作者Zicheng Hu, Zhijian Zhou, Xuan Zhang, Yuchen Liu, Cheng Chen, Yuan Li, Qi Gu, Yan Feng, Hongyan Hao, Chao Qu
Asynchronous RL accelerates large language model post-training by decoupling rollout generation from optimization, but trains on stale trajectories. Existing methods primarily correct token-level policy mismatch through importance-ratio control in the actor objective. We show that this policy-side correction alone is insufficient: advantage estimates also inherit mismatch from behavior-policy continuations, which we term advantage staleness. We derive exact bias and variance decompositions for a general two-channel actor update, revealing nonseparable coupling between policy-weight and advantage-estimation errors: their interaction induces multiplicative bias terms, while squared policy weights amplify advantage uncertainty in gradient variance. This motivates the hypothesis that policy- and advantage-side correction should be coordinated. We introduce Coupled Off-Policy Correction (COPC), an actor--critic method combining token-level ratio masking with two-sided clipped-ratio weighting of TD residuals for return and advantage estimation. Joint parameter sweeps across staleness levels support this hypothesis: the effect of one correction parameter depends on, and can reverse with, the other. COPC achieves the highest reported performance on tool-integrated mathematical reasoning and search, outperforming the strongest reported asynchronous baseline in each setting. It also offers a broad high-performing parameter region and improved training stability. In search, COPC remains stable throughout training, while most evaluated asynchronous baselines collapse late in training. These gains persist at 64-step policy staleness. COPC adds minimal step-time overhead over asynchronous PPO and retains a $1.7\times$ step-time speedup over synchronous PPO.
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Asynchronous RL accelerates large language model post-training by decoupling rollout generation from optimization, but trains on stale trajectories. Existing methods primarily correct token-level policy mismatch through importance-ratio control in the actor objective. We show that this policy-side correction alone is insufficient: advantage estimates also inherit mismatch from behavior-policy continuations, which we term advantage staleness. We derive exact bias and variance decompositions for a general two-channel actor update, revealing nonseparable coupling between policy-weight and advantage-estimation errors: their interaction induces multiplicative bias terms, while squared policy weights amplify advantage uncertainty in gradient variance. This motivates the hypothesis that policy- and advantage-side correction should be coordinated. We introduce Coupled Off-Policy Correction (COPC), an actor--critic method combining token-level ratio masking with two-sided clipped-ratio weighting of TD residuals for return and advantage estimation. Joint parameter sweeps across staleness levels support this hypothesis: the effect of one correction parameter depends on, and can reverse with, the other. COPC achieves the highest reported performance on tool-integrated mathematical reasoning and search, outperforming the strongest reported asynchronous baseline in each setting. It also offers a broad high-performing parameter region and improved training stability. In search, COPC remains stable throughout training, while most evaluated asynchronous baselines collapse late in training. These gains persist at 64-step policy staleness. COPC adds minimal step-time overhead over asynchronous PPO and retains a $1.7\times$ step-time speedup over synchronous PPO.
Modern language models undergo reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) on top of already-trained checkpoints. A key promise of RLVR is the discovery of new reasoning strategies. In principle, a model can sample novel ideas absent from its prior training data. In practice, however, augmenting RLVR with strong novelty incentives has seen limited success and can degrade model quality. Because verifiable rewards supervise only a narrow slice of the model's knowledge and behavior, such degradations are difficult to recover from. Instead, we decouple exploration from optimization in a framework we call Exploration-Distillation (ExpDis). We train one or more explorer policies with a novelty bonus in the reward, filter their trajectories for correctness and quality, and distill them into a separate student policy. The student policy is then trained without a novelty bonus. We repeat the above procedure for several rounds, alternating between exploration and optimization. This decoupling allows us to aggressively scale exploration without degrading the student policy. Across seven mathematical reasoning benchmarks and two model families, ExpDis outperforms DAPO at the same wall-clock budget. Moreover, we observe improved pass@$k$ scaling, indicating that ExpDis produces models that generate more diverse correct solutions.
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Modern language models undergo reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) on top of already-trained checkpoints. A key promise of RLVR is the discovery of new reasoning strategies. In principle, a model can sample novel ideas absent from its prior training data. In practice, however, augmenting RLVR with strong novelty incentives has seen limited success and can degrade model quality. Because verifiable rewards supervise only a narrow slice of the model's knowledge and behavior, such degradations are difficult to recover from. Instead, we decouple exploration from optimization in a framework we call Exploration-Distillation (ExpDis). We train one or more explorer policies with a novelty bonus in the reward, filter their trajectories for correctness and quality, and distill them into a separate student policy. The student policy is then trained without a novelty bonus. We repeat the above procedure for several rounds, alternating between exploration and optimization. This decoupling allows us to aggressively scale exploration without degrading the student policy. Across seven mathematical reasoning benchmarks and two model families, ExpDis outperforms DAPO at the same wall-clock budget. Moreover, we observe improved pass@$k$ scaling, indicating that ExpDis produces models that generate more diverse correct solutions.
Reinforcement learning is now central to eliciting reasoning in large language models, while in the popular algorithm Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) every token in a rollout receives the same advantage. We ask how to make process supervision efficient: accelerating convergence and improving final quality without the cost of value networks. We propose Bag-of-Tokens Group Relative Policy Optimization (BoT-GRPO), which extends GRPO to token-level reward models through a length-invariant "bag of tokens" aggregation: it collects all token-level rewards across rollouts, weights each by the inverse of its source sequence length, and computes per-token advantages relative to weighted group statistics. BoT-GRPO is critic-free, and is a drop-in replacement wherever GRPO is used when token-level reward is available. On React front-end code generation, BoT-GRPO reaches $80%$ compile rate up to $1.9\times$ faster than GRPO and converges faster than modern GRPO variants (GSPO, DAPO, PURE) while reaching higher final compile and VLM-judged win rates. On a second task, AIME mathematical reasoning, BoT-GRPO delivers absolute Pass@$k$ gains up to $8.1%$ over GRPO in half the steps. For both tasks we compare the algorithm's performance on reasoning vs. non-reasoning base-model families (Qwen2.5-3B, SmolLM3-3B, Phi-4-mini-reasoning). Our experiments also yield a practical recipe for the reward model itself: reward stability matters more than richness: clean, bounded, stable fine-grained signals consistently accelerate learning where noisier alternatives stall.
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Reinforcement learning is now central to eliciting reasoning in large language models, while in the popular algorithm Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) every token in a rollout receives the same advantage. We ask how to make process supervision efficient: accelerating convergence and improving final quality without the cost of value networks. We propose Bag-of-Tokens Group Relative Policy Optimization (BoT-GRPO), which extends GRPO to token-level reward models through a length-invariant "bag of tokens" aggregation: it collects all token-level rewards across rollouts, weights each by the inverse of its source sequence length, and computes per-token advantages relative to weighted group statistics. BoT-GRPO is critic-free, and is a drop-in replacement wherever GRPO is used when token-level reward is available. On React front-end code generation, BoT-GRPO reaches $80%$ compile rate up to $1.9\times$ faster than GRPO and converges faster than modern GRPO variants (GSPO, DAPO, PURE) while reaching higher final compile and VLM-judged win rates. On a second task, AIME mathematical reasoning, BoT-GRPO delivers absolute Pass@$k$ gains up to $8.1%$ over GRPO in half the steps. For both tasks we compare the algorithm's performance on reasoning vs. non-reasoning base-model families (Qwen2.5-3B, SmolLM3-3B, Phi-4-mini-reasoning). Our experiments also yield a practical recipe for the reward model itself: reward stability matters more than richness: clean, bounded, stable fine-grained signals consistently accelerate learning where noisier alternatives stall.
作者Zhiyi Yao, Zuning Liang, Yuedong Xu, Jin Zhao, Jessie Hui Wang, Tong Li
With the ever-growing size of deep learning models, GPU memory is prone to being insufficient during training. A prominent approach is ZeRO-Offload, which moves the optimizer states to CPU memory and performs parameter update using CPU. However, the deficiencies of ZeRO-Offload include low GPU utilization, imperfect overlapping of communication and computation, and inflexible offloading. In this paper, we leverage Direct Host Access (DHA) on the GPU that can compute data in CPU memory, forming a novel hybrid on-GPU and DHA. We design and implement MemFerry consisting of an execution scheduler and a shadow model. The scheduler strategically chooses layers of parameters for DHA computation and transmits the remaining parameters to GPU memory simultaneously to shorten forward propagation time, and further loads DHA parameters to GPU memory to reduce backward propagation time. The shadow model presents a unified memory abstraction for the parameter partitions stored separately in GPU and CPU memories. To further reduce GPU memory usage, we present MemFerry along with its dynamic programming algorithm that offloads gradients to CPU memory via DHA. We further extend MemFerry to emerging scale-up domains with ScaleUp-MemFerry, which exploits otherwise underutilized accelerator interconnect bandwidth to assist host-to-accelerator data movement through adaptive multi-path transfer. Our experiments show that \system trains up to $1.68\times$ faster and MemFerry can train $1.52\times$ larger model compared to ZeRO-Offload on a single GPU, and increase training speed by at least $28.1%$ when scaling to data parallelism on 8 GPUs. We further extend the design to a Huawei CloudMatrix384 scale-Up node with up to 8 NPUs, and our ScaleUp-MemFerry reduces the end-to-end iteration time by up to $20.7%$ over DeepSpeed.
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With the ever-growing size of deep learning models, GPU memory is prone to being insufficient during training. A prominent approach is ZeRO-Offload, which moves the optimizer states to CPU memory and performs parameter update using CPU. However, the deficiencies of ZeRO-Offload include low GPU utilization, imperfect overlapping of communication and computation, and inflexible offloading. In this paper, we leverage Direct Host Access (DHA) on the GPU that can compute data in CPU memory, forming a novel hybrid on-GPU and DHA. We design and implement MemFerry consisting of an execution scheduler and a shadow model. The scheduler strategically chooses layers of parameters for DHA computation and transmits the remaining parameters to GPU memory simultaneously to shorten forward propagation time, and further loads DHA parameters to GPU memory to reduce backward propagation time. The shadow model presents a unified memory abstraction for the parameter partitions stored separately in GPU and CPU memories. To further reduce GPU memory usage, we present MemFerry along with its dynamic programming algorithm that offloads gradients to CPU memory via DHA. We further extend MemFerry to emerging scale-up domains with ScaleUp-MemFerry, which exploits otherwise underutilized accelerator interconnect bandwidth to assist host-to-accelerator data movement through adaptive multi-path transfer. Our experiments show that \system trains up to $1.68\times$ faster and MemFerry can train $1.52\times$ larger model compared to ZeRO-Offload on a single GPU, and increase training speed by at least $28.1%$ when scaling to data parallelism on 8 GPUs. We further extend the design to a Huawei CloudMatrix384 scale-Up node with up to 8 NPUs, and our ScaleUp-MemFerry reduces the end-to-end iteration time by up to $20.7%$ over DeepSpeed.
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layers replace the feed-forward block of a Transformer with E expert networks, and each token is routed to k of these experts. Under expert parallelism (EP) the experts are distributed across GPUs, and every MoE layer runs all-to-all collectives in the forward and backward passes to dispatch tokens to their experts and then combine the results. On a cluster with 8 AMD Instinct MI300X GPUs per node, these collectives can take 45% of the training step at EP32 with top-2 routing and 60% with top-6 routing. We find that early in pretraining routers have already learned to assign tokens to experts in correlated patterns, both within a layer and across layers. At top-2, 0.8% of the expert pairs in a layer are selected together by 42% of tokens, and the experts a token selects at one layer predict the experts it selects at the next layer. We use these correlations to keep more token--expert assignments on the token's own GPU, which reduces communication across GPUs and across nodes. Correlated expert placement puts experts that are often selected together on the same GPU. Combined with a dispatcher that sends each token to each GPU once, it removes up to 58% of dispatched rows. Token shuffling applies when sequence parallelism shards tokens across the EP group. It moves each token to the GPU predicted to hold its next-layer experts during the reduce-scatter that follows attention. On one node this raises the share of token--expert assignments served on the token's GPU from 12.5% to 59%. In Megatron-LM, across EP degrees from 8 to 64 with top-2 and top-6 routing, the two methods reduce all-to-all time by 1.16-2.63X and end-to-end step time by up to 1.41X. Neither method changes the models' underlying routing decisions or expert parameters.
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Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layers replace the feed-forward block of a Transformer with E expert networks, and each token is routed to k of these experts. Under expert parallelism (EP) the experts are distributed across GPUs, and every MoE layer runs all-to-all collectives in the forward and backward passes to dispatch tokens to their experts and then combine the results. On a cluster with 8 AMD Instinct MI300X GPUs per node, these collectives can take 45% of the training step at EP32 with top-2 routing and 60% with top-6 routing. We find that early in pretraining routers have already learned to assign tokens to experts in correlated patterns, both within a layer and across layers. At top-2, 0.8% of the expert pairs in a layer are selected together by 42% of tokens, and the experts a token selects at one layer predict the experts it selects at the next layer. We use these correlations to keep more token--expert assignments on the token's own GPU, which reduces communication across GPUs and across nodes. Correlated expert placement puts experts that are often selected together on the same GPU. Combined with a dispatcher that sends each token to each GPU once, it removes up to 58% of dispatched rows. Token shuffling applies when sequence parallelism shards tokens across the EP group. It moves each token to the GPU predicted to hold its next-layer experts during the reduce-scatter that follows attention. On one node this raises the share of token--expert assignments served on the token's GPU from 12.5% to 59%. In Megatron-LM, across EP degrees from 8 to 64 with top-2 and top-6 routing, the two methods reduce all-to-all time by 1.16-2.63X and end-to-end step time by up to 1.41X. Neither method changes the models' underlying routing decisions or expert parameters.
Reinforcement Learning (RL) from outcome rewards suffers from sparse supervision, particularly on difficult, long-horizon tasks where successful trajectories are rare and costly to generate. On-Policy Distillation (OPD) offers an attractive alternative by providing dense token-level supervision from a stronger teacher along the student's own generations. Self-distillation methods further remove the need for a separate teacher model by conditioning the same policy on privileged information to serve as its own teacher. However, privileged conditioning alone does not guarantee that the resulting distillation update improves the student. Indeed, privileged information can lead the teacher to solve tasks through shortcuts unavailable to the student, producing supervision poorly matched to the student's current behavior. Consequently, even a higher-performing teacher can provide guidance that degrades student performance. To address this, we analyze how the choice of privileged teacher affects the student's update. We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the teacher's local distillation update to be a positive multiple of the student's reward gradient. Our analysis suggests that the teacher should not only perform well on the task, but also provide guidance suited to the student's current capabilities. This characterization motivates a practical teacher-training surrogate that combines outcome rewards with token-level Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization toward the student. Based on this result, we propose Joint On-Policy Learning and Teaching (JOLT), which jointly trains a single policy in two roles: a privileged teacher using a KL-regularized objective, and an unprivileged student using dense on-policy distillation. Across mathematical reasoning, coding, tool use, and terminal use, JOLT improves training efficiency and performance, with further gains from student rewards.
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Reinforcement Learning (RL) from outcome rewards suffers from sparse supervision, particularly on difficult, long-horizon tasks where successful trajectories are rare and costly to generate. On-Policy Distillation (OPD) offers an attractive alternative by providing dense token-level supervision from a stronger teacher along the student's own generations. Self-distillation methods further remove the need for a separate teacher model by conditioning the same policy on privileged information to serve as its own teacher. However, privileged conditioning alone does not guarantee that the resulting distillation update improves the student. Indeed, privileged information can lead the teacher to solve tasks through shortcuts unavailable to the student, producing supervision poorly matched to the student's current behavior. Consequently, even a higher-performing teacher can provide guidance that degrades student performance. To address this, we analyze how the choice of privileged teacher affects the student's update. We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the teacher's local distillation update to be a positive multiple of the student's reward gradient. Our analysis suggests that the teacher should not only perform well on the task, but also provide guidance suited to the student's current capabilities. This characterization motivates a practical teacher-training surrogate that combines outcome rewards with token-level Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization toward the student. Based on this result, we propose Joint On-Policy Learning and Teaching (JOLT), which jointly trains a single policy in two roles: a privileged teacher using a KL-regularized objective, and an unprivileged student using dense on-policy distillation. Across mathematical reasoning, coding, tool use, and terminal use, JOLT improves training efficiency and performance, with further gains from student rewards.
Learning from large-model demonstrations offers a way to train small agents that can complete recurring tasks without calling a large model at every step. A central design choice is what to retain from teacher trajectories that contain reasoning, actions, and information about task progress. We introduce Task-Progress Distillation (TPD), an offline approach that pairs each demonstrated action with a short label describing the current task stage. The student learns these compact targets and selects actions by jointly scoring admissible stage--action pairs, which a deterministic harness executes in the environment. On ALFWorld, a 1.7B student trained with 404 demonstrations achieves 72.4% mean unseen task success with either TPD or action-only supervision, compared with 48.3% for a reasoning-trained student using constrained action selection. Explicit stages provide an additional benefit at 200 demonstrations, improving success from 48.0% to 67.7% over action-only supervision. With more demonstrations, the action-only student closes the gap, and both approaches reach 76.9% at 808 demonstrations. Shared-history analyses link part of TPD's local advantage to better decisions when moving between subgoals, particularly from object acquisition to processing. These results show that compact supervision can train effective small task agents, while explicit task progress provides additional guidance at an intermediate demonstration budget.
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Learning from large-model demonstrations offers a way to train small agents that can complete recurring tasks without calling a large model at every step. A central design choice is what to retain from teacher trajectories that contain reasoning, actions, and information about task progress. We introduce Task-Progress Distillation (TPD), an offline approach that pairs each demonstrated action with a short label describing the current task stage. The student learns these compact targets and selects actions by jointly scoring admissible stage--action pairs, which a deterministic harness executes in the environment. On ALFWorld, a 1.7B student trained with 404 demonstrations achieves 72.4% mean unseen task success with either TPD or action-only supervision, compared with 48.3% for a reasoning-trained student using constrained action selection. Explicit stages provide an additional benefit at 200 demonstrations, improving success from 48.0% to 67.7% over action-only supervision. With more demonstrations, the action-only student closes the gap, and both approaches reach 76.9% at 808 demonstrations. Shared-history analyses link part of TPD's local advantage to better decisions when moving between subgoals, particularly from object acquisition to processing. These results show that compact supervision can train effective small task agents, while explicit task progress provides additional guidance at an intermediate demonstration budget.
Multi-teacher on-policy distillation (MOPD) is used in two settings. In common-domain composition, several teachers score each student rollout from one prompt domain and their signals form a single target; in routed-domain distillation, prompts from different domains are assigned to the corresponding specialist. Both settings usually transfer each teacher's endpoint policy, which mixes what post-training changed with preferences inherited from the teacher's base. We introduce $Δ$-MOPD, which transfers each teacher's teacher-minus-base logit shift re-anchored at the student's frozen initialization, and compare it with endpoint supervision in both settings while holding teacher selection fixed. We first expose the mechanism that impedes endpoint transfer: inherited base pull can exceed the post-training shift. Removing it reduces the teacher-term norm ratio and target--student KL. Across our experiments, the results suggest that shift targets are particularly useful when teacher signals are combined at a state. With three composed teachers, $Δ$-MOPD exceeds endpoint composition by $4.11$ Math and $1.95$ five-benchmark points; with two, it matches endpoint accuracy. Under phased routing, it achieves higher mean performance in both phase orders and reduces the observed order gap from $10.50$ to $6.42$ points. Under interleaved routing, where each update involves one teacher, the two targets perform comparably. The phased results provide supporting evidence that the benefit may extend to signals accumulated across training phases. Target construction is thus an independent design axis in MOPD, complementary to teacher selection.
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Multi-teacher on-policy distillation (MOPD) is used in two settings. In common-domain composition, several teachers score each student rollout from one prompt domain and their signals form a single target; in routed-domain distillation, prompts from different domains are assigned to the corresponding specialist. Both settings usually transfer each teacher's endpoint policy, which mixes what post-training changed with preferences inherited from the teacher's base. We introduce $Δ$-MOPD, which transfers each teacher's teacher-minus-base logit shift re-anchored at the student's frozen initialization, and compare it with endpoint supervision in both settings while holding teacher selection fixed. We first expose the mechanism that impedes endpoint transfer: inherited base pull can exceed the post-training shift. Removing it reduces the teacher-term norm ratio and target--student KL. Across our experiments, the results suggest that shift targets are particularly useful when teacher signals are combined at a state. With three composed teachers, $Δ$-MOPD exceeds endpoint composition by $4.11$ Math and $1.95$ five-benchmark points; with two, it matches endpoint accuracy. Under phased routing, it achieves higher mean performance in both phase orders and reduces the observed order gap from $10.50$ to $6.42$ points. Under interleaved routing, where each update involves one teacher, the two targets perform comparably. The phased results provide supporting evidence that the benefit may extend to signals accumulated across training phases. Target construction is thus an independent design axis in MOPD, complementary to teacher selection.
On-policy distillation (OPD) strengthens language-model reasoning, yet whether students acquire new factual knowledge or compositional skill for multi-step reasoning remains unknown. We separate these capabilities using a controlled synthetic framework that measures the student's initial capabilities and independently controls the teacher's additional facts, compositional skill, or both. Across four models from three families, reverse-KL OPD reliably transfers compositional skill across unseen reasoning structures, but transfers minimal factual knowledge. Decoupling the distillation recipe reveals the source of this asymmetry: replacing reverse KL with forward KL restores factual transfer, whereas student rollouts specifically improve the execution of multi-step reasoning. Experiments on recent factual QA and competition mathematics show a similar asymmetry under reverse-KL OPD, yielding notable reasoning gains without factual memory expansion. Together, these results demonstrate that on-policy distillation does not expand a model's parametric knowledge, but instead teaches it to organize and compose the knowledge it already possesses.
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On-policy distillation (OPD) strengthens language-model reasoning, yet whether students acquire new factual knowledge or compositional skill for multi-step reasoning remains unknown. We separate these capabilities using a controlled synthetic framework that measures the student's initial capabilities and independently controls the teacher's additional facts, compositional skill, or both. Across four models from three families, reverse-KL OPD reliably transfers compositional skill across unseen reasoning structures, but transfers minimal factual knowledge. Decoupling the distillation recipe reveals the source of this asymmetry: replacing reverse KL with forward KL restores factual transfer, whereas student rollouts specifically improve the execution of multi-step reasoning. Experiments on recent factual QA and competition mathematics show a similar asymmetry under reverse-KL OPD, yielding notable reasoning gains without factual memory expansion. Together, these results demonstrate that on-policy distillation does not expand a model's parametric knowledge, but instead teaches it to organize and compose the knowledge it already possesses.
作者Yuchen Zhu, Chenyi Xu, Yulin Zhang, Gang Xu, Wentao Zhu
Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) predict masked or future observations in representation space, offering a natural source of predictive latents for vision-language-action (VLA) models. Yet making these latents useful across pretraining, policy learning, and deployment requires addressing three failures: mismatch with embodiment-specific control, interference with action learning, and teacher miscalibration under distribution shifts. We introduce Juno, a unified framework built around one action-conditioned JEPA that serves as a control-aligned representation backbone, a predictive teacher, and an adaptable dynamics model. During pretraining, we train it on embodiment-matched trajectories and use a dynamic CLS loss to transfer motion-weighted patch dynamics to a compact global state. During policy learning, we fuse current-frame JEPA patches into VLA perception and use a decoupled reasoning branch with separate transformation parameters to distill future latent states for action generation. During deployment, we adapt the world model on all observed transitions, including failed rollouts, freeze the adapted teacher, and re-align the policy on verified executions using LoRA adapters and a trainable action head, without expert corrections or task rewards. On SimplerEnv, Juno raises average success from $60.9%$ to $68.5%$ over Qwen3GR00T, the strongest baseline, and test-time adaptation further reaches $72.7%$; on a real robot, it retains $70%$--$75%$ success under background, height, and object shifts where the base policy collapses to $0%$.
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Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) predict masked or future observations in representation space, offering a natural source of predictive latents for vision-language-action (VLA) models. Yet making these latents useful across pretraining, policy learning, and deployment requires addressing three failures: mismatch with embodiment-specific control, interference with action learning, and teacher miscalibration under distribution shifts. We introduce Juno, a unified framework built around one action-conditioned JEPA that serves as a control-aligned representation backbone, a predictive teacher, and an adaptable dynamics model. During pretraining, we train it on embodiment-matched trajectories and use a dynamic CLS loss to transfer motion-weighted patch dynamics to a compact global state. During policy learning, we fuse current-frame JEPA patches into VLA perception and use a decoupled reasoning branch with separate transformation parameters to distill future latent states for action generation. During deployment, we adapt the world model on all observed transitions, including failed rollouts, freeze the adapted teacher, and re-align the policy on verified executions using LoRA adapters and a trainable action head, without expert corrections or task rewards. On SimplerEnv, Juno raises average success from $60.9%$ to $68.5%$ over Qwen3GR00T, the strongest baseline, and test-time adaptation further reaches $72.7%$; on a real robot, it retains $70%$--$75%$ success under background, height, and object shifts where the base policy collapses to $0%$.
Generative speech enhancement (SE) is prone to linguistic hallucination when semantic constraint is unreliable under severe noise and reverberation. Moreover, approaches that generate discrete codec tokens are bounded by the quantization error of the codec decoder, regardless of token-prediction accuracy. We propose LIFT-SE, a two-stage generative framework that decouples linguistic inference from acoustic synthesis within QRes-Codec, which exposes a quantized latent and its residual-completed continuous form. The first stage predicts clean codec tokens autoregressively, conditioned on frame-aligned features from a self-supervised front-end distilled toward clean speech. The second stage applies conditional flow matching to transport Gaussian noise to the continuous latent conditioned on the predicted tokens, and the frozen decoder reconstructs the enhanced waveform. Discrete generation provides naturalness, while continuous refinement restores signal fidelity. Experiments on the DNS1 and URGENT benchmarks show that LIFT-SE attains favorable linguistic consistency under reverberant conditions together with competitive perceptual quality, and systematic ablations verify the necessity of both stages. Code will be released in the future.
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Generative speech enhancement (SE) is prone to linguistic hallucination when semantic constraint is unreliable under severe noise and reverberation. Moreover, approaches that generate discrete codec tokens are bounded by the quantization error of the codec decoder, regardless of token-prediction accuracy. We propose LIFT-SE, a two-stage generative framework that decouples linguistic inference from acoustic synthesis within QRes-Codec, which exposes a quantized latent and its residual-completed continuous form. The first stage predicts clean codec tokens autoregressively, conditioned on frame-aligned features from a self-supervised front-end distilled toward clean speech. The second stage applies conditional flow matching to transport Gaussian noise to the continuous latent conditioned on the predicted tokens, and the frozen decoder reconstructs the enhanced waveform. Discrete generation provides naturalness, while continuous refinement restores signal fidelity. Experiments on the DNS1 and URGENT benchmarks show that LIFT-SE attains favorable linguistic consistency under reverberant conditions together with competitive perceptual quality, and systematic ablations verify the necessity of both stages. Code will be released in the future.
Token-based world models enable fine-grained latent planning, but repeatedly processing large spatial token grids makes action search expensive. We introduce COSTGRAD, a training-free, goal-conditioned selector that ranks spatial tokens by the gradient norm of the planning cost with respect to each input token. By deriving importance from the downstream control objective, COSTGRAD targets tokens that matter for planning rather than merely for prediction. On AdaLN-conditioned predictors at $50%$ sparsity, COSTGRAD matches or exceeds full-token planning on three of four continuous-control benchmarks, while giving a measured $2.6\times$ wall-clock speedup per environment planning step. Combining token sparsity with reduced CEM search increases this to a $\sim 5\times$ total speedup while still exceeding the full-token baseline. We also identify an architecture-dependent failure mode: in a matched AdaLN-vs-concat comparison, concat maintains comparable full-token performance but pure COSTGRAD loses its advantage over random selection. This difference tracks action-pathway drift: gradient-selected removal produces less drift than random removal on AdaLN, but more on concat. These results highlight selector-architecture compatibility as a design axis for sparse world-model planning. Project page and demos: https://ycxuyingchen.github.io/costgrad/
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Token-based world models enable fine-grained latent planning, but repeatedly processing large spatial token grids makes action search expensive. We introduce COSTGRAD, a training-free, goal-conditioned selector that ranks spatial tokens by the gradient norm of the planning cost with respect to each input token. By deriving importance from the downstream control objective, COSTGRAD targets tokens that matter for planning rather than merely for prediction. On AdaLN-conditioned predictors at $50%$ sparsity, COSTGRAD matches or exceeds full-token planning on three of four continuous-control benchmarks, while giving a measured $2.6\times$ wall-clock speedup per environment planning step. Combining token sparsity with reduced CEM search increases this to a $\sim 5\times$ total speedup while still exceeding the full-token baseline. We also identify an architecture-dependent failure mode: in a matched AdaLN-vs-concat comparison, concat maintains comparable full-token performance but pure COSTGRAD loses its advantage over random selection. This difference tracks action-pathway drift: gradient-selected removal produces less drift than random removal on AdaLN, but more on concat. These results highlight selector-architecture compatibility as a design axis for sparse world-model planning. Project page and demos: https://ycxuyingchen.github.io/costgrad/
作者Jie Ren, Hao Kang, Kai Guo, Yiding Yang, Bo Liu, Liming Jiang, Qing Yan, Zichuan Liu, Yizhi Song, Yue Xing, Hui Liu, Xin Lu
Scribble-based interaction provides a lightweight and intuitive way for users to specify image editing intents in interactive editing tools. However, current image editing models based on VLMs or LLMs struggle to understand and execute edits based solely on scribble inputs. To systematically study this problem, we construct a new benchmark, ScribbleEdit, that evaluates the ability of image editing models to perform image editing conditioned on scribbles. This task requires both a deep understanding of the intention of the scribble and an accurate interpretation of its spatial information. In ScribbleEdit, we design an automated data construction pipeline and introduce a dedicated evaluation protocol that explicitly measures intention alignment. Our analysis reveals that existing VLM/LLM-based editing models fail to accurately capture scribble intentions. To guide future progress on scribble-only image editing, we propose a simple yet effective soft-token baseline, which enhances the model's understanding of scribble semantics and outperforms standard image editing models on our benchmark. Our evaluation and baseline together provide a concrete foundation for assessing and improving the scribble-driven image editing.
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Scribble-based interaction provides a lightweight and intuitive way for users to specify image editing intents in interactive editing tools. However, current image editing models based on VLMs or LLMs struggle to understand and execute edits based solely on scribble inputs. To systematically study this problem, we construct a new benchmark, ScribbleEdit, that evaluates the ability of image editing models to perform image editing conditioned on scribbles. This task requires both a deep understanding of the intention of the scribble and an accurate interpretation of its spatial information. In ScribbleEdit, we design an automated data construction pipeline and introduce a dedicated evaluation protocol that explicitly measures intention alignment. Our analysis reveals that existing VLM/LLM-based editing models fail to accurately capture scribble intentions. To guide future progress on scribble-only image editing, we propose a simple yet effective soft-token baseline, which enhances the model's understanding of scribble semantics and outperforms standard image editing models on our benchmark. Our evaluation and baseline together provide a concrete foundation for assessing and improving the scribble-driven image editing.
作者Hongzhuo Chen, Zhanliang Wang, Florent Pollet, Mian Umair Ahsan, Joshua Bie, Tzung-Chien Hsieh, Peter Krawitz, Cong Liu, Wendy K Chung, Chunhua Weng, Gamze Gürsoy, Kai Wang
Many rare genetic diseases are associated with recognizable craniofacial features. However, traditional approaches for describing facial morphology rely largely on qualitative clinical observation and free-text descriptions, which are often subjective, non-standardized, and difficult to reproduce across observers and institutions. Although the Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) provides controlled terms for describing facial features, these terms are typically categorical rather than quantitative and may vary depending on examiner experience and interpretation. Here, we present FaceKit, a computational framework for quantitative facial phenotyping from frontal facial photographs. FaceKit extracts standardized measurements of facial landmarks and derived 120 morphological features, then reports feature-level z-scores representing deviation from population reference distributions. The reference distributions are built from the FairFace dataset spanning diverse ancestral groups. We evaluated FaceKit on a curated subset of the GestaltMatcher Database covering 50 rare-disease cohorts. In addition to quantitative facial analysis, FaceKit includes synthetic facial image generation to support rare disease model development and data augmentation. We also performed privacy evaluation to assess whether synthetic images reveal identifiable information from real patient photographs and could compromise patient privacy. Across disease case studies, FaceKit-derived quantitative measurements captured known facial features associated with rare genetic disorders and provided objective support for clinical phenotyping. Together, these results establish FaceKit as a useful tool for quantitative phenotyping, and has the potential to improve rare disease diagnosis, support genotype-phenotype studies, and enable more reproducible clinical characterization across diverse patient populations.
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Many rare genetic diseases are associated with recognizable craniofacial features. However, traditional approaches for describing facial morphology rely largely on qualitative clinical observation and free-text descriptions, which are often subjective, non-standardized, and difficult to reproduce across observers and institutions. Although the Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) provides controlled terms for describing facial features, these terms are typically categorical rather than quantitative and may vary depending on examiner experience and interpretation. Here, we present FaceKit, a computational framework for quantitative facial phenotyping from frontal facial photographs. FaceKit extracts standardized measurements of facial landmarks and derived 120 morphological features, then reports feature-level z-scores representing deviation from population reference distributions. The reference distributions are built from the FairFace dataset spanning diverse ancestral groups. We evaluated FaceKit on a curated subset of the GestaltMatcher Database covering 50 rare-disease cohorts. In addition to quantitative facial analysis, FaceKit includes synthetic facial image generation to support rare disease model development and data augmentation. We also performed privacy evaluation to assess whether synthetic images reveal identifiable information from real patient photographs and could compromise patient privacy. Across disease case studies, FaceKit-derived quantitative measurements captured known facial features associated with rare genetic disorders and provided objective support for clinical phenotyping. Together, these results establish FaceKit as a useful tool for quantitative phenotyping, and has the potential to improve rare disease diagnosis, support genotype-phenotype studies, and enable more reproducible clinical characterization across diverse patient populations.
Physical world modeling requires predicting how interactions change a scene, not merely generating coherent motion. We propose STRIKE, a framework that separates visual state transition learning from dense video generation. We construct event-aligned supervision by extracting observed states from training videos and pairing them with transition descriptions and temporal offsets. An image-based transition model learns to predict the next scene configuration from the current image, a local transition specification, and elapsed time. At inference, a pretrained vision-language planner predicts time transition specifications, and recursive application of the learned transition model produces a sequence of future visual states. A separately trained dynamic model then generates the complete rollout conditioned on these states and their temporal locations. Experiments on Physics-IQ Verified, PhyGenBench, Pisa-Experiments, and RoboTwin2.0 show improvements of STRIKE over the corresponding video-backbone baselines in benchmark measures of physical consistency and manipulation-video fidelity. These results support learned visual state transitions as an effective intermediate representation for physical world modeling.
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Physical world modeling requires predicting how interactions change a scene, not merely generating coherent motion. We propose STRIKE, a framework that separates visual state transition learning from dense video generation. We construct event-aligned supervision by extracting observed states from training videos and pairing them with transition descriptions and temporal offsets. An image-based transition model learns to predict the next scene configuration from the current image, a local transition specification, and elapsed time. At inference, a pretrained vision-language planner predicts time transition specifications, and recursive application of the learned transition model produces a sequence of future visual states. A separately trained dynamic model then generates the complete rollout conditioned on these states and their temporal locations. Experiments on Physics-IQ Verified, PhyGenBench, Pisa-Experiments, and RoboTwin2.0 show improvements of STRIKE over the corresponding video-backbone baselines in benchmark measures of physical consistency and manipulation-video fidelity. These results support learned visual state transitions as an effective intermediate representation for physical world modeling.
We introduce QuadTok, a novel framework for visual tokenization and autoregressive image generation. Compared to traditional approaches using 2D grids or 1D token sequences, we propose a hierarchical quadtree structure, bridging the gap between 2D spatial binding and 1D sequence-level flexibility. The QuadTok tokenizer dynamically allocates representational capacity to visually intricate areas while leaving homogeneous regions at a coarse resolution. Compared with a fixed 256-token grid, our ImageNet-trained tokenizer saves approximately 10% of tokens on ImageNet and 9% when transferred zero-shot to the COCO dataset, while maintaining comparable reconstruction fidelity. Furthermore, the natural causality introduced by the tree structure seamlessly enables autoregressive image generation. Conditioned on a quadtree topology supplied before generation, our 947M GPT-style generative model achieves a 2.08 gFID on the ImageNet $256 \times 256$ benchmark. Additionally, leveraging the strong spatial correlation preserved by the quadtree structure, the QuadTok generator enables zero-shot spatially controlled image generation capabilities. Code: https://github.com/myc634/QuadTok.
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We introduce QuadTok, a novel framework for visual tokenization and autoregressive image generation. Compared to traditional approaches using 2D grids or 1D token sequences, we propose a hierarchical quadtree structure, bridging the gap between 2D spatial binding and 1D sequence-level flexibility. The QuadTok tokenizer dynamically allocates representational capacity to visually intricate areas while leaving homogeneous regions at a coarse resolution. Compared with a fixed 256-token grid, our ImageNet-trained tokenizer saves approximately 10% of tokens on ImageNet and 9% when transferred zero-shot to the COCO dataset, while maintaining comparable reconstruction fidelity. Furthermore, the natural causality introduced by the tree structure seamlessly enables autoregressive image generation. Conditioned on a quadtree topology supplied before generation, our 947M GPT-style generative model achieves a 2.08 gFID on the ImageNet $256 \times 256$ benchmark. Additionally, leveraging the strong spatial correlation preserved by the quadtree structure, the QuadTok generator enables zero-shot spatially controlled image generation capabilities. Code: https://github.com/myc634/QuadTok.
作者Mayank Sengupta, Nirmit Desai, Eric Song, Kunal Sawarkar
Many applications of physical AI run within finite or closed physical worlds with a limited set of physical laws governing object behavior. Examples include robots working in a warehouse and agents moving around in a video game. In order to better organize, filter, and curate data for physical AI applications, we propose a new approach centered on the unique settings and physical laws of individual datasets. We train LeCuration, a small world model intended to serve as a data curation tool for a separate, larger downstream model. To build this model, we choose LeWorldModel (LeWM)as our latent encoder and predictor, adding a diffusion transformer (DiT) decoder to add visuals to autoregressive gameplay rollout. We find that the embeddings of this model can be used as an anomaly detection signal and as a content-based clustering heuristic, and that auto-regressively predicting the game state with this model allows us to qualitatively check for action-state consistency. This paper presents a qualitative, proof-of-concept case study on CS:GO gameplay data; we do not yet report quantitative curation metrics or downstream training results, which we identify as the key next step.
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Many applications of physical AI run within finite or closed physical worlds with a limited set of physical laws governing object behavior. Examples include robots working in a warehouse and agents moving around in a video game. In order to better organize, filter, and curate data for physical AI applications, we propose a new approach centered on the unique settings and physical laws of individual datasets. We train LeCuration, a small world model intended to serve as a data curation tool for a separate, larger downstream model. To build this model, we choose LeWorldModel (LeWM)as our latent encoder and predictor, adding a diffusion transformer (DiT) decoder to add visuals to autoregressive gameplay rollout. We find that the embeddings of this model can be used as an anomaly detection signal and as a content-based clustering heuristic, and that auto-regressively predicting the game state with this model allows us to qualitatively check for action-state consistency. This paper presents a qualitative, proof-of-concept case study on CS:GO gameplay data; we do not yet report quantitative curation metrics or downstream training results, which we identify as the key next step.
作者Zihan Su, Junhao Zhuang, Yaowei Li, Siwen Lu, Haoran Li, Lingen Li, Haoyu Wu, Weiyang Jin, Songchun Zhang, Haoyang Huang, Chun Yuan, Zeyue Xue, Nan Duan
Autoregressive video generation requires denoising the current frames while writing their key-value representations as context for future predictions. However, these two roles typically share parameters, and we find that their gradients exhibit distinct patterns and systematic negative alignment, hindering the joint optimization of visual quality and temporal consistency. We introduce Self Gradient Forcing Plus (SGF+), which assigns separate parameters to context writing and denoising while preserving their interaction through causal attention. Both roles are jointly optimized using the original generation objective without auxiliary losses, with context writing supervised through its contribution to future predictions. This simple change improves visual quality and long-horizon consistency over the evaluated baselines in both framewise and chunkwise generation, without additional video training data or a longer training horizon. Trained on only 5s rollouts, SGF+ supports continuous generation for up to 24 hours without long-video fine-tuning. These results highlight role-specific parameterization as an effective design principle for high-quality autoregressive video generation and native long-horizon extrapolation.
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Autoregressive video generation requires denoising the current frames while writing their key-value representations as context for future predictions. However, these two roles typically share parameters, and we find that their gradients exhibit distinct patterns and systematic negative alignment, hindering the joint optimization of visual quality and temporal consistency. We introduce Self Gradient Forcing Plus (SGF+), which assigns separate parameters to context writing and denoising while preserving their interaction through causal attention. Both roles are jointly optimized using the original generation objective without auxiliary losses, with context writing supervised through its contribution to future predictions. This simple change improves visual quality and long-horizon consistency over the evaluated baselines in both framewise and chunkwise generation, without additional video training data or a longer training horizon. Trained on only 5s rollouts, SGF+ supports continuous generation for up to 24 hours without long-video fine-tuning. These results highlight role-specific parameterization as an effective design principle for high-quality autoregressive video generation and native long-horizon extrapolation.
作者Peng Liu, Shaoxiang Qin, Theodore Potsis, Lili Ji, Dingyang Geng, Liangzhu Leon Wang
Rapid and accurate prediction of urban wind and temperature fields is important for urban microclimate design and climate adaptation. Large-eddy simulation (LES) effectively resolves these instantaneous fields, but its application is limited in iterative design of urban microclimate applications due to high computational cost. Existing regressive data-driven models offers quick outputs, but they produce only deterministic point predictions that inherently fail to represent turbulent stochasticity. This paper adopts a novel generative framework of Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) that uses building geometry and mean flow as guidance to generate plausible three-dimensional instantaneous velocity and temperature fields for urban microclimate in seconds. To overcome the GPU memory bottleneck of pixel space 3D generation, the model operates in parallel on overlapping pixel space through a shared-noise initialization that preserves high spatial continuity of flow structure across the entire domain. Against reference LES data, the CFM surrogate can rapidly and accurately restore the first-order statistics with Normalized Root Mean Square Error (NRMSE) of 2.99% for wind and 1.77% for temperature, second-order turbulence metrics with NRMSE of 7.17% for wind and 8.84% for temperature, turbulent kinetic energy with NRMSE of 7%, probability density function and vertical profiles in representative locations. Wind engineering application of local gust prediction demonstrate that the speed and accuracy of CFM, supporting the use of generative AI for making turbulence-aware resilient urban design and climate adaptation more computationally feasible.
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Rapid and accurate prediction of urban wind and temperature fields is important for urban microclimate design and climate adaptation. Large-eddy simulation (LES) effectively resolves these instantaneous fields, but its application is limited in iterative design of urban microclimate applications due to high computational cost. Existing regressive data-driven models offers quick outputs, but they produce only deterministic point predictions that inherently fail to represent turbulent stochasticity. This paper adopts a novel generative framework of Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) that uses building geometry and mean flow as guidance to generate plausible three-dimensional instantaneous velocity and temperature fields for urban microclimate in seconds. To overcome the GPU memory bottleneck of pixel space 3D generation, the model operates in parallel on overlapping pixel space through a shared-noise initialization that preserves high spatial continuity of flow structure across the entire domain. Against reference LES data, the CFM surrogate can rapidly and accurately restore the first-order statistics with Normalized Root Mean Square Error (NRMSE) of 2.99% for wind and 1.77% for temperature, second-order turbulence metrics with NRMSE of 7.17% for wind and 8.84% for temperature, turbulent kinetic energy with NRMSE of 7%, probability density function and vertical profiles in representative locations. Wind engineering application of local gust prediction demonstrate that the speed and accuracy of CFM, supporting the use of generative AI for making turbulence-aware resilient urban design and climate adaptation more computationally feasible.
Camera trajectories control viewpoint changes in video generation, scene reconstruction, and robotic perception. Generating them from language requires both scene geometry and target-aware framing. We introduce OmniCam, an autoregressive model that generates camera pose sequences from a single panorama and textual trajectory descriptions. Its geometry-grounded pose token learning combines three components: a panoramic point-cloud encoder for omnidirectional geometric context; hybrid absolute-rotation and relative-translation tokenization with temporally consistent quaternion signs; and separate geometric and semantic conditioning streams with an explicit 3D target anchor. We also construct OmniCaT, containing 267,700 trajectories across four camera behaviors. On the reported OmniCaT evaluation, OmniCam reduces trajectory errors by 28--47% and collision rate by 65.8% relative to GenDoP retrained on OmniCaT. Against the best baseline for each metric, the ATE and collision reductions are 43.0% and 62.3%, respectively. Component ablations support the use of geometric and target-aware conditioning, while downstream experiments examine camera-controlled video generation and robotic active perception.
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Camera trajectories control viewpoint changes in video generation, scene reconstruction, and robotic perception. Generating them from language requires both scene geometry and target-aware framing. We introduce OmniCam, an autoregressive model that generates camera pose sequences from a single panorama and textual trajectory descriptions. Its geometry-grounded pose token learning combines three components: a panoramic point-cloud encoder for omnidirectional geometric context; hybrid absolute-rotation and relative-translation tokenization with temporally consistent quaternion signs; and separate geometric and semantic conditioning streams with an explicit 3D target anchor. We also construct OmniCaT, containing 267,700 trajectories across four camera behaviors. On the reported OmniCaT evaluation, OmniCam reduces trajectory errors by 28--47% and collision rate by 65.8% relative to GenDoP retrained on OmniCaT. Against the best baseline for each metric, the ATE and collision reductions are 43.0% and 62.3%, respectively. Component ablations support the use of geometric and target-aware conditioning, while downstream experiments examine camera-controlled video generation and robotic active perception.
We introduce MUNITE, a latent-variable framework for flexible any-to-any multimodal generation that treats encoding and latent generation as the same inference problem under different amounts of observed evidence. Given any subset of modalities, MUNITE models the conditional distribution over the latent representation associated with the complete observation. Full observation recovers deterministic encoding, no observation recovers the latent marginal, and intermediate subsets define conditional latent inference, all within a single conditional flow model. A shared latent sample captures variation that must remain consistent across generated targets, while modality-specific generative decoders model the remaining uncertainty independently. To learn these conditional distributions from incomplete training examples, we extend conditional flow matching through self-distillation: predictions conditioned on richer available observations supervise the same model conditioned on smaller subsets at the same intermediate latent state. When the richer-evidence trajectory follows the exact conditional flow, this provides the same expected learning signal as full-target denoising. Across PolyMNIST-D-Q, FFHQ64, and image-text-audio, MUNITE achieves competitive or better generation quality and source-target alignment, with higher joint-generation coherence. In particular, it attains the highest coherence in all one-to-many and unconditional image-text-audio comparisons, showing the effectiveness of unified latent inference across diverse multimodal settings.
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We introduce MUNITE, a latent-variable framework for flexible any-to-any multimodal generation that treats encoding and latent generation as the same inference problem under different amounts of observed evidence. Given any subset of modalities, MUNITE models the conditional distribution over the latent representation associated with the complete observation. Full observation recovers deterministic encoding, no observation recovers the latent marginal, and intermediate subsets define conditional latent inference, all within a single conditional flow model. A shared latent sample captures variation that must remain consistent across generated targets, while modality-specific generative decoders model the remaining uncertainty independently. To learn these conditional distributions from incomplete training examples, we extend conditional flow matching through self-distillation: predictions conditioned on richer available observations supervise the same model conditioned on smaller subsets at the same intermediate latent state. When the richer-evidence trajectory follows the exact conditional flow, this provides the same expected learning signal as full-target denoising. Across PolyMNIST-D-Q, FFHQ64, and image-text-audio, MUNITE achieves competitive or better generation quality and source-target alignment, with higher joint-generation coherence. In particular, it attains the highest coherence in all one-to-many and unconditional image-text-audio comparisons, showing the effectiveness of unified latent inference across diverse multimodal settings.
作者Zekai Liu, Zhilin Wang, Xuzheng He, Yu Cheng, Yang Yang
Text-to-music systems produce increasingly convincing audio, yet evaluation reveals little about whether the result matches user intent. A global text-audio relevance score can overlook the implicit intent in underspecified prompts and mask failures in specific requirements, such as instrumentation, structure, rhythm, or mood progression. To bridge this gap, we formulate text-to-music intent alignment as satisfying a per-request rubric of independently verifiable items covering both a request's explicit requirements and its implied musical intent. Scoring items individually makes evaluation diagnostic by intent source and musical dimension, rather than a single opaque score. We instantiate this as MuRA-Bench, a benchmark of real-world platform requests curated by music experts. We further propose MIRA (Musical Intent Refinement Agent), a test-time agent that first grounds a request's intent into rubrics, then searches over prompt revisions for a black-box generator under a bounded budget, iteratively generating music, verifying it against the rubrics, and using this feedback to guide a trajectory-aware tree search. Experiments across open-source and commercial backends show that MIRA improves intent alignment, enabling an open-source generator to achieve performance comparable to representative commercial systems (e.g. Suno and Mureka). Project page: https://mirareview.github.io/.
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Text-to-music systems produce increasingly convincing audio, yet evaluation reveals little about whether the result matches user intent. A global text-audio relevance score can overlook the implicit intent in underspecified prompts and mask failures in specific requirements, such as instrumentation, structure, rhythm, or mood progression. To bridge this gap, we formulate text-to-music intent alignment as satisfying a per-request rubric of independently verifiable items covering both a request's explicit requirements and its implied musical intent. Scoring items individually makes evaluation diagnostic by intent source and musical dimension, rather than a single opaque score. We instantiate this as MuRA-Bench, a benchmark of real-world platform requests curated by music experts. We further propose MIRA (Musical Intent Refinement Agent), a test-time agent that first grounds a request's intent into rubrics, then searches over prompt revisions for a black-box generator under a bounded budget, iteratively generating music, verifying it against the rubrics, and using this feedback to guide a trajectory-aware tree search. Experiments across open-source and commercial backends show that MIRA improves intent alignment, enabling an open-source generator to achieve performance comparable to representative commercial systems (e.g. Suno and Mureka). Project page: https://mirareview.github.io/.
Prior artisan mesh generation works largely predict face tokens autoregressively, which makes inference slow. Recent methods instead flow match continuous latents built by Variational AutoEncoders (VAEs), but reconstruction quality drops significantly when geometry and topology are jointly encoded, and further when the latent space is compressed. We present MeshCarve, a flow matching method that generates entirely in compact latent spaces, generating vertex positions and edge connections separately and sidestepping the difficulty of a joint compact latent. To shorten the token sequence, we propose a hierarchical sparse transformer backbone, instantiated as VertexVAE and EdgeVAE. Instead of encoding fields over the surface voxels, both VAEs anchor on discrete vertices in their latent spaces, which drastically reduces the token sequence length, and our spatial-aware compression shortens it further without costing reconstruction. VertexVAE directly encodes vertex occupancy. For connectivity, we propose vertex-link encoding, which turns arbitrary connectivity between vertices into fixed-length continuous per-vertex embeddings and recovers complex artistic topology faithfully. MeshCarve combines these VAEs with an anchor generator and flow matches on the shortened token sequences. It shows advantages over state-of-the-art autoregressive and flow matching methods on Objaverse and generalizes to Toys4K. To the best of our knowledge, it is among the first artisan mesh generation methods whose every generative stage runs in a spatially compressed latent, with a token sequence only a fraction of the most compressed previous autoregressive and flow matching works.
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Prior artisan mesh generation works largely predict face tokens autoregressively, which makes inference slow. Recent methods instead flow match continuous latents built by Variational AutoEncoders (VAEs), but reconstruction quality drops significantly when geometry and topology are jointly encoded, and further when the latent space is compressed. We present MeshCarve, a flow matching method that generates entirely in compact latent spaces, generating vertex positions and edge connections separately and sidestepping the difficulty of a joint compact latent. To shorten the token sequence, we propose a hierarchical sparse transformer backbone, instantiated as VertexVAE and EdgeVAE. Instead of encoding fields over the surface voxels, both VAEs anchor on discrete vertices in their latent spaces, which drastically reduces the token sequence length, and our spatial-aware compression shortens it further without costing reconstruction. VertexVAE directly encodes vertex occupancy. For connectivity, we propose vertex-link encoding, which turns arbitrary connectivity between vertices into fixed-length continuous per-vertex embeddings and recovers complex artistic topology faithfully. MeshCarve combines these VAEs with an anchor generator and flow matches on the shortened token sequences. It shows advantages over state-of-the-art autoregressive and flow matching methods on Objaverse and generalizes to Toys4K. To the best of our knowledge, it is among the first artisan mesh generation methods whose every generative stage runs in a spatially compressed latent, with a token sequence only a fraction of the most compressed previous autoregressive and flow matching works.
作者Deyuan Liu, Yihao Hu, Jingxuan Zhang, Xingying Li, Jun Xie, Jiacheng Liu, Jungang Li, Yu Huang, Xuanyi Liu, Yue Ding, Zecheng Wang, Lei Zhao, Mingda Wang, Zhenglin Cheng, Peng Sun, Tao Lin
Dense visual text requires image generators to reproduce long strings across multiple regions with correct placement and legibility. As short-string rendering improves, evaluation must test sustained performance across more demanding scenes. We introduce UltraText Bench, a bilingual benchmark for prompt-only generation of dense visual text. It contains 432 prompts spanning 24 real-world scene categories and three difficulty levels, split equally between English and Chinese. Each human-reviewed prompt supplies exact strings for four to twelve text regions, paired with structured references for their content, placement, and visual attributes. We use the Q-Judger vision-language model to assess each image against the complete reference, reporting text fidelity, text clarity, spatial quality, and scene quality. Across 24 model configurations, these dimensions reveal different strengths: Z-Image-Turbo gains 3.81 clarity points over Z-Image-Base while losing 14.76 fidelity points under the reported settings. Performance also varies with workload; Qwen-Image-2512's English composite falls from 86.50 at L1 to 42.86 at L3. Ten participants took part in human evaluation of the automatic scores. Repository: https://github.com/LINs-lab/UltraText_Bench.
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Dense visual text requires image generators to reproduce long strings across multiple regions with correct placement and legibility. As short-string rendering improves, evaluation must test sustained performance across more demanding scenes. We introduce UltraText Bench, a bilingual benchmark for prompt-only generation of dense visual text. It contains 432 prompts spanning 24 real-world scene categories and three difficulty levels, split equally between English and Chinese. Each human-reviewed prompt supplies exact strings for four to twelve text regions, paired with structured references for their content, placement, and visual attributes. We use the Q-Judger vision-language model to assess each image against the complete reference, reporting text fidelity, text clarity, spatial quality, and scene quality. Across 24 model configurations, these dimensions reveal different strengths: Z-Image-Turbo gains 3.81 clarity points over Z-Image-Base while losing 14.76 fidelity points under the reported settings. Performance also varies with workload; Qwen-Image-2512's English composite falls from 86.50 at L1 to 42.86 at L3. Ten participants took part in human evaluation of the automatic scores. Repository: https://github.com/LINs-lab/UltraText_Bench.
作者Dominik Schnaus, Thomas Dagès, Daniel Cremers, Xi Wang, Phillip Isola
Multimodal representations enable zero-shot classification and retrieval, but aligning independently trained models usually requires large amounts of paired data. Yet, the Platonic Representation Hypothesis suggests that models trained on different modalities may converge spontaneously toward a shared representation geometry. But then, do we even need paired examples for cross-modal alignment? Remarkably, we show that paired examples are unnecessary for coarse cross-modal alignment. Our simple Wasserstein Procrustes method with a coarse geometric initialization aligns two disjoint embedding sets by estimating a single orthogonal map without seeing any pairs. Across datasets, modalities, and unimodal models, we show that we can consistently align independently trained representations without pairs, and standard geometric alignment metrics accurately predict when this is possible. Nevertheless, we can naturally benefit from paired examples. In the very few-pair regime, our method substantially outperforms existing ones, while staying competitive with pair-based methods with more added examples. Finally, we demonstrate that the resulting alignments can enable text-to-image generation without paired examples. These results show that independently trained models often share enough geometry to establish cross-modal correspondence with little or no paired data.
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Multimodal representations enable zero-shot classification and retrieval, but aligning independently trained models usually requires large amounts of paired data. Yet, the Platonic Representation Hypothesis suggests that models trained on different modalities may converge spontaneously toward a shared representation geometry. But then, do we even need paired examples for cross-modal alignment? Remarkably, we show that paired examples are unnecessary for coarse cross-modal alignment. Our simple Wasserstein Procrustes method with a coarse geometric initialization aligns two disjoint embedding sets by estimating a single orthogonal map without seeing any pairs. Across datasets, modalities, and unimodal models, we show that we can consistently align independently trained representations without pairs, and standard geometric alignment metrics accurately predict when this is possible. Nevertheless, we can naturally benefit from paired examples. In the very few-pair regime, our method substantially outperforms existing ones, while staying competitive with pair-based methods with more added examples. Finally, we demonstrate that the resulting alignments can enable text-to-image generation without paired examples. These results show that independently trained models often share enough geometry to establish cross-modal correspondence with little or no paired data.
Recent single-stage 3D generative models commonly adopt VecSet representations, encoding 3D shapes as unordered sets of latent tokens. However, compared with two-stage methods that provide explicit positional guidance, these models must implicitly infer token positions throughout denoising, limiting their generation quality. We observe that, despite the absence of explicit positional conditioning, VecSet tokens retain recoverable spatial correspondences. Building on this observation, we propose Position Forcing, a position-based self-conditioning framework. During denoising, Position Forcing recovers token positions from the current clean latent estimate, quantizes them at progressively finer resolutions according to the denoising stage, and feeds the resulting positional encodings back into the diffusion Transformer. This progressively refined positional feedback provides spatial guidance at a granularity appropriate to each denoising stage, guiding shape generation along a coarse-to-fine trajectory and substantially improving generation quality without a separate position generation stage. Experiments demonstrate that Position Forcing achieves strong performance among single-stage 3D generative methods and outperforms several competitive multi-stage approaches.
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Recent single-stage 3D generative models commonly adopt VecSet representations, encoding 3D shapes as unordered sets of latent tokens. However, compared with two-stage methods that provide explicit positional guidance, these models must implicitly infer token positions throughout denoising, limiting their generation quality. We observe that, despite the absence of explicit positional conditioning, VecSet tokens retain recoverable spatial correspondences. Building on this observation, we propose Position Forcing, a position-based self-conditioning framework. During denoising, Position Forcing recovers token positions from the current clean latent estimate, quantizes them at progressively finer resolutions according to the denoising stage, and feeds the resulting positional encodings back into the diffusion Transformer. This progressively refined positional feedback provides spatial guidance at a granularity appropriate to each denoising stage, guiding shape generation along a coarse-to-fine trajectory and substantially improving generation quality without a separate position generation stage. Experiments demonstrate that Position Forcing achieves strong performance among single-stage 3D generative methods and outperforms several competitive multi-stage approaches.
Multimedia editing requires generative models to interpret complex, compositional instructions and modify only the desired elements across modalities, a capability largely beyond existing systems. Current approaches are typically limited to simple, single-attribute edits within one modality, since diverse, high-quality editing pairs are hard to obtain, especially for cross-modal tasks where aligned audiovisual (AV) data is scarce. We present CrossEdit, a unified omni-modal editing model for images, audio, and video that performs AV movie scene edits zero-shot through cross-modal transfer. Our key observation is that complex instruction-following, once learned in any modality, generalizes to others. We exploit the additive nature of acoustic signals to procedurally generate large-scale audio editing pairs with compositional instructions, and show that fine-tuning on this synthetic data and self-supervised AV masked reconstruction, alongside a targeted set of curated cross-modal tasks, induces instruction-following that transfers zero-shot to unseen modality and instruction combinations. To evaluate this capability, we release CrossEditBench, a human-annotated benchmark of AV edits on movie scenes, and propose AV-FES, a metric that jointly scores instruction following and consistency. We show that our proposed techniques improve performance on zero-shot AV movie scene editing, while maintaining or improving performance on lip-synced speech editing and standard image, video, and audio editing benchmarks. Demos are available at https://wanchichen.github.io/crossedit/.
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Multimedia editing requires generative models to interpret complex, compositional instructions and modify only the desired elements across modalities, a capability largely beyond existing systems. Current approaches are typically limited to simple, single-attribute edits within one modality, since diverse, high-quality editing pairs are hard to obtain, especially for cross-modal tasks where aligned audiovisual (AV) data is scarce. We present CrossEdit, a unified omni-modal editing model for images, audio, and video that performs AV movie scene edits zero-shot through cross-modal transfer. Our key observation is that complex instruction-following, once learned in any modality, generalizes to others. We exploit the additive nature of acoustic signals to procedurally generate large-scale audio editing pairs with compositional instructions, and show that fine-tuning on this synthetic data and self-supervised AV masked reconstruction, alongside a targeted set of curated cross-modal tasks, induces instruction-following that transfers zero-shot to unseen modality and instruction combinations. To evaluate this capability, we release CrossEditBench, a human-annotated benchmark of AV edits on movie scenes, and propose AV-FES, a metric that jointly scores instruction following and consistency. We show that our proposed techniques improve performance on zero-shot AV movie scene editing, while maintaining or improving performance on lip-synced speech editing and standard image, video, and audio editing benchmarks. Demos are available at https://wanchichen.github.io/crossedit/.
作者Afsara Benazir, Darius Pétermann, Felix Xiaozhu Lin, Salar Rahili
Pretrained text-to-speech (TTS) models can generate expressive speech, but reliable inference-time emotion control remains challenging: prompts and reference audio offer coarse, inconsistent control, whereas specialized conditioning and model adaptation require costly training. We present SteerSpeech, a lightweight activation-steering framework that controls emotion by injecting steering vectors into hidden activations. For each target emotion we train a lightweight low-rank transform, using a multi-expert objective that encourages monotonic emotion control while preserving speaker identity and linguistic content, constraining steering drift, and keeping the TTS backbone frozen. To optimize through discrete speech tokens, we introduce a two-pass generation-and-replay pipeline using a straight-through estimator to backpropagate expert supervision through sampled tokens. At inference, a target-emotion steering direction is optimized with its respective transform and injected into the base TTS model. Objective and subjective evaluations with Qwen3-TTS across seen, unseen, and accented speakers show stronger continuous emotion control with limited speaker and content degradation. SteerSpeech achieves 1.08x-7.12x baseline target-emotion scores and for a representative emotion subjectively, it receives 78.1%-96.8% intensity preference and 1.43x-1.46x speaker-identity preservation at high steering strengths.
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Pretrained text-to-speech (TTS) models can generate expressive speech, but reliable inference-time emotion control remains challenging: prompts and reference audio offer coarse, inconsistent control, whereas specialized conditioning and model adaptation require costly training. We present SteerSpeech, a lightweight activation-steering framework that controls emotion by injecting steering vectors into hidden activations. For each target emotion we train a lightweight low-rank transform, using a multi-expert objective that encourages monotonic emotion control while preserving speaker identity and linguistic content, constraining steering drift, and keeping the TTS backbone frozen. To optimize through discrete speech tokens, we introduce a two-pass generation-and-replay pipeline using a straight-through estimator to backpropagate expert supervision through sampled tokens. At inference, a target-emotion steering direction is optimized with its respective transform and injected into the base TTS model. Objective and subjective evaluations with Qwen3-TTS across seen, unseen, and accented speakers show stronger continuous emotion control with limited speaker and content degradation. SteerSpeech achieves 1.08x-7.12x baseline target-emotion scores and for a representative emotion subjectively, it receives 78.1%-96.8% intensity preference and 1.43x-1.46x speaker-identity preservation at high steering strengths.
作者Baoteng Li, Wenzhuo Wu, Kongming Liang, Zhanyu Ma
Multi-subject image generation requires rewards that verify whether requested attributes, actions, and relations hold for the specified reference subjects. Subject presence alone does not establish that the correct subjects participate in a requested interaction. We present reference-bound Visual Jev rewards that turn these visual decisions into generator training signals. Each subject-related question receives a positive label only when the requested condition and the relevant reference identities hold jointly. We construct fixed questions offline, train a Qwen3.5-4B verifier with binary supervision, and directly read Yes probabilities from its language-model head. Their mean supplies a GRPO reward while retaining individual judgments for inspection. Using 200 MICo-150K training tasks and 30 updates, the framework raises a GPT-5.4 composite score from 41.78 to 52.50 on a manually selected 897-task MICo-Bench subset; direct 27B rewards yield 51.84. Each reward is tested in one GRPO run, and offline human evaluation does not establish a statistically significant advantage over direct scoring. The study provides an initial implementation and evaluation of Visual Jev as a reference-bound reward for multi-subject image generation.
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Multi-subject image generation requires rewards that verify whether requested attributes, actions, and relations hold for the specified reference subjects. Subject presence alone does not establish that the correct subjects participate in a requested interaction. We present reference-bound Visual Jev rewards that turn these visual decisions into generator training signals. Each subject-related question receives a positive label only when the requested condition and the relevant reference identities hold jointly. We construct fixed questions offline, train a Qwen3.5-4B verifier with binary supervision, and directly read Yes probabilities from its language-model head. Their mean supplies a GRPO reward while retaining individual judgments for inspection. Using 200 MICo-150K training tasks and 30 updates, the framework raises a GPT-5.4 composite score from 41.78 to 52.50 on a manually selected 897-task MICo-Bench subset; direct 27B rewards yield 51.84. Each reward is tested in one GRPO run, and offline human evaluation does not establish a statistically significant advantage over direct scoring. The study provides an initial implementation and evaluation of Visual Jev as a reference-bound reward for multi-subject image generation.
作者Taejun Kim, Wonil Kim, Jongmin Jung, Hyeongseok Wi, Sangeun Kum, Keunhyoung Luke Kim, Taehyoung Kim, Dongjoo Moon, Seungsoon Park, Taewan Kim, Virginie Berger, Juhan Nam, Jongpil Lee
How can we verify whose music contributed to an AI-generated output? This paper demonstrates how input-based attribution can provide verifiable evidence of which audio sources were used in a generation and whether they shaped the output. To do so, we condition the generation solely on audio without any text input, then trace the inputs behind each output, and establish their musical effect. In prompt adherence tests and controlled input swaps, the stems generated by our generator, MixAudio, follow the prompt audio in timbre and the context audio in harmony. Yet these outputs may still reproduce training data not supplied as inputs. We therefore audit memorization with our musical version identification model, musicDNA, and find few reproductions outside the input records. On human-judged cases within the flagged pool, it achieves higher precision and recall than the other tested memorization detectors. The two evaluations suggest that input records and output analysis provide complementary evidence for attribution, on which rights-holder reporting and compensation can draw as the AI music economy takes shape. Audio examples are available at https://neutune.github.io/attr2027demo/
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How can we verify whose music contributed to an AI-generated output? This paper demonstrates how input-based attribution can provide verifiable evidence of which audio sources were used in a generation and whether they shaped the output. To do so, we condition the generation solely on audio without any text input, then trace the inputs behind each output, and establish their musical effect. In prompt adherence tests and controlled input swaps, the stems generated by our generator, MixAudio, follow the prompt audio in timbre and the context audio in harmony. Yet these outputs may still reproduce training data not supplied as inputs. We therefore audit memorization with our musical version identification model, musicDNA, and find few reproductions outside the input records. On human-judged cases within the flagged pool, it achieves higher precision and recall than the other tested memorization detectors. The two evaluations suggest that input records and output analysis provide complementary evidence for attribution, on which rights-holder reporting and compensation can draw as the AI music economy takes shape. Audio examples are available at https://neutune.github.io/attr2027demo/