Daily Papers

Current AI alignment through RLHF follows a single directional paradigm that AI conforms to human preferences while treating human cognition as fixed. We propose a shift to co-alignment through Bidirectional Cognitive Alignment (BiCA), where humans and AI mutually adapt. BiCA uses learnable protocols, representation mapping, and KL-budget constraints for controlled co-evolution. In collaborative navigation, BiCA achieved 85.5% success versus 70.3% baseline, with 230% better mutual adaptation and 332% better protocol convergence. Emergent protocols outperformed handcrafted ones by 84%, while bidirectional adaptation unexpectedly improved safety (+23% out-of-distribution robustness). The 46% synergy improvement demonstrates optimal collaboration exists at the intersection, not union, of human and AI capabilities, validating the shift from single-directional to co-alignment paradigms.

Gait recognition is a biometric technology that recognizes the identity of humans through their walking patterns. Existing appearance-based methods utilize CNN or Transformer to extract spatial and temporal features from silhouettes, while model-based methods employ GCN to focus on the special topological structure of skeleton points. However, the quality of silhouettes is limited by complex occlusions, and skeletons lack dense semantic features of the human body. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel gait recognition framework, dubbed Gait Multi-model Aggregation Network (GaitMA), which effectively combines two modalities to obtain a more robust and comprehensive gait representation for recognition. First, skeletons are represented by joint/limb-based heatmaps, and features from silhouettes and skeletons are respectively extracted using two CNN-based feature extractors. Second, a co-attention alignment module is proposed to align the features by element-wise attention. Finally, we propose a mutual learning module, which achieves feature fusion through cross-attention, Wasserstein loss is further introduced to ensure the effective fusion of two modalities. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our model on Gait3D, OU-MVLP, and CASIA-B.

The scale and diversity of demonstration data required for imitation learning is a significant challenge. We present EgoMimic, a full-stack framework which scales manipulation via human embodiment data, specifically egocentric human videos paired with 3D hand tracking. EgoMimic achieves this through: (1) a system to capture human embodiment data using the ergonomic Project Aria glasses, (2) a low-cost bimanual manipulator that minimizes the kinematic gap to human data, (3) cross-domain data alignment techniques, and (4) an imitation learning architecture that co-trains on human and robot data. Compared to prior works that only extract high-level intent from human videos, our approach treats human and robot data equally as embodied demonstration data and learns a unified policy from both data sources. EgoMimic achieves significant improvement on a diverse set of long-horizon, single-arm and bimanual manipulation tasks over state-of-the-art imitation learning methods and enables generalization to entirely new scenes. Finally, we show a favorable scaling trend for EgoMimic, where adding 1 hour of additional hand data is significantly more valuable than 1 hour of additional robot data. Videos and additional information can be found at https://egomimic.github.io/

Recent research on texture synthesis for 3D shapes benefits a lot from dramatically developed 2D text-to-image diffusion models, including inpainting-based and optimization-based approaches. However, these methods ignore the modal gap between the 2D diffusion model and 3D objects, which primarily render 3D objects into 2D images and texture each image separately. In this paper, we revisit the texture synthesis and propose a Variance alignment based 3D-2D Collaborative Denoising framework, dubbed VCD-Texture, to address these issues. Formally, we first unify both 2D and 3D latent feature learning in diffusion self-attention modules with re-projected 3D attention receptive fields. Subsequently, the denoised multi-view 2D latent features are aggregated into 3D space and then rasterized back to formulate more consistent 2D predictions. However, the rasterization process suffers from an intractable variance bias, which is theoretically addressed by the proposed variance alignment, achieving high-fidelity texture synthesis. Moreover, we present an inpainting refinement to further improve the details with conflicting regions. Notably, there is not a publicly available benchmark to evaluate texture synthesis, which hinders its development. Thus we construct a new evaluation set built upon three open-source 3D datasets and propose to use four metrics to thoroughly validate the texturing performance. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that VCD-Texture achieves superior performance against other counterparts.

The scaling hypothesis motivates the expansion of models past trillions of parameters as a path towards better performance. Recent significant developments, such as GPT-3, have been driven by this conjecture. However, as models scale-up, training them efficiently with backpropagation becomes difficult. Because model, pipeline, and data parallelism distribute parameters and gradients over compute nodes, communication is challenging to orchestrate: this is a bottleneck to further scaling. In this work, we argue that alternative training methods can mitigate these issues, and can inform the design of extreme-scale training hardware. Indeed, using a synaptically asymmetric method with a parallelizable backward pass, such as Direct Feedback Alignement, communication needs are drastically reduced. We present a photonic accelerator for Direct Feedback Alignment, able to compute random projections with trillions of parameters. We demonstrate our system on benchmark tasks, using both fully-connected and graph convolutional networks. Our hardware is the first architecture-agnostic photonic co-processor for training neural networks. This is a significant step towards building scalable hardware, able to go beyond backpropagation, and opening new avenues for deep learning.

Recent vision-language pre-training models have exhibited remarkable generalization ability in zero-shot recognition tasks. Previous open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding methods mostly focus on training 3D models using either image or text supervision while neglecting the collective strength of all modalities. In this work, we propose a Dense Multimodal Alignment (DMA) framework to densely co-embed different modalities into a common space for maximizing their synergistic benefits. Instead of extracting coarse view- or region-level text prompts, we leverage large vision-language models to extract complete category information and scalable scene descriptions to build the text modality, and take image modality as the bridge to build dense point-pixel-text associations. Besides, in order to enhance the generalization ability of the 2D model for downstream 3D tasks without compromising the open-vocabulary capability, we employ a dual-path integration approach to combine frozen CLIP visual features and learnable mask features. Extensive experiments show that our DMA method produces highly competitive open-vocabulary segmentation performance on various indoor and outdoor tasks.

Harnessing the power of LLMs requires a delicate dance between being helpful and harmless. This creates a fundamental tension between two competing challenges: vulnerability to adversarial attacks that elicit unsafe content, and a tendency for overrefusal on benign but sensitive prompts. Current approaches often navigate this dance with safeguard models that completely reject any content that contains unsafe portions. This approach cuts the music entirely-it may exacerbate overrefusals and fails to provide nuanced guidance for queries it refuses. To teach models a more coordinated choreography, we propose WaltzRL, a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning framework that formulates safety alignment as a collaborative, positive-sum game. WaltzRL jointly trains a conversation agent and a feedback agent, where the latter is incentivized to provide useful suggestions that improve the safety and helpfulness of the conversation agent's responses. At the core of WaltzRL is a Dynamic Improvement Reward (DIR) that evolves over time based on how well the conversation agent incorporates the feedback. At inference time, unsafe or overrefusing responses from the conversation agent are improved rather than discarded. The feedback agent is deployed together with the conversation agent and only engages adaptively when needed, preserving helpfulness and low latency on safe queries. Our experiments, conducted across five diverse datasets, demonstrate that WaltzRL significantly reduces both unsafe responses (e.g., from 39.0% to 4.6% on WildJailbreak) and overrefusals (from 45.3% to 9.9% on OR-Bench) compared to various baselines. By enabling the conversation and feedback agents to co-evolve and adaptively apply feedback, WaltzRL enhances LLM safety without degrading general capabilities, thereby advancing the Pareto front between helpfulness and harmlessness.

Current methods for content safety in Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), often rely on multi-stage training pipelines and lack fine-grained, post-deployment controllability. To address these limitations, we propose a unified co-training framework that efficiently integrates multiple safety behaviors: positive (lawful/prosocial), negative (unfiltered/risk-prone) and rejective (refusal-oriented/conservative) within a single SFT stage. Notably, each behavior is dynamically activated via a simple system-level instruction, or magic token, enabling stealthy and efficient behavioral switching at inference time. This flexibility supports diverse deployment scenarios, such as positive for safe user interaction, negative for internal red-teaming, and rejective for context-aware refusals triggered by upstream moderation signals. This co-training strategy induces a distinct Safety Alignment Margin in the output space, characterized by well-separated response distributions corresponding to each safety mode. The existence of this margin provides empirical evidence for the model's safety robustness and enables unprecedented fine-grained control. Experiments show that our method matches the safety alignment quality of SFT+DPO, with our 8B model notably surpassing DeepSeek-R1 (671B) in safety performance, while significantly reducing both training complexity and deployment costs. This work presents a scalable, efficient, and highly controllable solution for LLM content safety.

Ensuring robust safety alignment is crucial for Large Language Models (LLMs), yet existing defenses often lag behind evolving adversarial attacks due to their reliance on static, pre-collected data distributions. In this paper, we introduce MAGIC, a novel multi-turn multi-agent reinforcement learning framework that formulates LLM safety alignment as an adversarial asymmetric game. Specifically, an attacker agent learns to iteratively rewrite original queries into deceptive prompts, while a defender agent simultaneously optimizes its policy to recognize and refuse such inputs. This dynamic process triggers a co-evolution, where the attacker's ever-changing strategies continuously uncover long-tail vulnerabilities, driving the defender to generalize to unseen attack patterns. Remarkably, we observe that the attacker, endowed with initial reasoning ability, evolves novel, previously unseen combinatorial strategies through iterative RL training, underscoring our method's substantial potential. Theoretically, we provide insights into a more robust game equilibrium and derive safety guarantees. Extensive experiments validate our framework's effectiveness, demonstrating superior defense success rates without compromising the helpfulness of the model. Our code is available at https://github.com/BattleWen/MAGIC.

Sophisticated text-centric forgeries, fueled by rapid AIGC advancements, pose a significant threat to societal security and information authenticity. Current methods for text-centric forgery analysis are often limited to coarse-grained visual analysis and lack the capacity for sophisticated reasoning. Moreover, they typically treat detection, grounding, and explanation as discrete sub-tasks, overlooking their intrinsic relationships for holistic performance enhancement. To address these challenges, we introduce LogicLens, a unified framework for Visual-Textual Co-reasoning that reformulates these objectives into a joint task. The deep reasoning of LogicLens is powered by our novel Cross-Cues-aware Chain of Thought (CCT) mechanism, which iteratively cross-validates visual cues against textual logic. To ensure robust alignment across all tasks, we further propose a weighted multi-task reward function for GRPO-based optimization. Complementing this framework, we first designed the PR^2 (Perceiver, Reasoner, Reviewer) pipeline, a hierarchical and iterative multi-agent system that generates high-quality, cognitively-aligned annotations. Then, we constructed RealText, a diverse dataset comprising 5,397 images with fine-grained annotations, including textual explanations, pixel-level segmentation, and authenticity labels for model training. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of LogicLens across multiple benchmarks. In a zero-shot evaluation on T-IC13, it surpasses the specialized framework by 41.4% and GPT-4o by 23.4% in macro-average F1 score. Moreover, on the challenging dense-text T-SROIE dataset, it establishes a significant lead over other MLLM-based methods in mF1, CSS, and the macro-average F1. Our dataset, model, and code will be made publicly available.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show promise in embodied reasoning, yet remain far from true generalists-they often require task-specific fine-tuning, incur high compute costs, and generalize poorly to unseen tasks. We propose MetaVLA, a unified, backbone-agnostic post-training framework for efficient and scalable alignment. MetaVLA introduces Context-Aware Meta Co-Training, which consolidates diverse target tasks into a single fine-tuning stage while leveraging structurally diverse auxiliary tasks to improve in-domain generalization. Unlike naive multi-task SFT, MetaVLA integrates a lightweight meta-learning mechanism-derived from Attentive Neural Processes-to enable rapid adaptation from diverse contexts with minimal architectural change or inference overhead. On the LIBERO benchmark, MetaVLA with six auxiliary tasks outperforms OpenVLA by up to 8.0% on long-horizon tasks, reduces training steps from 240K to 75K, and cuts GPU time by ~76%. These results show that scalable, low-resource post-training is achievable-paving the way toward general-purpose embodied agents. Code will be available.

Optimal transport (OT) compares probability distributions by computing a meaningful alignment between their samples. CO-optimal transport (COOT) takes this comparison further by inferring an alignment between features as well. While this approach leads to better alignments and generalizes both OT and Gromov-Wasserstein distances, we provide a theoretical result showing that it is sensitive to outliers that are omnipresent in real-world data. This prompts us to propose unbalanced COOT for which we provably show its robustness to noise in the compared datasets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such result for OT methods in incomparable spaces. With this result in hand, we provide empirical evidence of this robustness for the challenging tasks of heterogeneous domain adaptation with and without varying proportions of classes and simultaneous alignment of samples and features across single-cell measurements.

We present MCQA, a learning-based algorithm for multimodal question answering. MCQA explicitly fuses and aligns the multimodal input (i.e. text, audio, and video), which forms the context for the query (question and answer). Our approach fuses and aligns the question and the answer within this context. Moreover, we use the notion of co-attention to perform cross-modal alignment and multimodal context-query alignment. Our context-query alignment module matches the relevant parts of the multimodal context and the query with each other and aligns them to improve the overall performance. We evaluate the performance of MCQA on Social-IQ, a benchmark dataset for multimodal question answering. We compare the performance of our algorithm with prior methods and observe an accuracy improvement of 4-7%.

The field of protein folding research has been greatly advanced by deep learning methods, with AlphaFold2 (AF2) demonstrating exceptional performance and atomic-level precision. As co-evolution is integral to protein structure prediction, AF2's accuracy is significantly influenced by the depth of multiple sequence alignment (MSA), which requires extensive exploration of a large protein database for similar sequences. However, not all protein sequences possess abundant homologous families, and consequently, AF2's performance can degrade on such queries, at times failing to produce meaningful results. To address this, we introduce a novel generative language model, MSA-Augmenter, which leverages protein-specific attention mechanisms and large-scale MSAs to generate useful, novel protein sequences not currently found in databases. These sequences supplement shallow MSAs, enhancing the accuracy of structural property predictions. Our experiments on CASP14 demonstrate that MSA-Augmenter can generate de novo sequences that retain co-evolutionary information from inferior MSAs, thereby improving protein structure prediction quality on top of strong AF2.

As neural networks grow larger and more complex and data-hungry, training costs are skyrocketing. Especially when lifelong learning is necessary, such as in recommender systems or self-driving cars, this might soon become unsustainable. In this study, we present the first optical co-processor able to accelerate the training phase of digitally-implemented neural networks. We rely on direct feedback alignment as an alternative to backpropagation, and perform the error projection step optically. Leveraging the optical random projections delivered by our co-processor, we demonstrate its use to train a neural network for handwritten digits recognition.

Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle with fine-grained or precise understanding of visuals though they give comprehensive perception and reasoning in a spectrum of vision applications. Recent studies either develop tool-using or unify specific visual tasks into the autoregressive framework, often at the expense of overall multimodal performance. To address this issue and enhance MLLMs with visual tasks in a scalable fashion, we propose Task Preference Optimization (TPO), a novel method that utilizes differentiable task preferences derived from typical fine-grained visual tasks. TPO introduces learnable task tokens that establish connections between multiple task-specific heads and the MLLM. By leveraging rich visual labels during training, TPO significantly enhances the MLLM's multimodal capabilities and task-specific performance. Through multi-task co-training within TPO, we observe synergistic benefits that elevate individual task performance beyond what is achievable through single-task training methodologies. Our instantiation of this approach with VideoChat and LLaVA demonstrates an overall 14.6% improvement in multimodal performance compared to baseline models. Additionally, MLLM-TPO demonstrates robust zero-shot capabilities across various tasks, performing comparably to state-of-the-art supervised models. The code will be released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/TPO

This paper addresses text-supervised semantic segmentation, aiming to learn a model capable of segmenting arbitrary visual concepts within images by using only image-text pairs without dense annotations. Existing methods have demonstrated that contrastive learning on image-text pairs effectively aligns visual segments with the meanings of texts. We notice that there is a discrepancy between text alignment and semantic segmentation: A text often consists of multiple semantic concepts, whereas semantic segmentation strives to create semantically homogeneous segments. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, Image-Text Co-Decomposition (CoDe), where the paired image and text are jointly decomposed into a set of image regions and a set of word segments, respectively, and contrastive learning is developed to enforce region-word alignment. To work with a vision-language model, we present a prompt learning mechanism that derives an extra representation to highlight an image segment or a word segment of interest, with which more effective features can be extracted from that segment. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our method performs favorably against existing text-supervised semantic segmentation methods on six benchmark datasets.

Despite their remarkable ability to capture linguistic nuances across diverse languages, questions persist regarding the degree of alignment between languages in multilingual embeddings. Drawing inspiration from research on high-dimensional representations in neural language models, we employ clustering to uncover latent concepts within multilingual models. Our analysis focuses on quantifying the alignment and overlap of these concepts across various languages within the latent space. To this end, we introduce two metrics and aimed at quantifying these aspects, enabling a deeper exploration of multilingual embeddings. Our study encompasses three multilingual models (mT5, mBERT, and XLM-R) and three downstream tasks (Machine Translation, Named Entity Recognition, and Sentiment Analysis). Key findings from our analysis include: i) deeper layers in the network demonstrate increased cross-lingual alignment due to the presence of language-agnostic concepts, ii) fine-tuning of the models enhances alignment within the latent space, and iii) such task-specific calibration helps in explaining the emergence of zero-shot capabilities in the models.The code is available at \url{https://github.com/baselmousi/multilingual-latent-concepts}

In this work, we present Semantic Gesticulator, a novel framework designed to synthesize realistic gestures accompanying speech with strong semantic correspondence. Semantically meaningful gestures are crucial for effective non-verbal communication, but such gestures often fall within the long tail of the distribution of natural human motion. The sparsity of these movements makes it challenging for deep learning-based systems, trained on moderately sized datasets, to capture the relationship between the movements and the corresponding speech semantics. To address this challenge, we develop a generative retrieval framework based on a large language model. This framework efficiently retrieves suitable semantic gesture candidates from a motion library in response to the input speech. To construct this motion library, we summarize a comprehensive list of commonly used semantic gestures based on findings in linguistics, and we collect a high-quality motion dataset encompassing both body and hand movements. We also design a novel GPT-based model with strong generalization capabilities to audio, capable of generating high-quality gestures that match the rhythm of speech. Furthermore, we propose a semantic alignment mechanism to efficiently align the retrieved semantic gestures with the GPT's output, ensuring the naturalness of the final animation. Our system demonstrates robustness in generating gestures that are rhythmically coherent and semantically explicit, as evidenced by a comprehensive collection of examples. User studies confirm the quality and human-likeness of our results, and show that our system outperforms state-of-the-art systems in terms of semantic appropriateness by a clear margin.

Despite recent advances in Large Video Language Models (LVLMs), they still struggle with fine-grained temporal understanding, hallucinate, and often make simple mistakes on even simple video question-answering tasks, all of which pose significant challenges to their safe and reliable deployment in real-world applications. To address these limitations, we propose a self-alignment framework that enables LVLMs to learn from their own errors. Our proposed framework first obtains a training set of preferred and non-preferred response pairs, where non-preferred responses are generated by incorporating common error patterns that often occur due to inadequate spatio-temporal understanding, spurious correlations between co-occurring concepts, and over-reliance on linguistic cues while neglecting the vision modality, among others. To facilitate self-alignment of LVLMs with the constructed preferred and non-preferred response pairs, we introduce Refined Regularized Preference Optimization (RRPO), a novel preference optimization method that utilizes sub-sequence-level refined rewards and token-wise KL regularization to address the limitations of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). We demonstrate that RRPO achieves more precise alignment and more stable training compared to DPO. Our experiments and analysis validate the effectiveness of our approach across diverse video tasks, including video hallucination, short- and long-video understanding, and fine-grained temporal reasoning.

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to cater to different human preferences, learning new skills, and unlearning harmful behavior is an important problem. Search-based methods, such as Best-of-N or Monte-Carlo Tree Search, are performant, but impractical for LLM adaptation due to their high inference cost. On the other hand, using Reinforcement Learning (RL) for adaptation is computationally efficient, but performs worse due to the optimization challenges in co-training the value function and the policy. We present a new framework for reward optimization, Value Augmented Sampling (VAS), that can maximize different reward functions using data sampled from only the initial, frozen LLM. VAS solves for the optimal reward-maximizing policy without co-training the policy and the value function, making the optimization stable, outperforming established baselines, such as PPO and DPO, on standard benchmarks, and achieving comparable results to Best-of-128 with lower inference cost. Unlike existing RL methods that require changing the weights of the LLM, VAS does not require access to the weights of the pre-trained LLM. Thus, it can even adapt LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT), which are available only as APIs. In addition, our algorithm unlocks the new capability of composing several rewards and controlling the extent of each one during deployment time, paving the road ahead for the future of aligned, personalized LLMs.

We introduce a method to train vision-language models for remote-sensing images without using any textual annotations. Our key insight is to use co-located internet imagery taken on the ground as an intermediary for connecting remote-sensing images and language. Specifically, we train an image encoder for remote sensing images to align with the image encoder of CLIP using a large amount of paired internet and satellite images. Our unsupervised approach enables the training of a first-of-its-kind large-scale vision language model (VLM) for remote sensing images at two different resolutions. We show that these VLMs enable zero-shot, open-vocabulary image classification, retrieval, segmentation and visual question answering for satellite images. On each of these tasks, our VLM trained without textual annotations outperforms existing VLMs trained with supervision, with gains of up to 20% for classification and 80% for segmentation.

We present TANGO, a framework for generating co-speech body-gesture videos. Given a few-minute, single-speaker reference video and target speech audio, TANGO produces high-fidelity videos with synchronized body gestures. TANGO builds on Gesture Video Reenactment (GVR), which splits and retrieves video clips using a directed graph structure - representing video frames as nodes and valid transitions as edges. We address two key limitations of GVR: audio-motion misalignment and visual artifacts in GAN-generated transition frames. In particular, (i) we propose retrieving gestures using latent feature distance to improve cross-modal alignment. To ensure the latent features could effectively model the relationship between speech audio and gesture motion, we implement a hierarchical joint embedding space (AuMoCLIP); (ii) we introduce the diffusion-based model to generate high-quality transition frames. Our diffusion model, Appearance Consistent Interpolation (ACInterp), is built upon AnimateAnyone and includes a reference motion module and homography background flow to preserve appearance consistency between generated and reference videos. By integrating these components into the graph-based retrieval framework, TANGO reliably produces realistic, audio-synchronized videos and outperforms all existing generative and retrieval methods. Our codes and pretrained models are available: https://pantomatrix.github.io/TANGO/

Storytelling is an integral part of human culture and significantly impacts cognitive and socio-emotional development and connection. Despite the importance of interactive visual storytelling, the process of creating such content requires specialized skills and is labor-intensive. This paper introduces ID.8, an open-source system designed for the co-creation of visual stories with generative AI. We focus on enabling an inclusive storytelling experience by simplifying the content creation process and allowing for customization. Our user evaluation confirms a generally positive user experience in domains such as enjoyment and exploration, while highlighting areas for improvement, particularly in immersiveness, alignment, and partnership between the user and the AI system. Overall, our findings indicate promising possibilities for empowering people to create visual stories with generative AI. This work contributes a novel content authoring system, ID.8, and insights into the challenges and potential of using generative AI for multimedia content creation.

Visual neural decoding seeks to reconstruct or infer perceived visual stimuli from brain activity patterns, providing critical insights into human cognition and enabling transformative applications in brain-computer interfaces and artificial intelligence. Current approaches, however, remain constrained by the scarcity of high-quality stimulus-brain response pairs and the inherent semantic mismatch between neural representations and visual content. Inspired by perceptual variability and co-adaptive strategy of the biological systems, we propose a novel self-supervised architecture, named NeuroBridge, which integrates Cognitive Prior Augmentation (CPA) with Shared Semantic Projector (SSP) to promote effective cross-modality alignment. Specifically, CPA simulates perceptual variability by applying asymmetric, modality-specific transformations to both EEG signals and images, enhancing semantic diversity. Unlike previous approaches, SSP establishes a bidirectional alignment process through a co-adaptive strategy, which mutually aligns features from two modalities into a shared semantic space for effective cross-modal learning. NeuroBridge surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods under both intra-subject and inter-subject settings. In the intra-subject scenario, it achieves the improvements of 12.3% in top-1 accuracy and 10.2% in top-5 accuracy, reaching 63.2% and 89.9% respectively on a 200-way zero-shot retrieval task. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and scalability of the proposed framework for neural visual decoding.

Modern RL-based post-training for large language models (LLMs) co-locate trajectory sampling and policy optimisation on the same GPU cluster, forcing the system to switch between inference and training workloads. This serial context switching violates the single-program-multiple-data (SPMD) assumption underlying today's distributed training systems. We present Echo, the RL system that cleanly decouples these two phases across heterogeneous "inference" and "training" swarms while preserving statistical efficiency. Echo introduces two lightweight synchronization protocols: a sequential pull mode that refreshes policy weights according to API call for minimal bias, and an asynchronous push-pull mode that streams version-tagged rollouts through a replay buffer to maximise hardware utilisation. Training four representative RL workloads with Qwen3-4B, Qwen2.5-7B, Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507 and Qwen3-32B on a geographically distributed cluster, Echo matches a fully co-located Verl baseline in convergence speed and final reward while off-loading trajectory generation to commodity edge hardware. These promising results demonstrate that large-scale RL for LLMs could achieve datacentre-grade performance using decentralised, heterogeneous resources.

Generating realistic talking faces is a complex and widely discussed task with numerous applications. In this paper, we present DiffTalker, a novel model designed to generate lifelike talking faces through audio and landmark co-driving. DiffTalker addresses the challenges associated with directly applying diffusion models to audio control, which are traditionally trained on text-image pairs. DiffTalker consists of two agent networks: a transformer-based landmarks completion network for geometric accuracy and a diffusion-based face generation network for texture details. Landmarks play a pivotal role in establishing a seamless connection between the audio and image domains, facilitating the incorporation of knowledge from pre-trained diffusion models. This innovative approach efficiently produces articulate-speaking faces. Experimental results showcase DiffTalker's superior performance in producing clear and geometrically accurate talking faces, all without the need for additional alignment between audio and image features.

Diffusion transformers have recently delivered strong text-to-image generation around 1K resolution, but we show that extending them to native 4K across diverse aspect ratios exposes a tightly coupled failure mode spanning positional encoding, VAE compression, and optimization. Tackling any of these factors in isolation leaves substantial quality on the table. We therefore take a data-model co-design view and introduce UltraFlux, a Flux-based DiT trained natively at 4K on MultiAspect-4K-1M, a 1M-image 4K corpus with controlled multi-AR coverage, bilingual captions, and rich VLM/IQA metadata for resolution- and AR-aware sampling. On the model side, UltraFlux couples (i) Resonance 2D RoPE with YaRN for training-window-, frequency-, and AR-aware positional encoding at 4K; (ii) a simple, non-adversarial VAE post-training scheme that improves 4K reconstruction fidelity; (iii) an SNR-Aware Huber Wavelet objective that rebalances gradients across timesteps and frequency bands; and (iv) a Stage-wise Aesthetic Curriculum Learning strategy that concentrates high-aesthetic supervision on high-noise steps governed by the model prior. Together, these components yield a stable, detail-preserving 4K DiT that generalizes across wide, square, and tall ARs. On the Aesthetic-Eval at 4096 benchmark and multi-AR 4K settings, UltraFlux consistently outperforms strong open-source baselines across fidelity, aesthetic, and alignment metrics, and-with a LLM prompt refiner-matches or surpasses the proprietary Seedream 4.0.

As LLMs are increasingly integrated into user-facing applications, addressing biases that perpetuate societal inequalities is crucial. While much work has gone into measuring or mitigating biases in these models, fewer studies have investigated their origins. Therefore, this study examines the correlation between gender-occupation bias in pre-training data and their manifestation in LLMs, focusing on the Dolma dataset and the OLMo model. Using zero-shot prompting and token co-occurrence analyses, we explore how biases in training data influence model outputs. Our findings reveal that biases present in pre-training data are amplified in model outputs. The study also examines the effects of prompt types, hyperparameters, and instruction-tuning on bias expression, finding instruction-tuning partially alleviating representational bias while still maintaining overall stereotypical gender associations, whereas hyperparameters and prompting variation have a lesser effect on bias expression. Our research traces bias throughout the LLM development pipeline and underscores the importance of mitigating bias at the pretraining stage.

Gestures are non-verbal but important behaviors accompanying people's speech. While previous methods are able to generate speech rhythm-synchronized gestures, the semantic context of the speech is generally lacking in the gesticulations. Although semantic gestures do not occur very regularly in human speech, they are indeed the key for the audience to understand the speech context in a more immersive environment. Hence, we introduce LivelySpeaker, a framework that realizes semantics-aware co-speech gesture generation and offers several control handles. In particular, our method decouples the task into two stages: script-based gesture generation and audio-guided rhythm refinement. Specifically, the script-based gesture generation leverages the pre-trained CLIP text embeddings as the guidance for generating gestures that are highly semantically aligned with the script. Then, we devise a simple but effective diffusion-based gesture generation backbone simply using pure MLPs, that is conditioned on only audio signals and learns to gesticulate with realistic motions. We utilize such powerful prior to rhyme the script-guided gestures with the audio signals, notably in a zero-shot setting. Our novel two-stage generation framework also enables several applications, such as changing the gesticulation style, editing the co-speech gestures via textual prompting, and controlling the semantic awareness and rhythm alignment with guided diffusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantages of the proposed framework over competing methods. In addition, our core diffusion-based generative model also achieves state-of-the-art performance on two benchmarks. The code and model will be released to facilitate future research.

Human communication combines speech with expressive nonverbal cues such as hand gestures that serve manifold communicative functions. Yet, current generative gesture generation approaches are restricted to simple, repetitive beat gestures that accompany the rhythm of speaking but do not contribute to communicating semantic meaning. This paper tackles a core challenge in co-speech gesture synthesis: generating iconic or deictic gestures that are semantically coherent with a verbal utterance. Such gestures cannot be derived from language input alone, which inherently lacks the visual meaning that is often carried autonomously by gestures. We therefore introduce a zero-shot system that generates gestures from a given language input and additionally is informed by imagistic input, without manual annotation or human intervention. Our method integrates an image analysis pipeline that extracts key object properties such as shape, symmetry, and alignment, together with a semantic matching module that links these visual details to spoken text. An inverse kinematics engine then synthesizes iconic and deictic gestures and combines them with co-generated natural beat gestures for coherent multimodal communication. A comprehensive user study demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach. In scenarios where speech alone was ambiguous, gestures generated by our system significantly improved participants' ability to identify object properties, confirming their interpretability and communicative value. While challenges remain in representing complex shapes, our results highlight the importance of context-aware semantic gestures for creating expressive and collaborative virtual agents or avatars, marking a substantial step forward towards efficient and robust, embodied human-agent interaction. More information and example videos are available here: https://review-anon-io.github.io/ImaGGen.github.io/

While reasoning-enhanced large language models perform strongly on English medical tasks, a persistent multilingual gap remains, with substantially weaker reasoning in local languages, limiting equitable global medical deployment. To bridge this gap, we introduce Med-CoReasoner, a language-informed co-reasoning framework that elicits parallel English and local-language reasoning, abstracts them into structured concepts, and integrates local clinical knowledge into an English logical scaffold via concept-level alignment and retrieval. This design combines the structural robustness of English reasoning with the practice-grounded expertise encoded in local languages. To evaluate multilingual medical reasoning beyond multiple-choice settings, we construct MultiMed-X, a benchmark covering seven languages with expert-annotated long-form question answering and natural language inference tasks, comprising 350 instances per language. Experiments across three benchmarks show that Med-CoReasoner improves multilingual reasoning performance by an average of 5%, with particularly substantial gains in low-resource languages. Moreover, model distillation and expert evaluation analysis further confirm that Med-CoReasoner produces clinically sound and culturally grounded reasoning traces.

Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) has achieved remarkable success across various downstream tasks, but such gains are largely driven by scaling up on training data. Yet, literature methods treat image-text pairs as isolated training examples; this neglects the rich relational structure naturally present in many domains, such as e-commerce product co-purchase graphs and social recommendation networks. Inspired by neuroscientific evidence that human encodes knowledge as relationship cognitive maps, we introduce Structure-aware Language-Image Pretraining (SLIP). SLIP integrates a structural contrastive loss to align modalities while also modeling relationships between neighboring entities in a structured graph. To support this paradigm, we construct a large-scale Amazon Product Co-purchase Multimodal Graph Dataset, enabling structured cross-modality supervision at scale. Experiment results show that SLIP consistently outperforms CLIP on cross-modal retrieval and classification tasks in both zero-shot and few-shot settings, showing the value of relational supervision for cross-modal alignment.

Relational reasoning lies at the core of many NLP tasks, drawing on complementary signals from text and graphs. While prior research has investigated how to leverage this dual complementarity, a detailed and systematic understanding of text-graph interplay and its effect on hybrid models remains underexplored. We take an analysis-driven approach to investigate text-graph representation complementarity via a unified architecture that supports knowledge co-distillation (CoD). We explore five tasks involving relational reasoning that differ in how text and graph structures encode the information needed to solve that task. By tracking how these dual representations evolve during training, we uncover interpretable patterns of alignment and divergence, and provide insights into when and why their integration is beneficial.

Tokenization serves as a foundational step for Large Language Models (LLMs) to process text. In new domains or languages, the inefficiency of the tokenizer will slow down the training and generation of LLM. The mismatch in vocabulary also hinders deep knowledge transfer between LLMs like token-level distillation. To mitigate this gap, we propose an efficient method named TokAlign to replace the vocabulary of LLM from the token co-occurrences view, and further transfer the token-level knowledge between models. It first aligns the source vocabulary to the target one by learning a one-to-one mapping matrix for token IDs. Model parameters, including embeddings, are rearranged and progressively fine-tuned for the new vocabulary. Our method significantly improves multilingual text compression rates and vocabulary initialization for LLMs, decreasing the perplexity from 3.4e^2 of strong baseline methods to 1.2e^2 after initialization. Experimental results on models across multiple parameter scales demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of TokAlign, which costs as few as 5k steps to restore the performance of the vanilla model. After unifying vocabularies between LLMs, token-level distillation can remarkably boost (+4.4% than sentence-level distillation) the base model, costing only 235M tokens.

In recent years, safety risks associated with large language models have become increasingly prominent, highlighting the urgent need to mitigate the generation of toxic and harmful content. The mainstream paradigm for LLM safety alignment typically adopts a collaborative framework involving three roles: an attacker for adversarial prompt generation, a defender for safety defense, and an evaluator for response assessment. In this paper, we propose a closed-loop reinforcement learning framework called TriPlay-RL that enables iterative and co-improving collaboration among three roles with near-zero manual annotation. Experimental results show that the attacker preserves high output diversity while achieving a 20%-50% improvement in adversarial effectiveness; the defender attains 10%-30% gains in safety performance without degrading general reasoning capability; and the evaluator continuously refines its fine-grained judgment ability through iterations, accurately distinguishing unsafe responses, simple refusals, and useful guidance. Overall, our framework establishes an efficient and scalable paradigm for LLM safety alignment, enabling continuous co-evolution within a unified learning loop.

Recent breakthroughs in diffusion models, multimodal pretraining, and efficient finetuning have led to an explosion of text-to-image generative models. Given human evaluation is expensive and difficult to scale, automated methods are critical for evaluating the increasingly large number of new models. However, most current automated evaluation metrics like FID or CLIPScore only offer a holistic measure of image quality or image-text alignment, and are unsuited for fine-grained or instance-level analysis. In this paper, we introduce GenEval, an object-focused framework to evaluate compositional image properties such as object co-occurrence, position, count, and color. We show that current object detection models can be leveraged to evaluate text-to-image models on a variety of generation tasks with strong human agreement, and that other discriminative vision models can be linked to this pipeline to further verify properties like object color. We then evaluate several open-source text-to-image models and analyze their relative generative capabilities on our benchmark. We find that recent models demonstrate significant improvement on these tasks, though they are still lacking in complex capabilities such as spatial relations and attribute binding. Finally, we demonstrate how GenEval might be used to help discover existing failure modes, in order to inform development of the next generation of text-to-image models. Our code to run the GenEval framework is publicly available at https://github.com/djghosh13/geneval.

We present DAD-3DHeads, a dense and diverse large-scale dataset, and a robust model for 3D Dense Head Alignment in the wild. It contains annotations of over 3.5K landmarks that accurately represent 3D head shape compared to the ground-truth scans. The data-driven model, DAD-3DNet, trained on our dataset, learns shape, expression, and pose parameters, and performs 3D reconstruction of a FLAME mesh. The model also incorporates a landmark prediction branch to take advantage of rich supervision and co-training of multiple related tasks. Experimentally, DAD-3DNet outperforms or is comparable to the state-of-the-art models in (i) 3D Head Pose Estimation on AFLW2000-3D and BIWI, (ii) 3D Face Shape Reconstruction on NoW and Feng, and (iii) 3D Dense Head Alignment and 3D Landmarks Estimation on DAD-3DHeads dataset. Finally, the diversity of DAD-3DHeads in camera angles, facial expressions, and occlusions enables a benchmark to study in-the-wild generalization and robustness to distribution shifts. The dataset webpage is https://p.farm/research/dad-3dheads.

We introduce and study the problem of adversarial arithmetic, which provides a simple yet challenging testbed for language model alignment. This problem is comprised of arithmetic questions posed in natural language, with an arbitrary adversarial string inserted before the question is complete. Even in the simple setting of 1-digit addition problems, it is easy to find adversarial prompts that make all tested models (including PaLM2, GPT4, Claude2) misbehave, and even to steer models to a particular wrong answer. We additionally provide a simple algorithm for finding successful attacks by querying those same models, which we name "prompt inversion rejection sampling" (PIRS). We finally show that models can be partially hardened against these attacks via reinforcement learning and via agentic constitutional loops. However, we were not able to make a language model fully robust against adversarial arithmetic attacks.

Avatar video generation models have achieved remarkable progress in recent years. However, prior work exhibits limited efficiency in generating long-duration high-resolution videos, suffering from temporal drifting, quality degradation, and weak prompt following as video length increases. To address these challenges, we propose KlingAvatar 2.0, a spatio-temporal cascade framework that performs upscaling in both spatial resolution and temporal dimension. The framework first generates low-resolution blueprint video keyframes that capture global semantics and motion, and then refines them into high-resolution, temporally coherent sub-clips using a first-last frame strategy, while retaining smooth temporal transitions in long-form videos. To enhance cross-modal instruction fusion and alignment in extended videos, we introduce a Co-Reasoning Director composed of three modality-specific large language model (LLM) experts. These experts reason about modality priorities and infer underlying user intent, converting inputs into detailed storylines through multi-turn dialogue. A Negative Director further refines negative prompts to improve instruction alignment. Building on these components, we extend the framework to support ID-specific multi-character control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model effectively addresses the challenges of efficient, multimodally aligned long-form high-resolution video generation, delivering enhanced visual clarity, realistic lip-teeth rendering with accurate lip synchronization, strong identity preservation, and coherent multimodal instruction following.

The rapid growth of e-commerce calls for multimodal models that comprehend rich visual and textual product information. Although recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for product understanding exhibit strong capability in representation learning for e-commerce, they still face three challenges: (i) the modality imbalance induced by modality mixed training; (ii) underutilization of the intrinsic alignment relationships among visual and textual information within a product; and (iii) limited handling of noise in e-commerce multimodal data. To address these, we propose MOON2.0, a dynamic modality-balanced multimodal representation learning framework for e-commerce product understanding. MOON2.0 comprises: (1) a Modality-driven Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) module that adaptively processes input samples by their modality composition, enabling Multimodal Joint Learning to mitigate the modality imbalance; (2) a Dual-level Alignment method to better leverage semantic alignment properties inside individual products; and (3) an MLLM-based Image-text Co-augmentation strategy that integrates textual enrichment with visual expansion, coupled with Dynamic Sample Filtering to improve training data quality. We further introduce MBE2.0, a co-augmented multimodal representation benchmark for e-commerce representation learning and evaluation. Experiments show that MOON2.0 delivers state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on MBE2.0 and multiple public datasets. Furthermore, attention-based heatmap visualization provides qualitative evidence of improved multimodal alignment of MOON2.0.

Formal verification is the next frontier for ensuring the correctness of code generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). While methods that co-generate code and formal specifications in formal languages, like Dafny, can, in principle, prove alignment with user intent, progress is bottlenecked by specification quality evaluation. Current benchmarks rely on matching against ground-truth specifications, a manual and expertise-intensive process that has limited existing datasets to a few hundred simple problems and also suffers from a reliability issue. To address this, we introduce VeriEquivBench, a new benchmark with 2,389 complex algorithmic problems that probe the limitations of current models in both code generation and formal reasoning. Our evaluation framework replaces ground-truth matching with a formally grounded metric, the equivalence score, and rigorously verifies the quality of generated specifications and code. Our results show that generating formally verifiable code remains a profound challenge for state-of-the-art LLMs. This underscores both the difficulty of the task and the need for benchmarks like VeriEquivBench to drive progress toward scalable and reliable coding agents.

While exploring visual scenes, humans' scanpaths are driven by their underlying attention processes. Understanding visual scanpaths is essential for various applications. Traditional scanpath models predict the where and when of gaze shifts without providing explanations, creating a gap in understanding the rationale behind fixations. To bridge this gap, we introduce GazeXplain, a novel study of visual scanpath prediction and explanation. This involves annotating natural-language explanations for fixations across eye-tracking datasets and proposing a general model with an attention-language decoder that jointly predicts scanpaths and generates explanations. It integrates a unique semantic alignment mechanism to enhance the consistency between fixations and explanations, alongside a cross-dataset co-training approach for generalization. These novelties present a comprehensive and adaptable solution for explainable human visual scanpath prediction. Extensive experiments on diverse eye-tracking datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of GazeXplain in both scanpath prediction and explanation, offering valuable insights into human visual attention and cognitive processes.

Human demonstrations offer rich environmental diversity and scale naturally, making them an appealing alternative to robot teleoperation. While this paradigm has advanced robot-arm manipulation, its potential for the more challenging, data-hungry problem of humanoid loco-manipulation remains largely unexplored. We present EgoHumanoid, the first framework to co-train a vision-language-action policy using abundant egocentric human demonstrations together with a limited amount of robot data, enabling humanoids to perform loco-manipulation across diverse real-world environments. To bridge the embodiment gap between humans and robots, including discrepancies in physical morphology and viewpoint, we introduce a systematic alignment pipeline spanning from hardware design to data processing. A portable system for scalable human data collection is developed, and we establish practical collection protocols to improve transferability. At the core of our human-to-humanoid alignment pipeline lies two key components. The view alignment reduces visual domain discrepancies caused by camera height and perspective variation. The action alignment maps human motions into a unified, kinematically feasible action space for humanoid control. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate that incorporating robot-free egocentric data significantly outperforms robot-only baselines by 51\%, particularly in unseen environments. Our analysis further reveals which behaviors transfer effectively and the potential for scaling human data.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves instruction following capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but suffers from training inefficiency due to inadequate difficulty assessment. Moreover, RLVR is prone to over-optimization, where LLMs exploit verification shortcuts without aligning to the actual intent of user instructions. We introduce Instruction Following Decorator (IFDecorator}, a framework that wraps RLVR training into a robust and sample-efficient pipeline. It consists of three components: (1) a cooperative-adversarial data flywheel that co-evolves instructions and hybrid verifications, generating progressively more challenging instruction-verification pairs; (2) IntentCheck, a bypass module enforcing intent alignment; and (3) trip wires, a diagnostic mechanism that detects reward hacking via trap instructions, which trigger and capture shortcut exploitation behaviors. Our Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct-IFDecorator achieves 87.43% accuracy on IFEval, outperforming larger proprietary models such as GPT-4o. Additionally, we demonstrate substantial improvements on FollowBench while preserving general capabilities. Our trip wires show significant reductions in reward hacking rates. We will release models, code, and data for future research.

Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models can be dynamically optimized using Test-Time Scaling (TTS) to mitigate Overthinking. Methods such as Coconut, SoftCoT and its variant are effective in continuous latent space inference, the core bottleneck still lies in the efficient generation and utilization of high-quality Latent Thought. Drawing from the theory of SoftCoT++ that a larger variance in the generated Latent Thought distribution more closely approximates the golden truth distribution, we propose a Latent Thought-Augmented Training Framework--LTA-Thinker, which improves distributional variance and enhances reasoning performance from two perspectives. First, LTA-Thinker constructs a Latent Thought generation architecture based on a learnable prior. This architecture aims to increase the variance distribution of generated Latent Thought Vectors in order to simplify the overall structure and raise the performance ceiling. Second, LTA-Thinker introduces a distribution-based directional optimization paradigm that jointly constrains both distribution locality and distribution scale. This mechanism improves information efficiency and computational cost through a multi-objective co-training strategy, which combines standard Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) loss with two novel losses: Semantic Alignment Loss, which utilizes KL divergence to ensure that the Latent Thought is highly relevant to the semantics of the question; Reasoning Focus Loss, which utilizes a contrastive learning mechanism to guide the model to focus on the most critical reasoning steps. Experiments show that LTA-thinker achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among various baselines and demonstrates a higher performance ceiling and better scaling effects.

Semantic IDs are discrete identifiers generated by quantizing the Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) embeddings, enabling efficient multi-modal content integration in recommendation systems. However, their lack of collaborative signals results in a misalignment with downstream discriminative and generative recommendation objectives. Recent studies have introduced various alignment mechanisms to address this problem, but their two-stage framework design still leads to two main limitations: (1) inevitable information loss during alignment, and (2) inflexibility in applying adaptive alignment strategies, consequently constraining the mutual information maximization during the alignment process. To address these limitations, we propose a novel and flexible one-stage Dual-Aligned Semantic IDs (DAS) method that simultaneously optimizes quantization and alignment, preserving semantic integrity and alignment quality while avoiding the information loss typically associated with two-stage methods. Meanwhile, DAS achieves more efficient alignment between the semantic IDs and collaborative signals, with the following two innovative and effective approaches: (1) Multi-view Constrative Alignment: To maximize mutual information between semantic IDs and collaborative signals, we first incorporate an ID-based CF debias module, and then design three effective contrastive alignment methods: dual user-to-item (u2i), dual item-to-item/user-to-user (i2i/u2u), and dual co-occurrence item-to-item/user-to-user (i2i/u2u). (2) Dual Learning: By aligning the dual quantizations of users and ads, the constructed semantic IDs for users and ads achieve stronger alignment. Finally, we conduct extensive offline experiments and online A/B tests to evaluate DAS's effectiveness, which is now successfully deployed across various advertising scenarios at Kuaishou App, serving over 400 million users daily.

Mean Opinion Score (MOS) prediction for text to music systems requires evaluating both overall musical quality and text prompt alignment. This paper introduces WhisQ, a multimodal architecture that addresses this dual-assessment challenge through sequence level co-attention and optimal transport regularization. WhisQ employs the Whisper Base pretrained model for temporal audio encoding and Qwen 3, a 0.6B Small Language Model (SLM), for text encoding, with both maintaining sequence structure for fine grained cross-modal modeling. The architecture features specialized prediction pathways: OMQ is predicted from pooled audio embeddings, while TA leverages bidirectional sequence co-attention between audio and text. Sinkhorn optimal transport loss further enforce semantic alignment in the shared embedding space. On the MusicEval Track-1 dataset, WhisQ achieves substantial improvements over the baseline: 7% improvement in Spearman correlation for OMQ and 14% for TA. Ablation studies reveal that optimal transport regularization provides the largest performance gain (10% SRCC improvement), demonstrating the importance of explicit cross-modal alignment for text-to-music evaluation.

Reconstructing complete and interactive 3D scenes remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision and robotics, particularly due to persistent object occlusions and limited sensor coverage. Multiview observations from a single scene scan often fail to capture the full structural details. Existing approaches typically rely on multi stage pipelines, such as segmentation, background completion, and inpainting or require per-object dense scanning, both of which are error-prone, and not easily scalable. We propose IGFuse, a novel framework that reconstructs interactive Gaussian scene by fusing observations from multiple scans, where natural object rearrangement between captures reveal previously occluded regions. Our method constructs segmentation aware Gaussian fields and enforces bi-directional photometric and semantic consistency across scans. To handle spatial misalignments, we introduce a pseudo-intermediate scene state for unified alignment, alongside collaborative co-pruning strategies to refine geometry. IGFuse enables high fidelity rendering and object level scene manipulation without dense observations or complex pipelines. Extensive experiments validate the framework's strong generalization to novel scene configurations, demonstrating its effectiveness for real world 3D reconstruction and real-to-simulation transfer. Our project page is available online.

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) enables the recognition of novel classes by leveraging semantic knowledge transfer from known to unknown categories. This knowledge, typically encapsulated in attribute descriptions, aids in identifying class-specific visual features, thus facilitating visual-semantic alignment and improving ZSL performance. However, real-world challenges such as distribution imbalances and attribute co-occurrence among instances often hinder the discernment of local variances in images, a problem exacerbated by the scarcity of fine-grained, region-specific attribute annotations. Moreover, the variability in visual presentation within categories can also skew attribute-category associations. In response, we propose a bidirectional cross-modal ZSL approach CREST. It begins by extracting representations for attribute and visual localization and employs Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) to measure underlying epistemic uncertainty, thereby enhancing the model's resilience against hard negatives. CREST incorporates dual learning pathways, focusing on both visual-category and attribute-category alignments, to ensure robust correlation between latent and observable spaces. Moreover, we introduce an uncertainty-informed cross-modal fusion technique to refine visual-attribute inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate our model's effectiveness and unique explainability across multiple datasets. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/JethroJames/CREST

Robustness to adversarial attacks is typically obtained through expensive adversarial training with Projected Gradient Descent. Here we introduce ROPUST, a remarkably simple and efficient method to leverage robust pre-trained models and further increase their robustness, at no cost in natural accuracy. Our technique relies on the use of an Optical Processing Unit (OPU), a photonic co-processor, and a fine-tuning step performed with Direct Feedback Alignment, a synthetic gradient training scheme. We test our method on nine different models against four attacks in RobustBench, consistently improving over state-of-the-art performance. We perform an ablation study on the single components of our defense, showing that robustness arises from parameter obfuscation and the alternative training method. We also introduce phase retrieval attacks, specifically designed to increase the threat level of attackers against our own defense. We show that even with state-of-the-art phase retrieval techniques, ROPUST remains an effective defense.

Reinforcement learning (RL) promises to unlock capabilities beyond imitation learning for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, but its requirement for massive real-world interaction prevents direct deployment on physical robots. Recent work attempts to use learned world models as simulators for policy optimization, yet closed-loop imagined rollouts inevitably suffer from hallucination and long-horizon error accumulation. Such errors do not merely degrade visual fidelity; they corrupt the optimization signal, encouraging policies to exploit model inaccuracies rather than genuine task progress. We propose WoVR, a reliable world-model-based reinforcement learning framework for post-training VLA policies. Instead of assuming a faithful world model, WoVR explicitly regulates how RL interacts with imperfect imagined dynamics. It improves rollout stability through a controllable action-conditioned video world model, reshapes imagined interaction to reduce effective error depth via Keyframe-Initialized Rollouts, and maintains policy-simulator alignment through World Model-Policy co-evolution. Extensive experiments on LIBERO benchmarks and real-world robotic manipulation demonstrate that WoVR enables stable long-horizon imagined rollouts and effective policy optimization, improving average LIBERO success from 39.95% to 69.2% (+29.3 points) and real-robot success from 61.7% to 91.7% (+30.0 points). These results show that learned world models can serve as practical simulators for reinforcement learning when hallucination is explicitly controlled.

Our experience of the world is multimodal - we see objects, hear sounds, feel texture, smell odors, and taste flavors. Modality refers to the way in which something happens or is experienced and a research problem is characterized as multimodal when it includes multiple such modalities. In order for Artificial Intelligence to make progress in understanding the world around us, it needs to be able to interpret such multimodal signals together. Multimodal machine learning aims to build models that can process and relate information from multiple modalities. It is a vibrant multi-disciplinary field of increasing importance and with extraordinary potential. Instead of focusing on specific multimodal applications, this paper surveys the recent advances in multimodal machine learning itself and presents them in a common taxonomy. We go beyond the typical early and late fusion categorization and identify broader challenges that are faced by multimodal machine learning, namely: representation, translation, alignment, fusion, and co-learning. This new taxonomy will enable researchers to better understand the state of the field and identify directions for future research.

Cooperative perception enables vehicles to share sensor readings and has become a new paradigm to improve driving safety, where the key enabling technology for realizing this vision is to real-time and accurately align and fuse the perceptions. Recent advances to align the views rely on high-density LiDAR data or fine-grained image feature representations, which however fail to meet the requirements of accuracy, real-time, and adaptability for autonomous driving. To this end, we present MMatch, a lightweight system that enables accurate and real-time perception fusion with mmWave radar point clouds. The key insight is that fine-grained spatial information provided by the radar present unique associations with all the vehicles even in two separate views. As a result, by capturing and understanding the unique local and global position of the targets in this association, we can quickly find out all the co-visible vehicles for view alignment. We implement MMatch on both the datasets collected from the CARLA platform and the real-world traffic with over 15,000 radar point cloud pairs. Experimental results show that MMatch achieves decimeter-level accuracy within 59ms, which significantly improves the reliability for autonomous driving.

The effects of ligand binding on protein structures and their in vivo functions carry numerous implications for modern biomedical research and biotechnology development efforts such as drug discovery. Although several deep learning (DL) methods and benchmarks designed for protein-ligand docking have recently been introduced, to date no prior works have systematically studied the behavior of the latest docking and structure prediction methods within the broadly applicable context of (1) using predicted (apo) protein structures for docking (e.g., for applicability to new proteins); (2) binding multiple (cofactor) ligands concurrently to a given target protein (e.g., for enzyme design); and (3) having no prior knowledge of binding pockets (e.g., for generalization to unknown pockets). To enable a deeper understanding of docking methods' real-world utility, we introduce PoseBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for broadly applicable protein-ligand docking. PoseBench enables researchers to rigorously and systematically evaluate DL methods for apo-to-holo protein-ligand docking and protein-ligand structure prediction using both primary ligand and multi-ligand benchmark datasets, the latter of which we introduce for the first time to the DL community. Empirically, using PoseBench, we find that (1) DL co-folding methods generally outperform comparable conventional and DL docking baselines, yet popular methods such as AlphaFold 3 are still challenged by prediction targets with novel protein sequences; (2) certain DL co-folding methods are highly sensitive to their input multiple sequence alignments, while others are not; and (3) DL methods struggle to strike a balance between structural accuracy and chemical specificity when predicting novel or multi-ligand protein targets. Code, data, tutorials, and benchmark results are available at https://github.com/BioinfoMachineLearning/PoseBench.

Prompt injection attacks pose a significant challenge to the safe deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in real-world applications. While prompt-based detection offers a lightweight and interpretable defense strategy, its effectiveness has been hindered by the need for manual prompt engineering. To address this issue, we propose AEGIS , an Automated co-Evolutionary framework for Guarding prompt Injections Schema. Both attack and defense prompts are iteratively optimized against each other using a gradient-like natural language prompt optimization technique. This framework enables both attackers and defenders to autonomously evolve via a Textual Gradient Optimization (TGO) module, leveraging feedback from an LLM-guided evaluation loop. We evaluate our system on a real-world assignment grading dataset of prompt injection attacks and demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing baselines, achieving superior robustness in both attack success and detection. Specifically, the attack success rate (ASR) reaches 1.0, representing an improvement of 0.26 over the baseline. For detection, the true positive rate (TPR) improves by 0.23 compared to the previous best work, reaching 0.84, and the true negative rate (TNR) remains comparable at 0.89. Ablation studies confirm the importance of co-evolution, gradient buffering, and multi-objective optimization. We also confirm that this framework is effective in different LLMs. Our results highlight the promise of adversarial training as a scalable and effective approach for guarding prompt injections.

In this paper, we provide the observation that too few queries assigned as positive samples in DETR with one-to-one set matching leads to sparse supervision on the encoder's output which considerably hurt the discriminative feature learning of the encoder and vice visa for attention learning in the decoder. To alleviate this, we present a novel collaborative hybrid assignments training scheme, namely Co-DETR, to learn more efficient and effective DETR-based detectors from versatile label assignment manners. This new training scheme can easily enhance the encoder's learning ability in end-to-end detectors by training the multiple parallel auxiliary heads supervised by one-to-many label assignments such as ATSS and Faster RCNN. In addition, we conduct extra customized positive queries by extracting the positive coordinates from these auxiliary heads to improve the training efficiency of positive samples in the decoder. In inference, these auxiliary heads are discarded and thus our method introduces no additional parameters and computational cost to the original detector while requiring no hand-crafted non-maximum suppression (NMS). We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on DETR variants, including DAB-DETR, Deformable-DETR, and DINO-Deformable-DETR. The state-of-the-art DINO-Deformable-DETR with Swin-L can be improved from 58.5% to 59.5% AP on COCO val. Surprisingly, incorporated with ViT-L backbone, we achieve 66.0% AP on COCO test-dev and 67.9% AP on LVIS val, outperforming previous methods by clear margins with much fewer model sizes. Codes are available at https://github.com/Sense-X/Co-DETR.

Embodiment co-design aims to optimize a robot's morphology and control policy simultaneously. While prior work has demonstrated its potential for generating environment-adaptive robots, this field still faces persistent challenges in optimization efficiency due to the (i) combinatorial nature of morphological search spaces and (ii) intricate dependencies between morphology and control. We prove that the ineffective morphology representation and unbalanced reward signals between the design and control stages are key obstacles to efficiency. To advance towards efficient embodiment co-design, we propose BodyGen, which utilizes (1) topology-aware self-attention for both design and control, enabling efficient morphology representation with lightweight model sizes; (2) a temporal credit assignment mechanism that ensures balanced reward signals for optimization. With our findings, Body achieves an average 60.03% performance improvement against state-of-the-art baselines. We provide codes and more results on the website: https://genesisorigin.github.io.

Segmenting objects in images and separating sound sources in audio are challenging tasks, in part because traditional approaches require large amounts of labeled data. In this paper we develop a neural network model for visual object segmentation and sound source separation that learns from natural videos through self-supervision. The model is an extension of recently proposed work that maps image pixels to sounds. Here, we introduce a learning approach to disentangle concepts in the neural networks, and assign semantic categories to network feature channels to enable independent image segmentation and sound source separation after audio-visual training on videos. Our evaluations show that the disentangled model outperforms several baselines in semantic segmentation and sound source separation.

CutMix is a vital augmentation strategy that determines the performance and generalization ability of vision transformers (ViTs). However, the inconsistency between the mixed images and the corresponding labels harms its efficacy. Existing CutMix variants tackle this problem by generating more consistent mixed images or more precise mixed labels, but inevitably introduce heavy training overhead or require extra information, undermining ease of use. To this end, we propose an novel and effective Self-Motivated image Mixing method (SMMix), which motivates both image and label enhancement by the model under training itself. Specifically, we propose a max-min attention region mixing approach that enriches the attention-focused objects in the mixed images. Then, we introduce a fine-grained label assignment technique that co-trains the output tokens of mixed images with fine-grained supervision. Moreover, we devise a novel feature consistency constraint to align features from mixed and unmixed images. Due to the subtle designs of the self-motivated paradigm, our SMMix is significant in its smaller training overhead and better performance than other CutMix variants. In particular, SMMix improves the accuracy of DeiT-T/S/B, CaiT-XXS-24/36, and PVT-T/S/M/L by more than +1% on ImageNet-1k. The generalization capability of our method is also demonstrated on downstream tasks and out-of-distribution datasets. Our project is anonymously available at https://github.com/ChenMnZ/SMMix.