing Chu, Xuran Meng, Shuxun Yang, Libo Qin, Yue Zhang, Wei Ye, Shikun Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 15</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Self-Rewarding Language Models propose an architecture in which the Large Language Models(LLMs) both generates responses and evaluates its own outputs via LLM-as-a-Judge prompting, dynamically improving its generative capabilities through iterative Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). However, our analysis reveals a critical limitation in existing Self-Rewarding paradigms: the synchronized improvement of chosen and rejected responses progressively narrows the representational difference between contrasting samples, undermining effective preference learning. We propose Temporal Self-Rewarding Language Models that strategically coordinate past, present, and future model generations to sustain learning signals. Our dual-phase framework introduces: (1) Anchored Rejection - fixing rejected responses using the past initial model's outputs and (2) Future-Guided Chosen - dynamically curating chosen samples using next-generation model predictions. Extensive experiments across three model families (Llama, Qwen, Mistral) and different model sizes (Llama3B/8B/70B) demonstrate significant improvements when trained with our method compared to Self-Rewarding using same computation resources. For example, Llama3.1-8B reaches a 29.44 win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0 with our method, outperforming the Self-Rewarding baseline (19.69) by 9.75. Notably, our method also demonstrates superior out-of-distribution generalization across mathematical reasoning (GSM8K), knowledge-based QA (ARC, TruthfulQA), and code generation (HumanEval) tasks, even though we do not specifically collect such training data.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06026 - Fri, 08 Aug 2025 05:25:54 +0000 + Retrieval-augmented reasoning with lean language models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11386 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.11386.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ryan Sze-Yin Chan, Federico Nanni, Tomas Lazauskas, Rosie Wood, Penelope Yong, Lionel Tarassenko, Mark Girolami, James Geddes, Andrew Duncan</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> This technical report details a novel approach to combining reasoning and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) within a single, lean language model architecture. While existing RAG systems typically rely on large-scale models and external APIs, our work addresses the increasing demand for performant and privacy-preserving solutions deployable in resource-constrained or secure environments. Building on recent developments in test-time scaling and small-scale reasoning models, we develop a retrieval augmented conversational agent capable of interpreting complex, domain-specific queries using a lightweight backbone model. Our system integrates a dense retriever with fine-tuned Qwen2.5-Instruct models, using synthetic query generation and reasoning traces derived from frontier models (e.g., DeepSeek-R1) over a curated corpus, in this case, the NHS A-to-Z condition pages. We explore the impact of summarisation-based document compression, synthetic data design, and reasoning-aware fine-tuning on model performance. Evaluation against both non-reasoning and general-purpose lean models demonstrates that our domain-specific fine-tuning approach yields substantial gains in answer accuracy and consistency, approaching frontier-level performance while remaining feasible for local deployment. All implementation details and code are publicly released to support reproducibility and adaptation across domains.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11386 + Fri, 15 Aug 2025 10:38:15 +0000 - Fact2Fiction: Targeted Poisoning Attack to Agentic Fact-checking System - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06059 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.06059.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Haorui He, Yupeng Li, Bin Benjamin Zhu, Dacheng Wen, Reynold Cheng, Francis C. M. Lau</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> State-of-the-art fact-checking systems combat misinformation at scale by employing autonomous LLM-based agents to decompose complex claims into smaller sub-claims, verify each sub-claim individually, and aggregate the partial results to produce verdicts with justifications (explanatory rationales for the verdicts). The security of these systems is crucial, as compromised fact-checkers, which tend to be easily underexplored, can amplify misinformation. This work introduces Fact2Fiction, the first poisoning attack framework targeting such agentic fact-checking systems. Fact2Fiction mirrors the decomposition strategy and exploits system-generated justifications to craft tailored malicious evidences that compromise sub-claim verification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Fact2Fiction achieves 8.9\%--21.2\% higher attack success rates than state-of-the-art attacks across various poisoning budgets. Fact2Fiction exposes security weaknesses in current fact-checking systems and highlights the need for defensive countermeasures.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06059 - Fri, 08 Aug 2025 06:44:57 +0000 + On-Policy RL Meets Off-Policy Experts: Harmonizing Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning via Dynamic Weighting + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11408 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.11408.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Wenhao Zhang, Yuexiang Xie, Yuchang Sun, Yanxi Chen, Guoyin Wang, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Jingren Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 6</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) are two prominent post-training paradigms for refining the capabilities and aligning the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing approaches that integrate SFT and RL often face the risk of disrupting established model patterns and inducing overfitting to expert data. To address this, we present a novel investigation into the unified view of SFT and RL through an off-policy versus on-policy lens. We propose CHORD, a framework for the Controllable Harmonization of On- and Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning via Dynamic Weighting, which reframes SFT not as a separate stage but as a dynamically weighted auxiliary objective within the on-policy RL process. Based on an analysis of off-policy expert data's influence at both holistic and granular levels, we incorporate a dual-control mechanism in CHORD. Specifically, the framework first employs a global coefficient to holistically guide the transition from off-policy imitation to on-policy exploration, and then applies a token-wise weighting function that enables granular learning from expert tokens, which preserves on-policy exploration and mitigates disruption from off-policy data. We conduct extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks, providing empirical evidence that CHORD achieves a stable and efficient learning process. By effectively harmonizing off-policy expert data with on-policy exploration, CHORD demonstrates significant improvements over baselines. We release the implementation at https://github.com/modelscope/Trinity-RFT/tree/main/examples/mix_chord to inspire further research.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11408 + Fri, 15 Aug 2025 11:20:03 +0000 - Shortcut Learning in Generalist Robot Policies: The Role of Dataset Diversity and Fragmentation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06426 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.06426.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Youguang Xing, Xu Luo, Junlin Xie, Lianli Gao, Hengtao Shen, Jingkuan Song</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 10</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Generalist robot policies trained on large-scale datasets such as Open X-Embodiment (OXE) demonstrate strong performance across a wide range of tasks. However, they often struggle to generalize beyond the distribution of their training data. In this paper, we investigate the underlying cause of this limited generalization capability. We identify shortcut learning -- the reliance on task-irrelevant features -- as a key impediment to generalization. Through comprehensive theoretical and empirical analysis, we uncover two primary contributors to shortcut learning: (1) limited diversity within individual sub-datasets, and (2) significant distributional disparities across sub-datasets, leading to dataset fragmentation. These issues arise from the inherent structure of large-scale datasets like OXE, which are typically composed of multiple sub-datasets collected independently across varied environments and embodiments. Our findings provide critical insights into dataset collection strategies that can reduce shortcut learning and enhance the generalization ability of generalist robot policies. Moreover, in scenarios where acquiring new large-scale data is impractical, we demonstrate that carefully selected robotic data augmentation strategies can effectively reduce shortcut learning in existing offline datasets, thereby improving generalization capabilities of generalist robot policies, e.g., pi_0, in both simulation and real-world environments. More information at https://lucky-light-sun.github.io/proj/shortcut-learning-in-grps/.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06426 - Fri, 08 Aug 2025 16:14:01 +0000 + Copyright Protection for Large Language Models: A Survey of Methods, Challenges, and Trends + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11548 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.11548.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhenhua Xu, Xubin Yue, Zhebo Wang, Qichen Liu, Xixiang Zhao, Jingxuan Zhang, Wenjun Zeng, Wengpeng Xing, Dezhang Kong, Changting Lin, Meng Han</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Copyright protection for large language models is of critical importance, given their substantial development costs, proprietary value, and potential for misuse. Existing surveys have predominantly focused on techniques for tracing LLM-generated content-namely, text watermarking-while a systematic exploration of methods for protecting the models themselves (i.e., model watermarking and model fingerprinting) remains absent. Moreover, the relationships and distinctions among text watermarking, model watermarking, and model fingerprinting have not been comprehensively clarified. This work presents a comprehensive survey of the current state of LLM copyright protection technologies, with a focus on model fingerprinting, covering the following aspects: (1) clarifying the conceptual connection from text watermarking to model watermarking and fingerprinting, and adopting a unified terminology that incorporates model watermarking into the broader fingerprinting framework; (2) providing an overview and comparison of diverse text watermarking techniques, highlighting cases where such methods can function as model fingerprinting; (3) systematically categorizing and comparing existing model fingerprinting approaches for LLM copyright protection; (4) presenting, for the first time, techniques for fingerprint transfer and fingerprint removal; (5) summarizing evaluation metrics for model fingerprints, including effectiveness, harmlessness, robustness, stealthiness, and reliability; and (6) discussing open challenges and future research directions. This survey aims to offer researchers a thorough understanding of both text watermarking and model fingerprinting technologies in the era of LLMs, thereby fostering further advances in protecting their intellectual property.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11548 + Fri, 15 Aug 2025 15:50:20 +0000 - Memp: Exploring Agent Procedural Memory - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06433 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.06433.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Runnan Fang, Yuan Liang, Xiaobin Wang, Jialong Wu, Shuofei Qiao, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 27</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Models (LLMs) based agents excel at diverse tasks, yet they suffer from brittle procedural memory that is manually engineered or entangled in static parameters. In this work, we investigate strategies to endow agents with a learnable, updatable, and lifelong procedural memory. We propose Memp that distills past agent trajectories into both fine-grained, step-by-step instructions and higher-level, script-like abstractions, and explore the impact of different strategies for Build, Retrieval, and Update of procedural memory. Coupled with a dynamic regimen that continuously updates, corrects, and deprecates its contents, this repository evolves in lockstep with new experience. Empirical evaluation on TravelPlanner and ALFWorld shows that as the memory repository is refined, agents achieve steadily higher success rates and greater efficiency on analogous tasks. Moreover, procedural memory built from a stronger model retains its value: migrating the procedural memory to a weaker model yields substantial performance gains.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06433 - Fri, 08 Aug 2025 16:20:56 +0000 + Ovis2.5 Technical Report + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11737 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.11737.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Shiyin Lu, Yang Li, Yu Xia, Yuwei Hu, Shanshan Zhao, Yanqing Ma, Zhichao Wei, Yinglun Li, Lunhao Duan, Jianshan Zhao, Yuxuan Han, Haijun Li, Wanying Chen, Junke Tang, Chengkun Hou, Zhixing Du, Tianli Zhou, Wenjie Zhang, Huping Ding, Jiahe Li, Wen Li, Gui Hu, Yiliang Gu, Siran Yang, Jiamang Wang, Hailong Sun, Yibo Wang, Hui Sun, Jinlong Huang, Yuping He, Shengze Shi, Weihong Zhang, Guodong Zheng, Junpeng Jiang, Sensen Gao, Yi-Feng Wu, Sijia Chen, Yuhui Chen, Qing-Guo Chen, Zhao Xu, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 100</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present Ovis2.5, a successor to Ovis2 designed for native-resolution visual perception and strong multimodal reasoning. Ovis2.5 integrates a native-resolution vision transformer that processes images at their native, variable resolutions, avoiding the degradation from fixed-resolution tiling and preserving both fine detail and global layout -- crucial for visually dense content like complex charts. To strengthen reasoning, we train the model to move beyond linear chain-of-thought and perform reflection -- including self-checking and revision. This advanced capability is exposed as an optional "thinking mode" at inference time, allowing users to trade latency for enhanced accuracy on difficult inputs. The model is trained via a comprehensive five-phase curriculum that progressively builds its skills. The process begins with foundational visual and multimodal pretraining, advances through large-scale instruction tuning, and culminates in alignment and reasoning enhancement using DPO and GRPO. To scale these upgrades efficiently, we employ multimodal data packing and hybrid parallelism, yielding a significant end-to-end speedup. We release two open-source models: Ovis2.5-9B and Ovis2.5-2B. The latter continues the "small model, big performance" philosophy of Ovis2, making it ideal for resource-constrained, on-device scenarios. On the OpenCompass multimodal leaderboard, Ovis2.5-9B averages 78.3, marking a substantial improvement over its predecessor, Ovis2-8B, and achieving state-of-the-art results among open-source MLLMs in the sub-40B parameter range; Ovis2.5-2B scores 73.9, establishing SOTA for its size. Beyond aggregate scores, Ovis2.5 achieves leading results on STEM benchmarks, exhibits strong capabilities on grounding and video tasks, and achieves open-source SOTA at its scale for complex chart analysis.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11737 + Fri, 15 Aug 2025 17:01:08 +0000 - GLM-4.5: Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding (ARC) Foundation Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06471 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.06471.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> GLM-4. 5 Team, Aohan Zeng, Xin Lv, Qinkai Zheng, Zhenyu Hou, Bin Chen, Chengxing Xie, Cunxiang Wang, Da Yin, Hao Zeng, Jiajie Zhang, Kedong Wang, Lucen Zhong, Mingdao Liu, Rui Lu, Shulin Cao, Xiaohan Zhang, Xuancheng Huang, Yao Wei, Yean Cheng, Yifan An, Yilin Niu, Yuanhao Wen, Yushi Bai, Zhengxiao Du, Zihan Wang, Zilin Zhu, Bohan Zhang, Bosi Wen, Bowen Wu, Bowen Xu, Can Huang, Casey Zhao, Changpeng Cai, Chao Yu, Chen Li, Chendi Ge, Chenghua Huang, Chenhui Zhang, Chenxi Xu, Chenzheng Zhu, Chuang Li, Congfeng Yin, Daoyan Lin, Dayong Yang, Dazhi Jiang, Ding Ai, Erle Zhu, Fei Wang, Gengzheng Pan, Guo Wang, Hailong Sun, Haitao Li, Haiyang Li, Haiyi Hu, Hanyu Zhang, Hao Peng, Hao Tai, Haoke Zhang, Haoran Wang, Haoyu Yang, He Liu, He Zhao, Hongwei Liu, Hongxi Yan, Huan Liu, Huilong Chen, Ji Li, Jiajing Zhao, Jiamin Ren, Jian Jiao, Jiani Zhao, Jianyang Yan, Jiaqi Wang, Jiayi Gui, Jiayue Zhao, Jie Liu, Jijie Li, Jing Li, Jing Lu, Jingsen Wang, Jingwei Yuan, Jingxuan Li, Jingzhao Du, Jinhua Du, Jinxin Liu, Junkai Zhi, Junli Gao, Ke Wang, Lekang Yang, Liang Xu, Lin Fan, Lindong Wu, Lintao Ding, Lu Wang, Man Zhang, Minghao Li, Minghuan Xu, Mingming Zhao, Mingshu Zhai, Pengfan Du, Qian Dong, Shangde Lei, Shangqing Tu, Shangtong Yang, Shaoyou Lu, Shijie Li, Shuang Li, Shuang-Li, Shuxun Yang, Sibo Yi, Tianshu Yu, Wei Tian, Weihan Wang, Wenbo Yu, Weng Lam Tam, Wenjie Liang, Wentao Liu, Xiao Wang, Xiaohan Jia, Xiaotao Gu, Xiaoying Ling, Xin Wang, Xing Fan, Xingru Pan, Xinyuan Zhang, Xinze Zhang, Xiuqing Fu, Xunkai Zhang, Yabo Xu, Yandong Wu, Yida Lu, Yidong Wang, Yilin Zhou, Yiming Pan, Ying Zhang, Yingli Wang, Yingru Li, Yinpei Su, Yipeng Geng, Yitong Zhu, Yongkun Yang, Yuhang Li, Yuhao Wu, Yujiang Li, Yunan Liu, Yunqing Wang, Yuntao Li, Yuxuan Zhang, Zezhen Liu, Zhen Yang, Zhengda Zhou, Zhongpei Qiao, Zhuoer Feng, Zhuorui Liu, Zichen Zhang, Zihan Wang, Zijun Yao, Zikang Wang, Ziqiang Liu, Ziwei Chai, Zixuan Li, Zuodong Zhao, Wenguang Chen, Jidong Zhai, Bin Xu, Minlie Huang, Hongning Wang, Juanzi Li, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 140</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present GLM-4.5, an open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) large language model with 355B total parameters and 32B activated parameters, featuring a hybrid reasoning method that supports both thinking and direct response modes. Through multi-stage training on 23T tokens and comprehensive post-training with expert model iteration and reinforcement learning, GLM-4.5 achieves strong performance across agentic, reasoning, and coding (ARC) tasks, scoring 70.1% on TAU-Bench, 91.0% on AIME 24, and 64.2% on SWE-bench Verified. With much fewer parameters than several competitors, GLM-4.5 ranks 3rd overall among all evaluated models and 2nd on agentic benchmarks. We release both GLM-4.5 (355B parameters) and a compact version, GLM-4.5-Air (106B parameters), to advance research in reasoning and agentic AI systems. Code, models, and more information are available at https://github.com/zai-org/GLM-4.5.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06471 - Fri, 08 Aug 2025 17:21:06 +0000 + Representing Speech Through Autoregressive Prediction of Cochlear Tokens + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11598 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.11598.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Greta Tuckute, Klemen Kotar, Evelina Fedorenko, Daniel L. K. Yamins</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 16</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We introduce AuriStream, a biologically inspired model for encoding speech via a two-stage framework inspired by the human auditory processing hierarchy. The first stage transforms raw audio into a time-frequency representation based on the human cochlea, from which we extract discrete cochlear tokens. The second stage applies an autoregressive sequence model over the cochlear tokens. AuriStream learns meaningful phoneme and word representations, and state-of-the-art lexical semantics. AuriStream shows competitive performance on diverse downstream SUPERB speech tasks. Complementing AuriStream's strong representational capabilities, it generates continuations of audio which can be visualized in a spectrogram space and decoded back into audio, providing insights into the model's predictions. In summary, we present a two-stage framework for speech representation learning to advance the development of more human-like models that efficiently handle a range of speech-based tasks.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11598 + Fri, 15 Aug 2025 17:06:04 +0000 - BrowseComp-Plus: A More Fair and Transparent Evaluation Benchmark of Deep-Research Agent - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06600 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.06600.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zijian Chen, Xueguang Ma, Shengyao Zhuang, Ping Nie, Kai Zou, Andrew Liu, Joshua Green, Kshama Patel, Ruoxi Meng, Mingyi Su, Sahel Sharifymoghaddam, Yanxi Li, Haoran Hong, Xinyu Shi, Xuye Liu, Nandan Thakur, Crystina Zhang, Luyu Gao, Wenhu Chen, Jimmy Lin</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 37</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Deep-Research agents, which integrate large language models (LLMs) with search tools, have shown success in improving the effectiveness of handling complex queries that require iterative search planning and reasoning over search results. Evaluations on current benchmarks like BrowseComp relies on black-box live web search APIs, have notable limitations in (1) fairness: dynamic and opaque web APIs hinder fair comparisons and reproducibility of deep research methods; (2) transparency: lack of control over the document corpus makes it difficult to isolate retriever contributions. In other words, the current evaluations may compare a complete deep research system at a given time, but they do not foster well-controlled experiments to provide insights into the capability of underlying deep research LLMs. To address these challenges, we introduce BrowseComp-Plus, a benchmark derived from BrowseComp, employing a fixed, carefully curated corpus. Each query in BrowseComp-Plus includes human-verified supporting documents and mined challenging negatives, enabling controlled experimentation. The benchmark is shown to be effective in distinguishing the performance of deep research systems. For instance, the open-source model Search-R1, when paired with the BM25 retriever, achieves 3.86% accuracy, whereas the GPT-5 achieves 55.9%. Integrating the GPT-5 with the Qwen3-Embedding-8B retriever further enhances its accuracy to 70.1% with fewer search calls. This benchmark allows comprehensive evaluation and disentangled analysis of deep research agents and retrieval methods, fostering insights into retrieval effectiveness, citation accuracy, and context engineering in Deep-Research system.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06600 - Fri, 08 Aug 2025 17:55:11 +0000 + Controlling Multimodal LLMs via Reward-guided Decoding + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11616 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.11616.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Oscar Mañas, Pierluca D'Oro, Koustuv Sinha, Adriana Romero-Soriano, Michal Drozdzal, Aishwarya Agrawal</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 6</p><p><b>Summary:</b> As Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) gain widespread applicability, it is becoming increasingly desirable to adapt them for diverse user needs. In this paper, we study the adaptation of MLLMs through controlled decoding. To achieve this, we introduce the first method for reward-guided decoding of MLLMs and demonstrate its application in improving their visual grounding. Our method involves building reward models for visual grounding and using them to guide the MLLM's decoding process. Concretely, we build two separate reward models to independently control the degree of object precision and recall in the model's output. Our approach enables on-the-fly controllability of an MLLM's inference process in two ways: first, by giving control over the relative importance of each reward function during decoding, allowing a user to dynamically trade off object precision for recall in image captioning tasks; second, by giving control over the breadth of the search during decoding, allowing the user to control the trade-off between the amount of test-time compute and the degree of visual grounding. We evaluate our method on standard object hallucination benchmarks, showing that it provides significant controllability over MLLM inference, while consistently outperforming existing hallucination mitigation methods.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11616 + Fri, 15 Aug 2025 17:29:06 +0000 - Deep Ignorance: Filtering Pretraining Data Builds Tamper-Resistant Safeguards into Open-Weight LLMs - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06601 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.06601.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Kyle O'Brien, Stephen Casper, Quentin Anthony, Tomek Korbak, Robert Kirk, Xander Davies, Ishan Mishra, Geoffrey Irving, Yarin Gal, Stella Biderman</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Open-weight AI systems offer unique benefits, including enhanced transparency, open research, and decentralized access. However, they are vulnerable to tampering attacks which can efficiently elicit harmful behaviors by modifying weights or activations. Currently, there is not yet a robust science of open-weight model risk management. Existing safety fine-tuning methods and other post-training techniques have struggled to make LLMs resistant to more than a few dozen steps of adversarial fine-tuning. In this paper, we investigate whether filtering text about dual-use topics from training data can prevent unwanted capabilities and serve as a more tamper-resistant safeguard. We introduce a multi-stage pipeline for scalable data filtering and show that it offers a tractable and effective method for minimizing biothreat proxy knowledge in LLMs. We pretrain multiple 6.9B-parameter models from scratch and find that they exhibit substantial resistance to adversarial fine-tuning attacks on up to 10,000 steps and 300M tokens of biothreat-related text -- outperforming existing post-training baselines by over an order of magnitude -- with no observed degradation to unrelated capabilities. However, while filtered models lack internalized dangerous knowledge, we find that they can still leverage such information when it is provided in context (e.g., via search tool augmentation), demonstrating a need for a defense-in-depth approach. Overall, these findings help to establish pretraining data curation as a promising layer of defense for open-weight AI systems.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06601 - Fri, 08 Aug 2025 17:59:47 +0000 + Thyme: Think Beyond Images + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11630 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.11630.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yi-Fan Zhang, Xingyu Lu, Shukang Yin, Chaoyou Fu, Wei Chen, Xiao Hu, Bin Wen, Kaiyu Jiang, Changyi Liu, Tianke Zhang, Haonan Fan, Kaibing Chen, Jiankang Chen, Haojie Ding, Kaiyu Tang, Zhang Zhang, Liang Wang, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Guorui Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 75</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Following OpenAI's introduction of the ``thinking with images'' concept, recent efforts have explored stimulating the use of visual information in the reasoning process to enhance model performance in perception and reasoning tasks. However, to the best of our knowledge, no open-source work currently offers a feature set as rich as proprietary models (O3), which can perform diverse image manipulations and simultaneously enhance logical reasoning capabilities through code. In this paper, we make a preliminary attempt in this direction by introducing Thyme (Think Beyond Images), a novel paradigm for enabling MLLMs to transcend existing ``think with images'' approaches by autonomously generating and executing diverse image processing and computational operations via executable code. This approach not only facilitates a rich, on-the-fly set of image manipulations (e.g., cropping, rotation, contrast enhancement) but also allows for mathematical computations, all while maintaining high autonomy in deciding when and how to apply these operations. We activate this capability through a two-stage training strategy: an initial SFT on a curated dataset of 500K samples to teach code generation, followed by a RL phase to refine decision-making. For the RL stage, we manually collect and design high-resolution question-answer pairs to increase the learning difficulty, and we propose GRPO-ATS (Group Relative Policy Optimization with Adaptive Temperature Sampling), an algorithm that applies distinct temperatures to text and code generation to balance reasoning exploration with code execution precision. We conduct extensive experimental analysis and ablation studies. Comprehensive evaluations on nearly 20 benchmarks show that Thyme yields significant and consistent performance gains, particularly in challenging high-resolution perception and complex reasoning tasks.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11630 + Fri, 15 Aug 2025 17:59:49 +0000 - LightSwitch: Multi-view Relighting with Material-guided Diffusion - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06494 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.06494.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yehonathan Litman, Fernando De la Torre, Shubham Tulsiani</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent approaches for 3D relighting have shown promise in integrating 2D image relighting generative priors to alter the appearance of a 3D representation while preserving the underlying structure. Nevertheless, generative priors used for 2D relighting that directly relight from an input image do not take advantage of intrinsic properties of the subject that can be inferred or cannot consider multi-view data at scale, leading to subpar relighting. In this paper, we propose Lightswitch, a novel finetuned material-relighting diffusion framework that efficiently relights an arbitrary number of input images to a target lighting condition while incorporating cues from inferred intrinsic properties. By using multi-view and material information cues together with a scalable denoising scheme, our method consistently and efficiently relights dense multi-view data of objects with diverse material compositions. We show that our 2D relighting prediction quality exceeds previous state-of-the-art relighting priors that directly relight from images. We further demonstrate that LightSwitch matches or outperforms state-of-the-art diffusion inverse rendering methods in relighting synthetic and real objects in as little as 2 minutes.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06494 - Fri, 08 Aug 2025 17:59:52 +0000 + FutureX: An Advanced Live Benchmark for LLM Agents in Future Prediction + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11987 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.11987.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhiyuan Zeng, Jiashuo Liu, Siyuan Chen, Tianci He, Yali Liao, Jinpeng Wang, Zaiyuan Wang, Yang Yang, Lingyue Yin, Mingren Yin, Zhenwei Zhu, Tianle Cai, Zehui Chen, Jiecao Chen, Yantao Du, Xiang Gao, Jiacheng Guo, Liang Hu, Jianpeng Jiao, Xiangsheng Li, Jingkai Liu, Shuang Ni, Zhoufutu Wen, Ge Zhang, Kaiyuan Zhang, Xin Zhou, Jose Blanchet, Xipeng Qiu, Mengdi Wang, Wenhao Huang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 57</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Future prediction is a complex task for LLM agents, requiring a high level of analytical thinking, information gathering, contextual understanding, and decision-making under uncertainty. Agents must not only gather and interpret vast amounts of dynamic information but also integrate diverse data sources, weigh uncertainties, and adapt predictions based on emerging trends, just as human experts do in fields like politics, economics, and finance. Despite its importance, no large-scale benchmark exists for evaluating agents on future prediction, largely due to challenges in handling real-time updates and retrieving timely, accurate answers. To address this, we introduce FutureX, a dynamic and live evaluation benchmark specifically designed for LLM agents performing future prediction tasks. FutureX is the largest and most diverse live benchmark for future prediction, supporting real-time daily updates and eliminating data contamination through an automated pipeline for question gathering and answer collection. We evaluate 25 LLM/agent models, including those with reasoning, search capabilities, and integration of external tools such as the open-source Deep Research Agent and closed-source Deep Research models. This comprehensive evaluation assesses agents' adaptive reasoning and performance in dynamic environments. Additionally, we provide in-depth analyses of agents' failure modes and performance pitfalls in future-oriented tasks, including the vulnerability to fake web pages and the temporal validity. Our goal is to establish a dynamic, contamination-free evaluation standard that drives the development of LLM agents capable of performing at the level of professional human analysts in complex reasoning and predictive thinking.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11987 + Sat, 16 Aug 2025 08:54:08 +0000 - Anatomy of a Machine Learning Ecosystem: 2 Million Models on Hugging Face - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06811 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.06811.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Benjamin Laufer, Hamidah Oderinwale, Jon Kleinberg</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Many have observed that the development and deployment of generative machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) models follow a distinctive pattern in which pre-trained models are adapted and fine-tuned for specific downstream tasks. However, there is limited empirical work that examines the structure of these interactions. This paper analyzes 1.86 million models on Hugging Face, a leading peer production platform for model development. Our study of model family trees -- networks that connect fine-tuned models to their base or parent -- reveals sprawling fine-tuning lineages that vary widely in size and structure. Using an evolutionary biology lens to study ML models, we use model metadata and model cards to measure the genetic similarity and mutation of traits over model families. We find that models tend to exhibit a family resemblance, meaning their genetic markers and traits exhibit more overlap when they belong to the same model family. However, these similarities depart in certain ways from standard models of asexual reproduction, because mutations are fast and directed, such that two `sibling' models tend to exhibit more similarity than parent/child pairs. Further analysis of the directional drifts of these mutations reveals qualitative insights about the open machine learning ecosystem: Licenses counter-intuitively drift from restrictive, commercial licenses towards permissive or copyleft licenses, often in violation of upstream license's terms; models evolve from multi-lingual compatibility towards english-only compatibility; and model cards reduce in length and standardize by turning, more often, to templates and automatically generated text. Overall, this work takes a step toward an empirically grounded understanding of model fine-tuning and suggests that ecological models and methods can yield novel scientific insights.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06811 - Sat, 09 Aug 2025 04:08:49 +0000 + Mind the Generation Process: Fine-Grained Confidence Estimation During LLM Generation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12040 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.12040.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jinyi Han, Tingyun Li, Shisong Chen, Jie Shi, Xinyi Wang, Guanglei Yue, Jiaqing Liang, Xin Lin, Liqian Wen, Zulong Chen, Yanghua Xiao</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 13</p><p><b>Summary:</b> While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse tasks, they fundamentally lack self-awareness and frequently exhibit overconfidence, assigning high confidence scores to incorrect predictions. Accurate confidence estimation is therefore critical for enhancing the trustworthiness and reliability of LLM-generated outputs. However, existing approaches suffer from coarse-grained scoring mechanisms that fail to provide fine-grained, continuous confidence estimates throughout the generation process. To address these limitations, we introduce FineCE, a novel confidence estimation method that delivers accurate, fine-grained confidence scores during text generation. Specifically, we first develop a comprehensive pipeline for constructing training data that effectively captures the underlying probabilistic distribution of LLM responses, and then train a model to predict confidence scores for arbitrary text sequences in a supervised manner. Furthermore, we propose a Backward Confidence Integration (BCI) strategy that leverages information from the subsequent text to enhance confidence estimation for the current sequence during inference. We also introduce three strategies for identifying optimal positions to perform confidence estimation within the generation process. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that FineCE consistently outperforms existing classical confidence estimation methods. Our code and all baselines used in the paper are available on GitHub.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12040 + Sat, 16 Aug 2025 13:29:35 +0000 - Technical Report: Full-Stack Fine-Tuning for the Q Programming Language - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06813 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.06813.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Brendan R. Hogan, Will Brown, Adel Boyarsky, Anderson Schneider, Yuriy Nevmyvaka</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Even though large language models are becoming increasingly capable, it is still unreasonable to expect them to excel at tasks that are under-represented on the Internet. Leveraging LLMs for specialized applications, particularly in niche programming languages and private domains, remains challenging and largely unsolved. In this work, we address this gap by presenting a comprehensive, open-source approach for adapting LLMs to the Q programming language, a popular tool in quantitative finance that is much less present on the Internet compared to Python, C, Java, and other ``mainstream" languages and is therefore not a strong suit of general-purpose AI models. We introduce a new Leetcode style evaluation dataset for Q, benchmark major frontier models on the dataset, then do pretraining, supervised fine tuning, and reinforcement learning to train a suite of reasoning and non-reasoning models based on the Qwen-2.5 series, spanning five parameter sizes (1.5B, 3B, 7B, 14B, 32B). Our best model achieves a pass@1 accuracy of 59 percent on our Q benchmark, surpassing the best-performing frontier model, Claude Opus-4 by 29.5 percent. Additionally, all models, even our 1.5B model, outperform GPT-4.1 on this task. In addition to releasing models, code, and data, we provide a detailed blueprint for dataset construction, model pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. Our methodology is broadly applicable, and we discuss how these techniques can be extended to other tasks, including those where evaluation may rely on soft or subjective signals.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06813 - Sat, 09 Aug 2025 04:22:07 +0000 + Inverse-LLaVA: Eliminating Alignment Pre-training Through Text-to-Vision Mapping + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12466 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.12466.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xuhui Zhan, Tyler Derr</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 8</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Traditional multimodal learning approaches require expensive alignment pre-training to bridge vision and language modalities, typically projecting visual features into discrete text token spaces. We challenge both fundamental assumptions underlying this paradigm by proposing Inverse-LLaVA, a novel approach that eliminates alignment pre-training entirely while inverting the conventional mapping direction. Rather than projecting visual features to text space, our method maps text embeddings into continuous visual representation space and performs fusion within transformer intermediate layers. Through selective additive components in attention mechanisms, we enable dynamic integration of visual and textual representations without requiring massive image-text alignment datasets. Comprehensive experiments across nine multimodal benchmarks demonstrate nuanced performance trade-offs: Inverse-LLaVA achieves notable improvements on reasoning-intensive and cognitive tasks (MM-VET: +0.2%, VizWiz: +1.8%, ScienceQA: +0.2%, cognitive reasoning: +27.2%), while showing expected decreases in perception tasks requiring memorized visual-text associations (celebrity recognition: -49.5%, OCR: -21.3%). These results provide the first empirical evidence that alignment pre-training is not necessary for effective multimodal learning, particularly for complex reasoning tasks. Our work establishes the feasibility of a new paradigm that reduces computational requirements by 45%, challenges conventional wisdom about modality fusion, and opens new research directions for efficient multimodal architectures that preserve modality-specific characteristics. Our project website with code and additional resources is available at https://inverse-llava.github.io.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12466 + Sun, 17 Aug 2025 18:36:04 +0000 - CannyEdit: Selective Canny Control and Dual-Prompt Guidance for Training-Free Image Editing - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06937 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.06937.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Weiyan Xie, Han Gao, Didan Deng, Kaican Li, April Hua Liu, Yongxiang Huang, Nevin L. Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) models have enabled training-free regional image editing by leveraging the generative priors of foundation models. However, existing methods struggle to balance text adherence in edited regions, context fidelity in unedited areas, and seamless integration of edits. We introduce CannyEdit, a novel training-free framework that addresses these challenges through two key innovations: (1) Selective Canny Control, which masks the structural guidance of Canny ControlNet in user-specified editable regions while strictly preserving details of the source images in unedited areas via inversion-phase ControlNet information retention. This enables precise, text-driven edits without compromising contextual integrity. (2) Dual-Prompt Guidance, which combines local prompts for object-specific edits with a global target prompt to maintain coherent scene interactions. On real-world image editing tasks (addition, replacement, removal), CannyEdit outperforms prior methods like KV-Edit, achieving a 2.93 to 10.49 percent improvement in the balance of text adherence and context fidelity. In terms of editing seamlessness, user studies reveal only 49.2 percent of general users and 42.0 percent of AIGC experts identified CannyEdit's results as AI-edited when paired with real images without edits, versus 76.08 to 89.09 percent for competitor methods.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06937 - Sat, 09 Aug 2025 11:06:58 +0000 + CorrSteer: Steering Improves Task Performance and Safety in LLMs through Correlation-based Sparse Autoencoder Feature Selection + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12535 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.12535.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Seonglae Cho, Zekun Wu, Adriano Koshiyama</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) can extract interpretable features from large language models (LLMs) without supervision. However, their effectiveness in downstream steering tasks is limited by the requirement for contrastive datasets or large activation storage. To address these limitations, we propose CorrSteer, which selects features by correlating sample correctness with SAE activations from generated tokens at inference time. This approach uses only inference-time activations to extract more relevant features, thereby avoiding spurious correlations. It also obtains steering coefficients from average activations, automating the entire pipeline. Our method shows improved task performance on QA, bias mitigation, jailbreaking prevention, and reasoning benchmarks on Gemma 2 2B and LLaMA 3.1 8B, notably achieving a +4.1% improvement in MMLU performance and a +22.9% improvement in HarmBench with only 4000 samples. Selected features demonstrate semantically meaningful patterns aligned with each task's requirements, revealing the underlying capabilities that drive performance. Our work establishes correlationbased selection as an effective and scalable approach for automated SAE steering across language model applications.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12535 + Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:01:42 +0000 - AMFT: Aligning LLM Reasoners by Meta-Learning the Optimal Imitation-Exploration Balance - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06944 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.06944.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Lixuan He, Jie Feng, Yong Li</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically fine-tuned for reasoning tasks through a two-stage pipeline of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL), a process fraught with catastrophic forgetting and suboptimal trade-offs between imitation and exploration. Recent single-stage methods attempt to unify SFT and RL using heuristics, but lack a principled mechanism for dynamically balancing the two paradigms. In this paper, we reframe this challenge through the theoretical lens of implicit rewards, viewing SFT and RL not as distinct methods but as complementary reward signals. We introduce Adaptive Meta Fine-Tuning (AMFT), a novel single-stage algorithm that learns the optimal balance between SFT's implicit, path-level reward and RL's explicit, outcome-based reward. The core of AMFT is a meta-gradient adaptive weight controller that treats the SFT-RL balance as a learnable parameter, dynamically optimizing it to maximize long-term task performance. This forward-looking approach, regularized by policy entropy for stability, autonomously discovers an effective training curriculum. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation on challenging benchmarks spanning mathematical reasoning, abstract visual reasoning (General Points), and vision-language navigation (V-IRL). AMFT consistently establishes a new state-of-the-art and demonstrats superior generalization on out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks. Ablation studies and training dynamic analysis confirm that the meta-learning controller is crucial for AMFT's stability, sample efficiency, and performance, offering a more principled and effective paradigm for LLM alignment.Our codes are open-sourced via https://github.com/hlxtsyj/AMFT.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06944 - Sat, 09 Aug 2025 11:40:54 +0000 + FLARE: Fast Low-rank Attention Routing Engine + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12594 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.12594.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Vedant Puri, Aditya Joglekar, Kevin Ferguson, Yu-hsuan Chen, Yongjie Jessica Zhang, Levent Burak Kara</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The quadratic complexity of self-attention limits its applicability and scalability on large unstructured meshes. We introduce Fast Low-rank Attention Routing Engine (FLARE), a linear complexity self-attention mechanism that routes attention through fixed-length latent sequences. Each attention head performs global communication among N tokens by projecting the input sequence onto a fixed length latent sequence of M ll N tokens using learnable query tokens. By routing attention through a bottleneck sequence, FLARE learns a low-rank form of attention that can be applied at O(NM) cost. FLARE not only scales to unprecedented problem sizes, but also delivers superior accuracy compared to state-of-the-art neural PDE surrogates across diverse benchmarks. We also release a new additive manufacturing dataset to spur further research. Our code is available at https://github.com/vpuri3/FLARE.py.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12594 + Mon, 18 Aug 2025 03:00:55 +0000 - Adversarial Video Promotion Against Text-to-Video Retrieval - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06964 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.06964.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Qiwei Tian, Chenhao Lin, Zhengyu Zhao, Qian Li, Shuai Liu, Chao Shen</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 8</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Thanks to the development of cross-modal models, text-to-video retrieval (T2VR) is advancing rapidly, but its robustness remains largely unexamined. Existing attacks against T2VR are designed to push videos away from queries, i.e., suppressing the ranks of videos, while the attacks that pull videos towards selected queries, i.e., promoting the ranks of videos, remain largely unexplored. These attacks can be more impactful as attackers may gain more views/clicks for financial benefits and widespread (mis)information. To this end, we pioneer the first attack against T2VR to promote videos adversarially, dubbed the Video Promotion attack (ViPro). We further propose Modal Refinement (MoRe) to capture the finer-grained, intricate interaction between visual and textual modalities to enhance black-box transferability. Comprehensive experiments cover 2 existing baselines, 3 leading T2VR models, 3 prevailing datasets with over 10k videos, evaluated under 3 scenarios. All experiments are conducted in a multi-target setting to reflect realistic scenarios where attackers seek to promote the video regarding multiple queries simultaneously. We also evaluated our attacks for defences and imperceptibility. Overall, ViPro surpasses other baselines by over 30/10/4% for white/grey/black-box settings on average. Our work highlights an overlooked vulnerability, provides a qualitative analysis on the upper/lower bound of our attacks, and offers insights into potential counterplays. Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/michaeltian108/ViPro.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06964 - Sat, 09 Aug 2025 12:20:13 +0000 + From AI for Science to Agentic Science: A Survey on Autonomous Scientific Discovery + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14111 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.14111.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jiaqi Wei, Yuejin Yang, Xiang Zhang, Yuhan Chen, Xiang Zhuang, Zhangyang Gao, Dongzhan Zhou, Guangshuai Wang, Zhiqiang Gao, Juntai Cao, Zijie Qiu, Xuming He, Qiang Zhang, Chenyu You, Shuangjia Zheng, Ning Ding, Wanli Ouyang, Nanqing Dong, Yu Cheng, Siqi Sun, Lei Bai, Bowen Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 25</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping scientific discovery, evolving from specialized computational tools into autonomous research partners. We position Agentic Science as a pivotal stage within the broader AI for Science paradigm, where AI systems progress from partial assistance to full scientific agency. Enabled by large language models (LLMs), multimodal systems, and integrated research platforms, agentic AI shows capabilities in hypothesis generation, experimental design, execution, analysis, and iterative refinement -- behaviors once regarded as uniquely human. This survey provides a domain-oriented review of autonomous scientific discovery across life sciences, chemistry, materials science, and physics. We unify three previously fragmented perspectives -- process-oriented, autonomy-oriented, and mechanism-oriented -- through a comprehensive framework that connects foundational capabilities, core processes, and domain-specific realizations. Building on this framework, we (i) trace the evolution of AI for Science, (ii) identify five core capabilities underpinning scientific agency, (iii) model discovery as a dynamic four-stage workflow, (iv) review applications across the above domains, and (v) synthesize key challenges and future opportunities. This work establishes a domain-oriented synthesis of autonomous scientific discovery and positions Agentic Science as a structured paradigm for advancing AI-driven research.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14111 + Mon, 18 Aug 2025 05:25:54 +0000 - ReasonRank: Empowering Passage Ranking with Strong Reasoning Ability - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07050 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.07050.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Wenhan Liu, Xinyu Ma, Weiwei Sun, Yutao Zhu, Yuchen Li, Dawei Yin, Zhicheng Dou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 110</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Model (LLM) based listwise ranking has shown superior performance in many passage ranking tasks. With the development of Large Reasoning Models, many studies have demonstrated that step-by-step reasoning during test-time helps improve listwise ranking performance. However, due to the scarcity of reasoning-intensive training data, existing rerankers perform poorly in many complex ranking scenarios and the ranking ability of reasoning-intensive rerankers remains largely underdeveloped. In this paper, we first propose an automated reasoning-intensive training data synthesis framework, which sources training queries and passages from diverse domains and applies DeepSeek-R1 to generate high-quality training labels. A self-consistency data filtering mechanism is designed to ensure the data quality. To empower the listwise reranker with strong reasoning ability, we further propose a two-stage post-training approach, which includes a cold-start supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage for reasoning pattern learning and a reinforcement learning (RL) stage for further ranking ability enhancement. During the RL stage, based on the nature of listwise ranking, we design a multi-view ranking reward, which is more effective than a ranking metric-based reward. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our trained reasoning-intensive reranker ReasonRank outperforms existing baselines significantly and also achieves much lower latency than pointwise reranker Rank1. Through further experiments, our ReasonRank has achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance 40.6 on the BRIGHT leaderboard\footnote{https://brightbenchmark.github.io/.} Our codes are available at https://github.com/8421BCD/ReasonRank.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07050 - Sat, 09 Aug 2025 17:26:18 +0000 + Leveraging Large Language Models for Predictive Analysis of Human Misery + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12669 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.12669.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Bishanka Seal, Rahul Seetharaman, Aman Bansal, Abhilash Nandy</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 13</p><p><b>Summary:</b> This study investigates the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for predicting human-perceived misery scores from natural language descriptions of real-world scenarios. The task is framed as a regression problem, where the model assigns a scalar value from 0 to 100 to each input statement. We evaluate multiple prompting strategies, including zero-shot, fixed-context few-shot, and retrieval-based prompting using BERT sentence embeddings. Few-shot approaches consistently outperform zero-shot baselines, underscoring the value of contextual examples in affective prediction. To move beyond static evaluation, we introduce the "Misery Game Show", a novel gamified framework inspired by a television format. It tests LLMs through structured rounds involving ordinal comparison, binary classification, scalar estimation, and feedback-driven reasoning. This setup enables us to assess not only predictive accuracy but also the model's ability to adapt based on corrective feedback. The gamified evaluation highlights the broader potential of LLMs in dynamic emotional reasoning tasks beyond standard regression. Code and data link: https://github.com/abhi1nandy2/Misery_Data_Exps_GitHub</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12669 + Mon, 18 Aug 2025 07:02:59 +0000 - Less Is More: Training-Free Sparse Attention with Global Locality for Efficient Reasoning - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07101 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.07101.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Lijie Yang, Zhihao Zhang, Arti Jain, Shijie Cao, Baihong Yuan, Yiwei Chen, Zhihao Jia, Ravi Netravali</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 13</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large reasoning models achieve strong performance through test-time scaling but incur substantial computational overhead, particularly from excessive token generation when processing short input prompts. While sparse attention mechanisms can reduce latency and memory usage, existing approaches suffer from significant accuracy degradation due to accumulated errors during long-generation reasoning. These methods generally require either high token retention rates or expensive retraining. We introduce LessIsMore, a training-free sparse attention mechanism for reasoning tasks, which leverages global attention patterns rather than relying on traditional head-specific local optimizations. LessIsMore aggregates token selections from local attention heads with recent contextual information, enabling unified cross-head token ranking for future decoding layers. This unified selection improves generalization and efficiency by avoiding the need to maintain separate token subsets per head. Evaluation across diverse reasoning tasks and benchmarks shows that LessIsMore preserves -- and in some cases improves -- accuracy while achieving a 1.1times average decoding speed-up compared to full attention. Moreover, LessIsMore attends to 2times fewer tokens without accuracy loss, achieving a 1.13times end-to-end speed-up compared to existing sparse attention methods.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07101 - Sat, 09 Aug 2025 21:10:33 +0000 + Unlearning Comparator: A Visual Analytics System for Comparative Evaluation of Machine Unlearning Methods + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12730 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.12730.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jaeung Lee, Suhyeon Yu, Yurim Jang, Simon S. Woo, Jaemin Jo</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Machine Unlearning (MU) aims to remove target training data from a trained model so that the removed data no longer influences the model's behavior, fulfilling "right to be forgotten" obligations under data privacy laws. Yet, we observe that researchers in this rapidly emerging field face challenges in analyzing and understanding the behavior of different MU methods, especially in terms of three fundamental principles in MU: accuracy, efficiency, and privacy. Consequently, they often rely on aggregate metrics and ad-hoc evaluations, making it difficult to accurately assess the trade-offs between methods. To fill this gap, we introduce a visual analytics system, Unlearning Comparator, designed to facilitate the systematic evaluation of MU methods. Our system supports two important tasks in the evaluation process: model comparison and attack simulation. First, it allows the user to compare the behaviors of two models, such as a model generated by a certain method and a retrained baseline, at class-, instance-, and layer-levels to better understand the changes made after unlearning. Second, our system simulates membership inference attacks (MIAs) to evaluate the privacy of a method, where an attacker attempts to determine whether specific data samples were part of the original training set. We evaluate our system through a case study visually analyzing prominent MU methods and demonstrate that it helps the user not only understand model behaviors but also gain insights that can inform the improvement of MU methods.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12730 + Mon, 18 Aug 2025 08:53:53 +0000 - ASM-UNet: Adaptive Scan Mamba Integrating Group Commonalities and Individual Variations for Fine-Grained Segmentation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07237 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.07237.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Bo Wang, Mengyuan Xu, Yue Yan, Yuqun Yang, Kechen Shu, Wei Ping, Xu Tang, Wei Jiang, Zheng You</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Precise lesion resection depends on accurately identifying fine-grained anatomical structures. While many coarse-grained segmentation (CGS) methods have been successful in large-scale segmentation (e.g., organs), they fall short in clinical scenarios requiring fine-grained segmentation (FGS), which remains challenging due to frequent individual variations in small-scale anatomical structures. Although recent Mamba-based models have advanced medical image segmentation, they often rely on fixed manually-defined scanning orders, which limit their adaptability to individual variations in FGS. To address this, we propose ASM-UNet, a novel Mamba-based architecture for FGS. It introduces adaptive scan scores to dynamically guide the scanning order, generated by combining group-level commonalities and individual-level variations. Experiments on two public datasets (ACDC and Synapse) and a newly proposed challenging biliary tract FGS dataset, namely BTMS, demonstrate that ASM-UNet achieves superior performance in both CGS and FGS tasks. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/YqunYang/ASM-UNet.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07237 - Sun, 10 Aug 2025 08:33:03 +0000 + HeroBench: A Benchmark for Long-Horizon Planning and Structured Reasoning in Virtual Worlds + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12782 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.12782.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Petr Anokhin, Roman Khalikov, Stefan Rebrikov, Viktor Volkov, Artyom Sorokin, Vincent Bissonnette</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 24</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in isolated step-by-step reasoning tasks such as mathematics and programming, but their proficiency in long-horizon planning, where solutions require extended, structured sequences of interdependent actions, remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks typically assess LLMs through abstract or low-dimensional algorithmic tasks, failing to capture the complexity of realistic planning environments. We introduce HeroBench, a novel benchmark designed specifically to evaluate long-horizon planning and structured reasoning within complex RPG-inspired virtual worlds. HeroBench provides a rigorously constructed dataset of tasks covering a wide range of difficulties, a simulated environment to execute and validate agent plans, and detailed analytical tools for evaluating model performance. Tasks challenge models to formulate strategic plans, efficiently gather resources, master necessary skills, craft equipment, and defeat adversaries, reflecting practical scenarios' layered dependencies and constraints. Our extensive evaluation of 25 state-of-the-art LLMs, spanning both open-source and proprietary models, including the GPT-5 family, reveals substantial performance disparities rarely observed in conventional reasoning benchmarks. Detailed error analysis further uncovers specific weaknesses in current models' abilities to generate robust high-level plans and reliably execute structured actions. HeroBench thus not only significantly advances the evaluation of LLM reasoning but also provides a flexible, scalable foundation for future research into advanced, autonomous planning in virtual environments.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12782 + Mon, 18 Aug 2025 09:59:02 +0000 - A Comprehensive Survey of Self-Evolving AI Agents: A New Paradigm Bridging Foundation Models and Lifelong Agentic Systems - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07407 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.07407.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jinyuan Fang, Yanwen Peng, Xi Zhang, Yingxu Wang, Xinhao Yi, Guibin Zhang, Yi Xu, Bin Wu, Siwei Liu, Zihao Li, Zhaochun Ren, Nikos Aletras, Xi Wang, Han Zhou, Zaiqiao Meng</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 78</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advances in large language models have sparked growing interest in AI agents capable of solving complex, real-world tasks. However, most existing agent systems rely on manually crafted configurations that remain static after deployment, limiting their ability to adapt to dynamic and evolving environments. To this end, recent research has explored agent evolution techniques that aim to automatically enhance agent systems based on interaction data and environmental feedback. This emerging direction lays the foundation for self-evolving AI agents, which bridge the static capabilities of foundation models with the continuous adaptability required by lifelong agentic systems. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of existing techniques for self-evolving agentic systems. Specifically, we first introduce a unified conceptual framework that abstracts the feedback loop underlying the design of self-evolving agentic systems. The framework highlights four key components: System Inputs, Agent System, Environment, and Optimisers, serving as a foundation for understanding and comparing different strategies. Based on this framework, we systematically review a wide range of self-evolving techniques that target different components of the agent system. We also investigate domain-specific evolution strategies developed for specialised fields such as biomedicine, programming, and finance, where optimisation objectives are tightly coupled with domain constraints. In addition, we provide a dedicated discussion on the evaluation, safety, and ethical considerations for self-evolving agentic systems, which are critical to ensuring their effectiveness and reliability. This survey aims to provide researchers and practitioners with a systematic understanding of self-evolving AI agents, laying the foundation for the development of more adaptive, autonomous, and lifelong agentic systems.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07407 - Sun, 10 Aug 2025 16:07:32 +0000 + Reinforcement Learning with Rubric Anchors + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12790 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.12790.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zenan Huang, Yihong Zhuang, Guoshan Lu, Zeyu Qin, Haokai Xu, Tianyu Zhao, Ru Peng, Jiaqi Hu, Zhanming Shen, Xiaomeng Hu, Xijun Gu, Peiyi Tu, Jiaxin Liu, Wenyu Chen, Yuzhuo Fu, Zhiting Fan, Yanmei Gu, Yuanyuan Wang, Zhengkai Yang, Jianguo Li, Junbo Zhao</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 8</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by the success of OpenAI's o-series. In RLVR, rewards are derived from verifiable signals-such as passing unit tests in code generation or matching correct answers in mathematical reasoning. While effective, this requirement largely confines RLVR to domains with automatically checkable outcomes. To overcome this, we extend the RLVR paradigm to open-ended tasks by integrating rubric-based rewards, where carefully designed rubrics serve as structured, model-interpretable criteria for automatic scoring of subjective outputs. We construct, to our knowledge, the largest rubric reward system to date, with over 10,000 rubrics from humans, LLMs, or a hybrid human-LLM collaboration. Implementing rubric-based RL is challenging; we tackle these issues with a clear framework and present an open-sourced Qwen-30B-A3B model with notable gains: 1) With only 5K+ samples, our system improves by +5.2% on open-ended benchmarks (especially humanities), outperforming a 671B DeepSeek-V3 model by +2.4%, while preserving general and reasoning abilities. 2) Our method provides fine-grained stylistic control, using rubrics as anchors to mitigate the "AI-like" tone and produce more human-like, expressive responses. We share key lessons in rubric construction, data selection, and training, and discuss limitations and future releases.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12790 + Mon, 18 Aug 2025 10:06:08 +0000 - CharacterShot: Controllable and Consistent 4D Character Animation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07409 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.07409.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Junyao Gao, Jiaxing Li, Wenran Liu, Yanhong Zeng, Fei Shen, Kai Chen, Yanan Sun, Cairong Zhao</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 36</p><p><b>Summary:</b> In this paper, we propose CharacterShot, a controllable and consistent 4D character animation framework that enables any individual designer to create dynamic 3D characters (i.e., 4D character animation) from a single reference character image and a 2D pose sequence. We begin by pretraining a powerful 2D character animation model based on a cutting-edge DiT-based image-to-video model, which allows for any 2D pose sequnce as controllable signal. We then lift the animation model from 2D to 3D through introducing dual-attention module together with camera prior to generate multi-view videos with spatial-temporal and spatial-view consistency. Finally, we employ a novel neighbor-constrained 4D gaussian splatting optimization on these multi-view videos, resulting in continuous and stable 4D character representations. Moreover, to improve character-centric performance, we construct a large-scale dataset Character4D, containing 13,115 unique characters with diverse appearances and motions, rendered from multiple viewpoints. Extensive experiments on our newly constructed benchmark, CharacterBench, demonstrate that our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods. Code, models, and datasets will be publicly available at https://github.com/Jeoyal/CharacterShot.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07409 - Sun, 10 Aug 2025 16:15:04 +0000 + Atom-Searcher: Enhancing Agentic Deep Research via Fine-Grained Atomic Thought Reward + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12800 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.12800.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yong Deng, Guoqing Wang, Zhenzhe Ying, Xiaofeng Wu, Jinzhen Lin, Wenwen Xiong, Yuqin Dai, Shuo Yang, Zhanwei Zhang, Qiwen Wang, Yang Qin, Changhua Meng</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable problem-solving abilities, but struggle with complex tasks due to static internal knowledge. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances access to external information, yet remains limited in multi-hop reasoning and strategic search due to rigid workflows. Recent advancements in agentic deep research empower LLMs to autonomously reason, search, and synthesize information. However, current approaches relying on outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) face critical issues such as conflicting gradients and reward sparsity, limiting performance gains and training efficiency. To address these, we first propose Atomic Thought, a novel LLM thinking paradigm that decomposes reasoning into fine-grained functional units. These units are supervised by Reasoning Reward Models (RRMs), which provide Atomic Thought Rewards (ATR) for fine-grained guidance. Building on this, we propose Atom-Searcher, a novel RL framework for agentic deep research that integrates Atomic Thought and ATR. Atom-Searcher uses a curriculum-inspired reward schedule, prioritizing process-level ATR early and transitioning to outcome rewards, accelerating convergence on effective reasoning paths. Experiments on seven benchmarks show consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art. Key advantages include: (1) Atom-Searcher scales computation at test-time. (2) Atomic Thought provides supervision anchors for RRMs, bridging deep research tasks and RRMs. (3) Atom-Searcher exhibits more interpretable, human-like reasoning patterns.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12800 + Mon, 18 Aug 2025 10:23:10 +0000 - Democratizing Diplomacy: A Harness for Evaluating Any Large Language Model on Full-Press Diplomacy - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07485 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.07485.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Alexander Duffy, Samuel J Paech, Ishana Shastri, Elizabeth Karpinski, Baptiste Alloui-Cros, Tyler Marques, Matthew Lyle Olson</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 10</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present the first evaluation harness that enables any out-of-the-box, local, Large Language Models (LLMs) to play full-press Diplomacy without fine-tuning or specialized training. Previous work required frontier LLMs, or fine-tuning, due to the high complexity and information density of Diplomacy's game state. Combined with the high variance of matches, these factors made Diplomacy prohibitive for study. In this work, we used data-driven iteration to optimize a textual game state representation such that a 24B model can reliably complete matches without any fine tuning. We develop tooling to facilitate hypothesis testing and statistical analysis, and we present case studies on persuasion, aggressive playstyles, and performance across a range of models. We conduct a variety of experiments across many popular LLMs, finding the larger models perform the best, but the smaller models still play adequately. We also introduce Critical State Analysis: an experimental protocol for rapidly iterating and analyzing key moments in a game at depth. Our harness democratizes the evaluation of strategic reasoning in LLMs by eliminating the need for fine-tuning, and it provides insights into how these capabilities emerge naturally from widely used LLMs. Our code is available in the supplement and will be open sourced.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07485 - Sun, 10 Aug 2025 21:07:08 +0000 + Next Visual Granularity Generation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12811 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.12811.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yikai Wang, Zhouxia Wang, Zhonghua Wu, Qingyi Tao, Kang Liao, Chen Change Loy</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 45</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We propose a novel approach to image generation by decomposing an image into a structured sequence, where each element in the sequence shares the same spatial resolution but differs in the number of unique tokens used, capturing different level of visual granularity. Image generation is carried out through our newly introduced Next Visual Granularity (NVG) generation framework, which generates a visual granularity sequence beginning from an empty image and progressively refines it, from global layout to fine details, in a structured manner. This iterative process encodes a hierarchical, layered representation that offers fine-grained control over the generation process across multiple granularity levels. We train a series of NVG models for class-conditional image generation on the ImageNet dataset and observe clear scaling behavior. Compared to the VAR series, NVG consistently outperforms it in terms of FID scores (3.30 -> 3.03, 2.57 ->2.44, 2.09 -> 2.06). We also conduct extensive analysis to showcase the capability and potential of the NVG framework. Our code and models will be released.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12811 + Mon, 18 Aug 2025 10:47:37 +0000 - VisR-Bench: An Empirical Study on Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Multilingual Long Document Understanding - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07493 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.07493.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jian Chen, Ming Li, Jihyung Kil, Chenguang Wang, Tong Yu, Ryan Rossi, Tianyi Zhou, Changyou Chen, Ruiyi Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 7</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Most organizational data in this world are stored as documents, and visual retrieval plays a crucial role in unlocking the collective intelligence from all these documents. However, existing benchmarks focus on English-only document retrieval or only consider multilingual question-answering on a single-page image. To bridge this gap, we introduce VisR-Bench, a multilingual benchmark designed for question-driven multimodal retrieval in long documents. Our benchmark comprises over 35K high-quality QA pairs across 1.2K documents, enabling fine-grained evaluation of multimodal retrieval. VisR-Bench spans sixteen languages with three question types (figures, text, and tables), offering diverse linguistic and question coverage. Unlike prior datasets, we include queries without explicit answers, preventing models from relying on superficial keyword matching. We evaluate various retrieval models, including text-based methods, multimodal encoders, and MLLMs, providing insights into their strengths and limitations. Our results show that while MLLMs significantly outperform text-based and multimodal encoder models, they still struggle with structured tables and low-resource languages, highlighting key challenges in multilingual visual retrieval.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07493 - Sun, 10 Aug 2025 21:44:43 +0000 + CAMAR: Continuous Actions Multi-Agent Routing + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12845 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.12845.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Artem Pshenitsyn, Aleksandr Panov, Alexey Skrynnik</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 6</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a powerful paradigm for solving cooperative and competitive decision-making problems. While many MARL benchmarks have been proposed, few combine continuous state and action spaces with challenging coordination and planning tasks. We introduce CAMAR, a new MARL benchmark designed explicitly for multi-agent pathfinding in environments with continuous actions. CAMAR supports cooperative and competitive interactions between agents and runs efficiently at up to 100,000 environment steps per second. We also propose a three-tier evaluation protocol to better track algorithmic progress and enable deeper analysis of performance. In addition, CAMAR allows the integration of classical planning methods such as RRT and RRT* into MARL pipelines. We use them as standalone baselines and combine RRT* with popular MARL algorithms to create hybrid approaches. We provide a suite of test scenarios and benchmarking tools to ensure reproducibility and fair comparison. Experiments show that CAMAR presents a challenging and realistic testbed for the MARL community.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12845 + Mon, 18 Aug 2025 11:32:26 +0000 - Klear-Reasoner: Advancing Reasoning Capability via Gradient-Preserving Clipping Policy Optimization - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07629 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.07629.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhenpeng Su, Leiyu Pan, Xue Bai, Dening Liu, Guanting Dong, Jiaming Huang, Wenping Hu, Guorui Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 36</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present Klear-Reasoner, a model with long reasoning capabilities that demonstrates careful deliberation during problem solving, achieving outstanding performance across multiple benchmarks. Although there are already many excellent works related to inference models in the current community, there are still many problems with reproducing high-performance inference models due to incomplete disclosure of training details. This report provides an in-depth analysis of the reasoning model, covering the entire post-training workflow from data preparation and long Chain-of-Thought supervised fine-tuning (long CoT SFT) to reinforcement learning (RL), along with detailed ablation studies for each experimental component. For SFT data, our experiments show that a small number of high-quality data sources are more effective than a large number of diverse data sources, and that difficult samples can achieve better results without accuracy filtering. In addition, we investigate two key issues with current clipping mechanisms in RL: Clipping suppresses critical exploration signals and ignores suboptimal trajectories. To address these challenges, we propose Gradient-Preserving clipping Policy Optimization (GPPO) that gently backpropagates gradients from clipped tokens. GPPO not only enhances the model's exploration capacity but also improves its efficiency in learning from negative samples. Klear-Reasoner exhibits exceptional reasoning abilities in mathematics and programming, scoring 90.5\% on AIME 2024, 83.2\% on AIME 2025, 66.0\% on LiveCodeBench V5 and 58.1\% on LiveCodeBench V6.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07629 - Mon, 11 Aug 2025 05:17:51 +0000 + S^2-Guidance: Stochastic Self Guidance for Training-Free Enhancement of Diffusion Models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12880 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.12880.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Chubin Chen, Jiashu Zhu, Xiaokun Feng, Nisha Huang, Meiqi Wu, Fangyuan Mao, Jiahong Wu, Xiangxiang Chu, Xiu Li</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 42</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Classifier-free Guidance (CFG) is a widely used technique in modern diffusion models for enhancing sample quality and prompt adherence. However, through an empirical analysis on Gaussian mixture modeling with a closed-form solution, we observe a discrepancy between the suboptimal results produced by CFG and the ground truth. The model's excessive reliance on these suboptimal predictions often leads to semantic incoherence and low-quality outputs. To address this issue, we first empirically demonstrate that the model's suboptimal predictions can be effectively refined using sub-networks of the model itself. Building on this insight, we propose S^2-Guidance, a novel method that leverages stochastic block-dropping during the forward process to construct stochastic sub-networks, effectively guiding the model away from potential low-quality predictions and toward high-quality outputs. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on text-to-image and text-to-video generation tasks demonstrate that S^2-Guidance delivers superior performance, consistently surpassing CFG and other advanced guidance strategies. Our code will be released.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12880 + Mon, 18 Aug 2025 12:31:20 +0000 - GLiClass: Generalist Lightweight Model for Sequence Classification Tasks - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07662 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.07662.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ihor Stepanov, Mykhailo Shtopko, Dmytro Vodianytskyi, Oleksandr Lukashov, Alexander Yavorskyi, Mykyta Yaroshenko</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 8</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Classification is one of the most widespread tasks in AI applications, serving often as the first step in filtering, sorting, and categorizing data. Since modern AI systems must handle large volumes of input data and early pipeline stages can propagate errors downstream, achieving high efficiency and accuracy is critical. Moreover, classification requirements can change dynamically based on user needs, necessitating models with strong zero-shot capabilities. While generative LLMs have become mainstream for zero-shot classification due to their versatility, they suffer from inconsistent instruction following and computational inefficiency. Cross-encoders, commonly used as rerankers in RAG pipelines, face a different bottleneck: they must process text-label pairs sequentially, significantly reducing efficiency with large label sets. Embedding-based approaches offer good efficiency but struggle with complex scenarios involving logical and semantic constraints. We propose GLiClass, a novel method that adapts the GLiNER architecture for sequence classification tasks. Our approach achieves strong accuracy and efficiency comparable to embedding-based methods, while maintaining the flexibility needed for zero-shot and few-shot learning scenarios. Additionally, we adapted proximal policy optimization (PPO) for multi-label text classification, enabling training classifiers in data-sparse conditions or from human feedback.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07662 - Mon, 11 Aug 2025 06:22:25 +0000 + A Stitch in Time Saves Nine: Proactive Self-Refinement for Language Models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12903 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.12903.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jinyi Han, Xinyi Wang, Haiquan Zhao, Tingyun li, Zishang Jiang, Sihang Jiang, Jiaqing Liang, Xin Lin, Weikang Zhou, Zeye Sun, Fei Yu, Yanghua Xiao</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 10</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advances in self-refinement have demonstrated significant potential for improving the outputs of large language models (LLMs) through iterative refinement. However, most existing self-refinement methods rely on a reactive process with a fixed number of iterations, making it difficult to determine the optimal timing and content of refinement based on the evolving generation context. Inspired by the way humans dynamically refine their thoughts during execution, we propose ProActive Self-Refinement (PASR), a novel method that enables LLMs to refine their outputs during the generation process. Unlike methods that regenerate entire responses, PASR proactively decides whether, when, and how to refine based on the model's internal state and evolving context. We conduct extensive experiments on a diverse set of 10 tasks to evaluate the effectiveness of PASR. Experimental results show that PASR significantly enhances problem-solving performance. In particular, on Qwen3-8B, PASR reduces average token consumption by 41.6 percent compared to standard generation, while also achieving an 8.2 percent improvement in accuracy. Our code and all baselines used in the paper are available in the GitHub.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12903 + Mon, 18 Aug 2025 13:07:21 +0000 - Learning to Align, Aligning to Learn: A Unified Approach for Self-Optimized Alignment - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07750 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.07750.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Haowen Wang, Yun Yue, Zhiling Ye, Shuowen Zhang, Lei Fan, Jiaxin Liang, Jiadi Jiang, Cheng Wei, Jingyuan Deng, Xudong Han, Ji Li, Chunxiao Guo, Peng Wei, Jian Wang, Jinjie Gu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 19</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Alignment methodologies have emerged as a critical pathway for enhancing language model alignment capabilities. While SFT (supervised fine-tuning) accelerates convergence through direct token-level loss intervention, its efficacy is constrained by offline policy trajectory. In contrast, RL(reinforcement learning) facilitates exploratory policy optimization, but suffers from low sample efficiency and stringent dependency on high-quality base models. To address these dual challenges, we propose GRAO (Group Relative Alignment Optimization), a unified framework that synergizes the respective strengths of SFT and RL through three key innovations: 1) A multi-sample generation strategy enabling comparative quality assessment via reward feedback; 2) A novel Group Direct Alignment Loss formulation leveraging intra-group relative advantage weighting; 3) Reference-aware parameter updates guided by pairwise preference dynamics. Our theoretical analysis establishes GRAO's convergence guarantees and sample efficiency advantages over conventional approaches. Comprehensive evaluations across complex human alignment tasks demonstrate GRAO's superior performance, achieving 57.70\%,17.65\% 7.95\% and 5.18\% relative improvements over SFT, DPO, PPO and GRPO baselines respectively. This work provides both a theoretically grounded alignment framework and empirical evidence for efficient capability evolution in language models.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07750 - Mon, 11 Aug 2025 08:28:47 +0000 + Lumen: Consistent Video Relighting and Harmonious Background Replacement with Video Generative Models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12945 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.12945.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jianshu Zeng, Yuxuan Liu, Yutong Feng, Chenxuan Miao, Zixiang Gao, Jiwang Qu, Jianzhang Zhang, Bin Wang, Kun Yuan</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 12</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Video relighting is a challenging yet valuable task, aiming to replace the background in videos while correspondingly adjusting the lighting in the foreground with harmonious blending. During translation, it is essential to preserve the original properties of the foreground, e.g., albedo, and propagate consistent relighting among temporal frames. In this paper, we propose Lumen, an end-to-end video relighting framework developed on large-scale video generative models, receiving flexible textual description for instructing the control of lighting and background. Considering the scarcity of high-qualified paired videos with the same foreground in various lighting conditions, we construct a large-scale dataset with a mixture of realistic and synthetic videos. For the synthetic domain, benefiting from the abundant 3D assets in the community, we leverage advanced 3D rendering engine to curate video pairs in diverse environments. For the realistic domain, we adapt a HDR-based lighting simulation to complement the lack of paired in-the-wild videos. Powered by the aforementioned dataset, we design a joint training curriculum to effectively unleash the strengths of each domain, i.e., the physical consistency in synthetic videos, and the generalized domain distribution in realistic videos. To implement this, we inject a domain-aware adapter into the model to decouple the learning of relighting and domain appearance distribution. We construct a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate Lumen together with existing methods, from the perspectives of foreground preservation and video consistency assessment. Experimental results demonstrate that Lumen effectively edit the input into cinematic relighted videos with consistent lighting and strict foreground preservation. Our project page: https://lumen-relight.github.io/</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12945 + Mon, 18 Aug 2025 14:21:22 +0000 - Grove MoE: Towards Efficient and Superior MoE LLMs with Adjugate Experts - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07785 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.07785.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Haoyuan Wu, Haoxing Chen, Xiaodong Chen, Zhanchao Zhou, Tieyuan Chen, Yihong Zhuang, Guoshan Lu, Zenan Huang, Junbo Zhao, Lin Liu, Zhenzhong Lan, Bei Yu, Jianguo Li</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 21</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture is a cornerstone of modern state-of-the-art (SOTA) large language models (LLMs). MoE models facilitate scalability by enabling sparse parameter activation. However, traditional MoE architecture uses homogeneous experts of a uniform size, activating a fixed number of parameters irrespective of input complexity and thus limiting computational efficiency. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Grove MoE, a novel architecture incorporating experts of varying sizes, inspired by the heterogeneous big.LITTLE CPU architecture. This architecture features novel adjugate experts with a dynamic activation mechanism, enabling model capacity expansion while maintaining manageable computational overhead. Building on this architecture, we present GroveMoE-Base and GroveMoE-Inst, 33B-parameter LLMs developed by applying an upcycling strategy to the Qwen3-30B-A3B-Base model during mid-training and post-training. GroveMoE models dynamically activate 3.14-3.28B parameters based on token complexity and achieve performance comparable to SOTA open-source models of similar or even larger size.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07785 - Mon, 11 Aug 2025 09:15:36 +0000 + Matrix-Game 2.0: An Open-Source, Real-Time, and Streaming Interactive World Model + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13009 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.13009.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xianglong He, Chunli Peng, Zexiang Liu, Boyang Wang, Yifan Zhang, Qi Cui, Fei Kang, Biao Jiang, Mengyin An, Yangyang Ren, Baixin Xu, Hao-Xiang Guo, Kaixiong Gong, Cyrus Wu, Wei Li, Xuchen Song, Yang Liu, Eric Li, Yahui Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 22</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advances in interactive video generations have demonstrated diffusion model's potential as world models by capturing complex physical dynamics and interactive behaviors. However, existing interactive world models depend on bidirectional attention and lengthy inference steps, severely limiting real-time performance. Consequently, they are hard to simulate real-world dynamics, where outcomes must update instantaneously based on historical context and current actions. To address this, we present Matrix-Game 2.0, an interactive world model generates long videos on-the-fly via few-step auto-regressive diffusion. Our framework consists of three key components: (1) A scalable data production pipeline for Unreal Engine and GTA5 environments to effectively produce massive amounts (about 1200 hours) of video data with diverse interaction annotations; (2) An action injection module that enables frame-level mouse and keyboard inputs as interactive conditions; (3) A few-step distillation based on the casual architecture for real-time and streaming video generation. Matrix Game 2.0 can generate high-quality minute-level videos across diverse scenes at an ultra-fast speed of 25 FPS. We open-source our model weights and codebase to advance research in interactive world modeling.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13009 + Mon, 18 Aug 2025 15:28:53 +0000 - Stand-In: A Lightweight and Plug-and-Play Identity Control for Video Generation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07901 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.07901.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Bowen Xue, Qixin Yan, Wenjing Wang, Hao Liu, Chen Li</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 36</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Generating high-fidelity human videos that match user-specified identities is important yet challenging in the field of generative AI. Existing methods often rely on an excessive number of training parameters and lack compatibility with other AIGC tools. In this paper, we propose Stand-In, a lightweight and plug-and-play framework for identity preservation in video generation. Specifically, we introduce a conditional image branch into the pre-trained video generation model. Identity control is achieved through restricted self-attentions with conditional position mapping, and can be learned quickly with only 2000 pairs. Despite incorporating and training just sim1\% additional parameters, our framework achieves excellent results in video quality and identity preservation, outperforming other full-parameter training methods. Moreover, our framework can be seamlessly integrated for other tasks, such as subject-driven video generation, pose-referenced video generation, stylization, and face swapping.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07901 - Mon, 11 Aug 2025 12:17:38 +0000 + Precise Action-to-Video Generation Through Visual Action Prompts + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13104 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.13104.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yuang Wang, Chao Wen, Haoyu Guo, Sida Peng, Minghan Qin, Hujun Bao, Xiaowei Zhou, Ruizhen Hu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 10</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present visual action prompts, a unified action representation for action-to-video generation of complex high-DoF interactions while maintaining transferable visual dynamics across domains. Action-driven video generation faces a precision-generality trade-off: existing methods using text, primitive actions, or coarse masks offer generality but lack precision, while agent-centric action signals provide precision at the cost of cross-domain transferability. To balance action precision and dynamic transferability, we propose to "render" actions into precise visual prompts as domain-agnostic representations that preserve both geometric precision and cross-domain adaptability for complex actions; specifically, we choose visual skeletons for their generality and accessibility. We propose robust pipelines to construct skeletons from two interaction-rich data sources - human-object interactions (HOI) and dexterous robotic manipulation - enabling cross-domain training of action-driven generative models. By integrating visual skeletons into pretrained video generation models via lightweight fine-tuning, we enable precise action control of complex interaction while preserving the learning of cross-domain dynamics. Experiments on EgoVid, RT-1 and DROID demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/VAP/.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13104 + Mon, 18 Aug 2025 17:12:28 +0000 - MolmoAct: Action Reasoning Models that can Reason in Space - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07917 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.07917.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jason Lee, Jiafei Duan, Haoquan Fang, Yuquan Deng, Shuo Liu, Boyang Li, Bohan Fang, Jieyu Zhang, Yi Ru Wang, Sangho Lee, Winson Han, Wilbert Pumacay, Angelica Wu, Rose Hendrix, Karen Farley, Eli VanderBilt, Ali Farhadi, Dieter Fox, Ranjay Krishna</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 36</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Reasoning is central to purposeful action, yet most robotic foundation models map perception and instructions directly to control, which limits adaptability, generalization, and semantic grounding. We introduce Action Reasoning Models (ARMs), a class of vision-language-action models that integrate perception, planning, and control through a structured three-stage pipeline. Our model, MolmoAct, encodes observations and instructions into depth-aware perception tokens, generates mid-level spatial plans as editable trajectory traces, and predicts precise low-level actions, enabling explainable and steerable behavior. MolmoAct-7B-D achieves strong performance across simulation and real-world settings: 70.5% zero-shot accuracy on SimplerEnv Visual Matching tasks, surpassing closed-source Pi-0 and GR00T N1; 86.6% average success on LIBERO, including an additional 6.3% gain over ThinkAct on long-horizon tasks; and in real-world fine-tuning, an additional 10% (single-arm) and an additional 22.7% (bimanual) task progression over Pi-0-FAST. It also outperforms baselines by an additional 23.3% on out-of-distribution generalization and achieves top human-preference scores for open-ended instruction following and trajectory steering. Furthermore, we release, for the first time, the MolmoAct Dataset -- a mid-training robot dataset comprising over 10,000 high quality robot trajectories across diverse scenarios and tasks. Training with this dataset yields an average 5.5% improvement in general performance over the base model. We release all model weights, training code, our collected dataset, and our action reasoning dataset, establishing MolmoAct as both a state-of-the-art robotics foundation model and an open blueprint for building ARMs that transform perception into purposeful action through structured reasoning. Blogpost: https://allenai.org/blog/molmoact</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07917 - Mon, 11 Aug 2025 12:32:45 +0000 + Motion2Motion: Cross-topology Motion Transfer with Sparse Correspondence + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13139 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.13139.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ling-Hao Chen, Yuhong Zhang, Zixin Yin, Zhiyang Dou, Xin Chen, Jingbo Wang, Taku Komura, Lei Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> This work studies the challenge of transfer animations between characters whose skeletal topologies differ substantially. While many techniques have advanced retargeting techniques in decades, transfer motions across diverse topologies remains less-explored. The primary obstacle lies in the inherent topological inconsistency between source and target skeletons, which restricts the establishment of straightforward one-to-one bone correspondences. Besides, the current lack of large-scale paired motion datasets spanning different topological structures severely constrains the development of data-driven approaches. To address these limitations, we introduce Motion2Motion, a novel, training-free framework. Simply yet effectively, Motion2Motion works with only one or a few example motions on the target skeleton, by accessing a sparse set of bone correspondences between the source and target skeletons. Through comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations, we demonstrate that Motion2Motion achieves efficient and reliable performance in both similar-skeleton and cross-species skeleton transfer scenarios. The practical utility of our approach is further evidenced by its successful integration in downstream applications and user interfaces, highlighting its potential for industrial applications. Code and data are available at https://lhchen.top/Motion2Motion.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13139 + Mon, 18 Aug 2025 17:50:31 +0000 - Beyond Ten Turns: Unlocking Long-Horizon Agentic Search with Large-Scale Asynchronous RL - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07976 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.07976.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jiaxuan Gao, Wei Fu, Minyang Xie, Shusheng Xu, Chuyi He, Zhiyu Mei, Banghua Zhu, Yi Wu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 43</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advancements in LLM-based agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling complex, knowledge-intensive tasks by integrating external tools. Among diverse choices of tools, search tools play a pivotal role in accessing vast external knowledge. However, open-source agents still fall short of achieving expert-level Search Intelligence, the ability to resolve ambiguous queries, generate precise searches, analyze results, and conduct thorough exploration. Existing approaches fall short in scalability, efficiency, and data quality. For example, small turn limits in existing online RL methods, e.g. <=10, restrict complex strategy learning. This paper introduces ASearcher, an open-source project for large-scale RL training of search agents. Our key contributions include: (1) Scalable fully asynchronous RL training that enables long-horizon search while maintaining high training efficiency. (2) A prompt-based LLM agent that autonomously synthesizes high-quality and challenging QAs, creating a large-scale QA dataset. Through RL training, our prompt-based QwQ-32B agent achieves substantial improvements, with 46.7% and 20.8% Avg@4 gains on xBench and GAIA, respectively. Notably, our agent exhibits extreme long-horizon search, with tool calls exceeding 40 turns and output tokens exceeding 150k during training time. With a simple agent design and no external LLMs, ASearcher-Web-QwQ achieves Avg@4 scores of 42.1 on xBench and 52.8 on GAIA, surpassing existing open-source 32B agents. We open-source our models, training data, and codes in https://github.com/inclusionAI/ASearcher.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07976 - Mon, 11 Aug 2025 13:36:57 +0000 + Has GPT-5 Achieved Spatial Intelligence? An Empirical Study + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13142 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.13142.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhongang Cai, Yubo Wang, Qingping Sun, Ruisi Wang, Chenyang Gu, Wanqi Yin, Zhiqian Lin, Zhitao Yang, Chen Wei, Xuanke Shi, Kewang Deng, Xiaoyang Han, Zukai Chen, Jiaqi Li, Xiangyu Fan, Hanming Deng, Lewei Lu, Bo Li, Ziwei Liu, Quan Wang, Dahua Lin, Lei Yang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 31</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Multi-modal models have achieved remarkable progress in recent years. Nevertheless, they continue to exhibit notable limitations in spatial understanding and reasoning, which are fundamental capabilities to achieving artificial general intelligence. With the recent release of GPT-5, allegedly the most powerful AI model to date, it is timely to examine where the leading models stand on the path toward spatial intelligence. First, we propose a comprehensive taxonomy of spatial tasks that unifies existing benchmarks and discuss the challenges in ensuring fair evaluation. We then evaluate state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source models on eight key benchmarks, at a cost exceeding one billion total tokens. Our empirical study reveals that (1) GPT-5 demonstrates unprecedented strength in spatial intelligence, yet (2) still falls short of human performance across a broad spectrum of tasks. Moreover, we (3) identify the more challenging spatial intelligence problems for multi-modal models, and (4) proprietary models do not exhibit a decisive advantage when facing the most difficult problems. In addition, we conduct a qualitative evaluation across a diverse set of scenarios that are intuitive for humans yet fail even the most advanced multi-modal models.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13142 + Mon, 18 Aug 2025 17:55:17 +0000 - Omni-Effects: Unified and Spatially-Controllable Visual Effects Generation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07981 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.07981.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Fangyuan Mao, Aiming Hao, Jintao Chen, Dongxia Liu, Xiaokun Feng, Jiashu Zhu, Meiqi Wu, Chubin Chen, Jiahong Wu, Xiangxiang Chu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 56</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Visual effects (VFX) are essential visual enhancements fundamental to modern cinematic production. Although video generation models offer cost-efficient solutions for VFX production, current methods are constrained by per-effect LoRA training, which limits generation to single effects. This fundamental limitation impedes applications that require spatially controllable composite effects, i.e., the concurrent generation of multiple effects at designated locations. However, integrating diverse effects into a unified framework faces major challenges: interference from effect variations and spatial uncontrollability during multi-VFX joint training. To tackle these challenges, we propose Omni-Effects, a first unified framework capable of generating prompt-guided effects and spatially controllable composite effects. The core of our framework comprises two key innovations: (1) LoRA-based Mixture of Experts (LoRA-MoE), which employs a group of expert LoRAs, integrating diverse effects within a unified model while effectively mitigating cross-task interference. (2) Spatial-Aware Prompt (SAP) incorporates spatial mask information into the text token, enabling precise spatial control. Furthermore, we introduce an Independent-Information Flow (IIF) module integrated within the SAP, isolating the control signals corresponding to individual effects to prevent any unwanted blending. To facilitate this research, we construct a comprehensive VFX dataset Omni-VFX via a novel data collection pipeline combining image editing and First-Last Frame-to-Video (FLF2V) synthesis, and introduce a dedicated VFX evaluation framework for validating model performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Omni-Effects achieves precise spatial control and diverse effect generation, enabling users to specify both the category and location of desired effects.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07981 - Mon, 11 Aug 2025 13:41:24 +0000 + 4DNeX: Feed-Forward 4D Generative Modeling Made Easy + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13154 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.13154.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhaoxi Chen, Tianqi Liu, Long Zhuo, Jiawei Ren, Zeng Tao, He Zhu, Fangzhou Hong, Liang Pan, Ziwei Liu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 58</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present 4DNeX, the first feed-forward framework for generating 4D (i.e., dynamic 3D) scene representations from a single image. In contrast to existing methods that rely on computationally intensive optimization or require multi-frame video inputs, 4DNeX enables efficient, end-to-end image-to-4D generation by fine-tuning a pretrained video diffusion model. Specifically, 1) to alleviate the scarcity of 4D data, we construct 4DNeX-10M, a large-scale dataset with high-quality 4D annotations generated using advanced reconstruction approaches. 2) we introduce a unified 6D video representation that jointly models RGB and XYZ sequences, facilitating structured learning of both appearance and geometry. 3) we propose a set of simple yet effective adaptation strategies to repurpose pretrained video diffusion models for 4D modeling. 4DNeX produces high-quality dynamic point clouds that enable novel-view video synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that 4DNeX outperforms existing 4D generation methods in efficiency and generalizability, offering a scalable solution for image-to-4D modeling and laying the foundation for generative 4D world models that simulate dynamic scene evolution.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13154 + Mon, 18 Aug 2025 17:59:55 +0000 - WideSearch: Benchmarking Agentic Broad Info-Seeking - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07999 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.07999.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ryan Wong, Jiawei Wang, Junjie Zhao, Li Chen, Yan Gao, Long Zhang, Xuan Zhou, Zuo Wang, Kai Xiang, Ge Zhang, Wenhao Huang, Yang Wang, Ke Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 99</p><p><b>Summary:</b> From professional research to everyday planning, many tasks are bottlenecked by wide-scale information seeking, which is more repetitive than cognitively complex. With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), automated search agents powered by LLMs offer a promising solution to liberate humans from this tedious work. However, the capability of these agents to perform such "wide-context" collection reliably and completely remains largely unevaluated due to a lack of suitable benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we introduce WideSearch, a new benchmark engineered to evaluate agent reliability on these large-scale collection tasks. The benchmark features 200 manually curated questions (100 in English, 100 in Chinese) from over 15 diverse domains, grounded in real user queries. Each task requires agents to collect large-scale atomic information, which could be verified one by one objectively, and arrange it into a well-organized output. A rigorous five-stage quality control pipeline ensures the difficulty, completeness, and verifiability of the dataset. We benchmark over 10 state-of-the-art agentic search systems, including single-agent, multi-agent frameworks, and end-to-end commercial systems. Most systems achieve overall success rates near 0\%, with the best performer reaching just 5\%. However, given sufficient time, cross-validation by multiple human testers can achieve a near 100\% success rate. These results demonstrate that present search agents have critical deficiencies in large-scale information seeking, underscoring urgent areas for future research and development in agentic search. Our dataset, evaluation pipeline, and benchmark results have been publicly released at https://widesearch-seed.github.io/</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07999 - Mon, 11 Aug 2025 14:03:09 +0000 + Rapidly Adapting to New Voice Spoofing: Few-Shot Detection of Synthesized Speech Under Distribution Shifts + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13320 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.13320.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ashi Garg, Zexin Cai, Henry Li Xinyuan, Leibny Paola García-Perera, Kevin Duh, Sanjeev Khudanpur, Matthew Wiesner, Nicholas Andrews</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We address the challenge of detecting synthesized speech under distribution shifts -- arising from unseen synthesis methods, speakers, languages, or audio conditions -- relative to the training data. Few-shot learning methods are a promising way to tackle distribution shifts by rapidly adapting on the basis of a few in-distribution samples. We propose a self-attentive prototypical network to enable more robust few-shot adaptation. To evaluate our approach, we systematically compare the performance of traditional zero-shot detectors and the proposed few-shot detectors, carefully controlling training conditions to introduce distribution shifts at evaluation time. In conditions where distribution shifts hamper the zero-shot performance, our proposed few-shot adaptation technique can quickly adapt using as few as 10 in-distribution samples -- achieving upto 32% relative EER reduction on deepfakes in Japanese language and 20% relative reduction on ASVspoof 2021 Deepfake dataset.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13320 + Mon, 18 Aug 2025 19:14:45 +0000 - Matrix-3D: Omnidirectional Explorable 3D World Generation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08086 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.08086.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhongqi Yang, Wenhang Ge, Yuqi Li, Jiaqi Chen, Haoyuan Li, Mengyin An, Fei Kang, Hua Xue, Baixin Xu, Yuyang Yin, Eric Li, Yang Liu, Yikai Wang, Hao-Xiang Guo, Yahui Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 67</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Explorable 3D world generation from a single image or text prompt forms a cornerstone of spatial intelligence. Recent works utilize video model to achieve wide-scope and generalizable 3D world generation. However, existing approaches often suffer from a limited scope in the generated scenes. In this work, we propose Matrix-3D, a framework that utilize panoramic representation for wide-coverage omnidirectional explorable 3D world generation that combines conditional video generation and panoramic 3D reconstruction. We first train a trajectory-guided panoramic video diffusion model that employs scene mesh renders as condition, to enable high-quality and geometrically consistent scene video generation. To lift the panorama scene video to 3D world, we propose two separate methods: (1) a feed-forward large panorama reconstruction model for rapid 3D scene reconstruction and (2) an optimization-based pipeline for accurate and detailed 3D scene reconstruction. To facilitate effective training, we also introduce the Matrix-Pano dataset, the first large-scale synthetic collection comprising 116K high-quality static panoramic video sequences with depth and trajectory annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in panoramic video generation and 3D world generation. See more in https://matrix-3d.github.io.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08086 - Mon, 11 Aug 2025 15:29:57 +0000 + Virtuous Machines: Towards Artificial General Science + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13421 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.13421.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Gabrielle Wehr, Reuben Rideaux, Amaya J. Fox, David R. Lightfoot, Jason Tangen, Jason B. Mattingley, Shane E. Ehrhardt</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 9</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Artificial intelligence systems are transforming scientific discovery by accelerating specific research tasks, from protein structure prediction to materials design, yet remain confined to narrow domains requiring substantial human oversight. The exponential growth of scientific literature and increasing domain specialisation constrain researchers' capacity to synthesise knowledge across disciplines and develop unifying theories, motivating exploration of more general-purpose AI systems for science. Here we show that a domain-agnostic, agentic AI system can independently navigate the scientific workflow - from hypothesis generation through data collection to manuscript preparation. The system autonomously designed and executed three psychological studies on visual working memory, mental rotation, and imagery vividness, executed one new online data collection with 288 participants, developed analysis pipelines through 8-hour+ continuous coding sessions, and produced completed manuscripts. The results demonstrate the capability of AI scientific discovery pipelines to conduct non-trivial research with theoretical reasoning and methodological rigour comparable to experienced researchers, though with limitations in conceptual nuance and theoretical interpretation. This is a step toward embodied AI that can test hypotheses through real-world experiments, accelerating discovery by autonomously exploring regions of scientific space that human cognitive and resource constraints might otherwise leave unexplored. It raises important questions about the nature of scientific understanding and the attribution of scientific credit.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13421 + Tue, 19 Aug 2025 00:35:56 +0000 - HierSearch: A Hierarchical Enterprise Deep Search Framework Integrating Local and Web Searches - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08088 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.08088.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jiejun Tan, Zhicheng Dou, Yan Yu, Jiehan Cheng, Qiang Ju, Jian Xie, Ji-Rong Wen</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 27</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recently, large reasoning models have demonstrated strong mathematical and coding abilities, and deep search leverages their reasoning capabilities in challenging information retrieval tasks. Existing deep search works are generally limited to a single knowledge source, either local or the Web. However, enterprises often require private deep search systems that can leverage search tools over both local and the Web corpus. Simply training an agent equipped with multiple search tools using flat reinforcement learning (RL) is a straightforward idea, but it has problems such as low training data efficiency and poor mastery of complex tools. To address the above issue, we propose a hierarchical agentic deep search framework, HierSearch, trained with hierarchical RL. At the low level, a local deep search agent and a Web deep search agent are trained to retrieve evidence from their corresponding domains. At the high level, a planner agent coordinates low-level agents and provides the final answer. Moreover, to prevent direct answer copying and error propagation, we design a knowledge refiner that filters out hallucinations and irrelevant evidence returned by low-level agents. Experiments show that HierSearch achieves better performance compared to flat RL, and outperforms various deep search and multi-source retrieval-augmented generation baselines in six benchmarks across general, finance, and medical domains.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08088 - Mon, 11 Aug 2025 15:31:47 +0000 + From Scores to Skills: A Cognitive Diagnosis Framework for Evaluating Financial Large Language Models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13491 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.13491.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ziyan Kuang, Feiyu Zhu, Maowei Jiang, Yanzhao Lai, Zelin Wang, Zhitong Wang, Meikang Qiu, Jiajia Huang, Min Peng, Qianqian Xie, Sophia Ananiadou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 58</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for financial applications, yet their suitability for this high-stakes domain remains largely unproven due to inadequacies in existing benchmarks. Existing benchmarks solely rely on score-level evaluation, summarizing performance with a single score that obscures the nuanced understanding of what models truly know and their precise limitations. They also rely on datasets that cover only a narrow subset of financial concepts, while overlooking other essentials for real-world applications. To address these gaps, we introduce FinCDM, the first cognitive diagnosis evaluation framework tailored for financial LLMs, enabling the evaluation of LLMs at the knowledge-skill level, identifying what financial skills and knowledge they have or lack based on their response patterns across skill-tagged tasks, rather than a single aggregated number. We construct CPA-QKA, the first cognitively informed financial evaluation dataset derived from the Certified Public Accountant (CPA) examination, with comprehensive coverage of real-world accounting and financial skills. It is rigorously annotated by domain experts, who author, validate, and annotate questions with high inter-annotator agreement and fine-grained knowledge labels. Our extensive experiments on 30 proprietary, open-source, and domain-specific LLMs show that FinCDM reveals hidden knowledge gaps, identifies under-tested areas such as tax and regulatory reasoning overlooked by traditional benchmarks, and uncovers behavioral clusters among models. FinCDM introduces a new paradigm for financial LLM evaluation by enabling interpretable, skill-aware diagnosis that supports more trustworthy and targeted model development, and all datasets and evaluation scripts will be publicly released to support further research.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13491 + Tue, 19 Aug 2025 03:52:15 +0000 - AimBot: A Simple Auxiliary Visual Cue to Enhance Spatial Awareness of Visuomotor Policies - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08113 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.08113.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yinpei Dai, Jayjun Lee, Yichi Zhang, Ziqiao Ma, Jed Yang, Amir Zadeh, Chuan Li, Nima Fazeli, Joyce Chai</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 9</p><p><b>Summary:</b> In this paper, we propose AimBot, a lightweight visual augmentation technique that provides explicit spatial cues to improve visuomotor policy learning in robotic manipulation. AimBot overlays shooting lines and scope reticles onto multi-view RGB images, offering auxiliary visual guidance that encodes the end-effector's state. The overlays are computed from depth images, camera extrinsics, and the current end-effector pose, explicitly conveying spatial relationships between the gripper and objects in the scene. AimBot incurs minimal computational overhead (less than 1 ms) and requires no changes to model architectures, as it simply replaces original RGB images with augmented counterparts. Despite its simplicity, our results show that AimBot consistently improves the performance of various visuomotor policies in both simulation and real-world settings, highlighting the benefits of spatially grounded visual feedback.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08113 - Mon, 11 Aug 2025 15:53:23 +0000 + OmniTry: Virtual Try-On Anything without Masks + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13632 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.13632.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yutong Feng, Linlin Zhang, Hengyuan Cao, Yiming Chen, Xiaoduan Feng, Jian Cao, Yuxiong Wu, Bin Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 15</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Virtual Try-ON (VTON) is a practical and widely-applied task, for which most of existing works focus on clothes. This paper presents OmniTry, a unified framework that extends VTON beyond garment to encompass any wearable objects, e.g., jewelries and accessories, with mask-free setting for more practical application. When extending to various types of objects, data curation is challenging for obtaining paired images, i.e., the object image and the corresponding try-on result. To tackle this problem, we propose a two-staged pipeline: For the first stage, we leverage large-scale unpaired images, i.e., portraits with any wearable items, to train the model for mask-free localization. Specifically, we repurpose the inpainting model to automatically draw objects in suitable positions given an empty mask. For the second stage, the model is further fine-tuned with paired images to transfer the consistency of object appearance. We observed that the model after the first stage shows quick convergence even with few paired samples. OmniTry is evaluated on a comprehensive benchmark consisting of 12 common classes of wearable objects, with both in-shop and in-the-wild images. Experimental results suggest that OmniTry shows better performance on both object localization and ID-preservation compared with existing methods. The code, model weights, and evaluation benchmark of OmniTry will be made publicly available at https://omnitry.github.io/.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13632 + Tue, 19 Aug 2025 08:47:31 +0000 - Follow-Your-Shape: Shape-Aware Image Editing via Trajectory-Guided Region Control - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08134 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.08134.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zeqian Long, Mingzhe Zheng, Kunyu Feng, Xinhua Zhang, Hongyu Liu, Harry Yang, Linfeng Zhang, Qifeng Chen, Yue Ma</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 9</p><p><b>Summary:</b> While recent flow-based image editing models demonstrate general-purpose capabilities across diverse tasks, they often struggle to specialize in challenging scenarios -- particularly those involving large-scale shape transformations. When performing such structural edits, these methods either fail to achieve the intended shape change or inadvertently alter non-target regions, resulting in degraded background quality. We propose Follow-Your-Shape, a training-free and mask-free framework that supports precise and controllable editing of object shapes while strictly preserving non-target content. Motivated by the divergence between inversion and editing trajectories, we compute a Trajectory Divergence Map (TDM) by comparing token-wise velocity differences between the inversion and denoising paths. The TDM enables precise localization of editable regions and guides a Scheduled KV Injection mechanism that ensures stable and faithful editing. To facilitate a rigorous evaluation, we introduce ReShapeBench, a new benchmark comprising 120 new images and enriched prompt pairs specifically curated for shape-aware editing. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior editability and visual fidelity, particularly in tasks requiring large-scale shape replacement.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08134 - Mon, 11 Aug 2025 16:10:00 +0000 + ViExam: Are Vision Language Models Better than Humans on Vietnamese Multimodal Exam Questions? + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13680 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.13680.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Vy Tuong Dang, An Vo, Quang Tau, Duc Dm, Daeyoung Kim</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Vision language models (VLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities on English multimodal tasks, but their performance on low-resource languages with genuinely multimodal educational content remains largely unexplored. In this work, we test how VLMs perform on Vietnamese educational assessments, investigating whether VLMs trained predominantly on English data can handle real-world cross-lingual multimodal reasoning. Our work presents the first comprehensive evaluation of VLM capabilities on multimodal Vietnamese exams through proposing ViExam, a benchmark containing 2,548 multimodal questions. We find that state-of-the-art VLMs achieve only 57.74% while open-source models achieve 27.70% mean accuracy across 7 academic domains, including Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geography, Driving Test, and IQ Test. Most VLMs underperform average human test-takers (66.54%), with only the thinking VLM o3 (74.07%) exceeding human average performance, yet still falling substantially short of human best performance (99.60%). Cross-lingual prompting with English instructions while maintaining Vietnamese content fails to improve performance, decreasing accuracy by 1 percentage point for SOTA VLMs. Human-in-the-loop collaboration can partially improve VLM performance by 5 percentage points. Code and data are available at: https://vi-exam.github.io.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13680 + Tue, 19 Aug 2025 09:31:18 +0000 - RedDino: A foundation model for red blood cell analysis - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08180 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.08180.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Luca Zedda, Andrea Loddo, Cecilia Di Ruberto, Carsten Marr</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Red blood cells (RBCs) are essential to human health, and their precise morphological analysis is important for diagnosing hematological disorders. Despite the promise of foundation models in medical diagnostics, comprehensive AI solutions for RBC analysis remain scarce. We present RedDino, a self-supervised foundation model designed for RBC image analysis. RedDino uses an RBC-specific adaptation of the DINOv2 self-supervised learning framework and is trained on a curated dataset of 1.25 million RBC images from diverse acquisition modalities and sources. Extensive evaluations show that RedDino outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on RBC shape classification. Through assessments including linear probing and nearest neighbor classification, we confirm its strong feature representations and generalization ability. Our main contributions are: (1) a foundation model tailored for RBC analysis, (2) ablation studies exploring DINOv2 configurations for RBC modeling, and (3) a detailed evaluation of generalization performance. RedDino addresses key challenges in computational hematology by capturing nuanced morphological features, advancing the development of reliable diagnostic tools. The source code and pretrained models for RedDino are available at https://github.com/Snarci/RedDino, and the pretrained models can be downloaded from our Hugging Face collection at https://huggingface.co/collections/Snarcy/reddino-689a13e29241d2e5690202fc</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08180 - Mon, 11 Aug 2025 16:59:31 +0000 + Refining Contrastive Learning and Homography Relations for Multi-Modal Recommendation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13745 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.13745.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Shouxing Ma, Yawen Zeng, Shiqing Wu, Guandong Xu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 0</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Multi-modal recommender system focuses on utilizing rich modal information ( i.e., images and textual descriptions) of items to improve recommendation performance. The current methods have achieved remarkable success with the powerful structure modeling capability of graph neural networks. However, these methods are often hindered by sparse data in real-world scenarios. Although contrastive learning and homography ( i.e., homogeneous graphs) are employed to address the data sparsity challenge, existing methods still suffer two main limitations: 1) Simple multi-modal feature contrasts fail to produce effective representations, causing noisy modal-shared features and loss of valuable information in modal-unique features; 2) The lack of exploration of the homograph relations between user interests and item co-occurrence results in incomplete mining of user-item interplay. To address the above limitations, we propose a novel framework for REfining multi-modAl contRastive learning and hoMography relations (REARM). Specifically, we complement multi-modal contrastive learning by employing meta-network and orthogonal constraint strategies, which filter out noise in modal-shared features and retain recommendation-relevant information in modal-unique features. To mine homogeneous relationships effectively, we integrate a newly constructed user interest graph and an item co-occurrence graph with the existing user co-occurrence and item semantic graphs for graph learning. The extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of REARM to various state-of-the-art baselines. Our visualization further shows an improvement made by REARM in distinguishing between modal-shared and modal-unique features. Code is available https://github.com/MrShouxingMa/REARM{here}.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13745 + Tue, 19 Aug 2025 11:35:48 +0000 - Reinforcement Learning in Vision: A Survey - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08189 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.08189.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Weijia Wu, Chen Gao, Joya Chen, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Qingwei Meng, Yiming Zhang, Yuke Qiu, Hong Zhou, Mike Zheng Shou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 26</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advances at the intersection of reinforcement learning (RL) and visual intelligence have enabled agents that not only perceive complex visual scenes but also reason, generate, and act within them. This survey offers a critical and up-to-date synthesis of the field. We first formalize visual RL problems and trace the evolution of policy-optimization strategies from RLHF to verifiable reward paradigms, and from Proximal Policy Optimization to Group Relative Policy Optimization. We then organize more than 200 representative works into four thematic pillars: multi-modal large language models, visual generation, unified model frameworks, and vision-language-action models. For each pillar we examine algorithmic design, reward engineering, benchmark progress, and we distill trends such as curriculum-driven training, preference-aligned diffusion, and unified reward modeling. Finally, we review evaluation protocols spanning set-level fidelity, sample-level preference, and state-level stability, and we identify open challenges that include sample efficiency, generalization, and safe deployment. Our goal is to provide researchers and practitioners with a coherent map of the rapidly expanding landscape of visual RL and to highlight promising directions for future inquiry. Resources are available at: https://github.com/weijiawu/Awesome-Visual-Reinforcement-Learning.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08189 - Mon, 11 Aug 2025 17:08:55 +0000 + Beyond Human Judgment: A Bayesian Evaluation of LLMs' Moral Values Understanding + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13804 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.13804.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Maciej Skorski, Alina Landowska</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> How do large language models understand moral dimensions compared to humans? This first large-scale Bayesian evaluation of market-leading language models provides the answer. In contrast to prior work using deterministic ground truth (majority or inclusion rules), we model annotator disagreements to capture both aleatoric uncertainty (inherent human disagreement) and epistemic uncertainty (model domain sensitivity). We evaluate top language models (Claude Sonnet 4, DeepSeek-V3, Llama 4 Maverick) across 250K+ annotations from ~700 annotators on 100K+ texts spanning social media, news, and forums. Our GPU-optimized Bayesian framework processed 1M+ model queries, revealing that AI models typically rank among the top 25\% of human annotators, achieving much better-than-average balanced accuracy. Importantly, we find that AI produces far fewer false negatives than humans, highlighting their more sensitive moral detection capabilities.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13804 + Tue, 19 Aug 2025 13:05:48 +0000 - Part I: Tricks or Traps? A Deep Dive into RL for LLM Reasoning - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08221 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.08221.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zihe Liu, Jiashun Liu, Yancheng He, Weixun Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Ling Pan, Xinyu Hu, Shaopan Xiong, Ju Huang, Jian Hu, Shengyi Huang, Siran Yang, Jiamang Wang, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 35</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Reinforcement learning for LLM reasoning has rapidly emerged as a prominent research area, marked by a significant surge in related studies on both algorithmic innovations and practical applications. Despite this progress, several critical challenges remain, including the absence of standardized guidelines for employing RL techniques and a fragmented understanding of their underlying mechanisms. Additionally, inconsistent experimental settings, variations in training data, and differences in model initialization have led to conflicting conclusions, obscuring the key characteristics of these techniques and creating confusion among practitioners when selecting appropriate techniques. This paper systematically reviews widely adopted RL techniques through rigorous reproductions and isolated evaluations within a unified open-source framework. We analyze the internal mechanisms, applicable scenarios, and core principles of each technique through fine-grained experiments, including datasets of varying difficulty, model sizes, and architectures. Based on these insights, we present clear guidelines for selecting RL techniques tailored to specific setups, and provide a reliable roadmap for practitioners navigating the RL for the LLM domain. Finally, we reveal that a minimalist combination of two techniques can unlock the learning capability of critic-free policies using vanilla PPO loss. The results demonstrate that our simple combination consistently improves performance, surpassing strategies like GRPO and DAPO.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08221 - Mon, 11 Aug 2025 17:39:45 +0000 + Prompt Orchestration Markup Language + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13948 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.13948.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yuge Zhang, Nan Chen, Jiahang Xu, Yuqing Yang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 39</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Models (LLMs) require sophisticated prompting, yet current practices face challenges in structure, data integration, format sensitivity, and tooling. Existing methods lack comprehensive solutions for organizing complex prompts involving diverse data types (documents, tables, images) or managing presentation variations systematically. To address these gaps, we introduce POML (Prompt Orchestration Markup Language). POML employs component-based markup for logical structure (roles, tasks, examples), specialized tags for seamless data integration, and a CSS-like styling system to decouple content from presentation, reducing formatting sensitivity. It includes templating for dynamic prompts and a comprehensive developer toolkit (IDE support, SDKs) to improve version control and collaboration. We validate POML through two case studies demonstrating its impact on complex application integration (PomLink) and accuracy performance (TableQA), as well as a user study assessing its effectiveness in real-world development scenarios.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13948 + Tue, 19 Aug 2025 15:37:29 +0000 - Cut2Next: Generating Next Shot via In-Context Tuning - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08244 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.08244.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jingwen He, Hongbo Liu, Jiajun Li, Ziqi Huang, Yu Qiao, Wanli Ouyang, Ziwei Liu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 12</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Effective multi-shot generation demands purposeful, film-like transitions and strict cinematic continuity. Current methods, however, often prioritize basic visual consistency, neglecting crucial editing patterns (e.g., shot/reverse shot, cutaways) that drive narrative flow for compelling storytelling. This yields outputs that may be visually coherent but lack narrative sophistication and true cinematic integrity. To bridge this, we introduce Next Shot Generation (NSG): synthesizing a subsequent, high-quality shot that critically conforms to professional editing patterns while upholding rigorous cinematic continuity. Our framework, Cut2Next, leverages a Diffusion Transformer (DiT). It employs in-context tuning guided by a novel Hierarchical Multi-Prompting strategy. This strategy uses Relational Prompts to define overall context and inter-shot editing styles. Individual Prompts then specify per-shot content and cinematographic attributes. Together, these guide Cut2Next to generate cinematically appropriate next shots. Architectural innovations, Context-Aware Condition Injection (CACI) and Hierarchical Attention Mask (HAM), further integrate these diverse signals without introducing new parameters. We construct RawCuts (large-scale) and CuratedCuts (refined) datasets, both with hierarchical prompts, and introduce CutBench for evaluation. Experiments show Cut2Next excels in visual consistency and text fidelity. Crucially, user studies reveal a strong preference for Cut2Next, particularly for its adherence to intended editing patterns and overall cinematic continuity, validating its ability to generate high-quality, narratively expressive, and cinematically coherent subsequent shots.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08244 - Mon, 11 Aug 2025 17:56:59 +0000 + RotBench: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models on Identifying Image Rotation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13968 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.13968.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Tianyi Niu, Jaemin Cho, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We investigate to what extent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can accurately identify the orientation of input images rotated 0{\deg}, 90{\deg}, 180{\deg}, and 270{\deg}. This task demands robust visual reasoning capabilities to detect rotational cues and contextualize spatial relationships within images, regardless of their orientation. To evaluate MLLMs on these abilities, we introduce RotBench -- a 350-image manually-filtered benchmark comprising lifestyle, portrait, and landscape images. Despite the relatively simple nature of this task, we show that several state-of-the-art open and proprietary MLLMs, including GPT-5, o3, and Gemini-2.5-Pro, do not reliably identify rotation in input images. Providing models with auxiliary information -- including captions, depth maps, and more -- or using chain-of-thought prompting offers only small and inconsistent improvements. Our results indicate that most models are able to reliably identify right-side-up (0{\deg}) images, while certain models are able to identify upside-down (180{\deg}) images. None can reliably distinguish between 90{\deg} and 270{\deg}. Simultaneously showing the image rotated in different orientations leads to moderate performance gains for reasoning models, while a modified setup using voting improves the performance of weaker models. We further show that fine-tuning does not improve models' ability to distinguish 90{\deg} and 270{\deg} rotations, despite substantially improving the identification of 180{\deg} images. Together, these results reveal a significant gap between MLLMs' spatial reasoning capabilities and human perception in identifying rotation.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13968 + Tue, 19 Aug 2025 15:58:25 +0000 - StableAvatar: Infinite-Length Audio-Driven Avatar Video Generation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08248 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.08248.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Shuyuan Tu, Yueming Pan, Yinming Huang, Xintong Han, Zhen Xing, Qi Dai, Chong Luo, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 24</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Current diffusion models for audio-driven avatar video generation struggle to synthesize long videos with natural audio synchronization and identity consistency. This paper presents StableAvatar, the first end-to-end video diffusion transformer that synthesizes infinite-length high-quality videos without post-processing. Conditioned on a reference image and audio, StableAvatar integrates tailored training and inference modules to enable infinite-length video generation. We observe that the main reason preventing existing models from generating long videos lies in their audio modeling. They typically rely on third-party off-the-shelf extractors to obtain audio embeddings, which are then directly injected into the diffusion model via cross-attention. Since current diffusion backbones lack any audio-related priors, this approach causes severe latent distribution error accumulation across video clips, leading the latent distribution of subsequent segments to drift away from the optimal distribution gradually. To address this, StableAvatar introduces a novel Time-step-aware Audio Adapter that prevents error accumulation via time-step-aware modulation. During inference, we propose a novel Audio Native Guidance Mechanism to further enhance the audio synchronization by leveraging the diffusion's own evolving joint audio-latent prediction as a dynamic guidance signal. To enhance the smoothness of the infinite-length videos, we introduce a Dynamic Weighted Sliding-window Strategy that fuses latent over time. Experiments on benchmarks show the effectiveness of StableAvatar both qualitatively and quantitatively.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08248 - Mon, 11 Aug 2025 17:58:24 +0000 + MMAU-Pro: A Challenging and Comprehensive Benchmark for Holistic Evaluation of Audio General Intelligence + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13992 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.13992.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Sonal Kumar, Šimon Sedláček, Vaibhavi Lokegaonkar, Fernando López, Wenyi Yu, Nishit Anand, Hyeonggon Ryu, Lichang Chen, Maxim Plička, Miroslav Hlaváček, William Fineas Ellingwood, Sathvik Udupa, Siyuan Hou, Allison Ferner, Sara Barahona, Cecilia Bolaños, Satish Rahi, Laura Herrera-Alarcón, Satvik Dixit, Siddhi Patil, Soham Deshmukh, Lasha Koroshinadze, Yao Liu, Leibny Paola Garcia Perera, Eleni Zanou, Themos Stafylakis, Joon Son Chung, David Harwath, Chao Zhang, Dinesh Manocha, Alicia Lozano-Diez, Santosh Kesiraju, Sreyan Ghosh, Ramani Duraiswami</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Audio comprehension-including speech, non-speech sounds, and music-is essential for achieving human-level intelligence. Consequently, AI agents must demonstrate holistic audio understanding to qualify as generally intelligent. However, evaluating auditory intelligence comprehensively remains challenging. To address this gap, we introduce MMAU-Pro, the most comprehensive and rigorously curated benchmark for assessing audio intelligence in AI systems. MMAU-Pro contains 5,305 instances, where each instance has one or more audios paired with human expert-generated question-answer pairs, spanning speech, sound, music, and their combinations. Unlike existing benchmarks, MMAU-Pro evaluates auditory intelligence across 49 unique skills and multiple complex dimensions, including long-form audio comprehension, spatial audio reasoning, multi-audio understanding, among others. All questions are meticulously designed to require deliberate multi-hop reasoning, including both multiple-choice and open-ended response formats. Importantly, audio data is sourced directly ``from the wild" rather than from existing datasets with known distributions. We evaluate 22 leading open-source and proprietary multimodal AI models, revealing significant limitations: even state-of-the-art models such as Gemini 2.5 Flash and Audio Flamingo 3 achieve only 59.2% and 51.7% accuracy, respectively, approaching random performance in multiple categories. Our extensive analysis highlights specific shortcomings and provides novel insights, offering actionable perspectives for the community to enhance future AI systems' progression toward audio general intelligence. The benchmark and code is available at https://sonalkum.github.io/mmau-pro.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13992 + Tue, 19 Aug 2025 16:33:49 +0000 - Mol-R1: Towards Explicit Long-CoT Reasoning in Molecule Discovery - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08401 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.08401.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jiatong Li, Weida Wang, Qinggang Zhang, Junxian Li, Di Zhang, Changmeng Zheng, Shufei Zhang, Xiaoyong Wei, Qing Li</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 37</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language models (LLMs), especially Explicit Long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1 and QWQ, have demonstrated powerful reasoning capabilities, achieving impressive performance in commonsense reasoning and mathematical inference. Despite their effectiveness, Long-CoT reasoning models are often criticized for their limited ability and low efficiency in knowledge-intensive domains such as molecule discovery. Success in this field requires a precise understanding of domain knowledge, including molecular structures and chemical principles, which is challenging due to the inherent complexity of molecular data and the scarcity of high-quality expert annotations. To bridge this gap, we introduce Mol-R1, a novel framework designed to improve explainability and reasoning performance of R1-like Explicit Long-CoT reasoning LLMs in text-based molecule generation. Our approach begins with a high-quality reasoning dataset curated through Prior Regulation via In-context Distillation (PRID), a dedicated distillation strategy to effectively generate paired reasoning traces guided by prior regulations. Building upon this, we introduce MoIA, Molecular Iterative Adaptation, a sophisticated training strategy that iteratively combines Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) with Reinforced Policy Optimization (RPO), tailored to boost the reasoning performance of R1-like reasoning models for molecule discovery. Finally, we examine the performance of Mol-R1 in the text-based molecule reasoning generation task, showing superior performance against existing baselines.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08401 - Mon, 11 Aug 2025 18:50:05 +0000 + Embodied-R1: Reinforced Embodied Reasoning for General Robotic Manipulation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13998 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.13998.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yifu Yuan, Haiqin Cui, Yaoting Huang, Yibin Chen, Fei Ni, Zibin Dong, Pengyi Li, Yan Zheng, Jianye Hao</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 14</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Generalization in embodied AI is hindered by the "seeing-to-doing gap," which stems from data scarcity and embodiment heterogeneity. To address this, we pioneer "pointing" as a unified, embodiment-agnostic intermediate representation, defining four core embodied pointing abilities that bridge high-level vision-language comprehension with low-level action primitives. We introduce Embodied-R1, a 3B Vision-Language Model (VLM) specifically designed for embodied reasoning and pointing. We use a wide range of embodied and general visual reasoning datasets as sources to construct a large-scale dataset, Embodied-Points-200K, which supports key embodied pointing capabilities. We then train Embodied-R1 using a two-stage Reinforced Fine-tuning (RFT) curriculum with a specialized multi-task reward design. Embodied-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on 11 embodied spatial and pointing benchmarks. Critically, it demonstrates robust zero-shot generalization by achieving a 56.2% success rate in the SIMPLEREnv and 87.5% across 8 real-world XArm tasks without any task-specific fine-tuning, representing a 62% improvement over strong baselines. Furthermore, the model exhibits high robustness against diverse visual disturbances. Our work shows that a pointing-centric representation, combined with an RFT training paradigm, offers an effective and generalizable pathway to closing the perception-action gap in robotics.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13998 + Tue, 19 Aug 2025 16:50:01 +0000 - Aryabhata: An exam-focused language model for JEE Math - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08665 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.08665.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ritvik Rastogi, Sachin Dharashivkar, Sandeep Varma</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 16</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present Aryabhata 1.0, a compact 7B parameter math reasoning model optimized for the Indian academic exam, the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE). Despite rapid progress in large language models (LLMs), current models often remain unsuitable for educational use. Aryabhata 1.0 is built by merging strong open-weight reasoning models, followed by supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with curriculum learning on verified chain-of-thought (CoT) traces curated through best-of-n rejection sampling. To further boost performance, we apply reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) using A2C objective with group-relative advantage estimation alongwith novel exploration strategies such as Adaptive Group Resizing and Temperature Scaling. Evaluated on both in-distribution (JEE Main 2025) and out-of-distribution (MATH, GSM8K) benchmarks, Aryabhata outperforms existing models in accuracy and efficiency, while offering pedagogically useful step-by-step reasoning. We release Aryabhata as a foundation model to advance exam-centric, open-source small language models. This marks our first open release for community feedback (https://huggingface.co/PhysicsWallahAI/Aryabhata-1.0{Aryabhata 1.0 on Hugging Face}); PW is actively training future models to further improve learning outcomes for students.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08665 - Tue, 12 Aug 2025 06:20:07 +0000 + LongSplat: Robust Unposed 3D Gaussian Splatting for Casual Long Videos + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14041 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.14041.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Chin-Yang Lin, Cheng Sun, Fu-En Yang, Min-Hung Chen, Yen-Yu Lin, Yu-Lun Liu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 53</p><p><b>Summary:</b> LongSplat addresses critical challenges in novel view synthesis (NVS) from casually captured long videos characterized by irregular camera motion, unknown camera poses, and expansive scenes. Current methods often suffer from pose drift, inaccurate geometry initialization, and severe memory limitations. To address these issues, we introduce LongSplat, a robust unposed 3D Gaussian Splatting framework featuring: (1) Incremental Joint Optimization that concurrently optimizes camera poses and 3D Gaussians to avoid local minima and ensure global consistency; (2) a robust Pose Estimation Module leveraging learned 3D priors; and (3) an efficient Octree Anchor Formation mechanism that converts dense point clouds into anchors based on spatial density. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate that LongSplat achieves state-of-the-art results, substantially improving rendering quality, pose accuracy, and computational efficiency compared to prior approaches. Project page: https://linjohnss.github.io/longsplat/</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14041 + Tue, 19 Aug 2025 17:59:56 +0000 - TopXGen: Topic-Diverse Parallel Data Generation for Low-Resource Machine Translation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08680 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.08680.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Armel Zebaze, Benoît Sagot, Rachel Bawden</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> LLMs have been shown to perform well in machine translation (MT) with the use of in-context learning (ICL), rivaling supervised models when translating into high-resource languages (HRLs). However, they lag behind when translating into low-resource language (LRLs). Example selection via similarity search and supervised fine-tuning help. However the improvements they give are limited by the size, quality and diversity of existing parallel datasets. A common technique in low-resource MT is synthetic parallel data creation, the most frequent of which is backtranslation, whereby existing target-side texts are automatically translated into the source language. However, this assumes the existence of good quality and relevant target-side texts, which are not readily available for many LRLs. In this paper, we present TopXGen, an LLM-based approach for the generation of high quality and topic-diverse data in multiple LRLs, which can then be backtranslated to produce useful and diverse parallel texts for ICL and fine-tuning. Our intuition is that while LLMs struggle to translate into LRLs, their ability to translate well into HRLs and their multilinguality enable them to generate good quality, natural-sounding target-side texts, which can be translated well into a high-resource source language. We show that TopXGen boosts LLM translation performance during fine-tuning and in-context learning. Code and outputs are available at https://github.com/ArmelRandy/topxgen.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08680 - Tue, 12 Aug 2025 06:58:02 +0000 + RynnEC: Bringing MLLMs into Embodied World + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14160 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.14160.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ronghao Dang, Yuqian Yuan, Yunxuan Mao, Kehan Li, Jiangpin Liu, Zhikai Wang, Xin Li, Fan Wang, Deli Zhao</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 14</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We introduce RynnEC, a video multimodal large language model designed for embodied cognition. Built upon a general-purpose vision-language foundation model, RynnEC incorporates a region encoder and a mask decoder, enabling flexible region-level video interaction. Despite its compact architecture, RynnEC achieves state-of-the-art performance in object property understanding, object segmentation, and spatial reasoning. Conceptually, it offers a region-centric video paradigm for the brain of embodied agents, providing fine-grained perception of the physical world and enabling more precise interactions. To mitigate the scarcity of annotated 3D datasets, we propose an egocentric video based pipeline for generating embodied cognition data. Furthermore, we introduce RynnEC-Bench, a region-centered benchmark for evaluating embodied cognitive capabilities. We anticipate that RynnEC will advance the development of general-purpose cognitive cores for embodied agents and facilitate generalization across diverse embodied tasks. The code, model checkpoints, and benchmark are available at: https://github.com/alibaba-damo-academy/RynnEC</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14160 + Tue, 19 Aug 2025 18:00:01 +0000 - Feedback-Driven Tool-Use Improvements in Large Language Models via Automated Build Environments - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08791 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.08791.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Junjie Ye, Changhao Jiang, Zhengyin Du, Yufei Xu, Xuesong Yao, Zhiheng Xi, Xiaoran Fan, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Jiecao Chen</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 16</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Effective tool use is essential for large language models (LLMs) to interact meaningfully with their environment. However, progress is limited by the lack of efficient reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks specifically designed for tool use, due to challenges in constructing stable training environments and designing verifiable reward mechanisms. To address this, we propose an automated environment construction pipeline, incorporating scenario decomposition, document generation, function integration, complexity scaling, and localized deployment. This enables the creation of high-quality training environments that provide detailed and measurable feedback without relying on external tools. Additionally, we introduce a verifiable reward mechanism that evaluates both the precision of tool use and the completeness of task execution. When combined with trajectory data collected from the constructed environments, this mechanism integrates seamlessly with standard RL algorithms to facilitate feedback-driven model training. Experiments on LLMs of varying scales demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the models' tool-use performance without degrading their general capabilities, regardless of inference modes or training algorithms. Our analysis suggests that these gains result from improved context understanding and reasoning, driven by updates to the lower-layer MLP parameters in models.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08791 - Tue, 12 Aug 2025 09:45:19 +0000 + Local Scale Equivariance with Latent Deep Equilibrium Canonicalizer + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14187 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.14187.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Md Ashiqur Rahman, Chiao-An Yang, Michael N. Cheng, Lim Jun Hao, Jeremiah Jiang, Teck-Yian Lim, Raymond A. Yeh</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Scale variation is a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Objects of the same class can have different sizes, and their perceived size is further affected by the distance from the camera. These variations are local to the objects, i.e., different object sizes may change differently within the same image. To effectively handle scale variations, we present a deep equilibrium canonicalizer (DEC) to improve the local scale equivariance of a model. DEC can be easily incorporated into existing network architectures and can be adapted to a pre-trained model. Notably, we show that on the competitive ImageNet benchmark, DEC improves both model performance and local scale consistency across four popular pre-trained deep-nets, e.g., ViT, DeiT, Swin, and BEiT. Our code is available at https://github.com/ashiq24/local-scale-equivariance.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14187 + Tue, 19 Aug 2025 18:21:59 +0000 - Towards Affordance-Aware Robotic Dexterous Grasping with Human-like Priors - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08896 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.08896.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Haoyu Zhao, Linghao Zhuang, Xingyue Zhao, Cheng Zeng, Haoran Xu, Yuming Jiang, Jun Cen, Kexiang Wang, Jiayan Guo, Siteng Huang, Xin Li, Deli Zhao, Hua Zou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 10</p><p><b>Summary:</b> A dexterous hand capable of generalizable grasping objects is fundamental for the development of general-purpose embodied AI. However, previous methods focus narrowly on low-level grasp stability metrics, neglecting affordance-aware positioning and human-like poses which are crucial for downstream manipulation. To address these limitations, we propose AffordDex, a novel framework with two-stage training that learns a universal grasping policy with an inherent understanding of both motion priors and object affordances. In the first stage, a trajectory imitator is pre-trained on a large corpus of human hand motions to instill a strong prior for natural movement. In the second stage, a residual module is trained to adapt these general human-like motions to specific object instances. This refinement is critically guided by two components: our Negative Affordance-aware Segmentation (NAA) module, which identifies functionally inappropriate contact regions, and a privileged teacher-student distillation process that ensures the final vision-based policy is highly successful. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AffordDex not only achieves universal dexterous grasping but also remains remarkably human-like in posture and functionally appropriate in contact location. As a result, AffordDex significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across seen objects, unseen instances, and even entirely novel categories.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08896 - Tue, 12 Aug 2025 12:36:01 +0000 + NVIDIA Nemotron Nano 2: An Accurate and Efficient Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Reasoning Model + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14444 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.14444.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> NVIDIA, Aarti Basant, Abhijit Khairnar, Abhijit Paithankar, Abhinav Khattar, Adi Renduchintala, Adithya Renduchintala, Aditya Malte, Akhiad Bercovich, Akshay Hazare, Alejandra Rico, Aleksander Ficek, Alex Kondratenko, Alex Shaposhnikov, Ali Taghibakhshi, Amelia Barton, Ameya Sunil Mahabaleshwarkar, Amy Shen, Andrew Tao, Ann Guan, Anna Shors, Anubhav Mandarwal, Arham Mehta, Arun Venkatesan, Ashton Sharabiani, Ashwath Aithal, Ashwin Poojary, Ayush Dattagupta, Balaram Buddharaju, Banghua Zhu, Barnaby Simkin, Bilal Kartal, Bita Darvish Rouhani, Bobby Chen, Boris Ginsburg, Brandon Norick, Brian Yu, Bryan Catanzaro, Charles Wang, Charlie Truong, Chetan Mungekar, Chintan Patel, Chris Alexiuk, Christian Munley, Christopher Parisien, Dan Su, Daniel Afrimi, Daniel Korzekwa, Daniel Rohrer, Daria Gitman, David Mosallanezhad, Deepak Narayanan, Dima Rekesh, Dina Yared, Dmytro Pykhtar, Dong Ahn, Duncan Riach, Eileen Long, Elliott Ning, Eric Chung, Erick Galinkin, Evelina Bakhturina, Gargi Prasad, Gerald Shen, Haim Elisha, Harsh Sharma, Hayley Ross, Helen Ngo, Herman Sahota, Hexin Wang, Hoo Chang Shin, Hua Huang, Iain Cunningham, Igor Gitman, Ivan Moshkov, Jaehun Jung, Jan Kautz, Jane Polak Scowcroft, Jared Casper, Jimmy Zhang, Jinze Xue, Jocelyn Huang, Joey Conway, John Kamalu, Jonathan Cohen, Joseph Jennings, Julien Veron Vialard, Junkeun Yi, Jupinder Parmar, Kari Briski, Katherine Cheung, Katherine Luna, Keith Wyss, Keshav Santhanam, Kezhi Kong, Krzysztof Pawelec, Kumar Anik, Kunlun Li, Kushan Ahmadian, Lawrence McAfee, Laya Sleiman, Leon Derczynski, Luis Vega, Maer Rodrigues de Melo, Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar, Marcin Chochowski, Mark Cai, Markus Kliegl, Marta Stepniewska-Dziubinska, Matvei Novikov, Mehrzad Samadi, Meredith Price, Meriem Boubdir, Michael Boone, Michael Evans, Michal Bien, Michal Zawalski, Miguel Martinez, Mike Chrzanowski, Mohammad Shoeybi, Mostofa Patwary, Namit Dhameja, Nave Assaf, Negar Habibi, Nidhi Bhatia, Nikki Pope, Nima Tajbakhsh, Nirmal Kumar Juluru, Oleg Rybakov, Oleksii Hrinchuk, Oleksii Kuchaiev, Oluwatobi Olabiyi, Pablo Ribalta, Padmavathy Subramanian, Parth Chadha, Pavlo Molchanov, Peter Dykas, Peter Jin, Piotr Bialecki, Piotr Januszewski, Pradeep Thalasta, Prashant Gaikwad, Prasoon Varshney, Pritam Gundecha, Przemek Tredak, Rabeeh Karimi Mahabadi, Rajen Patel, Ran El-Yaniv, Ranjit Rajan, Ria Cheruvu, Rima Shahbazyan, Ritika Borkar, Ritu Gala, Roger Waleffe, Ruoxi Zhang, Russell J. Hewett, Ryan Prenger, Sahil Jain, Samuel Kriman, Sanjeev Satheesh, Saori Kaji, Sarah Yurick, Saurav Muralidharan, Sean Narenthiran, Seonmyeong Bak, Sepehr Sameni, Seungju Han, Shanmugam Ramasamy, Shaona Ghosh, Sharath Turuvekere Sreenivas, Shelby Thomas, Shizhe Diao, Shreya Gopal, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Shubham Toshniwal, Shuoyang Ding, Siddharth Singh, Siddhartha Jain, Somshubra Majumdar, Stefania Alborghetti, Syeda Nahida Akter, Terry Kong, Tim Moon, Tomasz Hliwiak, Tomer Asida, Tony Wang, Twinkle Vashishth, Tyler Poon, Udi Karpas, Vahid Noroozi, Venkat Srinivasan, Vijay Korthikanti, Vikram Fugro, Vineeth Kalluru, Vitaly Kurin, Vitaly Lavrukhin, Wasi Uddin Ahmad, Wei Du, Wonmin Byeon, Ximing Lu, Xin Dong, Yashaswi Karnati, Yejin Choi, Yian Zhang, Ying Lin, Yonggan Fu, Yoshi Suhara, Zhen Dong, Zhiyu Li, Zhongbo Zhu, Zijia Chen</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 27</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We introduce Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2, a hybrid Mamba-Transformer language model designed to increase throughput for reasoning workloads while achieving state-of-the-art accuracy compared to similarly-sized models. Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2 builds on the Nemotron-H architecture, in which the majority of the self-attention layers in the common Transformer architecture are replaced with Mamba-2 layers, to achieve improved inference speed when generating the long thinking traces needed for reasoning. We create Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2 by first pre-training a 12-billion-parameter model (Nemotron-Nano-12B-v2-Base) on 20 trillion tokens using an FP8 training recipe. After aligning Nemotron-Nano-12B-v2-Base, we employ the Minitron strategy to compress and distill the model with the goal of enabling inference on up to 128k tokens on a single NVIDIA A10G GPU (22GiB of memory, bfloat16 precision). Compared to existing similarly-sized models (e.g., Qwen3-8B), we show that Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2 achieves on-par or better accuracy on reasoning benchmarks while achieving up to 6x higher inference throughput in reasoning settings like 8k input and 16k output tokens. We are releasing Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2, Nemotron-Nano12B-v2-Base, and Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2-Base checkpoints along with the majority of our pre- and post-training datasets on Hugging Face.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14444 + Wed, 20 Aug 2025 06:00:57 +0000 - DeCRED: Decoder-Centric Regularization for Encoder-Decoder Based Speech Recognition - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08938 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.08938.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Alexander Polok, Santosh Kesiraju, Karel Beneš, Bolaji Yusuf, Lukáš Burget, Jan Černocký</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 8</p><p><b>Summary:</b> This paper presents a simple yet effective regularization for the internal language model induced by the decoder in encoder-decoder ASR models, thereby improving robustness and generalization in both in- and out-of-domain settings. The proposed method, Decoder-Centric Regularization in Encoder-Decoder (DeCRED), adds auxiliary classifiers to the decoder, enabling next token prediction via intermediate logits. Empirically, DeCRED reduces the mean internal LM BPE perplexity by 36.6% relative to 11 test sets. Furthermore, this translates into actual WER improvements over the baseline in 5 of 7 in-domain and 3 of 4 out-of-domain test sets, reducing macro WER from 6.4% to 6.3% and 18.2% to 16.2%, respectively. On TEDLIUM3, DeCRED achieves 7.0% WER, surpassing the baseline and encoder-centric InterCTC regularization by 0.6% and 0.5%, respectively. Finally, we compare DeCRED with OWSM v3.1 and Whisper-medium, showing competitive WERs despite training on much less data with fewer parameters.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08938 - Tue, 12 Aug 2025 13:44:50 +0000 + DuPO: Enabling Reliable LLM Self-Verification via Dual Preference Optimization + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14460 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.14460.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Shuaijie She, Yu Bao, Yu Lu, Lu Xu, Tao Li, Wenhao Zhu, Shujian Huang, Shanbo Cheng, Lu Lu, Yuxuan Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 74</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present DuPO, a dual learning-based preference optimization framework that generates annotation-free feedback via a generalized duality. DuPO addresses two key limitations: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR)'s reliance on costly labels and applicability restricted to verifiable tasks, and traditional dual learning's restriction to strictly dual task pairs (e.g., translation and back-translation). Specifically, DuPO decomposes a primal task's input into known and unknown components, then constructs its dual task to reconstruct the unknown part using the primal output and known information (e.g., reversing math solutions to recover hidden variables), broadening applicability to non-invertible tasks. The quality of this reconstruction serves as a self-supervised reward to optimize the primal task, synergizing with LLMs' ability to instantiate both tasks via a single model. Empirically, DuPO achieves substantial gains across diverse tasks: it enhances the average translation quality by 2.13 COMET over 756 directions, boosts the mathematical reasoning accuracy by an average of 6.4 points on three challenge benchmarks, and enhances performance by 9.3 points as an inference-time reranker (trading computation for accuracy). These results position DuPO as a scalable, general, and annotation-free paradigm for LLM optimization.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14460 + Wed, 20 Aug 2025 06:31:18 +0000 - Train Long, Think Short: Curriculum Learning for Efficient Reasoning - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08940 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.08940.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud, Kumail Alhamoud, Abed Hammoud, Elie Bou-Zeid, Marzyeh Ghassemi, Bernard Ghanem</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 20</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent work on enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) has introduced explicit length control as a means of constraining computational cost while preserving accuracy. However, existing approaches rely on fixed-length training budgets, which do not take advantage of the natural progression from exploration to compression during learning. In this work, we propose a curriculum learning strategy for length-controlled reasoning using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Our method starts with generous token budgets and gradually tightens them over training, encouraging models to first discover effective solution strategies and then distill them into more concise reasoning traces. We augment GRPO with a reward function that balances three signals: task correctness (via verifier feedback), length efficiency, and formatting adherence (via structural tags). Experiments on GSM8K, MATH500, SVAMP, College Math, and GSM+ demonstrate that curriculum-based training consistently outperforms fixed-budget baselines at the same final budget, achieving higher accuracy and significantly improved token efficiency. We further ablate the impact of reward weighting and decay schedule design, showing that progressive constraint serves as a powerful inductive bias for training efficient reasoning models. Our code and checkpoints are released at: https://github.com/hammoudhasan/curriculum_grpo.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08940 - Tue, 12 Aug 2025 13:48:03 +0000 + Leuvenshtein: Efficient FHE-based Edit Distance Computation with Single Bootstrap per Cell + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14568 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.14568.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Wouter Legiest, Jan-Pieter D'Anvers, Bojan Spasic, Nam-Luc Tran, Ingrid Verbauwhede</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> This paper presents a novel approach to calculating the Levenshtein (edit) distance within the framework of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), specifically targeting third-generation schemes like TFHE. Edit distance computations are essential in applications across finance and genomics, such as DNA sequence alignment. We introduce an optimised algorithm that significantly reduces the cost of edit distance calculations called Leuvenshtein. This algorithm specifically reduces the number of programmable bootstraps (PBS) needed per cell of the calculation, lowering it from approximately 94 operations -- required by the conventional Wagner-Fisher algorithm -- to just 1. Additionally, we propose an efficient method for performing equality checks on characters, reducing ASCII character comparisons to only 2 PBS operations. Finally, we explore the potential for further performance improvements by utilising preprocessing when one of the input strings is unencrypted. Our Leuvenshtein achieves up to 278times faster performance compared to the best available TFHE implementation and up to 39times faster than an optimised implementation of the Wagner-Fisher algorithm. Moreover, when offline preprocessing is possible due to the presence of one unencrypted input on the server side, an additional 3times speedup can be achieved.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14568 + Wed, 20 Aug 2025 09:40:06 +0000 - Bridging Theory and Practice in Quantum Game Theory: Optimized Implementation of the Battle of the Sexes with Error Mitigation on NISQ Hardware - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09050 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09050.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Germán Díaz Agreda, Carlos Andres Duran Paredes, Mateo Buenaventura Samboni, Jhon Alejandro Andrade, Sebastián Andrés Cajas Ordoñez</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Implementing quantum game theory on real hardware is challenging due to noise, decoherence, and limited qubit connectivity, yet such demonstrations are essential to validate theoretical predictions. We present one of the first full experimental realizations of the Battle of the Sexes game under the Eisert-Wilkens-Lewenstein (EWL) framework on IBM Quantum's ibm sherbrooke superconducting processor. Four quantum strategies (I, H, R(pi/4), R(pi)) were evaluated across 31 entanglement values gamma in [0, pi] using 2048 shots per configuration, enabling a direct comparison between analytical predictions and hardware execution. To mitigate noise and variability, we introduce a Guided Circuit Mapping (GCM) method that dynamically selects qubit pairs and optimizes routing based on real-time topology and calibration data. The analytical model forecasts up to 108% payoff improvement over the classical equilibrium, and despite hardware-induced deviations, experimental results with GCM preserve the expected payoff trends within 3.5%-12% relative error. These findings show that quantum advantages in strategic coordination can persist under realistic NISQ conditions, providing a pathway toward practical applications of quantum game theory in multi-agent, economic, and distributed decision-making systems.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09050 - Tue, 12 Aug 2025 16:10:05 +0000 + MCP-Universe: Benchmarking Large Language Models with Real-World Model Context Protocol Servers + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14704 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.14704.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ziyang Luo, Zhiqi Shen, Wenzhuo Yang, Zirui Zhao, Prathyusha Jwalapuram, Amrita Saha, Doyen Sahoo, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong, Junnan Li</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 29</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The Model Context Protocol has emerged as a transformative standard for connecting large language models to external data sources and tools, rapidly gaining adoption across major AI providers and development platforms. However, existing benchmarks are overly simplistic and fail to capture real application challenges such as long-horizon reasoning and large, unfamiliar tool spaces. To address this critical gap, we introduce MCP-Universe, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLMs in realistic and hard tasks through interaction with real-world MCP servers. Our benchmark encompasses 6 core domains spanning 11 different MCP servers: Location Navigation, Repository Management, Financial Analysis, 3D Design, Browser Automation, and Web Searching. To ensure rigorous evaluation, we implement execution-based evaluators, including format evaluators for agent format compliance, static evaluators for time-invariant content matching, and dynamic evaluators that automatically retrieve real-time ground truth for temporally sensitive tasks. Through extensive evaluation of leading LLMs, we find that even SOTA models such as GPT-5 (43.72%), Grok-4 (33.33%) and Claude-4.0-Sonnet (29.44%) exhibit significant performance limitations. In addition, our benchmark poses a significant long-context challenge for LLM agents, as the number of input tokens increases rapidly with the number of interaction steps. Moreover, it introduces an unknown-tools challenge, as LLM agents often lack familiarity with the precise usage of the MCP servers. Notably, enterprise-level agents like Cursor cannot achieve better performance than standard ReAct frameworks. Beyond evaluation, we open-source our extensible evaluation framework with UI support, enabling researchers and practitioners to seamlessly integrate new agents and MCP servers while fostering innovation in the rapidly evolving MCP ecosystem.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14704 + Wed, 20 Aug 2025 13:28:58 +0000 - VertexRegen: Mesh Generation with Continuous Level of Detail - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09062 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09062.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xiang Zhang, Yawar Siddiqui, Armen Avetisyan, Chris Xie, Jakob Engel, Henry Howard-Jenkins</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 29</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We introduce VertexRegen, a novel mesh generation framework that enables generation at a continuous level of detail. Existing autoregressive methods generate meshes in a partial-to-complete manner and thus intermediate steps of generation represent incomplete structures. VertexRegen takes inspiration from progressive meshes and reformulates the process as the reversal of edge collapse, i.e. vertex split, learned through a generative model. Experimental results demonstrate that VertexRegen produces meshes of comparable quality to state-of-the-art methods while uniquely offering anytime generation with the flexibility to halt at any step to yield valid meshes with varying levels of detail.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09062 - Tue, 12 Aug 2025 16:25:46 +0000 + Tinker: Diffusion's Gift to 3D--Multi-View Consistent Editing From Sparse Inputs without Per-Scene Optimization + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14811 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.14811.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Canyu Zhao, Xiaoman Li, Tianjian Feng, Zhiyue Zhao, Hao Chen, Chunhua Shen</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 34</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We introduce Tinker, a versatile framework for high-fidelity 3D editing that operates in both one-shot and few-shot regimes without any per-scene finetuning. Unlike prior techniques that demand extensive per-scene optimization to ensure multi-view consistency or to produce dozens of consistent edited input views, Tinker delivers robust, multi-view consistent edits from as few as one or two images. This capability stems from repurposing pretrained diffusion models, which unlocks their latent 3D awareness. To drive research in this space, we curate the first large-scale multi-view editing dataset and data pipeline, spanning diverse scenes and styles. Building on this dataset, we develop our framework capable of generating multi-view consistent edited views without per-scene training, which consists of two novel components: (1) Referring multi-view editor: Enables precise, reference-driven edits that remain coherent across all viewpoints. (2) Any-view-to-video synthesizer: Leverages spatial-temporal priors from video diffusion to perform high-quality scene completion and novel-view generation even from sparse inputs. Through extensive experiments, Tinker significantly reduces the barrier to generalizable 3D content creation, achieving state-of-the-art performance on editing, novel-view synthesis, and rendering enhancement tasks. We believe that Tinker represents a key step towards truly scalable, zero-shot 3D editing. Project webpage: https://aim-uofa.github.io/Tinker</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14811 + Wed, 20 Aug 2025 16:02:59 +0000 - AutoCodeBench: Large Language Models are Automatic Code Benchmark Generators - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09101 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09101.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jason Chou, Ao Liu, Yuchi Deng, Zhiying Zeng, Tao Zhang, Haotian Zhu, Jianwei Cai, Yue Mao, Chenchen Zhang, Lingyun Tan, Ziyan Xu, Bohui Zhai, Hengyi Liu, Speed Zhu, Wiggin Zhou, Fengzong Lian</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 7</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various domains, with code generation emerging as a key area of focus. While numerous benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate their code generation abilities, these benchmarks face several critical limitations. First, they often rely on manual annotations, which are time-consuming and difficult to scale across different programming languages and problem complexities. Second, most existing benchmarks focus primarily on Python, while the few multilingual benchmarks suffer from limited difficulty and uneven language distribution. To address these challenges, we propose AutoCodeGen, an automated method for generating high-difficulty multilingual code generation datasets without manual annotations. AutoCodeGen ensures the correctness and completeness of test cases by generating test inputs with LLMs and obtaining test outputs through a multilingual sandbox, while achieving high data quality through reverse-order problem generation and multiple filtering steps. Using this novel method, we introduce AutoCodeBench, a large-scale code generation benchmark comprising 3,920 problems evenly distributed across 20 programming languages. It is specifically designed to evaluate LLMs on challenging, diverse, and practical multilingual tasks. We evaluate over 30 leading open-source and proprietary LLMs on AutoCodeBench and its simplified version AutoCodeBench-Lite. The results show that even the most advanced LLMs struggle with the complexity, diversity, and multilingual nature of these tasks. Besides, we introduce AutoCodeBench-Complete, specifically designed for base models to assess their few-shot code generation capabilities. We hope the AutoCodeBench series will serve as a valuable resource and inspire the community to focus on more challenging and practical multilingual code generation scenarios.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09101 - Tue, 12 Aug 2025 17:29:20 +0000 + MeshCoder: LLM-Powered Structured Mesh Code Generation from Point Clouds + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14879 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.14879.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Bingquan Dai, Li Ray Luo, Qihong Tang, Jie Wang, Xinyu Lian, Hao Xu, Minghan Qin, Xudong Xu, Bo Dai, Haoqian Wang, Zhaoyang Lyu, Jiangmiao Pang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 47</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Reconstructing 3D objects into editable programs is pivotal for applications like reverse engineering and shape editing. However, existing methods often rely on limited domain-specific languages (DSLs) and small-scale datasets, restricting their ability to model complex geometries and structures. To address these challenges, we introduce MeshCoder, a novel framework that reconstructs complex 3D objects from point clouds into editable Blender Python scripts. We develop a comprehensive set of expressive Blender Python APIs capable of synthesizing intricate geometries. Leveraging these APIs, we construct a large-scale paired object-code dataset, where the code for each object is decomposed into distinct semantic parts. Subsequently, we train a multimodal large language model (LLM) that translates 3D point cloud into executable Blender Python scripts. Our approach not only achieves superior performance in shape-to-code reconstruction tasks but also facilitates intuitive geometric and topological editing through convenient code modifications. Furthermore, our code-based representation enhances the reasoning capabilities of LLMs in 3D shape understanding tasks. Together, these contributions establish MeshCoder as a powerful and flexible solution for programmatic 3D shape reconstruction and understanding.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14879 + Wed, 20 Aug 2025 17:50:15 +0000 - OpenCUA: Open Foundations for Computer-Use Agents - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09123 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09123.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xinyuan Wang, Bowen Wang, Dunjie Lu, Junlin Yang, Tianbao Xie, Junli Wang, Jiaqi Deng, Xiaole Guo, Yiheng Xu, Chen Henry Wu, Zhennan Shen, Zhuokai Li, Ryan Li, Xiaochuan Li, Junda Chen, Boyuan Zheng, Peihang Li, Fangyu Lei, Ruisheng Cao, Yeqiao Fu, Dongchan Shin, Martin Shin, Jiarui Hu, Yuyan Wang, Jixuan Chen, Yuxiao Ye, Danyang Zhang, Dikang Du, Hao Hu, Huarong Chen, Zaida Zhou, Yipu Wang, Heng Wang, Diyi Yang, Victor Zhong, Flood Sung, Y. Charles, Zhilin Yang, Tao Yu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 22</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Vision-language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities as computer-use agents (CUAs) capable of automating diverse computer tasks. As their commercial potential grows, critical details of the most capable CUA systems remain closed. As these agents will increasingly mediate digital interactions and execute consequential decisions on our behalf, the research community needs access to open CUA frameworks to study their capabilities, limitations, and risks. To bridge this gap, we propose OpenCUA, a comprehensive open-source framework for scaling CUA data and foundation models. Our framework consists of: (1) an annotation infrastructure that seamlessly captures human computer-use demonstrations; (2) AgentNet, the first large-scale computer-use task dataset spanning 3 operating systems and 200+ applications and websites; (3) a scalable pipeline that transforms demonstrations into state-action pairs with reflective long Chain-of-Thought reasoning that sustain robust performance gains as data scales. Our end-to-end agent models demonstrate strong performance across CUA benchmarks. In particular, OpenCUA-32B achieves an average success rate of 34.8% on OSWorld-Verified, establishing a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) among open-source models and surpassing OpenAI CUA (GPT-4o). Further analysis confirms that our approach generalizes well across domains and benefits significantly from increased test-time computation. We release our annotation tool, datasets, code, and models to build open foundations for further CUA research.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09123 - Tue, 12 Aug 2025 17:52:32 +0000 + Snap-Snap: Taking Two Images to Reconstruct 3D Human Gaussians in Milliseconds + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14892 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.14892.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jia Lu, Taoran Yi, Jiemin Fang, Chen Yang, Chuiyun Wu, Wei Shen, Wenyu Liu, Qi Tian, Xinggang Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Reconstructing 3D human bodies from sparse views has been an appealing topic, which is crucial to broader the related applications. In this paper, we propose a quite challenging but valuable task to reconstruct the human body from only two images, i.e., the front and back view, which can largely lower the barrier for users to create their own 3D digital humans. The main challenges lie in the difficulty of building 3D consistency and recovering missing information from the highly sparse input. We redesign a geometry reconstruction model based on foundation reconstruction models to predict consistent point clouds even input images have scarce overlaps with extensive human data training. Furthermore, an enhancement algorithm is applied to supplement the missing color information, and then the complete human point clouds with colors can be obtained, which are directly transformed into 3D Gaussians for better rendering quality. Experiments show that our method can reconstruct the entire human in 190 ms on a single NVIDIA RTX 4090, with two images at a resolution of 1024x1024, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance on the THuman2.0 and cross-domain datasets. Additionally, our method can complete human reconstruction even with images captured by low-cost mobile devices, reducing the requirements for data collection. Demos and code are available at https://hustvl.github.io/Snap-Snap/.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14892 + Wed, 20 Aug 2025 17:59:11 +0000 - Complex Logical Instruction Generation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09125 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09125.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Mian Zhang, Shujian Liu, Sixun Dong, Ming Yin, Yebowen Hu, Xun Wang, Steven Ma, Song Wang, Sathish Reddy Indurthi, Haoyun Deng, Zhiyu Zoey Chen, Kaiqiang Song</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 38</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Instruction following has catalyzed the recent era of Large Language Models (LLMs) and is the foundational skill underpinning more advanced capabilities such as reasoning and agentic behaviors. As tasks grow more challenging, the logic structures embedded in natural language instructions becomes increasingly intricate. However, how well LLMs perform on such logic-rich instructions remains under-explored. We propose LogicIFGen and LogicIFEval. LogicIFGen is a scalable, automated framework for generating verifiable instructions from code functions, which can naturally express rich logic such as conditionals, nesting, recursion, and function calls. We further curate a collection of complex code functions and use LogicIFGen to construct LogicIFEval, a benchmark comprising 426 verifiable logic-rich instructions. Our experiments demonstrate that current state-of-the-art LLMs still struggle to correctly follow the instructions in LogicIFEval. Most LLMs can only follow fewer than 60% of the instructions, revealing significant deficiencies in the instruction-following ability. Code and Benchmark: https://github.com/mianzhang/LogicIF</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09125 - Tue, 12 Aug 2025 17:54:27 +0000 + Quantization Meets dLLMs: A Systematic Study of Post-training Quantization for Diffusion LLMs + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14896 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.14896.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Haokun Lin, Haobo Xu, Yichen Wu, Ziyu Guo, Renrui Zhang, Zhichao Lu, Ying Wei, Qingfu Zhang, Zhenan Sun</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 19</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advances in diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have introduced a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) LLMs for natural language generation tasks, leveraging full attention and denoising-based decoding strategies. However, the deployment of these models on edge devices remains challenging due to their massive parameter scale and high resource demands. While post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as a widely adopted technique for compressing AR LLMs, its applicability to dLLMs remains largely unexplored. In this work, we present the first systematic study on quantizing diffusion-based language models. We begin by identifying the presence of activation outliers, characterized by abnormally large activation values that dominate the dynamic range. These outliers pose a key challenge to low-bit quantization, as they make it difficult to preserve precision for the majority of values. More importantly, we implement state-of-the-art PTQ methods and conduct a comprehensive evaluation across multiple task types and model variants. Our analysis is structured along four key dimensions: bit-width, quantization method, task category, and model type. Through this multi-perspective evaluation, we offer practical insights into the quantization behavior of dLLMs under different configurations. We hope our findings provide a foundation for future research in efficient dLLM deployment. All codes and experimental setups will be released to support the community.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14896 + Wed, 20 Aug 2025 17:59:51 +0000 - Time Is a Feature: Exploiting Temporal Dynamics in Diffusion Language Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09138 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09138.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Wen Wang, Bozhen Fang, Chenchen Jing, Yongliang Shen, Yangyi Shen, Qiuyu Wang, Hao Ouyang, Hao Chen, Chunhua Shen</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 32</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) generate text through iterative denoising, yet current decoding strategies discard rich intermediate predictions in favor of the final output. Our work here reveals a critical phenomenon, temporal oscillation, where correct answers often emerge in the middle process, but are overwritten in later denoising steps. To address this issue, we introduce two complementary methods that exploit temporal consistency: 1) Temporal Self-Consistency Voting, a training-free, test-time decoding strategy that aggregates predictions across denoising steps to select the most consistent output; and 2) a post-training method termed Temporal Consistency Reinforcement, which uses Temporal Semantic Entropy (TSE), a measure of semantic stability across intermediate predictions, as a reward signal to encourage stable generations. Empirical results across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Using the negative TSE reward alone, we observe a remarkable average improvement of 24.7% on the Countdown dataset over an existing dLLM. Combined with the accuracy reward, we achieve absolute gains of 2.0% on GSM8K, 4.3% on MATH500, 6.6% on SVAMP, and 25.3% on Countdown, respectively. Our findings underscore the untapped potential of temporal dynamics in dLLMs and offer two simple yet effective tools to harness them.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09138 - Tue, 12 Aug 2025 17:59:57 +0000 + aiXiv: A Next-Generation Open Access Ecosystem for Scientific Discovery Generated by AI Scientists + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15126 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.15126.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Pengsong Zhang, Xiang Hu, Guowei Huang, Yang Qi, Heng Zhang, Xiuxu Li, Jiaxing Song, Jiabin Luo, Yijiang Li, Shuo Yin, Chengxiao Dai, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Xiaoyan Zhou, Zhenfei Yin, Boqin Yuan, Jing Dong, Guinan Su, Guanren Qiao, Haiming Tang, Anghong Du, Lili Pan, Zhenzhong Lan, Xinyu Liu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 14</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled AI agents to autonomously generate scientific proposals, conduct experiments, author papers, and perform peer reviews. Yet this flood of AI-generated research content collides with a fragmented and largely closed publication ecosystem. Traditional journals and conferences rely on human peer review, making them difficult to scale and often reluctant to accept AI-generated research content; existing preprint servers (e.g. arXiv) lack rigorous quality-control mechanisms. Consequently, a significant amount of high-quality AI-generated research lacks appropriate venues for dissemination, hindering its potential to advance scientific progress. To address these challenges, we introduce aiXiv, a next-generation open-access platform for human and AI scientists. Its multi-agent architecture allows research proposals and papers to be submitted, reviewed, and iteratively refined by both human and AI scientists. It also provides API and MCP interfaces that enable seamless integration of heterogeneous human and AI scientists, creating a scalable and extensible ecosystem for autonomous scientific discovery. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that aiXiv is a reliable and robust platform that significantly enhances the quality of AI-generated research proposals and papers after iterative revising and reviewing on aiXiv. Our work lays the groundwork for a next-generation open-access ecosystem for AI scientists, accelerating the publication and dissemination of high-quality AI-generated research content. Code is available at https://github.com/aixiv-org. Website is available at https://forms.gle/DxQgCtXFsJ4paMtn8.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15126 + Wed, 20 Aug 2025 23:16:41 +0000 - IAG: Input-aware Backdoor Attack on VLMs for Visual Grounding - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09456 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09456.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Junxian Li, Beining Xu, Di Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 7</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown significant advancements in tasks such as visual grounding, where they localize specific objects in images based on natural language queries and images. However, security issues in visual grounding tasks for VLMs remain underexplored, especially in the context of backdoor attacks. In this paper, we introduce a novel input-aware backdoor attack method, IAG, designed to manipulate the grounding behavior of VLMs. This attack forces the model to ground a specific target object in the input image, regardless of the user's query. We propose an adaptive trigger generator that embeds the semantic information of the attack target's description into the original image using a text-conditional U-Net, thereby overcoming the open-vocabulary attack challenge. To ensure the attack's stealthiness, we utilize a reconstruction loss to minimize visual discrepancies between poisoned and clean images. Additionally, we introduce a unified method for generating attack data. IAG is evaluated theoretically and empirically, demonstrating its feasibility and effectiveness. Notably, our ASR@0.5 on InternVL-2.5-8B reaches over 65\% on various testing sets. IAG also shows promising potential on manipulating Ferret-7B and LlaVA-1.5-7B with very little accuracy decrease on clean samples. Extensive specific experiments, such as ablation study and potential defense, also indicate the robustness and transferability of our attack.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09456 - Wed, 13 Aug 2025 03:22:19 +0000 + Mobile-Agent-v3: Foundamental Agents for GUI Automation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15144 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.15144.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jiabo Ye, Xi Zhang, Haiyang Xu, Haowei Liu, Junyang Wang, Zhaoqing Zhu, Ziwei Zheng, Feiyu Gao, Junjie Cao, Zhengxi Lu, Jitong Liao, Qi Zheng, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou, Ming Yan</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 45</p><p><b>Summary:</b> This paper introduces GUI-Owl, a foundational GUI agent model that achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source end-to-end models on ten GUI benchmarks across desktop and mobile environments, covering grounding, question answering, planning, decision-making, and procedural knowledge. GUI-Owl-7B achieves 66.4 on AndroidWorld and 29.4 on OSWorld. Building on this, we propose Mobile-Agent-v3, a general-purpose GUI agent framework that further improves performance to 73.3 on AndroidWorld and 37.7 on OSWorld, setting a new state-of-the-art for open-source GUI agent frameworks. GUI-Owl incorporates three key innovations: (1) Large-scale Environment Infrastructure: a cloud-based virtual environment spanning Android, Ubuntu, macOS, and Windows, enabling our Self-Evolving GUI Trajectory Production framework. This generates high-quality interaction data via automated query generation and correctness validation, leveraging GUI-Owl to refine trajectories iteratively, forming a self-improving loop. It supports diverse data pipelines and reduces manual annotation. (2) Diverse Foundational Agent Capabilities: by integrating UI grounding, planning, action semantics, and reasoning patterns, GUI-Owl supports end-to-end decision-making and can act as a modular component in multi-agent systems. (3) Scalable Environment RL: we develop a scalable reinforcement learning framework with fully asynchronous training for real-world alignment. We also introduce Trajectory-aware Relative Policy Optimization (TRPO) for online RL, achieving 34.9 on OSWorld. GUI-Owl and Mobile-Agent-v3 are open-sourced at https://github.com/X-PLUG/MobileAgent.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15144 + Thu, 21 Aug 2025 00:39:12 +0000 - The Surprising Effectiveness of Membership Inference with Simple N-Gram Coverage - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09603 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09603.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Skyler Hallinan, Jaehun Jung, Melanie Sclar, Ximing Lu, Abhilasha Ravichander, Sahana Ramnath, Yejin Choi, Sai Praneeth Karimireddy, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Xiang Ren</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Membership inference attacks serves as useful tool for fair use of language models, such as detecting potential copyright infringement and auditing data leakage. However, many current state-of-the-art attacks require access to models' hidden states or probability distribution, which prevents investigation into more widely-used, API-access only models like GPT-4. In this work, we introduce N-Gram Coverage Attack, a membership inference attack that relies solely on text outputs from the target model, enabling attacks on completely black-box models. We leverage the observation that models are more likely to memorize and subsequently generate text patterns that were commonly observed in their training data. Specifically, to make a prediction on a candidate member, N-Gram Coverage Attack first obtains multiple model generations conditioned on a prefix of the candidate. It then uses n-gram overlap metrics to compute and aggregate the similarities of these outputs with the ground truth suffix; high similarities indicate likely membership. We first demonstrate on a diverse set of existing benchmarks that N-Gram Coverage Attack outperforms other black-box methods while also impressively achieving comparable or even better performance to state-of-the-art white-box attacks - despite having access to only text outputs. Interestingly, we find that the success rate of our method scales with the attack compute budget - as we increase the number of sequences generated from the target model conditioned on the prefix, attack performance tends to improve. Having verified the accuracy of our method, we use it to investigate previously unstudied closed OpenAI models on multiple domains. We find that more recent models, such as GPT-4o, exhibit increased robustness to membership inference, suggesting an evolving trend toward improved privacy protections.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09603 - Wed, 13 Aug 2025 08:35:16 +0000 + Fin-PRM: A Domain-Specialized Process Reward Model for Financial Reasoning in Large Language Models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15202 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.15202.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yuanchen Zhou, Shuo Jiang, Jie Zhu, Junhui Li, Lifan Guo, Feng Chen, Chi Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Process Reward Models (PRMs) have emerged as a promising framework for supervising intermediate reasoning in large language models (LLMs), yet existing PRMs are primarily trained on general or Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) domains and fall short in domain-specific contexts such as finance, where reasoning is more structured, symbolic, and sensitive to factual and regulatory correctness. We introduce Fin-PRM, a domain-specialized, trajectory-aware PRM tailored to evaluate intermediate reasoning steps in financial tasks. Fin-PRM integrates step-level and trajectory-level reward supervision, enabling fine-grained evaluation of reasoning traces aligned with financial logic. We apply Fin-PRM in both offline and online reward learning settings, supporting three key applications: (i) selecting high-quality reasoning trajectories for distillation-based supervised fine-tuning, (ii) providing dense process-level rewards for reinforcement learning, and (iii) guiding reward-informed Best-of-N inference at test time. Experimental results on financial reasoning benchmarks, including CFLUE and FinQA, demonstrate that Fin-PRM consistently outperforms general-purpose PRMs and strong domain baselines in trajectory selection quality. Downstream models trained with Fin-PRM yield substantial improvements with baselines, with gains of 12.9\% in supervised learning, 5.2\% in reinforcement learning, and 5.1\% in test-time performance. These findings highlight the value of domain-specialized reward modeling for aligning LLMs with expert-level financial reasoning. Our project resources will be available at https://github.com/aliyun/qwen-dianjin.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15202 + Thu, 21 Aug 2025 03:31:11 +0000 - GSFixer: Improving 3D Gaussian Splatting with Reference-Guided Video Diffusion Priors - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09667 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09667.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xingyilang Yin, Qi Zhang, Jiahao Chang, Ying Feng, Qingnan Fan, Xi Yang, Chi-Man Pun, Huaqi Zhang, Xiaodong Cun</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Reconstructing 3D scenes using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) from sparse views is an ill-posed problem due to insufficient information, often resulting in noticeable artifacts. While recent approaches have sought to leverage generative priors to complete information for under-constrained regions, they struggle to generate content that remains consistent with input observations. To address this challenge, we propose GSFixer, a novel framework designed to improve the quality of 3DGS representations reconstructed from sparse inputs. The core of our approach is the reference-guided video restoration model, built upon a DiT-based video diffusion model trained on paired artifact 3DGS renders and clean frames with additional reference-based conditions. Considering the input sparse views as references, our model integrates both 2D semantic features and 3D geometric features of reference views extracted from the visual geometry foundation model, enhancing the semantic coherence and 3D consistency when fixing artifact novel views. Furthermore, considering the lack of suitable benchmarks for 3DGS artifact restoration evaluation, we present DL3DV-Res which contains artifact frames rendered using low-quality 3DGS. Extensive experiments demonstrate our GSFixer outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in 3DGS artifact restoration and sparse-view 3D reconstruction. Project page: https://github.com/GVCLab/GSFixer.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09667 - Wed, 13 Aug 2025 09:56:28 +0000 + Deep Think with Confidence + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15260 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.15260.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yichao Fu, Xuewei Wang, Yuandong Tian, Jiawei Zhao</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 43</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential in reasoning tasks through test-time scaling methods like self-consistency with majority voting. However, this approach often leads to diminishing returns in accuracy and high computational overhead. To address these challenges, we introduce Deep Think with Confidence (DeepConf), a simple yet powerful method that enhances both reasoning efficiency and performance at test time. DeepConf leverages model-internal confidence signals to dynamically filter out low-quality reasoning traces during or after generation. It requires no additional model training or hyperparameter tuning and can be seamlessly integrated into existing serving frameworks. We evaluate DeepConf across a variety of reasoning tasks and the latest open-source models, including Qwen 3 and GPT-OSS series. Notably, on challenging benchmarks such as AIME 2025, DeepConf@512 achieves up to 99.9% accuracy and reduces generated tokens by up to 84.7% compared to full parallel thinking.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15260 + Thu, 21 Aug 2025 05:48:38 +0000 - Sample More to Think Less: Group Filtered Policy Optimization for Concise Reasoning - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09726 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09726.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Vaishnavi Shrivastava, Ahmed Awadallah, Vidhisha Balachandran, Shivam Garg, Harkirat Behl, Dimitris Papailiopoulos</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 7</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language models trained with reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards tend to trade accuracy for length--inflating response lengths to achieve gains in accuracy. While longer answers may be warranted for harder problems, many tokens are merely "filler": repetitive, verbose text that makes no real progress. We introduce GFPO (Group Filtered Policy Optimization), which curbs this length explosion by sampling larger groups per problem during training and filtering responses to train on based on two key metrics: (1) response length and (2) token efficiency: reward per token ratio. By sampling more at training time, we teach models to think less at inference time. On the Phi-4-reasoning model, GFPO cuts GRPO's length inflation by 46-71% across challenging STEM and coding benchmarks (AIME 24/25, GPQA, Omni-MATH, LiveCodeBench) while maintaining accuracy. Optimizing for reward per token further increases reductions in length inflation to 71-85%. We also propose Adaptive Difficulty GFPO, which dynamically allocates more training resources to harder problems based on real-time difficulty estimates, improving the balance between computational efficiency and accuracy especially on difficult questions. GFPO demonstrates that increased training-time compute directly translates to reduced test-time compute--a simple yet effective trade-off for efficient reasoning.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09726 - Wed, 13 Aug 2025 11:43:49 +0000 + A Survey on Large Language Model Benchmarks + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15361 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.15361.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Shiwen Ni, Guhong Chen, Shuaimin Li, Xuanang Chen, Siyi Li, Bingli Wang, Qiyao Wang, Xingjian Wang, Yifan Zhang, Liyang Fan, Chengming Li, Ruifeng Xu, Le Sun, Min Yang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 15</p><p><b>Summary:</b> In recent years, with the rapid development of the depth and breadth of large language models' capabilities, various corresponding evaluation benchmarks have been emerging in increasing numbers. As a quantitative assessment tool for model performance, benchmarks are not only a core means to measure model capabilities but also a key element in guiding the direction of model development and promoting technological innovation. We systematically review the current status and development of large language model benchmarks for the first time, categorizing 283 representative benchmarks into three categories: general capabilities, domain-specific, and target-specific. General capability benchmarks cover aspects such as core linguistics, knowledge, and reasoning; domain-specific benchmarks focus on fields like natural sciences, humanities and social sciences, and engineering technology; target-specific benchmarks pay attention to risks, reliability, agents, etc. We point out that current benchmarks have problems such as inflated scores caused by data contamination, unfair evaluation due to cultural and linguistic biases, and lack of evaluation on process credibility and dynamic environments, and provide a referable design paradigm for future benchmark innovation.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15361 + Thu, 21 Aug 2025 08:43:35 +0000 - Seeing, Listening, Remembering, and Reasoning: A Multimodal Agent with Long-Term Memory - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09736 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09736.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Lin Long, Yichen He, Wentao Ye, Yiyuan Pan, Yuan Lin, Hang Li, Junbo Zhao, Wei Li</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 41</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We introduce M3-Agent, a novel multimodal agent framework equipped with long-term memory. Like humans, M3-Agent can process real-time visual and auditory inputs to build and update its long-term memory. Beyond episodic memory, it also develops semantic memory, enabling it to accumulate world knowledge over time. Its memory is organized in an entity-centric, multimodal format, allowing deeper and more consistent understanding of the environment. Given an instruction, M3-Agent autonomously performs multi-turn, iterative reasoning and retrieves relevant information from memory to accomplish the task. To evaluate memory effectiveness and memory-based reasoning in multimodal agents, we develop M3-Bench, a new long-video question answering benchmark. M3-Bench comprises 100 newly recorded real-world videos captured from a robot's perspective (M3-Bench-robot) and 929 web-sourced videos across diverse scenarios (M3-Bench-web). We annotate question-answer pairs designed to test key capabilities essential for agent applications, such as human understanding, general knowledge extraction, and cross-modal reasoning. Experimental results show that M3-Agent, trained via reinforcement learning, outperforms the strongest baseline, a prompting agent using Gemini-1.5-pro and GPT-4o, achieving 6.7%, 7.7%, and 5.3% higher accuracy on M3-Bench-robot, M3-Bench-web and VideoMME-long, respectively. Our work advances the multimodal agents toward more human-like long-term memory and provides insights into their practical design. Model, code and data are available at https://github.com/bytedance-seed/m3-agent</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09736 - Wed, 13 Aug 2025 12:03:03 +0000 + LLaSO: A Foundational Framework for Reproducible Research in Large Language and Speech Model + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15418 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.15418.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yirong Sun, Yizhong Geng, Peidong Wei, Yanjun Chen, Jinghan Yang, Rongfei Chen, Wei Zhang, Xiaoyu Shen</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The development of Large Speech-Language Models (LSLMs) has been slowed by fragmented architectures and a lack of transparency, hindering the systematic comparison and reproducibility of research. Unlike in the vision-language domain, the LSLM field suffers from the common practice of releasing model weights without their corresponding training data and configurations. To address these critical gaps, we introduce LLaSO, the first fully open, end-to-end framework for large-scale speech-language modeling. LLaSO provides the community with three essential resources: (1) LLaSO-Align, a 12M-instance speech-text alignment corpus; (2) LLaSO-Instruct, a 13.5M-instance multi-task instruction-tuning dataset; and (3) LLaSO-Eval, a reproducible benchmark for standardized evaluation. To validate our framework, we build and release LLaSO-Base, a 3.8B-parameter reference model trained exclusively on our public data. It achieves a normalized score of 0.72, establishing a strong, reproducible baseline that surpasses comparable models. Our analysis reveals that while broader training coverage enhances performance, significant generalization gaps persist on unseen tasks, particularly in pure audio scenarios. By releasing the complete stack of data, benchmarks, and models, LLaSO establishes a foundational open standard to unify research efforts and accelerate community-driven progress in LSLMs. We release the code, dataset, pretrained models, and results in https://github.com/EIT-NLP/LLaSO.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15418 + Thu, 21 Aug 2025 10:20:00 +0000 - μ-Parametrization for Mixture of Experts - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09752 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09752.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jan Małaśnicki, Kamil Ciebiera, Mateusz Boruń, Maciej Pióro, Jan Ludziejewski, Maciej Stefaniak, Michał Krutul, Sebastian Jaszczur, Marek Cygan, Kamil Adamczewski, Jakub Krajewski</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 6</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent years have seen a growing interest and adoption of LLMs, with muTransfer becoming a key technique for tuning hyperparameters in large-scale training. Meanwhile, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has emerged as a leading architecture in extremely large models. However, the intersection of these two advancements has remained unexplored. In this work, we derive a mu-Parameterization (muP) for MoE, providing theoretical guarantees for feature learning across model widths in both the router and experts. We empirically validate our parameterization and further investigate how scaling the number of experts and granularity affects the optimal learning rate.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09752 - Wed, 13 Aug 2025 12:31:27 +0000 + When and What: Diffusion-Grounded VideoLLM with Entity Aware Segmentation for Long Video Understanding + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15641 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.15641.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Pengcheng Fang, Yuxia Chen, Rui Guo</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Understanding videos requires more than answering open ended questions, it demands the ability to pinpoint when events occur and how entities interact across time. While recent Video LLMs have achieved remarkable progress in holistic reasoning, they remain coarse in temporal perception: timestamps are encoded only implicitly, frame level features are weak in capturing continuity, and language vision alignment often drifts from the entities of interest. In this paper, we present Grounded VideoDiT, a Video LLM designed to overcome these limitations by introducing three key innovations. First, a Diffusion Temporal Latent (DTL) encoder enhances boundary sensitivity and maintains temporal consistency. Second, object grounded representations explicitly bind query entities to localized visual evidence, strengthening alignment. Third, a mixed token scheme with discrete temporal tokens provides explicit timestamp modeling, enabling fine grained temporal reasoning. Together, these designs equip Grounded VideoDiT with robust grounding capabilities, as validated by state of the art results on Charades STA, NExT GQA, and multiple VideoQA benchmarks.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15641 + Thu, 21 Aug 2025 15:12:14 +0000 - Can LLM-Generated Textual Explanations Enhance Model Classification Performance? An Empirical Study - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09776 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09776.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Mahdi Dhaini, Juraj Vladika, Ege Erdogan, Zineb Attaoui, Gjergji Kasneci</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> In the rapidly evolving field of Explainable Natural Language Processing (NLP), textual explanations, i.e., human-like rationales, are pivotal for explaining model predictions and enriching datasets with interpretable labels. Traditional approaches rely on human annotation, which is costly, labor-intensive, and impedes scalability. In this work, we present an automated framework that leverages multiple state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) to generate high-quality textual explanations. We rigorously assess the quality of these LLM-generated explanations using a comprehensive suite of Natural Language Generation (NLG) metrics. Furthermore, we investigate the downstream impact of these explanations on the performance of pre-trained language models (PLMs) and LLMs across natural language inference tasks on two diverse benchmark datasets. Our experiments demonstrate that automated explanations exhibit highly competitive effectiveness compared to human-annotated explanations in improving model performance. Our findings underscore a promising avenue for scalable, automated LLM-based textual explanation generation for extending NLP datasets and enhancing model performance.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09776 - Wed, 13 Aug 2025 12:59:08 +0000 + "Does the cafe entrance look accessible? Where is the door?" Towards Geospatial AI Agents for Visual Inquiries + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15752 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.15752.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jon E. Froehlich, Jared Hwang, Zeyu Wang, John S. O'Meara, Xia Su, William Huang, Yang Zhang, Alex Fiannaca, Philip Nelson, Shaun Kane</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Interactive digital maps have revolutionized how people travel and learn about the world; however, they rely on pre-existing structured data in GIS databases (e.g., road networks, POI indices), limiting their ability to address geo-visual questions related to what the world looks like. We introduce our vision for Geo-Visual Agents--multimodal AI agents capable of understanding and responding to nuanced visual-spatial inquiries about the world by analyzing large-scale repositories of geospatial images, including streetscapes (e.g., Google Street View), place-based photos (e.g., TripAdvisor, Yelp), and aerial imagery (e.g., satellite photos) combined with traditional GIS data sources. We define our vision, describe sensing and interaction approaches, provide three exemplars, and enumerate key challenges and opportunities for future work.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15752 + Thu, 21 Aug 2025 17:49:52 +0000 - PRELUDE: A Benchmark Designed to Require Global Comprehension and Reasoning over Long Contexts - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09848 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09848.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Mo Yu, Tsz Ting Chung, Chulun Zhou, Tong Li, Rui Lu, Jiangnan Li, Liyan Xu, Haoshu Lu, Ning Zhang, Jing Li, Jie Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 42</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We introduce PRELUDE, a benchmark for evaluating long-context understanding through the task of determining whether a character's prequel story is consistent with the canonical narrative of the original book. Our task poses a stronger demand for global comprehension and deep reasoning than existing benchmarks -- as the prequels are not part of the original story, assessing their plausibility typically requires searching and integrating information that is only indirectly related. Empirically, 88% of instances require evidence from multiple parts of the narrative. Experimental results highlight the challenge of our task: in-context learning, RAG and in-domain training with state-of-the-art LLMs, and commercial DeepResearch services, lag behind humans by >15%. A further human study reveals that models often produce correct answers with flawed reasoning, leading to an over 30% gap in reasoning accuracy compared to humans. These findings underscore the substantial room for improvement in long-context understanding and reasoning.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09848 - Wed, 13 Aug 2025 14:28:25 +0000 + Dissecting Tool-Integrated Reasoning: An Empirical Study and Analysis + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15754 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.15754.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yufeng Zhao, Junnan Liu, Hongwei Liu, Dongsheng Zhu, Yuan Shen, Songyang Zhang, Kai Chen</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in reasoning tasks through methods like chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. However, they often fall short in tasks requiring precise computations. Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) has emerged as a solution by incorporating external tools into the reasoning process. Nevertheless, the generalization of TIR in improving the reasoning ability of LLM is still unclear. Additionally, whether TIR has improved the model's reasoning behavior and helped the model think remains to be studied. We introduce ReasonZoo, a comprehensive benchmark encompassing nine diverse reasoning categories, to evaluate the effectiveness of TIR across various domains. Additionally, we propose two novel metrics, Performance-Aware Cost (PAC) and Area Under the Performance-Cost Curve (AUC-PCC), to assess reasoning efficiency. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that TIR-enabled models consistently outperform their non-TIR counterparts in both mathematical and non-mathematical tasks. Furthermore, TIR enhances reasoning efficiency, as evidenced by improved PAC and AUC-PCC, indicating reduced overthinking and more streamlined reasoning. These findings underscore the domain-general benefits of TIR and its potential to advance LLM capabilities in complex reasoning tasks.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15754 + Thu, 21 Aug 2025 17:50:24 +0000 - AWorld: Dynamic Multi-Agent System with Stable Maneuvering for Robust GAIA Problem Solving - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09889 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09889.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhitian Xie, Qintong Wu, Chengyue Yu, Chenyi Zhuang, Jinjie Gu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 27</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has empowered intelligent agents to leverage diverse external tools for solving complex real-world problems. However, as agents increasingly depend on multiple tools, they encounter new challenges: extended contexts from disparate sources and noisy or irrelevant tool outputs can undermine system reliability and accuracy. These challenges underscore the necessity for enhanced stability in agent-based systems. To address this, we introduce dynamic supervision and maneuvering mechanisms, constructing a robust and dynamic Multi-Agent System (MAS) architecture within the AWorld framework. In our approach, the Execution Agent invokes the Guard Agent at critical steps to verify and correct the reasoning process, effectively reducing errors arising from noise and bolstering problem-solving robustness. Extensive experiments on the GAIA test dataset reveal that our dynamic maneuvering mechanism significantly improves both the effectiveness and stability of solutions, outperforming single-agent system (SAS) and standard tool-augmented systems. As a result, our dynamic MAS system achieved first place among open-source projects on the prestigious GAIA leaderboard. These findings highlight the practical value of collaborative agent roles in developing more reliable and trustworthy intelligent systems.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09889 - Wed, 13 Aug 2025 15:46:25 +0000 + LiveMCP-101: Stress Testing and Diagnosing MCP-enabled Agents on Challenging Queries + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15760 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.15760.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ming Yin, Dinghan Shen, Silei Xu, Jianbing Han, Sixun Dong, Mian Zhang, Yebowen Hu, Shujian Liu, Simin Ma, Song Wang, Sathish Reddy Indurthi, Xun Wang, Yiran Chen, Kaiqiang Song</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 33</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Tool calling has emerged as a critical capability for AI agents to interact with the real world and solve complex tasks. While the Model Context Protocol (MCP) provides a powerful standardized framework for tool integration, there is a significant gap in benchmarking how well AI agents can effectively solve multi-step tasks using diverse MCP tools in realistic, dynamic scenarios. In this work, we present LiveMCP-101, a benchmark of 101 carefully curated real-world queries, refined through iterative LLM rewriting and manual review, that require coordinated use of multiple MCP tools including web search, file operations, mathematical reasoning, and data analysis. Moreover, we introduce a novel evaluation approach that leverages ground-truth execution plans rather than raw API outputs, better reflecting the evolving nature of real-world environments. Experiments show that even frontier LLMs achieve a success rate below 60\%, highlighting major challenges in tool orchestration. Detailed ablations and error analysis further reveal distinct failure modes and inefficiencies in token usage, pointing to concrete directions for advancing current models. LiveMCP-101 sets a rigorous standard for evaluating real-world agent capabilities, advancing toward autonomous AI systems that reliably execute complex tasks through tool use.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15760 + Thu, 21 Aug 2025 17:55:54 +0000 - VisCodex: Unified Multimodal Code Generation via Merging Vision and Coding Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09945 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09945.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Lingjie Jiang, Shaohan Huang, Xun Wu, Yixia Li, Dongdong Zhang, Furu Wei</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 6</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have significantly advanced the integration of visual and textual understanding. However, their ability to generate code from multimodal inputs remains limited. In this work, we introduce VisCodex, a unified framework that seamlessly merges vision and coding language models to empower MLLMs with strong multimodal code generation abilities. Leveraging a task vector-based model merging technique, we integrate a state-of-the-art coding LLM into a strong vision-language backbone, while preserving both visual comprehension and advanced coding skills. To support training and evaluation, we introduce the Multimodal Coding Dataset (MCD), a large-scale and diverse collection of 598k samples, including high-quality HTML code, chart image-code pairs, image-augmented StackOverflow QA, and algorithmic problems. Furthermore, we propose InfiBench-V, a novel and challenging benchmark specifically designed to assess models on visually-rich, real-world programming questions that demand a nuanced understanding of both textual and visual contexts. Extensive experiments show that VisCodex achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source MLLMs and approaches proprietary models like GPT-4o, highlighting the effectiveness of our model merging strategy and new datasets.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09945 - Wed, 13 Aug 2025 17:00:44 +0000 + Waver: Wave Your Way to Lifelike Video Generation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15761 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.15761.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yifu Zhang, Hao Yang, Yuqi Zhang, Yifei Hu, Fengda Zhu, Chuang Lin, Xiaofeng Mei, Yi Jiang, Zehuan Yuan, Bingyue Peng</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 24</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present Waver, a high-performance foundation model for unified image and video generation. Waver can directly generate videos with durations ranging from 5 to 10 seconds at a native resolution of 720p, which are subsequently upscaled to 1080p. The model simultaneously supports text-to-video (T2V), image-to-video (I2V), and text-to-image (T2I) generation within a single, integrated framework. We introduce a Hybrid Stream DiT architecture to enhance modality alignment and accelerate training convergence. To ensure training data quality, we establish a comprehensive data curation pipeline and manually annotate and train an MLLM-based video quality model to filter for the highest-quality samples. Furthermore, we provide detailed training and inference recipes to facilitate the generation of high-quality videos. Building on these contributions, Waver excels at capturing complex motion, achieving superior motion amplitude and temporal consistency in video synthesis. Notably, it ranks among the Top 3 on both the T2V and I2V leaderboards at Artificial Analysis (data as of 2025-07-30 10:00 GMT+8), consistently outperforming existing open-source models and matching or surpassing state-of-the-art commercial solutions. We hope this technical report will help the community more efficiently train high-quality video generation models and accelerate progress in video generation technologies. Official page: https://github.com/FoundationVision/Waver.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15761 + Thu, 21 Aug 2025 17:56:10 +0000 - Noise Hypernetworks: Amortizing Test-Time Compute in Diffusion Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09968 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09968.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Luca Eyring, Shyamgopal Karthik, Alexey Dosovitskiy, Nataniel Ruiz, Zeynep Akata</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 13</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The new paradigm of test-time scaling has yielded remarkable breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) (e.g. reasoning models) and in generative vision models, allowing models to allocate additional computation during inference to effectively tackle increasingly complex problems. Despite the improvements of this approach, an important limitation emerges: the substantial increase in computation time makes the process slow and impractical for many applications. Given the success of this paradigm and its growing usage, we seek to preserve its benefits while eschewing the inference overhead. In this work we propose one solution to the critical problem of integrating test-time scaling knowledge into a model during post-training. Specifically, we replace reward guided test-time noise optimization in diffusion models with a Noise Hypernetwork that modulates initial input noise. We propose a theoretically grounded framework for learning this reward-tilted distribution for distilled generators, through a tractable noise-space objective that maintains fidelity to the base model while optimizing for desired characteristics. We show that our approach recovers a substantial portion of the quality gains from explicit test-time optimization at a fraction of the computational cost. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/HyperNoise</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09968 - Wed, 13 Aug 2025 17:33:37 +0000 + Intern-S1: A Scientific Multimodal Foundation Model + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15763 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.15763.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Lei Bai, Zhongrui Cai, Maosong Cao, Weihan Cao, Chiyu Chen, Haojiong Chen, Kai Chen, Pengcheng Chen, Ying Chen, Yongkang Chen, Yu Cheng, Yu Cheng, Pei Chu, Tao Chu, Erfei Cui, Ganqu Cui, Long Cui, Ziyun Cui, Nianchen Deng, Ning Ding, Nanqin Dong, Peijie Dong, Shihan Dou, Sinan Du, Haodong Duan, Caihua Fan, Ben Gao, Changjiang Gao, Jianfei Gao, Songyang Gao, Yang Gao, Zhangwei Gao, Jiaye Ge, Qiming Ge, Lixin Gu, Yuzhe Gu, Aijia Guo, Qipeng Guo, Xu Guo, Conghui He, Junjun He, Yili Hong, Siyuan Hou, Caiyu Hu, Hanglei Hu, Jucheng Hu, Ming Hu, Zhouqi Hua, Haian Huang, Junhao Huang, Xu Huang, Zixian Huang, Zhe Jiang, Lingkai Kong, Linyang Li, Peiji Li, Pengze Li, Shuaibin Li, Tianbin Li, Wei Li, Yuqiang Li, Dahua Lin, Junyao Lin, Tianyi Lin, Zhishan Lin, Hongwei Liu, Jiangning Liu, Jiyao Liu, Junnan Liu, Kai Liu, Kaiwen Liu, Kuikun Liu, Shichun Liu, Shudong Liu, Wei Liu, Xinyao Liu, Yuhong Liu, Zhan Liu, Yinquan Lu, Haijun Lv, Hongxia Lv, Huijie Lv, Qidang Lv, Ying Lv, Chengqi Lyu, Chenglong Ma, Jianpeng Ma, Ren Ma, Runmin Ma, Runyuan Ma, Xinzhu Ma, Yichuan Ma, Zihan Ma, Sixuan Mi, Junzhi Ning, Wenchang Ning, Xinle Pang, Jiahui Peng, Runyu Peng, Yu Qiao, Jiantao Qiu, Xiaoye Qu, Yuan Qu, Yuchen Ren, Fukai Shang, Wenqi Shao, Junhao Shen, Shuaike Shen, Chunfeng Song, Demin Song, Diping Song, Chenlin Su, Weijie Su, Weigao Sun, Yu Sun, Qian Tan, Cheng Tang, Huanze Tang, Kexian Tang, Shixiang Tang, Jian Tong, Aoran Wang, Bin Wang, Dong Wang, Lintao Wang, Rui Wang, Weiyun Wang, Wenhai Wang, Yi Wang, Ziyi Wang, Ling-I Wu, Wen Wu, Yue Wu, Zijian Wu, Linchen Xiao, Shuhao Xing, Chao Xu, Huihui Xu, Jun Xu, Ruiliang Xu, Wanghan Xu, GanLin Yang, Yuming Yang, Haochen Ye, Jin Ye, Shenglong Ye, Jia Yu, Jiashuo Yu, Jing Yu, Fei Yuan, Bo Zhang, Chao Zhang, Chen Zhang, Hongjie Zhang, Jin Zhang, Qiaosheng Zhang, Qiuyinzhe Zhang, Songyang Zhang, Taolin Zhang, Wenlong Zhang, Wenwei Zhang, Yechen Zhang, Ziyang Zhang, Haiteng Zhao, Qian Zhao, Xiangyu Zhao, Xiangyu Zhao, Bowen Zhou, Dongzhan Zhou, Peiheng Zhou, Yuhao Zhou, Yunhua Zhou, Dongsheng Zhu, Lin Zhu, Yicheng Zou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 206</p><p><b>Summary:</b> In recent years, a plethora of open-source foundation models have emerged, achieving remarkable progress in some widely attended fields, with performance being quite close to that of closed-source models. However, in high-value but more challenging scientific professional fields, either the fields still rely on expert models, or the progress of general foundation models lags significantly compared to those in popular areas, far from sufficient for transforming scientific research and leaving substantial gap between open-source models and closed-source models in these scientific domains. To mitigate this gap and explore a step further toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), we introduce Intern-S1, a specialized generalist equipped with general understanding and reasoning capabilities with expertise to analyze multiple science modal data. Intern-S1 is a multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 28 billion activated parameters and 241 billion total parameters, continually pre-trained on 5T tokens, including over 2.5T tokens from scientific domains. In the post-training stage, Intern-S1 undergoes offline and then online reinforcement learning (RL) in InternBootCamp, where we propose Mixture-of-Rewards (MoR) to synergize the RL training on more than 1000 tasks simultaneously. Through integrated innovations in algorithms, data, and training systems, Intern-S1 achieved top-tier performance in online RL training.On comprehensive evaluation benchmarks, Intern-S1 demonstrates competitive performance on general reasoning tasks among open-source models and significantly outperforms open-source models in scientific domains, surpassing closed-source state-of-the-art models in professional tasks, such as molecular synthesis planning, reaction condition prediction, predicting thermodynamic stabilities for crystals. Our models are available at https://huggingface.co/internlm/Intern-S1.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15763 + Thu, 21 Aug 2025 17:58:00 +0000 - Story2Board: A Training-Free Approach for Expressive Storyboard Generation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09983 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09983.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> David Dinkevich, Matan Levy, Omri Avrahami, Dvir Samuel, Dani Lischinski</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 57</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present Story2Board, a training-free framework for expressive storyboard generation from natural language. Existing methods narrowly focus on subject identity, overlooking key aspects of visual storytelling such as spatial composition, background evolution, and narrative pacing. To address this, we introduce a lightweight consistency framework composed of two components: Latent Panel Anchoring, which preserves a shared character reference across panels, and Reciprocal Attention Value Mixing, which softly blends visual features between token pairs with strong reciprocal attention. Together, these mechanisms enhance coherence without architectural changes or fine-tuning, enabling state-of-the-art diffusion models to generate visually diverse yet consistent storyboards. To structure generation, we use an off-the-shelf language model to convert free-form stories into grounded panel-level prompts. To evaluate, we propose the Rich Storyboard Benchmark, a suite of open-domain narratives designed to assess layout diversity and background-grounded storytelling, in addition to consistency. We also introduce a new Scene Diversity metric that quantifies spatial and pose variation across storyboards. Our qualitative and quantitative results, as well as a user study, show that Story2Board produces more dynamic, coherent, and narratively engaging storyboards than existing baselines.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09983 - Wed, 13 Aug 2025 17:56:26 +0000 + ATLAS: Decoupling Skeletal and Shape Parameters for Expressive Parametric Human Modeling + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15767 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.15767.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jinhyung Park, Javier Romero, Shunsuke Saito, Fabian Prada, Takaaki Shiratori, Yichen Xu, Federica Bogo, Shoou-I Yu, Kris Kitani, Rawal Khirodkar</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 10</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Parametric body models offer expressive 3D representation of humans across a wide range of poses, shapes, and facial expressions, typically derived by learning a basis over registered 3D meshes. However, existing human mesh modeling approaches struggle to capture detailed variations across diverse body poses and shapes, largely due to limited training data diversity and restrictive modeling assumptions. Moreover, the common paradigm first optimizes the external body surface using a linear basis, then regresses internal skeletal joints from surface vertices. This approach introduces problematic dependencies between internal skeleton and outer soft tissue, limiting direct control over body height and bone lengths. To address these issues, we present ATLAS, a high-fidelity body model learned from 600k high-resolution scans captured using 240 synchronized cameras. Unlike previous methods, we explicitly decouple the shape and skeleton bases by grounding our mesh representation in the human skeleton. This decoupling enables enhanced shape expressivity, fine-grained customization of body attributes, and keypoint fitting independent of external soft-tissue characteristics. ATLAS outperforms existing methods by fitting unseen subjects in diverse poses more accurately, and quantitative evaluations show that our non-linear pose correctives more effectively capture complex poses compared to linear models.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15767 + Thu, 21 Aug 2025 17:58:56 +0000 - Echo-4o: Harnessing the Power of GPT-4o Synthetic Images for Improved Image Generation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09987 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.09987.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Junyan Ye, Dongzhi Jiang, Zihao Wang, Leqi Zhu, Zhenghao Hu, Zilong Huang, Jun He, Zhiyuan Yan, Jinghua Yu, Hongsheng Li, Conghui He, Weijia Li</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 23</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recently, GPT-4o has garnered significant attention for its strong performance in image generation, yet open-source models still lag behind. Several studies have explored distilling image data from GPT-4o to enhance open-source models, achieving notable progress. However, a key question remains: given that real-world image datasets already constitute a natural source of high-quality data, why should we use GPT-4o-generated synthetic data? In this work, we identify two key advantages of synthetic images. First, they can complement rare scenarios in real-world datasets, such as surreal fantasy or multi-reference image generation, which frequently occur in user queries. Second, they provide clean and controllable supervision. Real-world data often contains complex background noise and inherent misalignment between text descriptions and image content, whereas synthetic images offer pure backgrounds and long-tailed supervision signals, facilitating more accurate text-to-image alignment. Building on these insights, we introduce Echo-4o-Image, a 180K-scale synthetic dataset generated by GPT-4o, harnessing the power of synthetic image data to address blind spots in real-world coverage. Using this dataset, we fine-tune the unified multimodal generation baseline Bagel to obtain Echo-4o. In addition, we propose two new evaluation benchmarks for a more accurate and challenging assessment of image generation capabilities: GenEval++, which increases instruction complexity to mitigate score saturation, and Imagine-Bench, which focuses on evaluating both the understanding and generation of imaginative content. Echo-4o demonstrates strong performance across standard benchmarks. Moreover, applying Echo-4o-Image to other foundation models (e.g., OmniGen2, BLIP3-o) yields consistent performance gains across multiple metrics, highlighting the datasets strong transferability.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09987 - Wed, 13 Aug 2025 17:59:28 +0000 + SceneGen: Single-Image 3D Scene Generation in One Feedforward Pass + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15769 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.15769.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yanxu Meng, Haoning Wu, Ya Zhang, Weidi Xie</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 15</p><p><b>Summary:</b> 3D content generation has recently attracted significant research interest due to its applications in VR/AR and embodied AI. In this work, we address the challenging task of synthesizing multiple 3D assets within a single scene image. Concretely, our contributions are fourfold: (i) we present SceneGen, a novel framework that takes a scene image and corresponding object masks as input, simultaneously producing multiple 3D assets with geometry and texture. Notably, SceneGen operates with no need for optimization or asset retrieval; (ii) we introduce a novel feature aggregation module that integrates local and global scene information from visual and geometric encoders within the feature extraction module. Coupled with a position head, this enables the generation of 3D assets and their relative spatial positions in a single feedforward pass; (iii) we demonstrate SceneGen's direct extensibility to multi-image input scenarios. Despite being trained solely on single-image inputs, our architectural design enables improved generation performance with multi-image inputs; and (iv) extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations confirm the efficiency and robust generation abilities of our approach. We believe this paradigm offers a novel solution for high-quality 3D content generation, potentially advancing its practical applications in downstream tasks. The code and model will be publicly available at: https://mengmouxu.github.io/SceneGen.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15769 + Thu, 21 Aug 2025 17:59:16 +0000 - We-Math 2.0: A Versatile MathBook System for Incentivizing Visual Mathematical Reasoning - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10433 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.10433.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Runqi Qiao, Qiuna Tan, Peiqing Yang, Yanzi Wang, Xiaowan Wang, Enhui Wan, Sitong Zhou, Guanting Dong, Yuchen Zeng, Yida Xu, Jie Wang, Chong Sun, Chen Li, Honggang Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 130</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various tasks, but still struggle with complex mathematical reasoning. Existing research primarily focuses on dataset construction and method optimization, often overlooking two critical aspects: comprehensive knowledge-driven design and model-centric data space modeling. In this paper, we introduce We-Math 2.0, a unified system that integrates a structured mathematical knowledge system, model-centric data space modeling, and a reinforcement learning (RL)-based training paradigm to comprehensively enhance the mathematical reasoning abilities of MLLMs. The key contributions of We-Math 2.0 are fourfold: (1) MathBook Knowledge System: We construct a five-level hierarchical system encompassing 491 knowledge points and 1,819 fundamental principles. (2) MathBook-Standard & Pro: We develop MathBook-Standard, a dataset that ensures broad conceptual coverage and flexibility through dual expansion. Additionally, we define a three-dimensional difficulty space and generate 7 progressive variants per problem to build MathBook-Pro, a challenging dataset for robust training. (3) MathBook-RL: We propose a two-stage RL framework comprising: (i) Cold-Start Fine-tuning, which aligns the model with knowledge-oriented chain-of-thought reasoning; and (ii) Progressive Alignment RL, leveraging average-reward learning and dynamic data scheduling to achieve progressive alignment across difficulty levels. (4) MathBookEval: We introduce a comprehensive benchmark covering all 491 knowledge points with diverse reasoning step distributions. Experimental results show that MathBook-RL performs competitively with existing baselines on four widely-used benchmarks and achieves strong results on MathBookEval, suggesting promising generalization in mathematical reasoning.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10433 - Thu, 14 Aug 2025 08:15:41 +0000 - - - HumanSense: From Multimodal Perception to Empathetic Context-Aware Responses through Reasoning MLLMs - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10576 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.10576.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zheng Qin, Ruobing Zheng, Yabing Wang, Tianqi Li, Yi Yuan, Jingdong Chen, Le Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 11</p><p><b>Summary:</b> While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show immense promise for achieving truly human-like interactions, progress is hindered by the lack of fine-grained evaluation frameworks for human-centered scenarios, encompassing both the understanding of complex human intentions and the provision of empathetic, context-aware responses. Here we introduce HumanSense, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the human-centered perception and interaction capabilities of MLLMs, with a particular focus on deep understanding of extended multimodal contexts and the formulation of rational feedback. Our evaluation reveals that leading MLLMs still have considerable room for improvement, particularly for advanced interaction-oriented tasks. Supplementing visual input with audio and text information yields substantial improvements, and Omni-modal models show advantages on these tasks. Furthermore, we argue that appropriate feedback stems from a contextual analysis of the interlocutor's needs and emotions, with reasoning ability serving as the key to unlocking it. Accordingly, we employ a multi-stage, modality-progressive reinforcement learning to enhance the reasoning abilities of an Omni model, achieving substantial gains on evaluation results. Additionally, we observe that successful reasoning processes exhibit highly consistent thought patterns. By designing corresponding prompts, we also enhance the performance of non-reasoning models in a training-free manner. Project page: brightpinkhttps://digital-avatar.github.io/ai/HumanSense/</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10576 - Thu, 14 Aug 2025 12:14:15 +0000 - - - Processing and acquisition traces in visual encoders: What does CLIP know about your camera? - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10637 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.10637.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ryan Ramos, Vladan Stojnić, Giorgos Kordopatis-Zilos, Yuta Nakashima, Giorgos Tolias, Noa Garcia</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Prior work has analyzed the robustness of visual encoders to image transformations and corruptions, particularly in cases where such alterations are not seen during training. When this occurs, they introduce a form of distribution shift at test time, often leading to performance degradation. The primary focus has been on severe corruptions that, when applied aggressively, distort useful signals necessary for accurate semantic predictions. We take a different perspective by analyzing parameters of the image acquisition process and transformations that may be subtle or even imperceptible to the human eye. We find that such parameters are systematically encoded in the learned visual representations and can be easily recovered. More strikingly, their presence can have a profound impact, either positively or negatively, on semantic predictions. This effect depends on whether there is a strong correlation or anti-correlation between semantic labels and these acquisition-based or processing-based labels. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/ryan-caesar-ramos/visual-encoder-traces</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10637 - Thu, 14 Aug 2025 13:34:13 +0000 - - - NextStep-1: Toward Autoregressive Image Generation with Continuous Tokens at Scale - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10711 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.10711.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> NextStep Team, Chunrui Han, Guopeng Li, Jingwei Wu, Quan Sun, Yan Cai, Yuang Peng, Zheng Ge, Deyu Zhou, Haomiao Tang, Hongyu Zhou, Kenkun Liu, Ailin Huang, Bin Wang, Changxin Miao, Deshan Sun, En Yu, Fukun Yin, Gang Yu, Hao Nie, Haoran Lv, Hanpeng Hu, Jia Wang, Jian Zhou, Jianjian Sun, Kaijun Tan, Kang An, Kangheng Lin, Liang Zhao, Mei Chen, Peng Xing, Rui Wang, Shiyu Liu, Shutao Xia, Tianhao You, Wei Ji, Xianfang Zeng, Xin Han, Xuelin Zhang, Yana Wei, Yanming Xu, Yimin Jiang, Yingming Wang, Yu Zhou, Yucheng Han, Ziyang Meng, Binxing Jiao, Daxin Jiang, Xiangyu Zhang, Yibo Zhu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 119</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Prevailing autoregressive (AR) models for text-to-image generation either rely on heavy, computationally-intensive diffusion models to process continuous image tokens, or employ vector quantization (VQ) to obtain discrete tokens with quantization loss. In this paper, we push the autoregressive paradigm forward with NextStep-1, a 14B autoregressive model paired with a 157M flow matching head, training on discrete text tokens and continuous image tokens with next-token prediction objectives. NextStep-1 achieves state-of-the-art performance for autoregressive models in text-to-image generation tasks, exhibiting strong capabilities in high-fidelity image synthesis. Furthermore, our method shows strong performance in image editing, highlighting the power and versatility of our unified approach. To facilitate open research, we will release our code and models to the community.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10711 - Thu, 14 Aug 2025 14:54:22 +0000 - - - Pass@k Training for Adaptively Balancing Exploration and Exploitation of Large Reasoning Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10751 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.10751.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhipeng Chen, Xiaobo Qin, Youbin Wu, Yue Ling, Qinghao Ye, Wayne Xin Zhao, Guang Shi</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 15</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), which typically adopts Pass@1 as the reward, has faced the issues in balancing exploration and exploitation, causing policies to prefer conservative actions, converging to a local optimum. Identifying an appropriate reward metric is therefore crucial. Regarding the prior work, although Pass@k has been used in evaluation, its connection to LLM exploration ability in RLVR remains largely overlooked. To investigate this, we first use Pass@k as the reward to train the policy model (i.e., Pass@k Training), and observe the improvement on its exploration ability. Next, we derive an analytical solution for the advantage of Pass@k Training, leading to an efficient and effective process. Building on this, our analysis reveals that exploration and exploitation are not inherently conflicting objectives, while they can mutually enhance each other. Moreover, Pass@k Training with analytical derivation essentially involves directly designing the advantage function. Inspired by this, we preliminarily explore the advantage design for RLVR, showing promising results and highlighting a potential future direction.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10751 - Thu, 14 Aug 2025 15:34:47 +0000 - - - UI-Venus Technical Report: Building High-performance UI Agents with RFT - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10833 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.10833.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhangxuan Gu, Zhengwen Zeng, Zhenyu Xu, Xingran Zhou, Shuheng Shen, Yunfei Liu, Beitong Zhou, Changhua Meng, Tianyu Xia, Weizhi Chen, Yue Wen, Jingya Dou, Fei Tang, Jinzhen Lin, Yulin Liu, Zhenlin Guo, Yichen Gong, Heng Jia, Changlong Gao, Yuan Guo, Yong Deng, Zhenyu Guo, Liang Chen, Weiqiang Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 22</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present UI-Venus, a native UI agent that takes only screenshots as input based on a multimodal large language model. UI-Venus achieves SOTA performance on both UI grounding and navigation tasks using only several hundred thousand high-quality training samples through reinforcement finetune (RFT) based on Qwen2.5-VL. Specifically, the 7B and 72B variants of UI-Venus obtain 94.1% / 50.8% and 95.3% / 61.9% on the standard grounding benchmarks, i.e., Screenspot-V2 / Pro, surpassing the previous SOTA baselines including open-source GTA1 and closed-source UI-TARS-1.5.To show UI-Venus's summary and planing ability, we also evaluate it on the AndroidWorld, an online UI navigation arena, on which our 7B and 72B variants achieve 49.1% and 65.9% success rate, also beating existing models.To achieve this, we introduce carefully designed reward functions for both UI grounding and navigation tasks and corresponding efficient data cleaning strategies.To further boost navigation performance, we propose Self-Evolving Trajectory History Alignment \& Sparse Action Enhancement that refine historical reasoning traces and balances the distribution of sparse but critical actions, leading to more coherent planning and better generalization in complex UI tasks. Our contributions include the publish of SOTA open-source UI agents, comprehensive data cleaning protocols and a novel self-evolving framework for improving navigation performance, which encourage further research and development in the community. Code is available at https://github.com/antgroup/UI-Venus.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10833 - Thu, 14 Aug 2025 16:58:07 +0000 - - - From Black Box to Transparency: Enhancing Automated Interpreting Assessment with Explainable AI in College Classrooms - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10860 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.10860.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhaokun Jiang, Ziyin Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advancements in machine learning have spurred growing interests in automated interpreting quality assessment. Nevertheless, existing research suffers from insufficient examination of language use quality, unsatisfactory modeling effectiveness due to data scarcity and imbalance, and a lack of efforts to explain model predictions. To address these gaps, we propose a multi-dimensional modeling framework that integrates feature engineering, data augmentation, and explainable machine learning. This approach prioritizes explainability over ``black box'' predictions by utilizing only construct-relevant, transparent features and conducting Shapley Value (SHAP) analysis. Our results demonstrate strong predictive performance on a novel English-Chinese consecutive interpreting dataset, identifying BLEURT and CometKiwi scores to be the strongest predictive features for fidelity, pause-related features for fluency, and Chinese-specific phraseological diversity metrics for language use. Overall, by placing particular emphasis on explainability, we present a scalable, reliable, and transparent alternative to traditional human evaluation, facilitating the provision of detailed diagnostic feedback for learners and supporting self-regulated learning advantages not afforded by automated scores in isolation.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10860 - Thu, 14 Aug 2025 17:31:18 +0000 - - - A Survey on Diffusion Language Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10875 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.10875.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Tianyi Li, Mingda Chen, Bowei Guo, Zhiqiang Shen</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 21</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) are rapidly emerging as a powerful and promising alternative to the dominant autoregressive (AR) paradigm. By generating tokens in parallel through an iterative denoising process, DLMs possess inherent advantages in reducing inference latency and capturing bidirectional context, thereby enabling fine-grained control over the generation process. While achieving a several-fold speed-up, recent advancements have allowed DLMs to show performance comparable to their autoregressive counterparts, making them a compelling choice for various natural language processing tasks. In this survey, we provide a holistic overview of the current DLM landscape. We trace its evolution and relationship with other paradigms, such as autoregressive and masked language models, and cover both foundational principles and state-of-the-art models. Our work offers an up-to-date, comprehensive taxonomy and an in-depth analysis of current techniques, from pre-training strategies to advanced post-training methods. Another contribution of this survey is a thorough review of DLM inference strategies and optimizations, including improvements in decoding parallelism, caching mechanisms, and generation quality. We also highlight the latest approaches to multimodal extensions of DLMs and delineate their applications across various practical scenarios. Furthermore, our discussion addresses the limitations and challenges of DLMs, including efficiency, long-sequence handling, and infrastructure requirements, while outlining future research directions to sustain progress in this rapidly evolving field. Project GitHub is available at https://github.com/VILA-Lab/Awesome-DLMs.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10875 - Thu, 14 Aug 2025 17:47:22 +0000 - - - ToonComposer: Streamlining Cartoon Production with Generative Post-Keyframing - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10881 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.10881.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Lingen Li, Guangzhi Wang, Zhaoyang Zhang, Yaowei Li, Xiaoyu Li, Qi Dou, Jinwei Gu, Tianfan Xue, Ying Shan</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 43</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Traditional cartoon and anime production involves keyframing, inbetweening, and colorization stages, which require intensive manual effort. Despite recent advances in AI, existing methods often handle these stages separately, leading to error accumulation and artifacts. For instance, inbetweening approaches struggle with large motions, while colorization methods require dense per-frame sketches. To address this, we introduce ToonComposer, a generative model that unifies inbetweening and colorization into a single post-keyframing stage. ToonComposer employs a sparse sketch injection mechanism to provide precise control using keyframe sketches. Additionally, it uses a cartoon adaptation method with the spatial low-rank adapter to tailor a modern video foundation model to the cartoon domain while keeping its temporal prior intact. Requiring as few as a single sketch and a colored reference frame, ToonComposer excels with sparse inputs, while also supporting multiple sketches at any temporal location for more precise motion control. This dual capability reduces manual workload and improves flexibility, empowering artists in real-world scenarios. To evaluate our model, we further created PKBench, a benchmark featuring human-drawn sketches that simulate real-world use cases. Our evaluation demonstrates that ToonComposer outperforms existing methods in visual quality, motion consistency, and production efficiency, offering a superior and more flexible solution for AI-assisted cartoon production.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10881 - Thu, 14 Aug 2025 17:50:11 +0000 - - - STream3R: Scalable Sequential 3D Reconstruction with Causal Transformer - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10893 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.10893.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yushi Lan, Yihang Luo, Fangzhou Hong, Shangchen Zhou, Honghua Chen, Zhaoyang Lyu, Shuai Yang, Bo Dai, Chen Change Loy, Xingang Pan</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 26</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present STream3R, a novel approach to 3D reconstruction that reformulates pointmap prediction as a decoder-only Transformer problem. Existing state-of-the-art methods for multi-view reconstruction either depend on expensive global optimization or rely on simplistic memory mechanisms that scale poorly with sequence length. In contrast, STream3R introduces an streaming framework that processes image sequences efficiently using causal attention, inspired by advances in modern language modeling. By learning geometric priors from large-scale 3D datasets, STream3R generalizes well to diverse and challenging scenarios, including dynamic scenes where traditional methods often fail. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently outperforms prior work across both static and dynamic scene benchmarks. Moreover, STream3R is inherently compatible with LLM-style training infrastructure, enabling efficient large-scale pretraining and fine-tuning for various downstream 3D tasks. Our results underscore the potential of causal Transformer models for online 3D perception, paving the way for real-time 3D understanding in streaming environments. More details can be found in our project page: https://nirvanalan.github.io/projects/stream3r.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10893 - Thu, 14 Aug 2025 17:58:05 +0000 - - - Puppeteer: Rig and Animate Your 3D Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10898 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.10898.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Chaoyue Song, Xiu Li, Fan Yang, Zhongcong Xu, Jiacheng Wei, Fayao Liu, Jiashi Feng, Guosheng Lin, Jianfeng Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 25</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Modern interactive applications increasingly demand dynamic 3D content, yet the transformation of static 3D models into animated assets constitutes a significant bottleneck in content creation pipelines. While recent advances in generative AI have revolutionized static 3D model creation, rigging and animation continue to depend heavily on expert intervention. We present Puppeteer, a comprehensive framework that addresses both automatic rigging and animation for diverse 3D objects. Our system first predicts plausible skeletal structures via an auto-regressive transformer that introduces a joint-based tokenization strategy for compact representation and a hierarchical ordering methodology with stochastic perturbation that enhances bidirectional learning capabilities. It then infers skinning weights via an attention-based architecture incorporating topology-aware joint attention that explicitly encodes inter-joint relationships based on skeletal graph distances. Finally, we complement these rigging advances with a differentiable optimization-based animation pipeline that generates stable, high-fidelity animations while being computationally more efficient than existing approaches. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in both skeletal prediction accuracy and skinning quality. The system robustly processes diverse 3D content, ranging from professionally designed game assets to AI-generated shapes, producing temporally coherent animations that eliminate the jittering issues common in existing methods.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10898 - Thu, 14 Aug 2025 17:59:31 +0000 + Visual Autoregressive Modeling for Instruction-Guided Image Editing + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15772 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2508.15772.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Qingyang Mao, Qi Cai, Yehao Li, Yingwei Pan, Mingyue Cheng, Ting Yao, Qi Liu, Tao Mei</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 7</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advances in diffusion models have brought remarkable visual fidelity to instruction-guided image editing. However, their global denoising process inherently entangles the edited region with the entire image context, leading to unintended spurious modifications and compromised adherence to editing instructions. In contrast, autoregressive models offer a distinct paradigm by formulating image synthesis as a sequential process over discrete visual tokens. Their causal and compositional mechanism naturally circumvents the adherence challenges of diffusion-based methods. In this paper, we present VAREdit, a visual autoregressive (VAR) framework that reframes image editing as a next-scale prediction problem. Conditioned on source image features and text instructions, VAREdit generates multi-scale target features to achieve precise edits. A core challenge in this paradigm is how to effectively condition the source image tokens. We observe that finest-scale source features cannot effectively guide the prediction of coarser target features. To bridge this gap, we introduce a Scale-Aligned Reference (SAR) module, which injects scale-matched conditioning information into the first self-attention layer. VAREdit demonstrates significant advancements in both editing adherence and efficiency. On standard benchmarks, it outperforms leading diffusion-based methods by 30\%+ higher GPT-Balance score. Moreover, it completes a 512times512 editing in 1.2 seconds, making it 2.2times faster than the similarly sized UltraEdit. The models are available at https://github.com/HiDream-ai/VAREdit.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15772 + Thu, 21 Aug 2025 17:59:32 +0000