What is music style? Though often described using text labels such as "swing," "classical," or "emotional," the real style remains implicit and hidden in concrete music examples. In this paper, we introduce a cross-modal framework that learns implicit music styles from raw audio and applies them to symbolic music generation. Inspired by BLIP-2, our model leverages a Querying Transformer (Q-Former) to extract style representations from a large, pre-trained audio language model (LM), and further applies them to condition a symbolic LM for generating piano arrangements. We adopt a two-stage training strategy: contrastive learning to align auditory style with symbolic expression, followed by generative modeling for music arrangement. Our model generates piano performances jointly conditioned on a lead sheet (content) and a reference audio example (style), enabling controllable and stylistically faithful arrangement. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in piano cover generation, style transfer, and audio-to-MIDI retrieval, achieving substantial improvements in style-aware alignment and music quality.
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What is music style? Though often described using text labels such as "swing," "classical," or "emotional," the real style remains implicit and hidden in concrete music examples. In this paper, we introduce a cross-modal framework that learns implicit music styles from raw audio and applies them to symbolic music generation. Inspired by BLIP-2, our model leverages a Querying Transformer (Q-Former) to extract style representations from a large, pre-trained audio language model (LM), and further applies them to condition a symbolic LM for generating piano arrangements. We adopt a two-stage training strategy: contrastive learning to align auditory style with symbolic expression, followed by generative modeling for music arrangement. Our model generates piano performances jointly conditioned on a lead sheet (content) and a reference audio example (style), enabling controllable and stylistically faithful arrangement. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in piano cover generation, style transfer, and audio-to-MIDI retrieval, achieving substantial improvements in style-aware alignment and music quality.
作者Meicong Zhang, Tiancheng Su, Jiahao Cheng, Guoxiu He, Xinqi Tao, Dejia Song
Generating a rigorous paper introduction with large language models (LLMs) remains challenging, since it requires coordinating background, gap identification, method and contribution within a coherent narrative. Existing solutions externalize this process as multi-stage prompts or agent workflows which are expensive and vulnerable to cross-stage drift. We propose StructPO, a struct-aware policy learning framework that internalizes the entire multi-stage writing workflow into a single-pass policy controlled by explicit stage tokens. StructPO introduces struct-aware credit assignment to decouple local stage quality from global coherence and refinement-guided optimization to internalize revision behavior into the first-pass policy. Experiments show that StructPO improves semantic alignment, structural rationality and inference efficiency over workflow-based baselines, generalizes to out-of-domain settings, and remains competitive with GPT-5.1 in human evaluation when scaled to Qwen3-32B. These results show that internalizing academic writing workflows through fine-grained policy optimization offers a viable alternative to costly external orchestration.
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Generating a rigorous paper introduction with large language models (LLMs) remains challenging, since it requires coordinating background, gap identification, method and contribution within a coherent narrative. Existing solutions externalize this process as multi-stage prompts or agent workflows which are expensive and vulnerable to cross-stage drift. We propose StructPO, a struct-aware policy learning framework that internalizes the entire multi-stage writing workflow into a single-pass policy controlled by explicit stage tokens. StructPO introduces struct-aware credit assignment to decouple local stage quality from global coherence and refinement-guided optimization to internalize revision behavior into the first-pass policy. Experiments show that StructPO improves semantic alignment, structural rationality and inference efficiency over workflow-based baselines, generalizes to out-of-domain settings, and remains competitive with GPT-5.1 in human evaluation when scaled to Qwen3-32B. These results show that internalizing academic writing workflows through fine-grained policy optimization offers a viable alternative to costly external orchestration.
作者Yongshi Ye, Liang Zhang, Yidong Chen, Xiaodong Shi, Biao Fu
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves LLM reasoning but typically relies on ground-truth (GT) answers, limiting scalability. Voting-based label-free RLVR replace gold supervision with answer-level consensus from model samples. However, collapse arises when the same answer-level signal is used both to estimate rewards and to drive token-level policy optimization, encouraging the model to directly reinforce answer tokens rather than improve reasoning. We propose OM-GRPO, a label-free RLVR framework that decouples reward estimation from policy optimization. OM-GRPO masks gradients on the answer span while retaining answer-level rewards through a soft consensus signal, shifting optimization pressure away from answer tokens. We further introduce Contrast-Augmented Reward, which refines reward estimation via low-cost pairwise comparisons over existing trajectories without additional rollouts. Across diverse reasoning benchmarks and three LLM backbones, OM-GRPO consistently outperforms existing label-free RLVR methods and matches supervised GT-reward training with stable optimization. This stability is particularly beneficial in the Test-Time Training setting, where OM-GRPO surpasses majority voting by 4.24 points.
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Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves LLM reasoning but typically relies on ground-truth (GT) answers, limiting scalability. Voting-based label-free RLVR replace gold supervision with answer-level consensus from model samples. However, collapse arises when the same answer-level signal is used both to estimate rewards and to drive token-level policy optimization, encouraging the model to directly reinforce answer tokens rather than improve reasoning. We propose OM-GRPO, a label-free RLVR framework that decouples reward estimation from policy optimization. OM-GRPO masks gradients on the answer span while retaining answer-level rewards through a soft consensus signal, shifting optimization pressure away from answer tokens. We further introduce Contrast-Augmented Reward, which refines reward estimation via low-cost pairwise comparisons over existing trajectories without additional rollouts. Across diverse reasoning benchmarks and three LLM backbones, OM-GRPO consistently outperforms existing label-free RLVR methods and matches supervised GT-reward training with stable optimization. This stability is particularly beneficial in the Test-Time Training setting, where OM-GRPO surpasses majority voting by 4.24 points.
作者Zixuan Liu, Fangzheng Wu, Brian Summa, Zizhan Zheng
Reinforcement learning (RL) with general utility extends classic RL by optimizing an arbitrary utility functional of the policy-induced occupancy measure, thereby enabling a broader range of applications. However, previous work on general utility RL typically assumes the evaluation utility is fixed and correctly specified. In practice, the utility used at deployment can deviate from the training one, creating a robustness gap that prior work does not address. Motivated by this, we propose robust general-utility RL, a minimax learning framework that trains policies against utility misspecification within a prescribed uncertainty set. Our framework strictly generalizes standard general-utility RL while also providing a unified view of many existing RL frameworks, including reward-robust RL and constrained RL, through appropriate choices of the utility uncertainty set. We further develop provably convergent stochastic algorithms for two regimes. For concave utilities, we develop a projected stochastic gradient descent-ascent method and establish stationarity guarantees. For the more challenging nonconcave regime, we propose a stochastic prox-extragradient algorithm that mitigates ill-posed behavior induced by nonconcavity, with convergence guarantees to approximate first-order stationarity. Experiments on LLM safety alignment and exploration maximization tasks further corroborate the convergence behavior consistent with our theory.
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Reinforcement learning (RL) with general utility extends classic RL by optimizing an arbitrary utility functional of the policy-induced occupancy measure, thereby enabling a broader range of applications. However, previous work on general utility RL typically assumes the evaluation utility is fixed and correctly specified. In practice, the utility used at deployment can deviate from the training one, creating a robustness gap that prior work does not address. Motivated by this, we propose robust general-utility RL, a minimax learning framework that trains policies against utility misspecification within a prescribed uncertainty set. Our framework strictly generalizes standard general-utility RL while also providing a unified view of many existing RL frameworks, including reward-robust RL and constrained RL, through appropriate choices of the utility uncertainty set. We further develop provably convergent stochastic algorithms for two regimes. For concave utilities, we develop a projected stochastic gradient descent-ascent method and establish stationarity guarantees. For the more challenging nonconcave regime, we propose a stochastic prox-extragradient algorithm that mitigates ill-posed behavior induced by nonconcavity, with convergence guarantees to approximate first-order stationarity. Experiments on LLM safety alignment and exploration maximization tasks further corroborate the convergence behavior consistent with our theory.
作者Mingzhuo Li, Guang Li, Linfeng Ye, Jiafeng Mao, Takahiro Ogawa, Konstantinos N. Plataniotis, Miki Haseyama
Dataset distillation compresses a large training set into a compact synthetic set while retaining its downstream utility. Most existing methods target randomly initialized networks, whereas modern vision systems often adapt frozen pretrained encoders with lightweight modules. Distilled samples should therefore preserve the discriminative geometry of the pretrained representation space, which existing generative objectives do not explicitly consider. We propose self-supervised representation-guided generative dataset distillation (SRG), a framework that translates the SSL geometry into diffusion guidance. Specifically, SRG constructs class-wise prototypes from real-image SSL representations and performs guidance through three SSL-space objectives for prototype alignment, inter-class discrimination, and intra-class assignment. During diffusion sampling, it adopts a stage-wise guidance strategy: early denoising is anchored to the latent of the real image whose SSL representation is nearest to the assigned prototype, whereas later denoising is guided by the SSL-space objectives. This division preserves the visual realism provided by the generative prior while progressively steering samples toward representative and class-discriminative regions of the SSL representation space. SRG consistently outperforms the evaluated generative baselines across multiple datasets and IPC settings. A cross-encoder evaluation further indicates transfer across pretrained representation spaces. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of representation-guided generation for dataset distillation with pretrained SSL models.
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Dataset distillation compresses a large training set into a compact synthetic set while retaining its downstream utility. Most existing methods target randomly initialized networks, whereas modern vision systems often adapt frozen pretrained encoders with lightweight modules. Distilled samples should therefore preserve the discriminative geometry of the pretrained representation space, which existing generative objectives do not explicitly consider. We propose self-supervised representation-guided generative dataset distillation (SRG), a framework that translates the SSL geometry into diffusion guidance. Specifically, SRG constructs class-wise prototypes from real-image SSL representations and performs guidance through three SSL-space objectives for prototype alignment, inter-class discrimination, and intra-class assignment. During diffusion sampling, it adopts a stage-wise guidance strategy: early denoising is anchored to the latent of the real image whose SSL representation is nearest to the assigned prototype, whereas later denoising is guided by the SSL-space objectives. This division preserves the visual realism provided by the generative prior while progressively steering samples toward representative and class-discriminative regions of the SSL representation space. SRG consistently outperforms the evaluated generative baselines across multiple datasets and IPC settings. A cross-encoder evaluation further indicates transfer across pretrained representation spaces. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of representation-guided generation for dataset distillation with pretrained SSL models.
Agentic reinforcement learning enables LLM agents to learn through interaction, but sparse trajectory-level rewards reveal success without identifying which intermediate decisions deserve credit. Training-only privileged skills can provide denser supervision by allowing the same frozen policy snapshot to rescore fixed tokens from skill-free trajectories while conditioned on task-matched procedural skills. Existing methods, however, do not jointly calibrate teacher scores across interaction steps, relate teacher confidence to realized returns, and integrate the resulting signal into native reward-to-advantage construction. We introduce Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Self-Distilled Reward Shaping (ADRS), a framework for constructing return-associated token-level credit for multi-turn language agents. ADRS centers and normalizes privileged token scores within each step, modulates them with a return-associated Teacher Value Advantage (TVA) gate based on within-group confidence--return association, and incorporates the gated token signal into native RL credit construction. Together, these components determine what the teacher prefers, when that preference is return-relevant, and how it enters the native reinforcement-learning credit path, while keeping rollouts and inference skill-free. Finally, experiments across three interactive benchmarks show that ADRS consistently improves performance on long-horizon tasks, with gains persisting across RL backbones, reduced-data settings, unseen tasks, and extended training. For anonymous review, our code is available at the following the link: https://github.com/gitrxh/ADRS-arxiv
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Agentic reinforcement learning enables LLM agents to learn through interaction, but sparse trajectory-level rewards reveal success without identifying which intermediate decisions deserve credit. Training-only privileged skills can provide denser supervision by allowing the same frozen policy snapshot to rescore fixed tokens from skill-free trajectories while conditioned on task-matched procedural skills. Existing methods, however, do not jointly calibrate teacher scores across interaction steps, relate teacher confidence to realized returns, and integrate the resulting signal into native reward-to-advantage construction. We introduce Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Self-Distilled Reward Shaping (ADRS), a framework for constructing return-associated token-level credit for multi-turn language agents. ADRS centers and normalizes privileged token scores within each step, modulates them with a return-associated Teacher Value Advantage (TVA) gate based on within-group confidence--return association, and incorporates the gated token signal into native RL credit construction. Together, these components determine what the teacher prefers, when that preference is return-relevant, and how it enters the native reinforcement-learning credit path, while keeping rollouts and inference skill-free. Finally, experiments across three interactive benchmarks show that ADRS consistently improves performance on long-horizon tasks, with gains persisting across RL backbones, reduced-data settings, unseen tasks, and extended training. For anonymous review, our code is available at the following the link: https://github.com/gitrxh/ADRS-arxiv
作者Ziqi Jia, Yalu Ouyang, Bo Pang, Panpan Li, Hangfei Xu, Shengzhao Wen, Shiyong Li, Yanpeng Wang
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective method for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods suffer from insufficient precision in feedback on generated answer trajectories and exhibit the phenomenon of problem difficulty drift. To address these challenges, we propose CVPO - Curriculum-guided Value-Variance Policy Optimization. At the response trajectory level, we find that token-level value-variance correlates with exploration intensity. Our theoretical analysis shows this variance bounds policy update magnitude. We then use the estimated trajectory value-variance to quantify the intrinsic randomness in generation. Based on this, we design a variance-aware advantage adjustment mechanism for different reward types. At the question level, we introduce a dynamic curriculum weighting method that adapts to question difficulty. This helps the model focus on tasks matched to its current ability during each training stage. Experimental results show our method outperforms strong value-based baselines like VAPO. It achieves better performance and stronger exploration, enabling more accurate and robust reasoning in language models across various math tasks.
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Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective method for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods suffer from insufficient precision in feedback on generated answer trajectories and exhibit the phenomenon of problem difficulty drift. To address these challenges, we propose CVPO - Curriculum-guided Value-Variance Policy Optimization. At the response trajectory level, we find that token-level value-variance correlates with exploration intensity. Our theoretical analysis shows this variance bounds policy update magnitude. We then use the estimated trajectory value-variance to quantify the intrinsic randomness in generation. Based on this, we design a variance-aware advantage adjustment mechanism for different reward types. At the question level, we introduce a dynamic curriculum weighting method that adapts to question difficulty. This helps the model focus on tasks matched to its current ability during each training stage. Experimental results show our method outperforms strong value-based baselines like VAPO. It achieves better performance and stronger exploration, enabling more accurate and robust reasoning in language models across various math tasks.
作者Xiuyuan Zhu, Ke Lu, Kun Dong, Siwen Jiao, Hao Wu, Zijin Du, Shun Mao, Dongming Zhang, Jian Xue
Generative Vision-Language Models (VLMs) commonly treat bounding-box coordinates as independent output symbols, leaving numerical order and axis semantics implicit. We identify this representation as an important source of error in visual grounding. Hi-Token encodes each coordinate with axis-specific tokens for the hundreds, tens, and ones digits, which adds coarse-to-fine structure and increases token reuse while retaining the existing VLM architecture. Hi-GAR complements this representation with a geometry-based reward for Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), using box overlap and coordinate accuracy at multiple scales. Controlled comparisons under matched training conditions show that Hi-Token improves localization throughout the evaluated IoU range. Hi-GAR further reduces low-overlap predictions and is used only during training. Experiments on three VLM backbones and the RefCOCO family show consistent gains across models and benchmarks. Hi-R1 achieves higher values than strong specialist baselines on most reported metrics. Analyses of token frequency, digit boundaries, object scale, and IoU distributions explain the effects of coordinate representation and reward training. The results show that structured coordinate generation provides an effective approach to generative visual grounding.
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Generative Vision-Language Models (VLMs) commonly treat bounding-box coordinates as independent output symbols, leaving numerical order and axis semantics implicit. We identify this representation as an important source of error in visual grounding. Hi-Token encodes each coordinate with axis-specific tokens for the hundreds, tens, and ones digits, which adds coarse-to-fine structure and increases token reuse while retaining the existing VLM architecture. Hi-GAR complements this representation with a geometry-based reward for Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), using box overlap and coordinate accuracy at multiple scales. Controlled comparisons under matched training conditions show that Hi-Token improves localization throughout the evaluated IoU range. Hi-GAR further reduces low-overlap predictions and is used only during training. Experiments on three VLM backbones and the RefCOCO family show consistent gains across models and benchmarks. Hi-R1 achieves higher values than strong specialist baselines on most reported metrics. Analyses of token frequency, digit boundaries, object scale, and IoU distributions explain the effects of coordinate representation and reward training. The results show that structured coordinate generation provides an effective approach to generative visual grounding.
作者Pyrros Koussios, Chenhao Li, Xin Chen, Andreas Krause
Designing effective reward functions remains a major bottleneck in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Recent work uses large foundation Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as reward models, computing text-observation similarity to bypass manual reward engineering. Although promising, these rewards are often noisy and unreliable, limiting their direct utility during deployment. We present Structure-Aware Fine-Tuning (SAFT), a simple, self-supervised method that refines these imperfect reward signals online without access to ground-truth supervision. SAFT leverages intrinsic structural priors to regularize the VLM's latent space via LoRA adapters. We rigorously evaluate SAFT across a spectrum of base model capabilities to demonstrate its versatility. Our results show that SAFT consistently denoises the reward landscape, yielding faster policy convergence and substantially improved alignment (EPIC distance) relative to the underlying base model, suggesting that failures can often be attributed to structural brittleness rather than semantic misunderstanding. By replacing extensive human preference annotation with structural inductive biases inherent to the task, SAFT offers a scalable path for stabilizing text-conditioned RL and underscores the broader value of incorporating task structure as a general inductive bias.
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Designing effective reward functions remains a major bottleneck in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Recent work uses large foundation Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as reward models, computing text-observation similarity to bypass manual reward engineering. Although promising, these rewards are often noisy and unreliable, limiting their direct utility during deployment. We present Structure-Aware Fine-Tuning (SAFT), a simple, self-supervised method that refines these imperfect reward signals online without access to ground-truth supervision. SAFT leverages intrinsic structural priors to regularize the VLM's latent space via LoRA adapters. We rigorously evaluate SAFT across a spectrum of base model capabilities to demonstrate its versatility. Our results show that SAFT consistently denoises the reward landscape, yielding faster policy convergence and substantially improved alignment (EPIC distance) relative to the underlying base model, suggesting that failures can often be attributed to structural brittleness rather than semantic misunderstanding. By replacing extensive human preference annotation with structural inductive biases inherent to the task, SAFT offers a scalable path for stabilizing text-conditioned RL and underscores the broader value of incorporating task structure as a general inductive bias.
Many critical reasoning tasks, including clinical diagnosis, legal judgment, and industrial fault diagnosis, require step-dependent causal chains in which early errors propagate and correct conclusions can mask invalid reasoning. Although large language models perform well on such tasks, privacy, latency, and controllability motivate distillation into locally deployable models. Standard trajectory imitation does not correct process errors on the student's own rollout distribution. We propose CausalOPD, a curriculum online process distillation framework. A knowledge-augmented teacher first provides trajectories grounded in domain-specific causal rules, entity relations, and structural constraints. The student then generates on-policy trajectories, and the teacher identifies the first wrong step, defined as the earliest transition that verifiably violates available constraints. Starting from the verified prefix, short-horizon reinforcement learning repairs this localized failure. A causal-stage curriculum advances from evidence-level to mechanism-level and conclusion-level errors, following their propagation order. Across three domains, CausalOPD improves average path correctness by 23.4 percentage points over sequence-level online process distillation and reduces the right-label-wrong-reasoning rate from 15.7% to 4.4%. The domain-specific 8B students also surpass both evaluated proprietary references in path correctness across all domains.
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Many critical reasoning tasks, including clinical diagnosis, legal judgment, and industrial fault diagnosis, require step-dependent causal chains in which early errors propagate and correct conclusions can mask invalid reasoning. Although large language models perform well on such tasks, privacy, latency, and controllability motivate distillation into locally deployable models. Standard trajectory imitation does not correct process errors on the student's own rollout distribution. We propose CausalOPD, a curriculum online process distillation framework. A knowledge-augmented teacher first provides trajectories grounded in domain-specific causal rules, entity relations, and structural constraints. The student then generates on-policy trajectories, and the teacher identifies the first wrong step, defined as the earliest transition that verifiably violates available constraints. Starting from the verified prefix, short-horizon reinforcement learning repairs this localized failure. A causal-stage curriculum advances from evidence-level to mechanism-level and conclusion-level errors, following their propagation order. Across three domains, CausalOPD improves average path correctness by 23.4 percentage points over sequence-level online process distillation and reduces the right-label-wrong-reasoning rate from 15.7% to 4.4%. The domain-specific 8B students also surpass both evaluated proprietary references in path correctness across all domains.
作者Yuanshen Guan, Zipeng Feng, Chengru Song, Zhiwei Xiong, Peiqin Sun
Aligning diffusion models with human preferences usually relies on a sparse terminal reward evaluated on the final generated samples, presenting a severe temporal credit-assignment challenge across the multi-step denoising process. We propose Latent Reward Registers, a mechanism that estimates terminal preference directly from intermediate noisy latents by prepending learnable, position-free register tokens to the input sequence of a frozen Diffusion Transformer (DiT). This independent readout mechanism extracts latent reward evidence without altering the generator's hidden states or velocity field. The resulting dense, differentiable reward signal throughout the full denoising process facilitates two alignment strategies. For training, Reward-Gradient On-Policy Distillation (RG-OPD) distills reward-guided updates along on-policy trajectories, bypassing the computationally expensive rollouts of standard policy gradients. For inference, Reward-Guided Sampling (RGS) steers trajectories via magnitude-matched reward gradients without parameter updates. Empirically, at high noise levels (u = 0.8), the registers reach the highest pairwise accuracy among the evaluated latent reward models. Furthermore, RG-OPD outperforms online reinforcement learning baselines while reducing GPU hours by up to 33x, and RGS establishes a new state-of-the-art among training-free methods, strictly enhancing both alignment and perceptual metrics. Code and weights are available at https://github.com/Guanys-dar/latent-reward-register
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Aligning diffusion models with human preferences usually relies on a sparse terminal reward evaluated on the final generated samples, presenting a severe temporal credit-assignment challenge across the multi-step denoising process. We propose Latent Reward Registers, a mechanism that estimates terminal preference directly from intermediate noisy latents by prepending learnable, position-free register tokens to the input sequence of a frozen Diffusion Transformer (DiT). This independent readout mechanism extracts latent reward evidence without altering the generator's hidden states or velocity field. The resulting dense, differentiable reward signal throughout the full denoising process facilitates two alignment strategies. For training, Reward-Gradient On-Policy Distillation (RG-OPD) distills reward-guided updates along on-policy trajectories, bypassing the computationally expensive rollouts of standard policy gradients. For inference, Reward-Guided Sampling (RGS) steers trajectories via magnitude-matched reward gradients without parameter updates. Empirically, at high noise levels (u = 0.8), the registers reach the highest pairwise accuracy among the evaluated latent reward models. Furthermore, RG-OPD outperforms online reinforcement learning baselines while reducing GPU hours by up to 33x, and RGS establishes a new state-of-the-art among training-free methods, strictly enhancing both alignment and perceptual metrics. Code and weights are available at https://github.com/Guanys-dar/latent-reward-register
We aim to improve model performance in multi-reward reinforcement learning training process. Existing Group reward-Decoupled Normalization Policy Optimization (GDPO) has mitigated the issue of reward signals masking one another during direct scalarization by normalizing each reward dimension separately before aggregation. However, our experiments show that GDPO still struggles to balance reward signals with different granularities. Specifically, in some particular training tasks, the model may receive a dense reward that assigns fine-grained scores ranging from 0.1 to 1.0, together with a sparse reward that provides only binary feedback of either 0 or 1. In such cases, we find that the sparse reward may provide an insufficient optimization signal, preventing its corresponding capability from being effectively reinforced. Therefore, how can we strengthen the optimization signal from the sparse reward without sacrificing the capability already learned from the fine-grained reward? To overcome this limitation, we propose Specialize-and-Merge Online Policy Distillation (SMOPD), a two-stage training method for multi-reward optimization. Stage1-Specialize: SMOPD first employs reward-priority configurations to train multiple reward-specialized teachers, allowing each reward to be learned under conditions where its signal can effectively drive optimization. Stage2-Merge: SMOPD then utilizes online policy distillation to combine the reward-specialized capabilities of these teachers into a single student policy, while maintaining balanced task-level optimization. To validate our method, we conduct experiments on two multi-reward settings: complementary rewards(tool-calling accuracy and format) and conflicting rewards (helpful and harmless rewards). Based on above settings, SMOPD outperforms GDPO across 1.5B, 3B and 7B backbones.
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We aim to improve model performance in multi-reward reinforcement learning training process. Existing Group reward-Decoupled Normalization Policy Optimization (GDPO) has mitigated the issue of reward signals masking one another during direct scalarization by normalizing each reward dimension separately before aggregation. However, our experiments show that GDPO still struggles to balance reward signals with different granularities. Specifically, in some particular training tasks, the model may receive a dense reward that assigns fine-grained scores ranging from 0.1 to 1.0, together with a sparse reward that provides only binary feedback of either 0 or 1. In such cases, we find that the sparse reward may provide an insufficient optimization signal, preventing its corresponding capability from being effectively reinforced. Therefore, how can we strengthen the optimization signal from the sparse reward without sacrificing the capability already learned from the fine-grained reward? To overcome this limitation, we propose Specialize-and-Merge Online Policy Distillation (SMOPD), a two-stage training method for multi-reward optimization. Stage1-Specialize: SMOPD first employs reward-priority configurations to train multiple reward-specialized teachers, allowing each reward to be learned under conditions where its signal can effectively drive optimization. Stage2-Merge: SMOPD then utilizes online policy distillation to combine the reward-specialized capabilities of these teachers into a single student policy, while maintaining balanced task-level optimization. To validate our method, we conduct experiments on two multi-reward settings: complementary rewards(tool-calling accuracy and format) and conflicting rewards (helpful and harmless rewards). Based on above settings, SMOPD outperforms GDPO across 1.5B, 3B and 7B backbones.
Federated learning enables collaborative model training across distributed edge devices while strictly preserving data privacy. To facilitate practical deployment on resource-constrained edge devices, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) due to their sparse computing mechanisms and high energy efficiency. However, jointly training ANNs and SNNs exposes a challenge of representational misalignment, which is intrinsically caused by differences in information representation, specifically the semantic gap between continuous real-valued activations in ANNs and discrete spatio-temporal spikes in SNNs. To overcome this barrier, we propose AS-FedBridge, a novel federated learning framework tailored for mixed ANN-SNN clients. AS-FedBridge features a lightweight Bridge equipped with a Pseudo-Spike Interface, which effectively projects continuous signals into a spike-compatible space to facilitate ANN-SNN alignment. Given the absence of existing mixed ANN-SNN federated frameworks, we establish a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate against multiple advanced heterogeneous FL methods. Our empirical analysis demonstrates a positive correlation between the degree of ANN-SNN alignment and the collaborative FL performance. Across four datasets, AS-FedBridge consistently demonstrates advanced accuracy while mitigating extreme scale, architecture, and client heterogeneity challenge. Furthermore, our framework enables a highly controllable trade-off between model performance and resource efficiency. AS-FedBridge accomplishes these robust performance gains while introducing only marginal computational overhead, establishing a robust and practical foundation for mixed ANN-SNN federated learning systems.
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Federated learning enables collaborative model training across distributed edge devices while strictly preserving data privacy. To facilitate practical deployment on resource-constrained edge devices, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) due to their sparse computing mechanisms and high energy efficiency. However, jointly training ANNs and SNNs exposes a challenge of representational misalignment, which is intrinsically caused by differences in information representation, specifically the semantic gap between continuous real-valued activations in ANNs and discrete spatio-temporal spikes in SNNs. To overcome this barrier, we propose AS-FedBridge, a novel federated learning framework tailored for mixed ANN-SNN clients. AS-FedBridge features a lightweight Bridge equipped with a Pseudo-Spike Interface, which effectively projects continuous signals into a spike-compatible space to facilitate ANN-SNN alignment. Given the absence of existing mixed ANN-SNN federated frameworks, we establish a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate against multiple advanced heterogeneous FL methods. Our empirical analysis demonstrates a positive correlation between the degree of ANN-SNN alignment and the collaborative FL performance. Across four datasets, AS-FedBridge consistently demonstrates advanced accuracy while mitigating extreme scale, architecture, and client heterogeneity challenge. Furthermore, our framework enables a highly controllable trade-off between model performance and resource efficiency. AS-FedBridge accomplishes these robust performance gains while introducing only marginal computational overhead, establishing a robust and practical foundation for mixed ANN-SNN federated learning systems.
Causal diagnostic models must explain how conclusions follow from evidence because diagnoses guide repairs and treatments. Yet serious cases are scarce, records rarely contain reasoning paths, and data transfer poorly across configurations, complicating local deployment. We present DiagLoop, a counterfactual data flywheel that converts codified physical relations or clinical guidelines, authored once per mechanism family, into training supervision beyond recorded cases. A training-only teacher proposes counterfactual worlds by varying causes, contexts, and observations, while an independent hybrid checker admits only valid worlds. The student reasons through symptom abstraction, causal-chain construction, and root-cause attribution. Stage-specific criteria identify its earliest failure. For nonterminal failures, a bounded repair probes downstream competence, and the resulting weakness profile guides subsequent data generation. Stage-localized reinforcement learning updates only the model-generated continuation, while replay and preservation reduce forgetting. The same criteria govern admission, attribution, reward, and regeneration through checks separate from the proposer. Using only synthesized scenarios and no case-level expert reasoning annotations, the resulting 8B model improves strict path correctness over the strongest conventional baseline. Gains are 11.6 points across eight industrial systems and 5.5 points across ten disease categories. Gains over a deranged-routing control are 3.9 and 2.3 points, respectively. The model also exceeds the evaluated proprietary references in both domains, even when they receive few-shot examples or the specification in context.
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Causal diagnostic models must explain how conclusions follow from evidence because diagnoses guide repairs and treatments. Yet serious cases are scarce, records rarely contain reasoning paths, and data transfer poorly across configurations, complicating local deployment. We present DiagLoop, a counterfactual data flywheel that converts codified physical relations or clinical guidelines, authored once per mechanism family, into training supervision beyond recorded cases. A training-only teacher proposes counterfactual worlds by varying causes, contexts, and observations, while an independent hybrid checker admits only valid worlds. The student reasons through symptom abstraction, causal-chain construction, and root-cause attribution. Stage-specific criteria identify its earliest failure. For nonterminal failures, a bounded repair probes downstream competence, and the resulting weakness profile guides subsequent data generation. Stage-localized reinforcement learning updates only the model-generated continuation, while replay and preservation reduce forgetting. The same criteria govern admission, attribution, reward, and regeneration through checks separate from the proposer. Using only synthesized scenarios and no case-level expert reasoning annotations, the resulting 8B model improves strict path correctness over the strongest conventional baseline. Gains are 11.6 points across eight industrial systems and 5.5 points across ten disease categories. Gains over a deranged-routing control are 3.9 and 2.3 points, respectively. The model also exceeds the evaluated proprietary references in both domains, even when they receive few-shot examples or the specification in context.
Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) enables LLMs to solve complex tasks through iterative tool interactions. However, existing reinforcement learning methods often rely on trajectory-level supervision, limiting fine-grained credit assignment in long-horizon TIR scenarios. On-policy self-distillation offers denser signals through teacher branches with privileged context, but existing approaches typically derive such context from ground-truth answers or retrieved skills, which may not reflect the states actually visited by the agent. Moreover, token-level supervision fails to capture the turn-level structure of tool interactions. To address this, we propose TurnSight, a turn-level hindsight self-distillation framework that derives supervision directly from execution-conditioned hindsight. It then constructs multiple hindsight views with different lookahead horizons and selects reliable supervision through cross-horizon directional agreement. Finally, the selected hindsight signal is normalized across sibling rollouts and used to adaptively modulate RL advantages while preserving their original optimization direction. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of TurnSight. Our codes are available at https://github.com/quchangle1/TurnSight.
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Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) enables LLMs to solve complex tasks through iterative tool interactions. However, existing reinforcement learning methods often rely on trajectory-level supervision, limiting fine-grained credit assignment in long-horizon TIR scenarios. On-policy self-distillation offers denser signals through teacher branches with privileged context, but existing approaches typically derive such context from ground-truth answers or retrieved skills, which may not reflect the states actually visited by the agent. Moreover, token-level supervision fails to capture the turn-level structure of tool interactions. To address this, we propose TurnSight, a turn-level hindsight self-distillation framework that derives supervision directly from execution-conditioned hindsight. It then constructs multiple hindsight views with different lookahead horizons and selects reliable supervision through cross-horizon directional agreement. Finally, the selected hindsight signal is normalized across sibling rollouts and used to adaptively modulate RL advantages while preserving their original optimization direction. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of TurnSight. Our codes are available at https://github.com/quchangle1/TurnSight.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to provide conversational practice for English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners. Effective ESL tutoring, however, requires more than fluent response generation: a tutor must select an appropriate pedagogical action based on learner behavior and dialogue context. Human-tutoring research offers principles for adaptive support, but they are often task-specific and remain insufficiently integrated into LLM-based ESL tutor training and evaluation. We present TACT (Taxonomy-Aligned Conversational Tutor), a human-grounded framework for post-training and evaluating pedagogically adaptive ESL tutors. Drawing on established literature, we develop two complementary taxonomies: the Tutor-Strategy Taxonomy with 13 tutor response strategies and the Student-Move Taxonomy characterizing learner behavior by move type and status. Using these taxonomies, we construct TACTCorpus, which enriches 260 authentic teacher-student conversations with 32,379 annotations and quality-controlled augmented training data. We then post-train Qwen3.5-4B through supervised fine-tuning followed by taxonomy-aligned Group Relative Policy Optimization, producing TACTutor and optimizing it for scaffolding quality rather than reference imitation alone. On TACTBench, a strategy-balanced diagnostic benchmark comprising 78 authentic tutoring contexts, TACTutor improves over its backbone by 20.30% and outperforms all evaluated proprietary baselines under the same protocol, while maintaining backbone performance on established external educational benchmarks; in a blinded study with 50 learners, it also receives the highest overall mean rating among the evaluated tutors. We release the data, benchmark, and model weights, providing an open foundation for developing pedagogically adaptive ESL tutors.
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Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to provide conversational practice for English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners. Effective ESL tutoring, however, requires more than fluent response generation: a tutor must select an appropriate pedagogical action based on learner behavior and dialogue context. Human-tutoring research offers principles for adaptive support, but they are often task-specific and remain insufficiently integrated into LLM-based ESL tutor training and evaluation. We present TACT (Taxonomy-Aligned Conversational Tutor), a human-grounded framework for post-training and evaluating pedagogically adaptive ESL tutors. Drawing on established literature, we develop two complementary taxonomies: the Tutor-Strategy Taxonomy with 13 tutor response strategies and the Student-Move Taxonomy characterizing learner behavior by move type and status. Using these taxonomies, we construct TACTCorpus, which enriches 260 authentic teacher-student conversations with 32,379 annotations and quality-controlled augmented training data. We then post-train Qwen3.5-4B through supervised fine-tuning followed by taxonomy-aligned Group Relative Policy Optimization, producing TACTutor and optimizing it for scaffolding quality rather than reference imitation alone. On TACTBench, a strategy-balanced diagnostic benchmark comprising 78 authentic tutoring contexts, TACTutor improves over its backbone by 20.30% and outperforms all evaluated proprietary baselines under the same protocol, while maintaining backbone performance on established external educational benchmarks; in a blinded study with 50 learners, it also receives the highest overall mean rating among the evaluated tutors. We release the data, benchmark, and model weights, providing an open foundation for developing pedagogically adaptive ESL tutors.
作者Yinuo Jiang, Yongjie Ye, Zhou Tao, Xiang Zhuang, Qiang Zhang, Huajun Chen, Tiankai Li
On-Policy distillation (OPD) transfers teacher capabilities by supervising student-sampled trajectories with dense token-level teacher signals. Recent selective OPD methods improve this process by prioritizing signals that are confident, informative, or learnable. However, the assumptions overlook a fundamental failure mode of language models: their token-level judgments can be driven by input-agnostic language priors, formatting conventions, or stereotyped reasoning templates rather than task-specific evidence. We refer to such optimization-relevant but weakly input-grounded supervision as spurious signals in OPD, which may produce large gradients while contributing little task-improving direction. To mitigate this issue, we propose SA-OPD, a Spurious-Signal-Aware On-Policy Distillation framework that identifies and filters misleading token-level supervision based on input-groundedness and optimization impact. SA-OPD introduces a lightweight input-groundedness proxy estimating whether a token-level distillation signal truly depends on the input. It then filters only tokens that simultaneously exhibit low input-groundedness and extreme distillation divergence, thereby removing high-impact spurious updates and achieving fine-grained OPD optimization. Extensive experiments on both large language model (LLM) and vision-language model (VLM) settings demonstrate that SA-OPD consistently outperforms Vanilla OPD and competitive selective methods. These results establish input-groundedness as a key dimension for OPD supervision selection and offer a simple, effective strategy for mitigating spurious updates.
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On-Policy distillation (OPD) transfers teacher capabilities by supervising student-sampled trajectories with dense token-level teacher signals. Recent selective OPD methods improve this process by prioritizing signals that are confident, informative, or learnable. However, the assumptions overlook a fundamental failure mode of language models: their token-level judgments can be driven by input-agnostic language priors, formatting conventions, or stereotyped reasoning templates rather than task-specific evidence. We refer to such optimization-relevant but weakly input-grounded supervision as spurious signals in OPD, which may produce large gradients while contributing little task-improving direction. To mitigate this issue, we propose SA-OPD, a Spurious-Signal-Aware On-Policy Distillation framework that identifies and filters misleading token-level supervision based on input-groundedness and optimization impact. SA-OPD introduces a lightweight input-groundedness proxy estimating whether a token-level distillation signal truly depends on the input. It then filters only tokens that simultaneously exhibit low input-groundedness and extreme distillation divergence, thereby removing high-impact spurious updates and achieving fine-grained OPD optimization. Extensive experiments on both large language model (LLM) and vision-language model (VLM) settings demonstrate that SA-OPD consistently outperforms Vanilla OPD and competitive selective methods. These results establish input-groundedness as a key dimension for OPD supervision selection and offer a simple, effective strategy for mitigating spurious updates.
Camera-based bird's-eye-view (BEV) 3D detection typically assumes accurate and fixed camera extrinsics. In detectors using spatial cross-attention (SCA), extrinsic perturbations displace the image-plane projections of BEV reference points, causing queries to sample features from incorrect regions and degrading detection performance. To address this failure mode, Noise-Conditional Gated Rectification (NCGR) is proposed to compensate for projection errors without explicitly estimating a full six-degree-of-freedom extrinsic correction. For each query-camera pair, a 2D rectification offset is predicted and modulated by a camera-level gate to rectify the base projection before native deformable sampling. During training, the perturbation-derived quantities used to construct the condition and gate are gradually replaced through scheduled interpolation by counterparts generated from an auxiliary scalar predicted from camera features. This transition enables blind inference without perturbation metadata. During training, a weight-shared clean-teacher/perturbed-student pair is used, and the rectification module is supervised by a BEV-consistency objective between the two branches. NCGR is evaluated on nuScenes with simulated dynamic and static extrinsic perturbations. In a five-camera dynamic stress test, NCGR achieves 39.69% NDS, compared with 28.00% for BEVFormer and 33.23% for CAPE. Under clean extrinsics, NCGR maintains performance comparable to that of BEVFormer.
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Camera-based bird's-eye-view (BEV) 3D detection typically assumes accurate and fixed camera extrinsics. In detectors using spatial cross-attention (SCA), extrinsic perturbations displace the image-plane projections of BEV reference points, causing queries to sample features from incorrect regions and degrading detection performance. To address this failure mode, Noise-Conditional Gated Rectification (NCGR) is proposed to compensate for projection errors without explicitly estimating a full six-degree-of-freedom extrinsic correction. For each query-camera pair, a 2D rectification offset is predicted and modulated by a camera-level gate to rectify the base projection before native deformable sampling. During training, the perturbation-derived quantities used to construct the condition and gate are gradually replaced through scheduled interpolation by counterparts generated from an auxiliary scalar predicted from camera features. This transition enables blind inference without perturbation metadata. During training, a weight-shared clean-teacher/perturbed-student pair is used, and the rectification module is supervised by a BEV-consistency objective between the two branches. NCGR is evaluated on nuScenes with simulated dynamic and static extrinsic perturbations. In a five-camera dynamic stress test, NCGR achieves 39.69% NDS, compared with 28.00% for BEVFormer and 33.23% for CAPE. Under clean extrinsics, NCGR maintains performance comparable to that of BEVFormer.
作者Yuan Xie, Jiaqi Song, Xianliang Wang, Ming Lei, Jie Gao, Jie Wu
Modern LLM-based ASR systems have established multilingual capability as a standard feature, leveraging large-scale multilingual corpora and LLMs' cross-lingual knowledge to achieve competitive performance across multilingual benchmarks. However, joint modeling of languages with heterogeneous acoustic, phonological, and lexical characteristics inevitably introduces optimization conflicts, undermining language-wise specialization. To address this challenge, we propose Language-Specialized Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation (LS-MOPD), which decouples language-specific knowledge acquisition from multilingual capability integration: language-specialized teachers are independently optimized via reinforcement learning (RL), after which their expertise is integrated into a generalist multilingual student through language routing and token-level multi-teacher distillation, thereby reducing direct cross-lingual optimization conflicts. We further explore two acoustic-prefix configurations, static and dynamic, to examine how teacher--student prefix consistency influences the efficacy of on-policy distillation. Experiments on benchmarks covering Mandarin, Mandarin subdialects, Cantonese, and English demonstrate that LS-MOPD substantially outperforms RL baselines and consistently surpasses the empirical performance envelope defined by best-performing RL teachers, revealing its potential to generalize beyond all teachers in multilingual ASR.
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Modern LLM-based ASR systems have established multilingual capability as a standard feature, leveraging large-scale multilingual corpora and LLMs' cross-lingual knowledge to achieve competitive performance across multilingual benchmarks. However, joint modeling of languages with heterogeneous acoustic, phonological, and lexical characteristics inevitably introduces optimization conflicts, undermining language-wise specialization. To address this challenge, we propose Language-Specialized Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation (LS-MOPD), which decouples language-specific knowledge acquisition from multilingual capability integration: language-specialized teachers are independently optimized via reinforcement learning (RL), after which their expertise is integrated into a generalist multilingual student through language routing and token-level multi-teacher distillation, thereby reducing direct cross-lingual optimization conflicts. We further explore two acoustic-prefix configurations, static and dynamic, to examine how teacher--student prefix consistency influences the efficacy of on-policy distillation. Experiments on benchmarks covering Mandarin, Mandarin subdialects, Cantonese, and English demonstrate that LS-MOPD substantially outperforms RL baselines and consistently surpasses the empirical performance envelope defined by best-performing RL teachers, revealing its potential to generalize beyond all teachers in multilingual ASR.
作者Zhang Weihui, Wang Ruizhi, Xu Hongye, Wang Huiqiong, Sun Li, Song Mingli
Developing robust flood assessment models requires high-quality paired satellite imagery, yet such data remain scarce for flood-specific image generation. Although generative models provide a promising means of data augmentation, existing methods often yield implausible spatial layouts of flooded regions and distort scene structures. We propose FlowForm, a framework for satellite flood synthesis that integrates SWE-inspired latent regularization with structure-aware conditioning. The Flood Descriptor Module (FDM) imposes differentiable penalties on residuals of the steady-state Shallow Water Equation in auxiliary latent fields at the diffusion bottleneck. The Terrain Anchor Adapter (TAA) injects depth, semantic, and edge features at four encoder scales of the U-Net. We further curate FloodScape, a large-scale, high-resolution dataset comprising paired satellite images acquired before and after disasters. In addition to standard image-generation metrics, we evaluate the consistency of flooded regions, zero-shot generalization to a geographically held-out flood event, and sensitivity to individual components. Across all reported comparisons, FlowForm achieves higher visual fidelity, greater similarity between paired images, and stronger consistency of flooded regions.
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Developing robust flood assessment models requires high-quality paired satellite imagery, yet such data remain scarce for flood-specific image generation. Although generative models provide a promising means of data augmentation, existing methods often yield implausible spatial layouts of flooded regions and distort scene structures. We propose FlowForm, a framework for satellite flood synthesis that integrates SWE-inspired latent regularization with structure-aware conditioning. The Flood Descriptor Module (FDM) imposes differentiable penalties on residuals of the steady-state Shallow Water Equation in auxiliary latent fields at the diffusion bottleneck. The Terrain Anchor Adapter (TAA) injects depth, semantic, and edge features at four encoder scales of the U-Net. We further curate FloodScape, a large-scale, high-resolution dataset comprising paired satellite images acquired before and after disasters. In addition to standard image-generation metrics, we evaluate the consistency of flooded regions, zero-shot generalization to a geographically held-out flood event, and sensitivity to individual components. Across all reported comparisons, FlowForm achieves higher visual fidelity, greater similarity between paired images, and stronger consistency of flooded regions.
End-to-end driving requires a coherent understanding of future scenes, yet existing methods model these scenes using task-specific heads and output formats, with limited scalability. Can video generation instead provide a shared predictor? We introduce SUV, a unified end-to-end driving framework that casts future Scene Understanding as Video generation using a pretrained video foundation model. SUV models future appearance, semantics, relative depth, and instance-level dynamics as video streams with a shared video expert, without stream-specific visual prediction heads. Through joint video-action attention, the action expert attends to the latent representations of all future streams and generates the ego trajectory. Experiments show that SUV directly predicts all four future streams, while controlled ablations show that structured future supervision and direct future-stream access yield higher trajectory planning scores. With only a single front camera and no candidate-trajectory selection, SUV outperforms a broad set of recent state-of-the-art methods on both NAVSIM-v2 splits, achieving 91.0 EPDMS on navtest and 36.9 on navhard. On the long-tail WOD-E2E benchmark, SUV achieves a competitive RFS of 7.94.
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End-to-end driving requires a coherent understanding of future scenes, yet existing methods model these scenes using task-specific heads and output formats, with limited scalability. Can video generation instead provide a shared predictor? We introduce SUV, a unified end-to-end driving framework that casts future Scene Understanding as Video generation using a pretrained video foundation model. SUV models future appearance, semantics, relative depth, and instance-level dynamics as video streams with a shared video expert, without stream-specific visual prediction heads. Through joint video-action attention, the action expert attends to the latent representations of all future streams and generates the ego trajectory. Experiments show that SUV directly predicts all four future streams, while controlled ablations show that structured future supervision and direct future-stream access yield higher trajectory planning scores. With only a single front camera and no candidate-trajectory selection, SUV outperforms a broad set of recent state-of-the-art methods on both NAVSIM-v2 splits, achieving 91.0 EPDMS on navtest and 36.9 on navhard. On the long-tail WOD-E2E benchmark, SUV achieves a competitive RFS of 7.94.
Knowledge Distillation (KD) offers a promising yet underexplored path for compressing large action recognition models. However, existing KD methods suffer from two key limitations: 1) reliance on fixed input samples leads to suboptimal feature alignment between the frozen teacher (larger model) and the learnable student (smaller model), and 2) applying a uniform distillation strength for all channels fails to account for their varying importance in capturing distinct knowledge (e.g., motion tempo or magnitude) across training epochs. This motivates us to develop an Adaptive Sample-aware Channel-wise Dynamic (ASCD) KD approach, which operates in two stages. First, we use an adaptive sample generation module to create updated samples by incorporating semantics from sample gradients, which are derived by minimizing a feature loss weighted by channel centroid frequency differences at each layer. Meanwhile, crucial motion-related details are preserved by applying a Gaussian mask to frequency features. Second, we employ a channel-wise dynamic distillation module to train student on these generated samples, guided by sample gradients and feature frequencies. For efficiency, samples are updated periodically rather than per epoch. Extensive experiments on three video benchmarks (UCF101, Kinetics-400, Something-Something-v2) and two image datasets (CIFAR-100, ImageNet) demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvccn/ASCD_KD_Action.
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Knowledge Distillation (KD) offers a promising yet underexplored path for compressing large action recognition models. However, existing KD methods suffer from two key limitations: 1) reliance on fixed input samples leads to suboptimal feature alignment between the frozen teacher (larger model) and the learnable student (smaller model), and 2) applying a uniform distillation strength for all channels fails to account for their varying importance in capturing distinct knowledge (e.g., motion tempo or magnitude) across training epochs. This motivates us to develop an Adaptive Sample-aware Channel-wise Dynamic (ASCD) KD approach, which operates in two stages. First, we use an adaptive sample generation module to create updated samples by incorporating semantics from sample gradients, which are derived by minimizing a feature loss weighted by channel centroid frequency differences at each layer. Meanwhile, crucial motion-related details are preserved by applying a Gaussian mask to frequency features. Second, we employ a channel-wise dynamic distillation module to train student on these generated samples, guided by sample gradients and feature frequencies. For efficiency, samples are updated periodically rather than per epoch. Extensive experiments on three video benchmarks (UCF101, Kinetics-400, Something-Something-v2) and two image datasets (CIFAR-100, ImageNet) demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvccn/ASCD_KD_Action.
Controllable local editing of 3D assets requires precise target localization and appropriate visual guidance. However, existing methods lack a simple yet accurate way to obtain 3D masks and struggle to achieve the desired edit while faithfully preserving the structure and appearance of non-target regions. To address these challenges, we present EditFlow3D, a training-free framework for local 3D editing. Given a source asset and an edit instruction, a VLM-driven workflow interprets the editing intent and automatically constructs a visual guidance image and a refined 3D editing mask, enabling localized editing in the native representation space of a pretrained 3D generative model. Specifically, mask-guided differential flow focuses the edit on the target region, while step-wise trajectory preservation maintains consistency between non-target regions and the source asset without directly replacing intermediate features. Since the existing Edit3D-Bench covers only a limited range of local editing categories, we further introduce EditFlow-Bench as a complementary benchmark encompassing a broader variety of structural and appearance edits, and evaluate EditFlow3D on both benchmarks. Quantitative results, qualitative comparisons, and a user study demonstrate that EditFlow3D achieves more accurate target-region editing and better preserves non-target regions than existing 3D editing methods.
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Controllable local editing of 3D assets requires precise target localization and appropriate visual guidance. However, existing methods lack a simple yet accurate way to obtain 3D masks and struggle to achieve the desired edit while faithfully preserving the structure and appearance of non-target regions. To address these challenges, we present EditFlow3D, a training-free framework for local 3D editing. Given a source asset and an edit instruction, a VLM-driven workflow interprets the editing intent and automatically constructs a visual guidance image and a refined 3D editing mask, enabling localized editing in the native representation space of a pretrained 3D generative model. Specifically, mask-guided differential flow focuses the edit on the target region, while step-wise trajectory preservation maintains consistency between non-target regions and the source asset without directly replacing intermediate features. Since the existing Edit3D-Bench covers only a limited range of local editing categories, we further introduce EditFlow-Bench as a complementary benchmark encompassing a broader variety of structural and appearance edits, and evaluate EditFlow3D on both benchmarks. Quantitative results, qualitative comparisons, and a user study demonstrate that EditFlow3D achieves more accurate target-region editing and better preserves non-target regions than existing 3D editing methods.
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant progress in chart understanding, generation, and editing, but their ability to annotate existing charts remains underexplored. Annotating charts is a common yet challenging communicative task, requiring models to infer intended messages, interpret chart semantics, and place appropriate textual or graphical elements. To address this gap, we introduce ChartAnno, a benchmark for evaluating MLLMs on chart annotation generation. It contains 1,200 real-world charts with paired code and annotation instructions across three levels of instruction specificity. We evaluate 10 representative MLLMs under two primary input settings: (1) chart code alone and (2) both chart code and chart image, and further include a chart image-only ablation study. Results show that proprietary models remain stronger overall, although large-scale open-source models narrow the gap. More specific instructions improve annotation quality, while inferring abstract intent remains most difficult for current MLLMs. Providing chart images brings limited overall gains, with improvements mainly appearing in design-related metrics. These findings highlight chart annotation generation as a challenging task requiring semantic grounding and effective annotation design. Code and data will be released in a future version.
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Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant progress in chart understanding, generation, and editing, but their ability to annotate existing charts remains underexplored. Annotating charts is a common yet challenging communicative task, requiring models to infer intended messages, interpret chart semantics, and place appropriate textual or graphical elements. To address this gap, we introduce ChartAnno, a benchmark for evaluating MLLMs on chart annotation generation. It contains 1,200 real-world charts with paired code and annotation instructions across three levels of instruction specificity. We evaluate 10 representative MLLMs under two primary input settings: (1) chart code alone and (2) both chart code and chart image, and further include a chart image-only ablation study. Results show that proprietary models remain stronger overall, although large-scale open-source models narrow the gap. More specific instructions improve annotation quality, while inferring abstract intent remains most difficult for current MLLMs. Providing chart images brings limited overall gains, with improvements mainly appearing in design-related metrics. These findings highlight chart annotation generation as a challenging task requiring semantic grounding and effective annotation design. Code and data will be released in a future version.
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve and mature, recent AI practices have moved beyond large language models (LLMs) and text or image generation tasks, increasingly integrating tools, agents, and harnesses to solve real business and industrial problems. However, the power of AI is not verified under these real-world complex systems for various reasons, considering reliability, feasibility, resilience, and responsibility requirements in real commercial and industrial operations. This study synthesizes adjacent research and introduces Enactive AI as a conceptual framework for enterprise and industry reasoning, site-level decision support, and execution feedback. Four complementary roles organize the framework: an Organizational World defines operations management logic and an organizational behavior world model behind an enterprise from a strategic-institutional horizon; a Site World defines a physically bounded industrial optimization and execution world model from an operational-realization horizon; Schema Intelligence provides the coupling mechanism between two world models to weave various AI applications via two models; and Enactive Decision Cycle triggers the self-evolving dynamic process to update and audit the entire framework. By foregrounding decision intelligence in complex systems, Enactive AI expands the frontier of AI from model capability to system-aware action, opening new possibilities for scalable, governable, and socially valuable AI deployment. Enactive AI points toward a future in which AI progress is measured not only by what models can generate or automate, but by how reliably intelligent systems can support consequential action, responsible governance, and durable social value in the complex systems that shape modern life, which we believe will define the next frontier of AI research for enterprise-level and industrial complex systems.
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As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve and mature, recent AI practices have moved beyond large language models (LLMs) and text or image generation tasks, increasingly integrating tools, agents, and harnesses to solve real business and industrial problems. However, the power of AI is not verified under these real-world complex systems for various reasons, considering reliability, feasibility, resilience, and responsibility requirements in real commercial and industrial operations. This study synthesizes adjacent research and introduces Enactive AI as a conceptual framework for enterprise and industry reasoning, site-level decision support, and execution feedback. Four complementary roles organize the framework: an Organizational World defines operations management logic and an organizational behavior world model behind an enterprise from a strategic-institutional horizon; a Site World defines a physically bounded industrial optimization and execution world model from an operational-realization horizon; Schema Intelligence provides the coupling mechanism between two world models to weave various AI applications via two models; and Enactive Decision Cycle triggers the self-evolving dynamic process to update and audit the entire framework. By foregrounding decision intelligence in complex systems, Enactive AI expands the frontier of AI from model capability to system-aware action, opening new possibilities for scalable, governable, and socially valuable AI deployment. Enactive AI points toward a future in which AI progress is measured not only by what models can generate or automate, but by how reliably intelligent systems can support consequential action, responsible governance, and durable social value in the complex systems that shape modern life, which we believe will define the next frontier of AI research for enterprise-level and industrial complex systems.
Image-goal visual navigation is a fundamental capability for embodied agents. Existing navigation policies efficiently predict waypoint trajectories but lack visual foresight, while navigation world models can anticipate future observations but often require costly planning rollouts. We present UniNav, a unified world-action model that generates future visual observations and continuous waypoint trajectories through a single diffusion process. Given history frames and a goal image, UniNav jointly denoises visual and waypoint tokens within a single transformer, unifying future prediction and action generation in a shared framework. To improve spatial grounding, we incorporate geometry-aware camera tokens. We also train on both trajectory-labeled navigation data and video-only data, enabling the model to benefit from diverse videos without waypoint annotations. Based on this unified framework, we introduce two variants: UniNav-Full jointly predicts interpretable future observations and their corresponding trajectories, while UniNav-Fast removes future-image tokens at inference for efficient trajectory prediction. Experiments on navigation benchmarks show that UniNav outperforms the strongest baseline in ATE across all datasets. With one-step inference, UniNav-Fast achieves a latency of 0.1s without a substantial accuracy drop. Code will be released.
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Image-goal visual navigation is a fundamental capability for embodied agents. Existing navigation policies efficiently predict waypoint trajectories but lack visual foresight, while navigation world models can anticipate future observations but often require costly planning rollouts. We present UniNav, a unified world-action model that generates future visual observations and continuous waypoint trajectories through a single diffusion process. Given history frames and a goal image, UniNav jointly denoises visual and waypoint tokens within a single transformer, unifying future prediction and action generation in a shared framework. To improve spatial grounding, we incorporate geometry-aware camera tokens. We also train on both trajectory-labeled navigation data and video-only data, enabling the model to benefit from diverse videos without waypoint annotations. Based on this unified framework, we introduce two variants: UniNav-Full jointly predicts interpretable future observations and their corresponding trajectories, while UniNav-Fast removes future-image tokens at inference for efficient trajectory prediction. Experiments on navigation benchmarks show that UniNav outperforms the strongest baseline in ATE across all datasets. With one-step inference, UniNav-Fast achieves a latency of 0.1s without a substantial accuracy drop. Code will be released.
作者Ning Zhu, An Chen, Mengfei Zhao, Juntao Xu, Jingze Liang, Boyuan Gu, Liang-Jian Deng
Text-to-image diffusion models can generate individual concepts well, but they often omit or merge concepts incorrectly with multiple concepts. We trace these failures to an early coordination bottleneck: before denoising begins, prompt-conditioned attention may allocate different concepts to strongly overlapping spatial support, which can keep their attention coupled as denoising proceeds. This observation motivates treating compositional generation as a boundary-condition problem rather than repeatedly controlling the evolving trajectory. To this end, we propose Rectify-then-Diffuse (RTD), a training-free framework that rectifies the initial allocation once before standard denoising. Firstly, we propose Soft-Overlap Disentanglement (SOD), which converts normalized overlap between pilot concept maps into a differentiable and layout-agnostic separation objective. Secondly, we introduce Isotropic Gradient Rectification (IGR), which normalizes the SOD gradient and applies a bounded latent displacement with a consistent scale across prompts and initializations. Extensive experiments show that RTD achieves state-of-the-art compositional fidelity and robust gains. On the AE-Bench object pair subset, RTD improves BLIP-VQA by 45.8% and ImageReward by 19.6% over CO3 while running 2.3$\times$ faster. Code will be released at https://github.com/Z-yiwei/rectify-then-diffuse
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Text-to-image diffusion models can generate individual concepts well, but they often omit or merge concepts incorrectly with multiple concepts. We trace these failures to an early coordination bottleneck: before denoising begins, prompt-conditioned attention may allocate different concepts to strongly overlapping spatial support, which can keep their attention coupled as denoising proceeds. This observation motivates treating compositional generation as a boundary-condition problem rather than repeatedly controlling the evolving trajectory. To this end, we propose Rectify-then-Diffuse (RTD), a training-free framework that rectifies the initial allocation once before standard denoising. Firstly, we propose Soft-Overlap Disentanglement (SOD), which converts normalized overlap between pilot concept maps into a differentiable and layout-agnostic separation objective. Secondly, we introduce Isotropic Gradient Rectification (IGR), which normalizes the SOD gradient and applies a bounded latent displacement with a consistent scale across prompts and initializations. Extensive experiments show that RTD achieves state-of-the-art compositional fidelity and robust gains. On the AE-Bench object pair subset, RTD improves BLIP-VQA by 45.8% and ImageReward by 19.6% over CO3 while running 2.3$\times$ faster. Code will be released at https://github.com/Z-yiwei/rectify-then-diffuse
We introduce UniWorld-Design, a framework that redefines image generation from flat pixel synthesis to structured visual composition, with semantic RGBA layers as the atomic units of generation, understanding, and editing. Our key insight is that pixels define how an image is rendered, whereas layers define how an image is created, understood, and edited. Just as human designers create and manipulate visual content through layers rather than raw pixels, UniWorld-Design equips multimodal generative models with a layer-native design space. UniWorld-Design comprises two models. The Text-to-RGBA (T2RGBA) model generates standalone RGBA assets directly from text. The Image-to-Layer (I2L) model conditions on a finished image, a global instruction and per-layer prompts, and jointly produces ordered, complete semantic RGBA layers. Its instruction interface supports top-level decomposition, recursive decomposition and targeted extraction, making layering an instruction-addressable operation for agentic editing. Because I2L learns complete semantic objects rather than visible-pixel partitions, its layers stay usable when moved or removed. On the Crello benchmark, I2L reduces per-layer RGB L1 error by 37% and achieves a 34% relative improvement in Alpha Soft IoU over Qwen-Image-Layered. Separately, T2RGBA achieves the highest CLIP Score, outperforming LayerDiffuse and OmniAlpha.
展开完整摘要收起摘要↓
We introduce UniWorld-Design, a framework that redefines image generation from flat pixel synthesis to structured visual composition, with semantic RGBA layers as the atomic units of generation, understanding, and editing. Our key insight is that pixels define how an image is rendered, whereas layers define how an image is created, understood, and edited. Just as human designers create and manipulate visual content through layers rather than raw pixels, UniWorld-Design equips multimodal generative models with a layer-native design space. UniWorld-Design comprises two models. The Text-to-RGBA (T2RGBA) model generates standalone RGBA assets directly from text. The Image-to-Layer (I2L) model conditions on a finished image, a global instruction and per-layer prompts, and jointly produces ordered, complete semantic RGBA layers. Its instruction interface supports top-level decomposition, recursive decomposition and targeted extraction, making layering an instruction-addressable operation for agentic editing. Because I2L learns complete semantic objects rather than visible-pixel partitions, its layers stay usable when moved or removed. On the Crello benchmark, I2L reduces per-layer RGB L1 error by 37% and achieves a 34% relative improvement in Alpha Soft IoU over Qwen-Image-Layered. Separately, T2RGBA achieves the highest CLIP Score, outperforming LayerDiffuse and OmniAlpha.
Latent diffusion models (LDMs) have recently significantly advanced embodied learning in constructing powerful embodied manipulation world models. However, despite the remarkable performance, existing LDMs predominantly rely on Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) optimized for natural scenes while failing to account for the unique characteristics of embodied manipulation scenarios, yielding latent representations that are neither compact nor controllable, thereby hindering efficient training of LDMs and precise robotic control. To solve this problem, we present EmbodiedVAE, a novel video VAE that provides compact yet controllable latent representations tailored for the robotic manipulation world models. Specifically, EmbodiedVAE adopts a dual-encoder, single-decoder architecture with an asymmetric spatio-temporal compression module, which automatically disentangles the robot arm's motion from background environment, resulting in overall compactness while providing explicit embodied latent to support fine-grained action control. To further preserve the temporal consistency of learned robotic motion latent, we introduce an optimal-transport-based consistency module that explicitly enforces motion fidelity and inter-frame coherence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed EmbodiedVAE achieves superior reconstruction quality with high compression rate, while enabling more precise action control in robotic manipulation scenarios with an average of 2dB PSNR improvement over state-of-the-art video VAEs.
展开完整摘要收起摘要↓
Latent diffusion models (LDMs) have recently significantly advanced embodied learning in constructing powerful embodied manipulation world models. However, despite the remarkable performance, existing LDMs predominantly rely on Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) optimized for natural scenes while failing to account for the unique characteristics of embodied manipulation scenarios, yielding latent representations that are neither compact nor controllable, thereby hindering efficient training of LDMs and precise robotic control. To solve this problem, we present EmbodiedVAE, a novel video VAE that provides compact yet controllable latent representations tailored for the robotic manipulation world models. Specifically, EmbodiedVAE adopts a dual-encoder, single-decoder architecture with an asymmetric spatio-temporal compression module, which automatically disentangles the robot arm's motion from background environment, resulting in overall compactness while providing explicit embodied latent to support fine-grained action control. To further preserve the temporal consistency of learned robotic motion latent, we introduce an optimal-transport-based consistency module that explicitly enforces motion fidelity and inter-frame coherence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed EmbodiedVAE achieves superior reconstruction quality with high compression rate, while enabling more precise action control in robotic manipulation scenarios with an average of 2dB PSNR improvement over state-of-the-art video VAEs.
Spatial instruction following has become a crucial requirement for text-to-image (T2I) generation. A common challenge arises when directional expressions are interpreted under different frames of reference. For example, ``the left of'' may refer to the viewer's image coordinates or to the intrinsic orientation of an object, leading to different expected layouts. Existing T2I benchmarks reveal important layout failures, yet they rarely isolate whether models can follow a specified frame of reference when it differs from camera view. To mitigate this gap, we introduce FoR-T2I, a benchmark for evaluating this distinction with 1,200 prompt pairs built from controlled spatial layouts. In each pair, the camera-view (Cam) prompt states the target relation in camera view, while the frame-of-reference (FoR) prompt describes the same target placement through an oriented anchor object. Across 22 closed-source and open-source T2I models, mean final accuracy is 41.8% lower on FoR prompts than on matched Cam prompts; even the best-performing model achieves only 44.3% FoR accuracy. This suggests that current models struggle more when the same layout is described through an object's orientation rather than directly in image coordinates. We further analyze this gap by relation type and camera view, compare several training-free prompting and feedback-based mitigation strategies, and propose a VLM-gated rewriting approach that selects rewritten prompts using visual feedback, improving average FoR accuracy from 25.0% to 29.2% under the same generation budget.
展开完整摘要收起摘要↓
Spatial instruction following has become a crucial requirement for text-to-image (T2I) generation. A common challenge arises when directional expressions are interpreted under different frames of reference. For example, ``the left of'' may refer to the viewer's image coordinates or to the intrinsic orientation of an object, leading to different expected layouts. Existing T2I benchmarks reveal important layout failures, yet they rarely isolate whether models can follow a specified frame of reference when it differs from camera view. To mitigate this gap, we introduce FoR-T2I, a benchmark for evaluating this distinction with 1,200 prompt pairs built from controlled spatial layouts. In each pair, the camera-view (Cam) prompt states the target relation in camera view, while the frame-of-reference (FoR) prompt describes the same target placement through an oriented anchor object. Across 22 closed-source and open-source T2I models, mean final accuracy is 41.8% lower on FoR prompts than on matched Cam prompts; even the best-performing model achieves only 44.3% FoR accuracy. This suggests that current models struggle more when the same layout is described through an object's orientation rather than directly in image coordinates. We further analyze this gap by relation type and camera view, compare several training-free prompting and feedback-based mitigation strategies, and propose a VLM-gated rewriting approach that selects rewritten prompts using visual feedback, improving average FoR accuracy from 25.0% to 29.2% under the same generation budget.