作者Guangming Wang, Xiaoyu Zhang, Yucheng Xin, Wanli Ma, Jiucai Liu, Yunxiang Ma, Joe Ingham, Haibing Wu, Yixiong Jing, Olaf Wysocki, Brian Sheil
Cable-suspended hoisting is widely used to move heavy or bulky payloads that cannot be handled conveniently by rigid pick-and-place systems, for example in crane-assisted construction. Robotic hoisting using flexible cables is challenging because payload motion is underactuated, external disturbances vary, and delayed or lost visual observations can make the perceived payload state stale at control execution. These effects are particularly critical during precise insertion of a suspended payload's sockets onto rebar pins, which is a very common task in construction environments. We present SwingRL, a residual reinforcement-learning (RL) framework that combines an age-aware world model, a classical anti-swing prior, and a recurrent residual policy to address two coupled problems: stale feedback and uncertain dynamics. The world model propagates the newest received payload observation to the current control step using the executed commands, providing a time-aligned state estimate under delayed and lossy sensing. The prior supplies nominal tracking and swing damping. The residual policy learns bounded corrections to the prior rather than the complete control law, compensating for system-parameter variation, external disturbances, and remaining state-estimation errors. We evaluate SwingRL against classical and learning-based baselines across a cumulative difficulty ladder covering system-parameter variation, wind disturbance, degraded sensing, and strong gusts. Under the most difficult setting, SwingRL achieves 69.5% strict and 77.3% broad success, exceeding all baselines by at least 60 percentage points, respectively. World-model ablations support the role of time-aligned state estimation in maintaining insertion success as observation loss increases. Finally, without real-robot fine-tuning, SwingRL achieves 90% success on the physical rig.
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Cable-suspended hoisting is widely used to move heavy or bulky payloads that cannot be handled conveniently by rigid pick-and-place systems, for example in crane-assisted construction. Robotic hoisting using flexible cables is challenging because payload motion is underactuated, external disturbances vary, and delayed or lost visual observations can make the perceived payload state stale at control execution. These effects are particularly critical during precise insertion of a suspended payload's sockets onto rebar pins, which is a very common task in construction environments. We present SwingRL, a residual reinforcement-learning (RL) framework that combines an age-aware world model, a classical anti-swing prior, and a recurrent residual policy to address two coupled problems: stale feedback and uncertain dynamics. The world model propagates the newest received payload observation to the current control step using the executed commands, providing a time-aligned state estimate under delayed and lossy sensing. The prior supplies nominal tracking and swing damping. The residual policy learns bounded corrections to the prior rather than the complete control law, compensating for system-parameter variation, external disturbances, and remaining state-estimation errors. We evaluate SwingRL against classical and learning-based baselines across a cumulative difficulty ladder covering system-parameter variation, wind disturbance, degraded sensing, and strong gusts. Under the most difficult setting, SwingRL achieves 69.5% strict and 77.3% broad success, exceeding all baselines by at least 60 percentage points, respectively. World-model ablations support the role of time-aligned state estimation in maintaining insertion success as observation loss increases. Finally, without real-robot fine-tuning, SwingRL achieves 90% success on the physical rig.
作者Yiyi Cai, Yuhan Wu, Kunhang Li, Tu Fangyuan, Xiangyue Zhang, Qiaoge Li, Zhixiang Wang, Kaipeng Zhang, Haiyang Liu
We present FloodDiffusion 2 (FD2), an efficient and controllable framework that builds upon FloodDiffusion (FD1), a state-of-the-art streaming motion generation model. While FD1 produces plausible motion, it suffers from low efficiency and limited controllability, as its attention design requires repeated computation over the entire history, and it lacks precise trajectory control for real-world applications. To address these limitations and improve generation quality, FD2 introduces three advances. First, Partial Attention makes finalized history representations independent of the active window, enabling KV-cached inference and shared-history packing for efficient training. Second, we establish a necessary-and-sufficient Bregman criterion for regression losses to preserve diffusion's conditional-mean velocity field. This criterion guides an FK-induced quadratic loss that incorporates motion geometry without online FK evaluation. Third, FD2 introduces precise path conditioning to control the character's root trajectory while preserving natural body motion. Experiments show that FD2 reduces training computation by 4.6$\times$ and accelerates denoising by 11.29$\times$, reaching 2.303 ms per update on long sequences. Alongside these efficiency gains, FD2 improves motion quality over FD1 and achieves state-of-the-art FID scores among streaming methods, with 0.048 on SEED and 0.053 on HumanML3D.
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We present FloodDiffusion 2 (FD2), an efficient and controllable framework that builds upon FloodDiffusion (FD1), a state-of-the-art streaming motion generation model. While FD1 produces plausible motion, it suffers from low efficiency and limited controllability, as its attention design requires repeated computation over the entire history, and it lacks precise trajectory control for real-world applications. To address these limitations and improve generation quality, FD2 introduces three advances. First, Partial Attention makes finalized history representations independent of the active window, enabling KV-cached inference and shared-history packing for efficient training. Second, we establish a necessary-and-sufficient Bregman criterion for regression losses to preserve diffusion's conditional-mean velocity field. This criterion guides an FK-induced quadratic loss that incorporates motion geometry without online FK evaluation. Third, FD2 introduces precise path conditioning to control the character's root trajectory while preserving natural body motion. Experiments show that FD2 reduces training computation by 4.6$\times$ and accelerates denoising by 11.29$\times$, reaching 2.303 ms per update on long sequences. Alongside these efficiency gains, FD2 improves motion quality over FD1 and achieves state-of-the-art FID scores among streaming methods, with 0.048 on SEED and 0.053 on HumanML3D.
Speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) in time-sensitive applications such as video dubbing requires not only semantic fidelity and speaker preservation, but also strict duration consistency to avoid audio-visual misalignment. However, existing S2ST systems largely generate target speech without explicit temporal planning, making duration control an unresolved challenge. We introduce DuraS2ST, a duration-aligned reasoning framework that enables a single speech language model to first generate an explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) for planning target wording and phonetic length, and then synthesize the corresponding speech tokens. To support this paradigm, we construct DuraSet-440K, a high-quality duration-aligned CoT corpus for supervised initialization. We further optimize the model with multi-modal multi-dimensional reinforcement learning, using a Duration Margin Reward to balance translation quality and duration consistency, and Modality-Aware Reward Attribution to assign rewards to appropriate token spans. Experiments on CVSS-T show that DuraS2ST achieves a strong balance between translation quality and duration consistency, outperforming competitive open-source and commercial baselines. Project page: https://github.com/Mia11939/DuraS2ST.
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Speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) in time-sensitive applications such as video dubbing requires not only semantic fidelity and speaker preservation, but also strict duration consistency to avoid audio-visual misalignment. However, existing S2ST systems largely generate target speech without explicit temporal planning, making duration control an unresolved challenge. We introduce DuraS2ST, a duration-aligned reasoning framework that enables a single speech language model to first generate an explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) for planning target wording and phonetic length, and then synthesize the corresponding speech tokens. To support this paradigm, we construct DuraSet-440K, a high-quality duration-aligned CoT corpus for supervised initialization. We further optimize the model with multi-modal multi-dimensional reinforcement learning, using a Duration Margin Reward to balance translation quality and duration consistency, and Modality-Aware Reward Attribution to assign rewards to appropriate token spans. Experiments on CVSS-T show that DuraS2ST achieves a strong balance between translation quality and duration consistency, outperforming competitive open-source and commercial baselines. Project page: https://github.com/Mia11939/DuraS2ST.
作者Francesco Verdini, Antonis Asonitis, Aref Farhadipour, Marzieh Razavi, Pierre-Edouard Honnet, Vijeta Avijeet, Juan Pablo Zuluaga Gomez
Autoregressive text-to-speech (TTS) systems synthesize natural speech but, once trained, offer little control over speaking rate. We show that speaking rate can be steered at inference time, without retraining, by clamping a single decoder block's activation along a discovered speed axis. A decoder-block analysis recovers the rate axis, a neutral operating point, and a per-step intensity scale; at inference, the activation's projection onto this axis is set to a fixed scalar. Learning this direction from synthetically time-stretched and time-compressed speech yields rate control that largely preserves speaker identity, generalizes across model architectures, and maintains high naturalness in objective and human evaluations. Unlike standard additive steering, which breaks at the slow extreme, clamping remains stable on all three systems tested; at moderate targets, the better rule depends on the model. Finally, we show that rate information is decodable across layers but causally steerable only within a mid-depth window, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the public Seed-TTS-Eval benchmark.
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Autoregressive text-to-speech (TTS) systems synthesize natural speech but, once trained, offer little control over speaking rate. We show that speaking rate can be steered at inference time, without retraining, by clamping a single decoder block's activation along a discovered speed axis. A decoder-block analysis recovers the rate axis, a neutral operating point, and a per-step intensity scale; at inference, the activation's projection onto this axis is set to a fixed scalar. Learning this direction from synthetically time-stretched and time-compressed speech yields rate control that largely preserves speaker identity, generalizes across model architectures, and maintains high naturalness in objective and human evaluations. Unlike standard additive steering, which breaks at the slow extreme, clamping remains stable on all three systems tested; at moderate targets, the better rule depends on the model. Finally, we show that rate information is decodable across layers but causally steerable only within a mid-depth window, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the public Seed-TTS-Eval benchmark.
作者Ivan Kapelyukh, Xiaohan Zhang, Stephen James, Laura Herlant, Edward Johns
We present ZeroBot, a real2sim framework for learning a robot manipulation task from scratch in minutes under challenging conditions: zero human demonstrations, zero policy pre-training, and zero known object models. Given only a single view of an object and a goal pose for that object, ZeroBot uses image-to-3D generative models to obtain a complete object mesh, which is used in simulation for large-scale parallel reinforcement learning. To accelerate training, we introduce an action space which leverages the generated geometry and learned value function to sample states involving robot-object contact. When evaluated on real-world tasks including grasping, pushing, articulated object interaction, and multi-stage manipulation, ZeroBot achieves an 87% success rate with an average training time of 119 seconds. These results show the value of using image-to-3D models in a real2sim framework for rapid, autonomous robot learning.
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We present ZeroBot, a real2sim framework for learning a robot manipulation task from scratch in minutes under challenging conditions: zero human demonstrations, zero policy pre-training, and zero known object models. Given only a single view of an object and a goal pose for that object, ZeroBot uses image-to-3D generative models to obtain a complete object mesh, which is used in simulation for large-scale parallel reinforcement learning. To accelerate training, we introduce an action space which leverages the generated geometry and learned value function to sample states involving robot-object contact. When evaluated on real-world tasks including grasping, pushing, articulated object interaction, and multi-stage manipulation, ZeroBot achieves an 87% success rate with an average training time of 119 seconds. These results show the value of using image-to-3D models in a real2sim framework for rapid, autonomous robot learning.
Humanoid robots are increasingly expected to serve as embodied social agents that communicate naturally with humans through face-to-face interaction. During such communication, humanoid robots require body behaviors that are synchronized with speech, affectively expressive, and suitable for real-time execution. However, existing co-speech methods are primarily developed for digital humans and lack joint support for affective control and low-latency continuous generation on physical embodiments. To bridge this gap, we present SocialHumanoid, a system for expressive humanoid behavior via one-step co-speech motion generation. Given response speech and a specified affective condition, SocialHumanoid generates each full-body motion window in a single forward pass and connects successive windows through motion-history conditioning. The generated human motion is further converted online into embodiment-compatible robot references and tracked by a whole-body controller for physical execution. To provide explicit supervision for affective body expression, we further introduce AffectMoCap, a 4-hour dataset captured from two professional actors, containing synchronized speech, body motion, fine-grained hand motion, and emotion annotations. On BEAT2, SocialHumanoid achieves the best FGD among the compared generation methods, competitive speech-motion synchrony, and approximately $6\times$ faster inference than GestureLSM under the same protocol. Perceptual evaluations further show that training with AffectMoCap improves affect recognition from generated body motion, while real-robot experiments demonstrate continuous affect-conditioned behavior and stable long-horizon execution. Our project page is https://rex0191.github.io/SocialHumanoid/.
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Humanoid robots are increasingly expected to serve as embodied social agents that communicate naturally with humans through face-to-face interaction. During such communication, humanoid robots require body behaviors that are synchronized with speech, affectively expressive, and suitable for real-time execution. However, existing co-speech methods are primarily developed for digital humans and lack joint support for affective control and low-latency continuous generation on physical embodiments. To bridge this gap, we present SocialHumanoid, a system for expressive humanoid behavior via one-step co-speech motion generation. Given response speech and a specified affective condition, SocialHumanoid generates each full-body motion window in a single forward pass and connects successive windows through motion-history conditioning. The generated human motion is further converted online into embodiment-compatible robot references and tracked by a whole-body controller for physical execution. To provide explicit supervision for affective body expression, we further introduce AffectMoCap, a 4-hour dataset captured from two professional actors, containing synchronized speech, body motion, fine-grained hand motion, and emotion annotations. On BEAT2, SocialHumanoid achieves the best FGD among the compared generation methods, competitive speech-motion synchrony, and approximately $6\times$ faster inference than GestureLSM under the same protocol. Perceptual evaluations further show that training with AffectMoCap improves affect recognition from generated body motion, while real-robot experiments demonstrate continuous affect-conditioned behavior and stable long-horizon execution. Our project page is https://rex0191.github.io/SocialHumanoid/.
Generative models learn visual structure through denoising, yet their internal states are entangled with both noise level and network depth, making it difficult to obtain a stable visual representation from the generator itself. We introduce RepFlow, which learns such a representation from the generator's evolving computation and uses it to guide generation. Specifically, a separate timestep-free encoder is trained, through a timestep-conditioned predictor, to recover generator states across depths and noise levels from masked clean images. By excluding the reference noise and masked-out content from the encoder's input, we encourage the encoder to distill visual information that is recoverable from the visible image context and predictive of generator states. The representation learned from the generator's evolving states is then fed back to guide and improve the generator, whose updated states provide supervision for further representation learning, forming a reciprocal learning process. This reciprocal process improves multi-step generation and representation quality, as measured by frozen linear probing on ImageNet with latent-space SiT and pixel-space JiT, without an externally pretrained representation teacher. Across the two unconditional settings, FID decreases by $19.2$--$40.8%$ relative to native training, while linear-probe accuracy improves by 6.80--10.04 percentage points over the best searched raw generator features. The learned representation also serves as a distributional metric for one-step JiT post-training, extending its role from instance-level alignment to distribution-level supervision.
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Generative models learn visual structure through denoising, yet their internal states are entangled with both noise level and network depth, making it difficult to obtain a stable visual representation from the generator itself. We introduce RepFlow, which learns such a representation from the generator's evolving computation and uses it to guide generation. Specifically, a separate timestep-free encoder is trained, through a timestep-conditioned predictor, to recover generator states across depths and noise levels from masked clean images. By excluding the reference noise and masked-out content from the encoder's input, we encourage the encoder to distill visual information that is recoverable from the visible image context and predictive of generator states. The representation learned from the generator's evolving states is then fed back to guide and improve the generator, whose updated states provide supervision for further representation learning, forming a reciprocal learning process. This reciprocal process improves multi-step generation and representation quality, as measured by frozen linear probing on ImageNet with latent-space SiT and pixel-space JiT, without an externally pretrained representation teacher. Across the two unconditional settings, FID decreases by $19.2$--$40.8%$ relative to native training, while linear-probe accuracy improves by 6.80--10.04 percentage points over the best searched raw generator features. The learned representation also serves as a distributional metric for one-step JiT post-training, extending its role from instance-level alignment to distribution-level supervision.
作者Cheng Yang, Chufan Shi, Huijuan Wang, Bo Shui, Yaokang Wu, Muzi Tao, Yibo Yan, Xuezhe Ma, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
Multimodal foundation models edit natural photographs at production quality, yet the same models struggle with structured visual content such as infographics. Unlike photographs, infographics encode information through logical relations; editing one element often requires surrounding elements to be adapted. We refer to this global layout reasoning capability as reflow. Existing image-editing benchmarks neither provide a dedicated setting for structured visual content nor evaluate the reflow capability. We introduce InfoEdit, a novel benchmark of 1,000 infographics across eight logical-relation families, paired with 4,000 editing instructions across four editing tasks, and a reflow-aware evaluation protocol. Across eight frontier editors, only GPT-Image-2 clears 60% average success rate; most models fall below 7%, and no editor exceeds 36% on the Swap-Block task even with perfect target localization. We further show that code-level editing can match the strongest pixel-level editor, revealing complementary strengths across tasks. InfoEdit identifies reflow as a central challenge in structured visual content editing and provides a diagnostic benchmark to facilitate future progress.
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Multimodal foundation models edit natural photographs at production quality, yet the same models struggle with structured visual content such as infographics. Unlike photographs, infographics encode information through logical relations; editing one element often requires surrounding elements to be adapted. We refer to this global layout reasoning capability as reflow. Existing image-editing benchmarks neither provide a dedicated setting for structured visual content nor evaluate the reflow capability. We introduce InfoEdit, a novel benchmark of 1,000 infographics across eight logical-relation families, paired with 4,000 editing instructions across four editing tasks, and a reflow-aware evaluation protocol. Across eight frontier editors, only GPT-Image-2 clears 60% average success rate; most models fall below 7%, and no editor exceeds 36% on the Swap-Block task even with perfect target localization. We further show that code-level editing can match the strongest pixel-level editor, revealing complementary strengths across tasks. InfoEdit identifies reflow as a central challenge in structured visual content editing and provides a diagnostic benchmark to facilitate future progress.
Text-guided image editing aims to perform a desired edit while preserving source content unrelated to it. Pretrained rectified-flow models enable training-free editing of real images through modifications to their sampling trajectories. However, responses at locations unrelated to the desired edit can still accumulate along the editing trajectory and become visible in the final result. To overcome this, we propose Constrained Edit Fields (CEF), which assigns each spatial location a continuous edit responsibility that quantifies its relevance to the desired edit. CEF estimates edit responsibility directly from the source image when the relevant content is present. For edits whose target content is absent from the source, CEF first generates an unconstrained proposal to reveal its realized spatial support and then estimates responsibility from that proposal. At each editing step, CEF decomposes the base edit field into prompt-induced and trajectory-induced components, enabling edit responsibility to preserve instruction-relevant updates while suppressing unintended trajectory-induced changes. Evaluated on all 700 PIE-Bench examples, CEF achieves state-of-the-art Structure Distance, background LPIPS, and background MSE with both Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium and FLUX, while retaining competitive instruction alignment. On Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium, it reduces these metrics over the previous best results by 10.2%, 21.2%, and 48.0%, respectively.
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Text-guided image editing aims to perform a desired edit while preserving source content unrelated to it. Pretrained rectified-flow models enable training-free editing of real images through modifications to their sampling trajectories. However, responses at locations unrelated to the desired edit can still accumulate along the editing trajectory and become visible in the final result. To overcome this, we propose Constrained Edit Fields (CEF), which assigns each spatial location a continuous edit responsibility that quantifies its relevance to the desired edit. CEF estimates edit responsibility directly from the source image when the relevant content is present. For edits whose target content is absent from the source, CEF first generates an unconstrained proposal to reveal its realized spatial support and then estimates responsibility from that proposal. At each editing step, CEF decomposes the base edit field into prompt-induced and trajectory-induced components, enabling edit responsibility to preserve instruction-relevant updates while suppressing unintended trajectory-induced changes. Evaluated on all 700 PIE-Bench examples, CEF achieves state-of-the-art Structure Distance, background LPIPS, and background MSE with both Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium and FLUX, while retaining competitive instruction alignment. On Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium, it reduces these metrics over the previous best results by 10.2%, 21.2%, and 48.0%, respectively.
We present In-Token Learning, an image restoration framework that adapts a pretrained diffusion transformer using conditional rectified flow matching. Clean targets paired with degraded inputs supervise transport from Gaussian noise to restored images. Spatially aligned degraded-image tokens are fused with evolving latent tokens along the channel dimension, preserving the image-token count at a given resolution. Direct Low-Quality Guidance (DLG) combines frozen degraded-image embeddings with a fixed task prompt through the native conditioning pathway, without a trainable ControlNet-style branch or image captioning. We evaluate super-resolution and denoising on DIV2K, LSDIR, FFHQ, RealLQ250, and RealPhoto60, and automatic colorization on DIV2K and LSDIR. The tasks use separately trained checkpoints under the same framework. Results show competitive fidelity and perceptual quality under the evaluated protocols, with weaker generalization on RealLQ250. We report full-image QHD ($2560{\times}1440$) inference and a tiled $12$K restoration demonstration of Along the River During the Qingming Festival. Attention cost still increases with resolution. This technical report preserves the early broader study underlying Fill2SR, which subsequently developed the real-world super-resolution direction.
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We present In-Token Learning, an image restoration framework that adapts a pretrained diffusion transformer using conditional rectified flow matching. Clean targets paired with degraded inputs supervise transport from Gaussian noise to restored images. Spatially aligned degraded-image tokens are fused with evolving latent tokens along the channel dimension, preserving the image-token count at a given resolution. Direct Low-Quality Guidance (DLG) combines frozen degraded-image embeddings with a fixed task prompt through the native conditioning pathway, without a trainable ControlNet-style branch or image captioning. We evaluate super-resolution and denoising on DIV2K, LSDIR, FFHQ, RealLQ250, and RealPhoto60, and automatic colorization on DIV2K and LSDIR. The tasks use separately trained checkpoints under the same framework. Results show competitive fidelity and perceptual quality under the evaluated protocols, with weaker generalization on RealLQ250. We report full-image QHD ($2560{\times}1440$) inference and a tiled $12$K restoration demonstration of Along the River During the Qingming Festival. Attention cost still increases with resolution. This technical report preserves the early broader study underlying Fill2SR, which subsequently developed the real-world super-resolution direction.
Symbolic models make melody, harmony, rhythm, and form explicit but typically stop before a finished recording; audio models produce complete songs while leaving composition implicit. We introduce YuE2, which unifies symbolic and audio music generation at frontier quality through symbolic planning. A single AR-NAR Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) first writes a readable score specifying melody and harmony, expands it into semantic music tokens, and realizes it as full-song audio. In comparisons using the same checkpoint, experts prefer symbolic planning for overall quality and musicality, with 49.3% of overall preferences versus 34.6% without planning. Experts also favor the unified model over a separate language model and diffusion Transformer. On WildSongBench, YuE2 scores 6.73 on SongBench Global Avg, exceeding all evaluated public baselines. Selecting from eight candidates (best-of-8), YuE2 reaches 6.96, the highest observed mean among all evaluated systems. Expert listening further establishes its competitiveness with proprietary song generators, favoring best-of-8 over Suno v4.5 and yielding nearly balanced preferences against Suno v5. To learn this generation process from recordings without aligned scores, we introduce MERT2 and SheetSage2 to supply semantic and symbolic supervision. MERT2 sets a new state of the art in music representation learning, surpassing previous best results on 14 of 15 MARBLE metrics; SheetSage2 leads 12 of 15 benchmark-metric pairs in our lead-sheet transcription comparison. The same checkpoint follows score edits while largely preserving unedited musical content and generates zero-shot covers without cover-specific training. Its readable score also enables agentic music editing, with external language models translating user feedback into revisions of the composition.
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Symbolic models make melody, harmony, rhythm, and form explicit but typically stop before a finished recording; audio models produce complete songs while leaving composition implicit. We introduce YuE2, which unifies symbolic and audio music generation at frontier quality through symbolic planning. A single AR-NAR Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) first writes a readable score specifying melody and harmony, expands it into semantic music tokens, and realizes it as full-song audio. In comparisons using the same checkpoint, experts prefer symbolic planning for overall quality and musicality, with 49.3% of overall preferences versus 34.6% without planning. Experts also favor the unified model over a separate language model and diffusion Transformer. On WildSongBench, YuE2 scores 6.73 on SongBench Global Avg, exceeding all evaluated public baselines. Selecting from eight candidates (best-of-8), YuE2 reaches 6.96, the highest observed mean among all evaluated systems. Expert listening further establishes its competitiveness with proprietary song generators, favoring best-of-8 over Suno v4.5 and yielding nearly balanced preferences against Suno v5. To learn this generation process from recordings without aligned scores, we introduce MERT2 and SheetSage2 to supply semantic and symbolic supervision. MERT2 sets a new state of the art in music representation learning, surpassing previous best results on 14 of 15 MARBLE metrics; SheetSage2 leads 12 of 15 benchmark-metric pairs in our lead-sheet transcription comparison. The same checkpoint follows score edits while largely preserving unedited musical content and generates zero-shot covers without cover-specific training. Its readable score also enables agentic music editing, with external language models translating user feedback into revisions of the composition.
Multi-speaker dialogue TTS requires natural speech generation, consistent speaker identity, coherent cross-turn transitions, and fine-grained control of expressive attributes such as emotion, speaking rate, and loudness. These requirements are difficult to satisfy reliably with one-shot generation, especially in long-form dialogue. We propose a controllable multi-speaker dialogue TTS framework that formulates synthesis as critique-driven iterative refinement. Its speech backbone, ControlEdit-TTS, unifies instruction-following synthesis and natural-language-guided attribute editing, enabling correction of expressive errors without full regeneration. The framework further performs hierarchical utterance-level and scene-level critique, routing detected issues to editing, resynthesis, or timing adjustment. Experiments on a bilingual Chinese--English dialogue benchmark show improved utterance-level instruction following, better dialogue-level preference than direct dialogue models and agentic baselines, and more effective refinement than regeneration-only alternatives while preserving speaker identity. Ablations further confirm the benefits of scene-level critique and edit-based correction.
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Multi-speaker dialogue TTS requires natural speech generation, consistent speaker identity, coherent cross-turn transitions, and fine-grained control of expressive attributes such as emotion, speaking rate, and loudness. These requirements are difficult to satisfy reliably with one-shot generation, especially in long-form dialogue. We propose a controllable multi-speaker dialogue TTS framework that formulates synthesis as critique-driven iterative refinement. Its speech backbone, ControlEdit-TTS, unifies instruction-following synthesis and natural-language-guided attribute editing, enabling correction of expressive errors without full regeneration. The framework further performs hierarchical utterance-level and scene-level critique, routing detected issues to editing, resynthesis, or timing adjustment. Experiments on a bilingual Chinese--English dialogue benchmark show improved utterance-level instruction following, better dialogue-level preference than direct dialogue models and agentic baselines, and more effective refinement than regeneration-only alternatives while preserving speaker identity. Ablations further confirm the benefits of scene-level critique and edit-based correction.
World models can be studied as experimental systems with response laws of their own. We introduce MultiEcho, a framework for estimating these laws through controlled counterfactual interventions, delimiting their applicability, and separately testing their physical correspondence. Across nine simulated physical systems and seven frozen model configurations, three-reference estimators predict complete intervention responses and recover intervention parameters. Estimator selection uses discovery data only; frozen fits are evaluated on validation and confirmation contexts. The experiments distinguish response predictability, intervention readability and physical accuracy. Responses can be locally describable yet poorly match physical effects in the same target coordinates. Event-window, visibility and camera interventions reveal conditional applicability, and paired generator configurations show reduced readability under a scene prompt with stronger guidance. Magnitude sweeps expose small image errors alongside large relative effect errors. An exact-reset material experiment separates registered visible-response success from fixed-readout failure on material-dependent futures at matched positions and velocities. Exact finite-scale identities resolve odd and even response errors; first-order remainder bounds specify when refined calibration converges. MultiEcho provides an experimental basis for studying learned-world laws independently of, and in relation to, physical laws.
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World models can be studied as experimental systems with response laws of their own. We introduce MultiEcho, a framework for estimating these laws through controlled counterfactual interventions, delimiting their applicability, and separately testing their physical correspondence. Across nine simulated physical systems and seven frozen model configurations, three-reference estimators predict complete intervention responses and recover intervention parameters. Estimator selection uses discovery data only; frozen fits are evaluated on validation and confirmation contexts. The experiments distinguish response predictability, intervention readability and physical accuracy. Responses can be locally describable yet poorly match physical effects in the same target coordinates. Event-window, visibility and camera interventions reveal conditional applicability, and paired generator configurations show reduced readability under a scene prompt with stronger guidance. Magnitude sweeps expose small image errors alongside large relative effect errors. An exact-reset material experiment separates registered visible-response success from fixed-readout failure on material-dependent futures at matched positions and velocities. Exact finite-scale identities resolve odd and even response errors; first-order remainder bounds specify when refined calibration converges. MultiEcho provides an experimental basis for studying learned-world laws independently of, and in relation to, physical laws.
Video world models are emerging as data engines, action planners, and generative simulators for autonomous driving, but existing benchmarks primarily assess visual fidelity and coarse physical plausibility, providing limited evidence on whether generated driving futures obey realistic vehicle kinematics and dynamics. This limitation is further compounded by the lack of datasets in which vehicle, road, maneuver, and speed conditions are independently controlled, and ground-truth vehicle states are recorded in synchrony with videos. We introduce VehDyn, a driving world model benchmark for vehicle dynamics. VehDyn is built on a CARLA-CarSim co-simulation platform where photorealistic rendering is coupled with a validated multi-body dynamics model, and it contains 10,080 configurations from a full factorial design over five vehicle types, four tire-road friction coefficients, three maneuvers, four target speeds, 14 scenes, and three illuminations, each paired with synchronized position, velocity, and attitude sequences. Built on this dataset, VehDyn introduces a hierarchical evaluation framework that measures trajectory alignment, kinematic consistency, and dynamic consistency, and benchmarks 12 state-of-the-art video world models. We further assess the video quality using two established protocols and correlate it with the VehDyn score. Trajectory-level metrics are nearly saturated, with ten of twelve models within 20% of ground truth, while no model reaches 92% of ground truth on dynamic consistency, and visual-quality metrics are only weakly correlated with vehicle-dynamics fidelity. DrivingWorld achieves the highest VehDyn score, followed by Cosmos 3 Nano and LTX-Video 2.5, and the VehDyn score agrees closely with human judgment. VehDyn provides a systematic foundation for developing driving world models that are physically consistent and visually realistic.
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Video world models are emerging as data engines, action planners, and generative simulators for autonomous driving, but existing benchmarks primarily assess visual fidelity and coarse physical plausibility, providing limited evidence on whether generated driving futures obey realistic vehicle kinematics and dynamics. This limitation is further compounded by the lack of datasets in which vehicle, road, maneuver, and speed conditions are independently controlled, and ground-truth vehicle states are recorded in synchrony with videos. We introduce VehDyn, a driving world model benchmark for vehicle dynamics. VehDyn is built on a CARLA-CarSim co-simulation platform where photorealistic rendering is coupled with a validated multi-body dynamics model, and it contains 10,080 configurations from a full factorial design over five vehicle types, four tire-road friction coefficients, three maneuvers, four target speeds, 14 scenes, and three illuminations, each paired with synchronized position, velocity, and attitude sequences. Built on this dataset, VehDyn introduces a hierarchical evaluation framework that measures trajectory alignment, kinematic consistency, and dynamic consistency, and benchmarks 12 state-of-the-art video world models. We further assess the video quality using two established protocols and correlate it with the VehDyn score. Trajectory-level metrics are nearly saturated, with ten of twelve models within 20% of ground truth, while no model reaches 92% of ground truth on dynamic consistency, and visual-quality metrics are only weakly correlated with vehicle-dynamics fidelity. DrivingWorld achieves the highest VehDyn score, followed by Cosmos 3 Nano and LTX-Video 2.5, and the VehDyn score agrees closely with human judgment. VehDyn provides a systematic foundation for developing driving world models that are physically consistent and visually realistic.
Planning from pixels needs more than a latent space that is stable and predictable. The state the planner scores must also be organized by how actions move the system. Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) avoid pixel reconstruction by predicting future representations, but existing action-conditioned JEPAs ask one embedding to serve both perception and control. We introduce H-JEPA, which separates the two. A wide perceptual code is regularized toward a well-scaled isotropic geometry with a Bures-Wasserstein prior, and a fixed orthonormal slice of that code is the control state, which inherits the code's covariance without any objective of its own. The state evolves under phase-conditioned dissipative port-Hamiltonian dynamics whose input port has orthonormal columns. Port-inverse consistency (PIC) reads the executed action back through the transpose of that port. We show that this readout is exactly the rollout error projected onto the port directions, so PIC is a parameter-free reweighting of prediction error and not an auxiliary action decoder. Untying the readout from the port breaks this identity and loses half of the gain. H-JEPA matches or exceeds reconstruction-free baselines, including the action-decoding Delta-JEPA, on four pixel-based control benchmarks after at most $10$ training epochs, and its largest gain is on OGB-Cube ($91.9$ against $79.3$ percent). Ablations on PushT and OGB-Cube separate the contributions of the structured predictor, PIC, the prediction horizon, the state rank, and the anti-collapse prior.
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Planning from pixels needs more than a latent space that is stable and predictable. The state the planner scores must also be organized by how actions move the system. Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) avoid pixel reconstruction by predicting future representations, but existing action-conditioned JEPAs ask one embedding to serve both perception and control. We introduce H-JEPA, which separates the two. A wide perceptual code is regularized toward a well-scaled isotropic geometry with a Bures-Wasserstein prior, and a fixed orthonormal slice of that code is the control state, which inherits the code's covariance without any objective of its own. The state evolves under phase-conditioned dissipative port-Hamiltonian dynamics whose input port has orthonormal columns. Port-inverse consistency (PIC) reads the executed action back through the transpose of that port. We show that this readout is exactly the rollout error projected onto the port directions, so PIC is a parameter-free reweighting of prediction error and not an auxiliary action decoder. Untying the readout from the port breaks this identity and loses half of the gain. H-JEPA matches or exceeds reconstruction-free baselines, including the action-decoding Delta-JEPA, on four pixel-based control benchmarks after at most $10$ training epochs, and its largest gain is on OGB-Cube ($91.9$ against $79.3$ percent). Ablations on PushT and OGB-Cube separate the contributions of the structured predictor, PIC, the prediction horizon, the state rank, and the anti-collapse prior.
作者Thomas Walker, Randall Balestriero, Richard Baraniuk
Detecting failures in World Model (WM)-based planning requires monitoring whether the model is behaviorally aligned with the current task, which in turn requires studying its internal representations. Here, we show that centroids---sub-component Jacobian row-sums---effectively identify the behavioral properties of WMs, complementing traditional activation-based knowledge signals. The centroids of a model are easily computed through Jacobian vector products and characterize how the model organizes the geometry of its input space, yielding an efficient perspective on internal representations, including the generation of task-relevant saliency maps. Evaluated on continuous control tasks using JEPA WMs, this behavioral view reveals a structural dissociation, where the encoder correctly represents the goal while the predictor remains behaviorally unresponsive. This failure mode directly predicts planning failure before any action is taken, allowing for goal resampling to recapture out-of-distribution success. Moreover, centroid-based methods outperform baseline methods as distribution-shift detectors. Together, these tools yield a behavioral monitoring stack that is operational and consequential under distribution shifts.
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Detecting failures in World Model (WM)-based planning requires monitoring whether the model is behaviorally aligned with the current task, which in turn requires studying its internal representations. Here, we show that centroids---sub-component Jacobian row-sums---effectively identify the behavioral properties of WMs, complementing traditional activation-based knowledge signals. The centroids of a model are easily computed through Jacobian vector products and characterize how the model organizes the geometry of its input space, yielding an efficient perspective on internal representations, including the generation of task-relevant saliency maps. Evaluated on continuous control tasks using JEPA WMs, this behavioral view reveals a structural dissociation, where the encoder correctly represents the goal while the predictor remains behaviorally unresponsive. This failure mode directly predicts planning failure before any action is taken, allowing for goal resampling to recapture out-of-distribution success. Moreover, centroid-based methods outperform baseline methods as distribution-shift detectors. Together, these tools yield a behavioral monitoring stack that is operational and consequential under distribution shifts.
Recent real-world image super-resolution (SR) methods often adapt text-to-image (T2I) backbones with ControlNet-style branches or spatial conditioning tokens, which increases memory and computes with resolution and often constrains training to a fixed scale. We propose Fill2SR, which repurposes a masked-inpainting Diffusion Transformer for SR without extra spatial branches. Our Inpainting-Interface Evidence Adapter (IIEA) writes the low-quality (LQ) observation into the native masked-image slot under a full-image mask, turning inpainting into a reverse-degradation conditional rectified flow trained with LoRA-only tuning. We further introduce RCDT, an offline pipeline that distills degradation descriptors from unpaired real images and transfers them onto clean targets using frozen open-source models. Fill2SR supports mixed-resolution training up to QHD and yields stable performance across $512/1024/2048$ outputs. On synthetic benchmarks, our base model with IIEA achieves the best LPIPS on DIV2K and LSDIR; adding RCDT trades a small LPIPS drop for consistently stronger no-reference quality on RealLQ250 and RealPhoto60. Fill2SR remains memory-predictable, running $1536^2$ inference on a single 32GB GPU and extending to multi-megapixel outputs via tiled restoration.
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Recent real-world image super-resolution (SR) methods often adapt text-to-image (T2I) backbones with ControlNet-style branches or spatial conditioning tokens, which increases memory and computes with resolution and often constrains training to a fixed scale. We propose Fill2SR, which repurposes a masked-inpainting Diffusion Transformer for SR without extra spatial branches. Our Inpainting-Interface Evidence Adapter (IIEA) writes the low-quality (LQ) observation into the native masked-image slot under a full-image mask, turning inpainting into a reverse-degradation conditional rectified flow trained with LoRA-only tuning. We further introduce RCDT, an offline pipeline that distills degradation descriptors from unpaired real images and transfers them onto clean targets using frozen open-source models. Fill2SR supports mixed-resolution training up to QHD and yields stable performance across $512/1024/2048$ outputs. On synthetic benchmarks, our base model with IIEA achieves the best LPIPS on DIV2K and LSDIR; adding RCDT trades a small LPIPS drop for consistently stronger no-reference quality on RealLQ250 and RealPhoto60. Fill2SR remains memory-predictable, running $1536^2$ inference on a single 32GB GPU and extending to multi-megapixel outputs via tiled restoration.
作者Jiali Chen, Zhengteng Lin, Zuqi Wang, Shirong Lin, Xi Yu, Xusen Hei, DingBa Fu, Jiayuan Xie, Yi Cai
In realistic education, a solution is often expressed not only in words but in a drawing--a circuit, a geometric construction, a function plot--and a teacher must grade the drawing as carefully as the text. Recent advances in unified multimodal models have enabled scientific image generation, yet verifying the correctness of these specialized visual outputs remains a critical bottleneck: errors often arise from intricate domain knowledge, structural reasoning, and multi-step instruction rather than surface-level artifacts. Existing verifiers mainly target natural images and compress judgement into scalar scores, leaving scientific coverage and explainable feedback for error correction underexplored. To bridge this gap, we make three main contributions. (1) We construct SciGen-Verify, a benchmark dedicated to explainable verification of scientific image generation, spanning instruction following, multidisciplinary reasoning, and world knowledge domains. It contains a three-tier hierarchical protocol over the binary judgement, supporting explanation, and corrective editing instruction. (2) We develop SciGen-Verifier, a reasoning-driven multimodal verifier trained via cold-start supervised fine-tuning followed by a curriculum-based two-stage reinforcement learning pipeline. The rubric-guided process rewards first strengthen scientific reasoning exploration and outcome rewards subsequently align output with ground-truth annotation. (3) On SciGen-Verify, SciGen-Verifier achieves competitive performance against much larger proprietary models. It further serves as a practical online critic for iterative image rectification.
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In realistic education, a solution is often expressed not only in words but in a drawing--a circuit, a geometric construction, a function plot--and a teacher must grade the drawing as carefully as the text. Recent advances in unified multimodal models have enabled scientific image generation, yet verifying the correctness of these specialized visual outputs remains a critical bottleneck: errors often arise from intricate domain knowledge, structural reasoning, and multi-step instruction rather than surface-level artifacts. Existing verifiers mainly target natural images and compress judgement into scalar scores, leaving scientific coverage and explainable feedback for error correction underexplored. To bridge this gap, we make three main contributions. (1) We construct SciGen-Verify, a benchmark dedicated to explainable verification of scientific image generation, spanning instruction following, multidisciplinary reasoning, and world knowledge domains. It contains a three-tier hierarchical protocol over the binary judgement, supporting explanation, and corrective editing instruction. (2) We develop SciGen-Verifier, a reasoning-driven multimodal verifier trained via cold-start supervised fine-tuning followed by a curriculum-based two-stage reinforcement learning pipeline. The rubric-guided process rewards first strengthen scientific reasoning exploration and outcome rewards subsequently align output with ground-truth annotation. (3) On SciGen-Verify, SciGen-Verifier achieves competitive performance against much larger proprietary models. It further serves as a practical online critic for iterative image rectification.
We present VGGT-Diff, a geometry-routed multi-view diffusion model for sparse-view novel view synthesis. Existing novel view synthesis (NVS) methods face a fundamental trade-off: reconstruction-based approaches preserve observed geometry but struggle to synthesize unseen regions, while diffusion-based methods provide strong generative priors yet rely on implicit source-to-query correspondence. VGGT-Diff bridges these regimes by routing visual geometry latents from VGGT-Ω into a pretrained video diffusion model. Each visual token is associated with a 3D point and confidence, then transformed into query-aligned latent conditions through a confidence-aware Visual Geometry Router (VGR) that preserves front and back surface evidence. These conditions guide joint target-view denoising, while Point-Track Residual Consistency (PTRC) regularizes predicted-clean residuals along reliable 3D tracks, improving multi-view stability. We further introduce robust geometry conditioning, combining training-time regularization with inference-time guidance for improved robustness. Experiments show competitive or state-of-the-art performance across interpolation and extrapolation under different viewpoint difficulties. Our code is available at https://github.com/chenkangjie1123/VGGT-Diff.
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We present VGGT-Diff, a geometry-routed multi-view diffusion model for sparse-view novel view synthesis. Existing novel view synthesis (NVS) methods face a fundamental trade-off: reconstruction-based approaches preserve observed geometry but struggle to synthesize unseen regions, while diffusion-based methods provide strong generative priors yet rely on implicit source-to-query correspondence. VGGT-Diff bridges these regimes by routing visual geometry latents from VGGT-Ω into a pretrained video diffusion model. Each visual token is associated with a 3D point and confidence, then transformed into query-aligned latent conditions through a confidence-aware Visual Geometry Router (VGR) that preserves front and back surface evidence. These conditions guide joint target-view denoising, while Point-Track Residual Consistency (PTRC) regularizes predicted-clean residuals along reliable 3D tracks, improving multi-view stability. We further introduce robust geometry conditioning, combining training-time regularization with inference-time guidance for improved robustness. Experiments show competitive or state-of-the-art performance across interpolation and extrapolation under different viewpoint difficulties. Our code is available at https://github.com/chenkangjie1123/VGGT-Diff.
Diffusion transformers incur substantial inference cost through repeated model evaluations along a sampling trajectory. We introduce GeoShrink, a training-free acceleration method that retains the original solver grid while evaluating the model only at a prescribed set of anchors. At skipped stages, GeoShrink predicts the solver-facing output by adding a geometrically retained fraction of the latest observed innovation to the most recent exact output. We derive this rule from chordal tangent transport and round-trip line projection, and establish a geometric anchor-spacing principle that minimizes the largest adjacent gap expansion under fixed coverage and first span. The analysis characterizes the geometric closure and propagation of prediction errors without assuming access to future model outputs. Experiments cover image, video, motion, and audio generation, together with adapted 3D backends. At approximately $5\times$ acceleration, GeoShrink improves FLUX PSNR by 3.10 dB over the strongest listed baseline. On HunyuanVideo, it achieves a reported $4.99\times$ speedup and improves ChronoMagic-Bench-150 PSNR by 5.44 dB over the strongest listed fidelity baseline. Comparisons at fixed evaluation budgets further show substantial gains on motion, audio, music, and 3D generation.
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Diffusion transformers incur substantial inference cost through repeated model evaluations along a sampling trajectory. We introduce GeoShrink, a training-free acceleration method that retains the original solver grid while evaluating the model only at a prescribed set of anchors. At skipped stages, GeoShrink predicts the solver-facing output by adding a geometrically retained fraction of the latest observed innovation to the most recent exact output. We derive this rule from chordal tangent transport and round-trip line projection, and establish a geometric anchor-spacing principle that minimizes the largest adjacent gap expansion under fixed coverage and first span. The analysis characterizes the geometric closure and propagation of prediction errors without assuming access to future model outputs. Experiments cover image, video, motion, and audio generation, together with adapted 3D backends. At approximately $5\times$ acceleration, GeoShrink improves FLUX PSNR by 3.10 dB over the strongest listed baseline. On HunyuanVideo, it achieves a reported $4.99\times$ speedup and improves ChronoMagic-Bench-150 PSNR by 5.44 dB over the strongest listed fidelity baseline. Comparisons at fixed evaluation budgets further show substantial gains on motion, audio, music, and 3D generation.
作者Xuanhua Yin, Chuanzhi Xu, Haoxian Zhou, Shunqi Mao, Weidong Cai
Flow-matching models generate high-quality images and videos, but repeated neural network evaluations make sampling expensive. Skipping evaluations reduces this cost by extending an available velocity estimate over a longer span. However, local velocity agreement alone does not determine a suitable span, and checking each candidate endpoint adds costly model calls. We introduce ReAL, a training-free sampler that selects how far to advance using one shared lookahead. Our key insight is that the discrepancy between uncorrected and lookahead-corrected endpoint proposals can be computed directly from the observed velocity mismatch and the candidate span beyond the lookahead. This relation provides a span-dependent selection criterion without additional endpoint evaluations. The same lookahead selects the longest passing candidate span, corrects the accepted update, and supplies its velocity as the next starting estimate. After initialization, each regular iteration requires only one fresh evaluation. ReAL uses the pretrained velocity output and original noise schedule, with no additional training or access to internal features. Experiments cover four image-generation backbones, video generation, and image editing. ReAL achieves 4.91x measured speedup on FLUX.1-dev while retaining 97.0% of dense mean ImageReward. On HunyuanVideo, it achieves a 5.49x speedup while maintaining a VBench score close to that of dense sampling.
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Flow-matching models generate high-quality images and videos, but repeated neural network evaluations make sampling expensive. Skipping evaluations reduces this cost by extending an available velocity estimate over a longer span. However, local velocity agreement alone does not determine a suitable span, and checking each candidate endpoint adds costly model calls. We introduce ReAL, a training-free sampler that selects how far to advance using one shared lookahead. Our key insight is that the discrepancy between uncorrected and lookahead-corrected endpoint proposals can be computed directly from the observed velocity mismatch and the candidate span beyond the lookahead. This relation provides a span-dependent selection criterion without additional endpoint evaluations. The same lookahead selects the longest passing candidate span, corrects the accepted update, and supplies its velocity as the next starting estimate. After initialization, each regular iteration requires only one fresh evaluation. ReAL uses the pretrained velocity output and original noise schedule, with no additional training or access to internal features. Experiments cover four image-generation backbones, video generation, and image editing. ReAL achieves 4.91x measured speedup on FLUX.1-dev while retaining 97.0% of dense mean ImageReward. On HunyuanVideo, it achieves a 5.49x speedup while maintaining a VBench score close to that of dense sampling.
作者Yuhe Liu, Xinyin Ma, Gongfan Fang, Songhua Liu, Xinchao Wang
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have established themselves as a scalable backbone for high-fidelity image synthesis. However, unlike U-Net based diffusion models that rely on rigid, hand-crafted skip connections, DiTs predominantly use a uniform residual stream that integrates all preceding layers as a monolithic state. In this work, we rethink residual connections in diffusion transformers and propose to transform them from passive summation into an active retrieval mechanism optimized for image denoising. First, we conduct a systematic analysis of DiT's internal representation, revealing a latent preference for early-layer feature reuse and symmetric layer guidance. Motivated by this, we introduce a structured connectivity design that explicitly integrates local residual connections with long-range pathways. Instead of static skip connections or dense all-layer routing, our method enables each transformer block to selectively ``attend'' to critical earlier representations, dynamically retrieving spatial and semantic cues through direct, differentiable cross-depth paths. Experiments show that our adaptive connectivity leads to faster convergence, with up to $1.73\times$ fewer training iterations, and significant gains in FID and visual quality with less than $0.1%$ additional parameters, further improving a strong REPA-XL/2 model from $5.9$ to $4.34$ FID without guidance and reaching $1.39$ FID with classifier-free guidance. Our findings suggest that adaptive cross-layer connectivity is a critical yet underexplored factor in diffusion transformers, and that incorporating structured information pathways provides a simple and effective direction for improving scalable generative models.
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Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have established themselves as a scalable backbone for high-fidelity image synthesis. However, unlike U-Net based diffusion models that rely on rigid, hand-crafted skip connections, DiTs predominantly use a uniform residual stream that integrates all preceding layers as a monolithic state. In this work, we rethink residual connections in diffusion transformers and propose to transform them from passive summation into an active retrieval mechanism optimized for image denoising. First, we conduct a systematic analysis of DiT's internal representation, revealing a latent preference for early-layer feature reuse and symmetric layer guidance. Motivated by this, we introduce a structured connectivity design that explicitly integrates local residual connections with long-range pathways. Instead of static skip connections or dense all-layer routing, our method enables each transformer block to selectively ``attend'' to critical earlier representations, dynamically retrieving spatial and semantic cues through direct, differentiable cross-depth paths. Experiments show that our adaptive connectivity leads to faster convergence, with up to $1.73\times$ fewer training iterations, and significant gains in FID and visual quality with less than $0.1%$ additional parameters, further improving a strong REPA-XL/2 model from $5.9$ to $4.34$ FID without guidance and reaching $1.39$ FID with classifier-free guidance. Our findings suggest that adaptive cross-layer connectivity is a critical yet underexplored factor in diffusion transformers, and that incorporating structured information pathways provides a simple and effective direction for improving scalable generative models.
作者Brandon Gary Kaplowitz, Osaze James Obahor, Christian Schroeder de Witt
World models improve sample efficiency by training policies on imagined trajectories, but their usefulness depends on learning representations that capture the information needed for future control. We study whether self-supervised joint-embedding prediction (JEPA) can provide this learning signal for multi-agent reinforcement learning. We introduce MA-JEPA, a stochastic world model that replaces observation reconstruction with prediction of target representations, enabling model-based multi-agent reinforcement learning with centralized training and decentralized execution. A categorical latent state and a causal Transformer are trained with posterior and action-conditioned dynamics prediction objectives and are then used for actor-critic learning from latent imagination. A training-only joint predictor conditions on all agents' local states and actions to predict each agent's next local observation embedding. These predictions are passed through the same local posterior used during real interaction with a centralized critic that is used only for value learning, with execution remaining decentralized. Our experiments show that this architecture performs strongly on SMAC, matching or exceeding the strongest reported comparator mean win rate on four of eight evaluated maps.
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World models improve sample efficiency by training policies on imagined trajectories, but their usefulness depends on learning representations that capture the information needed for future control. We study whether self-supervised joint-embedding prediction (JEPA) can provide this learning signal for multi-agent reinforcement learning. We introduce MA-JEPA, a stochastic world model that replaces observation reconstruction with prediction of target representations, enabling model-based multi-agent reinforcement learning with centralized training and decentralized execution. A categorical latent state and a causal Transformer are trained with posterior and action-conditioned dynamics prediction objectives and are then used for actor-critic learning from latent imagination. A training-only joint predictor conditions on all agents' local states and actions to predict each agent's next local observation embedding. These predictions are passed through the same local posterior used during real interaction with a centralized critic that is used only for value learning, with execution remaining decentralized. Our experiments show that this architecture performs strongly on SMAC, matching or exceeding the strongest reported comparator mean win rate on four of eight evaluated maps.
Data videos communicate data insights through dynamic charts, voice narration, and synchronized animations, and have become a widely adopted form of data storytelling. However, producing them requires expertise in data analysis, narrative design, and video editing. Static visualization tools lack narrative and animation capabilities; authoring tools rely on pre-prepared charts rather than raw data; and pixel-level models generate videos end-to-end but cannot guarantee data accuracy or provenance. End-to-end automatic generation faces two core challenges: how to uniformly represent charts, narration, and animations together with their temporal relationships, and how to efficiently search a vast design space for narrative-coherent compositions. We present DataMagic, which authors data videos from raw tabular data through declarative multi-agent orchestration. First, the declarative specification DVSpec unifies charts, narration, and animations with data-bound references and declarative synchronization, ensuring data provenance and automatic audio-visual alignment. Second, a "Generate-then-Orchestrate" multi-agent strategy generates candidate scenes in parallel and then optimizes narrative coherence through global orchestration. DVSpec provides a shared state for three complementary interaction modes, bridging full automation with fine-grained human control. Evaluations on 109 real-world samples show that even the most advanced LLM (e.g., GPT-5) achieves only 2.13/5 with execution success rates between 48.62% and 86.24%; DataMagic improves quality to 3.89 (+83%) with success rates above 95%, with the most significant gains in animation and narrative dimensions. A user study shows that, compared to a conversational LLM workflow, DataMagic improves creation efficiency (79.7% reduction in task time) and reduces perceived cognitive load. Project page: https://github.com/HKUSTDial/DataMagic.
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Data videos communicate data insights through dynamic charts, voice narration, and synchronized animations, and have become a widely adopted form of data storytelling. However, producing them requires expertise in data analysis, narrative design, and video editing. Static visualization tools lack narrative and animation capabilities; authoring tools rely on pre-prepared charts rather than raw data; and pixel-level models generate videos end-to-end but cannot guarantee data accuracy or provenance. End-to-end automatic generation faces two core challenges: how to uniformly represent charts, narration, and animations together with their temporal relationships, and how to efficiently search a vast design space for narrative-coherent compositions. We present DataMagic, which authors data videos from raw tabular data through declarative multi-agent orchestration. First, the declarative specification DVSpec unifies charts, narration, and animations with data-bound references and declarative synchronization, ensuring data provenance and automatic audio-visual alignment. Second, a "Generate-then-Orchestrate" multi-agent strategy generates candidate scenes in parallel and then optimizes narrative coherence through global orchestration. DVSpec provides a shared state for three complementary interaction modes, bridging full automation with fine-grained human control. Evaluations on 109 real-world samples show that even the most advanced LLM (e.g., GPT-5) achieves only 2.13/5 with execution success rates between 48.62% and 86.24%; DataMagic improves quality to 3.89 (+83%) with success rates above 95%, with the most significant gains in animation and narrative dimensions. A user study shows that, compared to a conversational LLM workflow, DataMagic improves creation efficiency (79.7% reduction in task time) and reduces perceived cognitive load. Project page: https://github.com/HKUSTDial/DataMagic.
Quantization errors in video diffusion transformers can be amplified or attenuated by subsequent denoising updates, making local reconstruction error an incomplete predictor of final impact. We introduce PulseQuant, a 4-bit post-training quantization method that combines trajectory sensitivity with activation geometry to guide offline calibration. Isolated block--step interventions estimate propagation risk, which prioritizes sensitive trajectory states during row-radius selection. With these radii fixed, response-subspace correction uses neighboring-code edits to reduce residual components along dominant activation directions. Both stages preserve the original 4-bit weight representation. Controlled interventions show that short-horizon propagated error predicts final latent error more reliably than immediate block-output error, supporting calibration beyond local reconstruction objectives. Evaluations on Wan models, Self Forcing, and MiniMax-H3 demonstrate improvements in key consistency and dense-reference metrics while remaining competitive on other attributes across model scales and generation paradigms.
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Quantization errors in video diffusion transformers can be amplified or attenuated by subsequent denoising updates, making local reconstruction error an incomplete predictor of final impact. We introduce PulseQuant, a 4-bit post-training quantization method that combines trajectory sensitivity with activation geometry to guide offline calibration. Isolated block--step interventions estimate propagation risk, which prioritizes sensitive trajectory states during row-radius selection. With these radii fixed, response-subspace correction uses neighboring-code edits to reduce residual components along dominant activation directions. Both stages preserve the original 4-bit weight representation. Controlled interventions show that short-horizon propagated error predicts final latent error more reliably than immediate block-output error, supporting calibration beyond local reconstruction objectives. Evaluations on Wan models, Self Forcing, and MiniMax-H3 demonstrate improvements in key consistency and dense-reference metrics while remaining competitive on other attributes across model scales and generation paradigms.
Evaluating emotion preservation in expressive speech generation involves assessing how closely generated speech matches a reference in emotion. Human listening tests assess this similarity, but their cost motivates automatic measures aligned with human judgments. To support the development and evaluation of such measures, we introduce SES-Bench, a speech emotion similarity benchmark built from human comparisons of two candidate utterances against a shared reference. These comparisons record which candidate listeners find emotionally closer to the reference and the strength of their preference. Using these annotations, we train SES-Judge to score emotion similarity between two utterances. SES-Judge significantly outperforms embedding cosine similarity and prompted large audio-language models in preference accuracy and correlation with human ratings that capture both preference direction and strength.
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Evaluating emotion preservation in expressive speech generation involves assessing how closely generated speech matches a reference in emotion. Human listening tests assess this similarity, but their cost motivates automatic measures aligned with human judgments. To support the development and evaluation of such measures, we introduce SES-Bench, a speech emotion similarity benchmark built from human comparisons of two candidate utterances against a shared reference. These comparisons record which candidate listeners find emotionally closer to the reference and the strength of their preference. Using these annotations, we train SES-Judge to score emotion similarity between two utterances. SES-Judge significantly outperforms embedding cosine similarity and prompted large audio-language models in preference accuracy and correlation with human ratings that capture both preference direction and strength.
作者Ambuj Mehrish, Abhinaba Roy, Alex Ivanov, Tawsif Ahmed, Dorien Herremans
Zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) can reproduce an unseen speaker from a short reference recording, but typically entangles speaker identity and accent within the same reference. We introduce DEFINE, an end-to-end framework that decouples these factors by conditioning speaker identity and target accent on separate audio exemplars. A single inference-time guidance weight continuously controls accent strength without retraining. Built on F5-TTS with parameter-efficient LoRA adaptation, DEFINE maps short accent exemplars into a conditioning space using an exemplar encoder supervised through learned accent prototypes, requiring neither accent labels at inference time nor post-synthesis waveform conversion. On seen accents, increasing accent guidance improves accent-probe accuracy from 6.5% to 19.6%. More importantly, a single DEFINE model generalizes accent control beyond its training accent set: on seen and out-of-domain accents, though not on held-out accents, it matches the accent transfer performance of a two-model TTS-voice-conversion cascade while achieving higher speaker similarity and comparable predicted speech quality. These results demonstrate that speaker identity and accent can be independently controlled from audio exemplars within a single zero-shot TTS model, including for accents unseen during training.
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Zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) can reproduce an unseen speaker from a short reference recording, but typically entangles speaker identity and accent within the same reference. We introduce DEFINE, an end-to-end framework that decouples these factors by conditioning speaker identity and target accent on separate audio exemplars. A single inference-time guidance weight continuously controls accent strength without retraining. Built on F5-TTS with parameter-efficient LoRA adaptation, DEFINE maps short accent exemplars into a conditioning space using an exemplar encoder supervised through learned accent prototypes, requiring neither accent labels at inference time nor post-synthesis waveform conversion. On seen accents, increasing accent guidance improves accent-probe accuracy from 6.5% to 19.6%. More importantly, a single DEFINE model generalizes accent control beyond its training accent set: on seen and out-of-domain accents, though not on held-out accents, it matches the accent transfer performance of a two-model TTS-voice-conversion cascade while achieving higher speaker similarity and comparable predicted speech quality. These results demonstrate that speaker identity and accent can be independently controlled from audio exemplars within a single zero-shot TTS model, including for accents unseen during training.
Recent video generation models produce realistic videos and show potential as a foundation for world models. These advances create opportunities for generating medical teaching demonstrations, which requires both convincing visual quality and precise procedural actions. However, whether current generators can meet these requirements has not been measured. To address this problem, we introduce Readiness Evaluation of Medical Education Demonstration sYnthesis (REMEDY), to our knowledge, the first benchmark for AI-generated medical teaching demonstrations. REMEDY provides 900 first frames from real demonstration videos, covering 12 tasks across four scenarios: operating room, imaging, clinic and bedside, and resuscitation. Five contemporary open-source video generation models produce 4,500 videos from these frames. We combine task-specific clinical checklists with video and motion quality metrics. Evaluation covers four dimensions: clinical action following, clinical profiles, video quality, and motion quality. Our results show that realistic appearance and temporal consistency do not ensure correct clinical actions. Even the most advanced MiniMax-H3 achieves only 28.25% on strict clinical success rate, and fine-grained clinical actions remain challenging. These findings establish a foundation and roadmap for developing future medical education world models.
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Recent video generation models produce realistic videos and show potential as a foundation for world models. These advances create opportunities for generating medical teaching demonstrations, which requires both convincing visual quality and precise procedural actions. However, whether current generators can meet these requirements has not been measured. To address this problem, we introduce Readiness Evaluation of Medical Education Demonstration sYnthesis (REMEDY), to our knowledge, the first benchmark for AI-generated medical teaching demonstrations. REMEDY provides 900 first frames from real demonstration videos, covering 12 tasks across four scenarios: operating room, imaging, clinic and bedside, and resuscitation. Five contemporary open-source video generation models produce 4,500 videos from these frames. We combine task-specific clinical checklists with video and motion quality metrics. Evaluation covers four dimensions: clinical action following, clinical profiles, video quality, and motion quality. Our results show that realistic appearance and temporal consistency do not ensure correct clinical actions. Even the most advanced MiniMax-H3 achieves only 28.25% on strict clinical success rate, and fine-grained clinical actions remain challenging. These findings establish a foundation and roadmap for developing future medical education world models.
作者Ruiqing Sun, Sen Yang, Dawei Feng, Bo Ding, Yijie Wang, Huaimin Wang
De novo 3D molecular generation jointly models molecular size, topology, and geometry. Most methods pre-sample molecular size and generate Cartesian coordinates, limiting variable-size conditional tasks such as fragment completion and scaffold decoration while often relying on equivariant architectures. Internal-coordinate methods avoid rigid-body redundancy but typically require a known molecular graph or autoregressive construction, which may accumulate errors. We propose TreeRef, a tree-based molecular representation that assigns molecular topology and topology-dependent local 3D geometry to a naturally variable-size tree. RingRef nodes encode ring closures while preserving the tree structure, while Null nodes allow molecular size to emerge directly from node occupancy. Based on TreeRef, we develop TreeRef-BFN, a Bayesian Flow Network with a standard Transformer backbone that globally couples these locally defined variables and jointly generates discrete molecular variables and continuous local geometry. A single pretrained TreeRef-BFN supports unconditional generation and variable-size structure-conditioned 3D generation through masking alone, without retraining. Empirical studies demonstrate strong chemical validity, molecular stability, and diversity, accurate local geometric distributions, fast sampling, and competitive property-conditioned generation, establishing TreeRef-BFN as an efficient and flexible framework for 3D molecular generation.
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De novo 3D molecular generation jointly models molecular size, topology, and geometry. Most methods pre-sample molecular size and generate Cartesian coordinates, limiting variable-size conditional tasks such as fragment completion and scaffold decoration while often relying on equivariant architectures. Internal-coordinate methods avoid rigid-body redundancy but typically require a known molecular graph or autoregressive construction, which may accumulate errors. We propose TreeRef, a tree-based molecular representation that assigns molecular topology and topology-dependent local 3D geometry to a naturally variable-size tree. RingRef nodes encode ring closures while preserving the tree structure, while Null nodes allow molecular size to emerge directly from node occupancy. Based on TreeRef, we develop TreeRef-BFN, a Bayesian Flow Network with a standard Transformer backbone that globally couples these locally defined variables and jointly generates discrete molecular variables and continuous local geometry. A single pretrained TreeRef-BFN supports unconditional generation and variable-size structure-conditioned 3D generation through masking alone, without retraining. Empirical studies demonstrate strong chemical validity, molecular stability, and diversity, accurate local geometric distributions, fast sampling, and competitive property-conditioned generation, establishing TreeRef-BFN as an efficient and flexible framework for 3D molecular generation.
作者Ugo Leone Cavalcanti, Fabio Tosi, Matteo Poggi, Andrea Conti, Vladimir Zlokolica, Valerio Cambareri, Stefano Mattoccia
We present ProDyGS, a novel dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting framework for high-quality novel view synthesis from videos captured by a single static camera. While existing methods rely on multi-view setups or significant camera motion for geometric constraints, our approach addresses the challenging scenario where multi-view supervision is completely absent. We overcome this limitation by generating synthetic multi-view supervision through depth-guided proxy image synthesis. Specifically, we estimate temporally consistent depth maps using foundational monocular depth networks, then construct 3D Gaussian representations that generate proxy images from arbitrary viewpoints. A deformation network learns temporal dynamics by warping canonical Gaussians using this augmented supervision. Experiments on the DyNeRF dataset demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance while requiring only monocular depth estimation as external supervision, outperforming approaches that rely on stronger priors such as scene flow.
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We present ProDyGS, a novel dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting framework for high-quality novel view synthesis from videos captured by a single static camera. While existing methods rely on multi-view setups or significant camera motion for geometric constraints, our approach addresses the challenging scenario where multi-view supervision is completely absent. We overcome this limitation by generating synthetic multi-view supervision through depth-guided proxy image synthesis. Specifically, we estimate temporally consistent depth maps using foundational monocular depth networks, then construct 3D Gaussian representations that generate proxy images from arbitrary viewpoints. A deformation network learns temporal dynamics by warping canonical Gaussians using this augmented supervision. Experiments on the DyNeRF dataset demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance while requiring only monocular depth estimation as external supervision, outperforming approaches that rely on stronger priors such as scene flow.