Industrial anomaly detection and localization are limited by scarce real anomalies and pixel-level annotations, a bottleneck that synthetic image-mask pairs can alleviate. However, existing few-shot mask-guided generation may over-follow mask geometry, produce weak anomalies, or use condition masks incompatible with the current object instance. We propose OSAGEN, which combines object-aware mask priors with multistage decoupled diffusion. Its three-stage adaptation sequentially learns normal appearance, defect appearance under coarse conditions, and fine-grained mask calibration, improving defect realization and local control. QBG injects object structure from a matched normal image into mask diffusion to produce object-aware priors, while ISC restricts anomaly propagation and preserves normal content during sampling. A lightweight materialization step recovers pixel-level labels aligned with the realized defects. On MVTec AD and VisA, OSAGEN achieves AP-P/F1-P scores of 88.1/82.2 and 68.5/66.1, respectively, under a unified downstream localization protocol. The code will be released upon acceptance.
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Industrial anomaly detection and localization are limited by scarce real anomalies and pixel-level annotations, a bottleneck that synthetic image-mask pairs can alleviate. However, existing few-shot mask-guided generation may over-follow mask geometry, produce weak anomalies, or use condition masks incompatible with the current object instance. We propose OSAGEN, which combines object-aware mask priors with multistage decoupled diffusion. Its three-stage adaptation sequentially learns normal appearance, defect appearance under coarse conditions, and fine-grained mask calibration, improving defect realization and local control. QBG injects object structure from a matched normal image into mask diffusion to produce object-aware priors, while ISC restricts anomaly propagation and preserves normal content during sampling. A lightweight materialization step recovers pixel-level labels aligned with the realized defects. On MVTec AD and VisA, OSAGEN achieves AP-P/F1-P scores of 88.1/82.2 and 68.5/66.1, respectively, under a unified downstream localization protocol. The code will be released upon acceptance.
作者Dhruv Agrawal, Dominik Borer, Luca Vögeli, Robert Sumner, Martin Guay, Jakob Buhmann
Motion editing is central to VFX and game development, where it is used extensively to modify and augment existing movements to conform to new environments or changes in artistic direction. While traditional motion editing can do small modifications, it cannot accommodate larger structural edits, resulting in visual warping artifacts that require authoring new motion. Conversely, recent advances in large-scale generative modeling have unlocked newfound capabilities for authoring entire movements by directly manipulating sparse spatial constraints. While impressive at creating new movements, these methods lack the capability to preserve and edit existing motion interactively. In this work, we introduce scheduled inpainting, a method that enables interactive generative motion editing, a novel paradigm unifying motion synthesis and editing by leveraging generative models. Scheduled inpainting is a simple yet powerful inference-based technique that enables fine-grained spatiotemporal control over the balance between preserving the original motion and generating new content. By building atop generative models that support direct manipulation, our system allows artists to interactively refine existing animations while ensuring results remain natural and consistent with the learned motion distribution. Scheduled inpainting is versatile and supports many editing applications, such as extending, stitching, and compositing different clips. Finally, we extensively validate our approach by comparing with four baselines, conducting ablations of our design, and reporting user feedback.
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Motion editing is central to VFX and game development, where it is used extensively to modify and augment existing movements to conform to new environments or changes in artistic direction. While traditional motion editing can do small modifications, it cannot accommodate larger structural edits, resulting in visual warping artifacts that require authoring new motion. Conversely, recent advances in large-scale generative modeling have unlocked newfound capabilities for authoring entire movements by directly manipulating sparse spatial constraints. While impressive at creating new movements, these methods lack the capability to preserve and edit existing motion interactively. In this work, we introduce scheduled inpainting, a method that enables interactive generative motion editing, a novel paradigm unifying motion synthesis and editing by leveraging generative models. Scheduled inpainting is a simple yet powerful inference-based technique that enables fine-grained spatiotemporal control over the balance between preserving the original motion and generating new content. By building atop generative models that support direct manipulation, our system allows artists to interactively refine existing animations while ensuring results remain natural and consistent with the learned motion distribution. Scheduled inpainting is versatile and supports many editing applications, such as extending, stitching, and compositing different clips. Finally, we extensively validate our approach by comparing with four baselines, conducting ablations of our design, and reporting user feedback.
作者Zhisheng Han, Shiyao Wu, Jiayan Qiu, Yakun Ju, Lu Liu, Le Zhang, Pengfei Feng, Huiyu Zhou, Zheheng Jiang
Single-image 3D hand avatar reconstruction is fundamentally ill-posed and particularly challenging due to limited visual evidence under severe self-occlusion and the complex pose-dependent deformation of highly articulated hands. Existing methods predominantly rely on implicit NeRF-style representations, whose volumetric fitting is computationally expensive and often struggles to preserve fine-grained hand details. In this work, we present OASIS, a tailored 3D Gaussian Splatting framework for single-image hand avatar reconstruction. To faithfully encode sparse image-specific appearance cues in single-view reconstruction, we construct geometry-aligned visual evidence tokens by explicitly aligning input image observations with 3D hand geometry and context-adaptively tokenizing the resulting visual evidence. Since severe self-occlusion makes the reliability of image evidence inherently visibility-dependent, we introduce a visibility-conditioned point-image attention to reliably transfer visual evidence to geometric tokens, yielding occlusion-aware Gaussian features for faithful and robust reconstruction. To further capture non-rigid deformation of articulated hands, we introduce a Feature-on-Mesh representation to enable Gaussian deformation to be guided by local surface stretching. Under this framework, we adopt a one-shot adaptation scheme that learns a shared hand prior from multi-identity training data and then fits it to a target image for target-specific reconstruction. Extensive experiments show that OASIS outperforms existing baselines in both visual fidelity and efficiency across challenging poses and in-the-wild scenarios, and further demonstrates strong versatility in downstream applications such as text-to-avatar generation and texture editing.
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Single-image 3D hand avatar reconstruction is fundamentally ill-posed and particularly challenging due to limited visual evidence under severe self-occlusion and the complex pose-dependent deformation of highly articulated hands. Existing methods predominantly rely on implicit NeRF-style representations, whose volumetric fitting is computationally expensive and often struggles to preserve fine-grained hand details. In this work, we present OASIS, a tailored 3D Gaussian Splatting framework for single-image hand avatar reconstruction. To faithfully encode sparse image-specific appearance cues in single-view reconstruction, we construct geometry-aligned visual evidence tokens by explicitly aligning input image observations with 3D hand geometry and context-adaptively tokenizing the resulting visual evidence. Since severe self-occlusion makes the reliability of image evidence inherently visibility-dependent, we introduce a visibility-conditioned point-image attention to reliably transfer visual evidence to geometric tokens, yielding occlusion-aware Gaussian features for faithful and robust reconstruction. To further capture non-rigid deformation of articulated hands, we introduce a Feature-on-Mesh representation to enable Gaussian deformation to be guided by local surface stretching. Under this framework, we adopt a one-shot adaptation scheme that learns a shared hand prior from multi-identity training data and then fits it to a target image for target-specific reconstruction. Extensive experiments show that OASIS outperforms existing baselines in both visual fidelity and efficiency across challenging poses and in-the-wild scenarios, and further demonstrates strong versatility in downstream applications such as text-to-avatar generation and texture editing.
Generative video compositing, which involves inserting external assets seamlessly into existing video sequences, is essential for content creation and visual effects. However, existing approaches suffer from a control-fidelity trade-off: they either hallucinate motion from static images, failing to preserve the dynamics of pre-animated assets, or lack fine-grained spatial control for precise asset placement along user-defined trajectories. We propose FlexComposer, a unified framework that standardizes video compositing as a trajectory-guided conditional generation task, enabling the seamless integration of both static images and dynamic footage. Our approach introduces three key designs: (1) a Unified Canonical Foreground Representation that decouples an object's intrinsic motion from its global displacement, standardizing heterogeneous inputs into a stabilized, centered latent space; (2) a Spatial-Aware Latent Injection strategy that exploits the translation equivariance of VAE latent spaces to transport canonical features onto target trajectories via a parameter-free mechanism; and (3) a Hybrid Dataset and Synthetic-to-Real Curriculum that synergizes procedural simulation, real-world cinematic footage, and generative data to implicitly learn physically plausible illumination and shadow harmonization. This unified design handles diverse inputs from product photos to dynamic subjects achieving high-fidelity motion control and environmental integration without the need for explicit 3D reconstruction or auxiliary learnable adapters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlexComposer outperforms state-of-the-art methods in visual quality, temporal consistency, and trajectory adherence.
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Generative video compositing, which involves inserting external assets seamlessly into existing video sequences, is essential for content creation and visual effects. However, existing approaches suffer from a control-fidelity trade-off: they either hallucinate motion from static images, failing to preserve the dynamics of pre-animated assets, or lack fine-grained spatial control for precise asset placement along user-defined trajectories. We propose FlexComposer, a unified framework that standardizes video compositing as a trajectory-guided conditional generation task, enabling the seamless integration of both static images and dynamic footage. Our approach introduces three key designs: (1) a Unified Canonical Foreground Representation that decouples an object's intrinsic motion from its global displacement, standardizing heterogeneous inputs into a stabilized, centered latent space; (2) a Spatial-Aware Latent Injection strategy that exploits the translation equivariance of VAE latent spaces to transport canonical features onto target trajectories via a parameter-free mechanism; and (3) a Hybrid Dataset and Synthetic-to-Real Curriculum that synergizes procedural simulation, real-world cinematic footage, and generative data to implicitly learn physically plausible illumination and shadow harmonization. This unified design handles diverse inputs from product photos to dynamic subjects achieving high-fidelity motion control and environmental integration without the need for explicit 3D reconstruction or auxiliary learnable adapters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlexComposer outperforms state-of-the-art methods in visual quality, temporal consistency, and trajectory adherence.
Satellite image editing requires spatially precise object-level control, but supervised editing datasets for overhead imagery are costly to build because object masks, semantic labels, and paired edits are rarely available at scale. We introduce SatEdit, a mask-conditioned satellite image editing framework that constructs training supervision from unlabeled imagery. SatEdit proposes object masks with a seg- mentation foundation model, assigns semantic la- bels to sampled segments with a Vision-Language Model, and applies lightweight human verification before generating paired addition and removal exam- ples through mask-guided inpainting. We fine-tune a high-resolution image editing backbone with LoRA on a SODA-A-derived dataset containing 1,014 im- ages and 852 verified object annotations across 91 classes. In controlled comparisons with open- source and proprietary image editing models, SatE- dit achieves the highest aggregate masked-region se- mantic alignment, with a CLIP score of 0.6322 and CLIP delta of 0.0726, while preserving the surround- ing scene qualitatively. These results suggest that VLM-assisted segment annotation is a practical route to data-efficient, spatially controllable satellite image editing.
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Satellite image editing requires spatially precise object-level control, but supervised editing datasets for overhead imagery are costly to build because object masks, semantic labels, and paired edits are rarely available at scale. We introduce SatEdit, a mask-conditioned satellite image editing framework that constructs training supervision from unlabeled imagery. SatEdit proposes object masks with a seg- mentation foundation model, assigns semantic la- bels to sampled segments with a Vision-Language Model, and applies lightweight human verification before generating paired addition and removal exam- ples through mask-guided inpainting. We fine-tune a high-resolution image editing backbone with LoRA on a SODA-A-derived dataset containing 1,014 im- ages and 852 verified object annotations across 91 classes. In controlled comparisons with open- source and proprietary image editing models, SatE- dit achieves the highest aggregate masked-region se- mantic alignment, with a CLIP score of 0.6322 and CLIP delta of 0.0726, while preserving the surround- ing scene qualitatively. These results suggest that VLM-assisted segment annotation is a practical route to data-efficient, spatially controllable satellite image editing.
作者Yingmao Miao, Pengfei Zhang, Xiaochen Lv, Meng Yu, Lei Sun, Xiangxiang Chu, Chao Shen, Chenhao Lin
While recent image editing models have made rapid progress, multi-reference editing remains challenging, particularly in maintaining visual consistency across references and ensuring overall visual harmony. Reinforcement learning has proven highly effective for text-to-image generation and single-image editing, but its extension to multi-reference editing is hindered by the absence of suitable reward models that capture multi-image relational constraints. Moreover, naively using multimodal large language models(MLLMs) as zero-shot evaluators faces a key tension between hallucination-prone long-form reasoning and the limited deductive power of short-form judgments. We address these issues with a Multi-dimensional Evaluation-Verification Reward(EVR). EVR decomposes evaluation into distinct visual criteria; for each criterion, an MLLM Evaluator generates multiple candidate hypotheses, and a Verifier grounds each claim in concrete visual evidence to accept or reject it, producing reliable and fine-grained reward signals. Together with a scalable data pipeline, our method enables RL fine-tuning of off-the-shelf editors without architectural changes. Extensive experiments show substantial gains over the base Qwen-Image-Edit, improving consistency and harmony to match or surpass NanoBanana.
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While recent image editing models have made rapid progress, multi-reference editing remains challenging, particularly in maintaining visual consistency across references and ensuring overall visual harmony. Reinforcement learning has proven highly effective for text-to-image generation and single-image editing, but its extension to multi-reference editing is hindered by the absence of suitable reward models that capture multi-image relational constraints. Moreover, naively using multimodal large language models(MLLMs) as zero-shot evaluators faces a key tension between hallucination-prone long-form reasoning and the limited deductive power of short-form judgments. We address these issues with a Multi-dimensional Evaluation-Verification Reward(EVR). EVR decomposes evaluation into distinct visual criteria; for each criterion, an MLLM Evaluator generates multiple candidate hypotheses, and a Verifier grounds each claim in concrete visual evidence to accept or reject it, producing reliable and fine-grained reward signals. Together with a scalable data pipeline, our method enables RL fine-tuning of off-the-shelf editors without architectural changes. Extensive experiments show substantial gains over the base Qwen-Image-Edit, improving consistency and harmony to match or surpass NanoBanana.
作者Chong Gao, Jie Ma, Zhan Peng, Chongxiao Wang, Haoxue Wu, Jun Liang, Guanbin Li, Jing Li
Multimodal video generation aims to generate and edit videos conditioned on arbitrary combinations of text, images, and videos within a single model, allowing diverse tasks to share complementary data and generative priors. Unifying these tasks requires multimodal understanding of diverse conditions, which is typically provided by a pretrained vision-language model (VLM). A key challenge is how to connect the VLM's hierarchical multimodal representations with a pretrained video diffusion transformer (DiT). Existing methods either inject features from only the final or a few manually selected VLM layers, or jointly train architecture-matched understanding and generation streams, making it difficult to reuse heterogeneous pretrained backbones. We introduce MoRoute, a unified multimodal video generation framework that formulates a frozen VLM and a pretrained video DiT with different architectures as heterogeneous experts connected through dynamic layer routing. For each input, a lightweight block-wise router enables every DiT block to select the VLM layer most relevant to its generation stage, thereby learning an adaptive correspondence between multimodal understanding and video synthesis. MoRoute further incorporates reference images and source videos directly into the DiT token sequence through unified in-context conditioning, preserving fine-grained visual details across diverse generation and editing tasks. Experiments on IntelligentVBench, OpenVE-Bench, and RefVIE-Bench show that MoRoute consistently surpasses the best competing method on each benchmark, improving the average score by 0.15, 0.18, and 0.34 on a 1-5 scale, respectively.
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Multimodal video generation aims to generate and edit videos conditioned on arbitrary combinations of text, images, and videos within a single model, allowing diverse tasks to share complementary data and generative priors. Unifying these tasks requires multimodal understanding of diverse conditions, which is typically provided by a pretrained vision-language model (VLM). A key challenge is how to connect the VLM's hierarchical multimodal representations with a pretrained video diffusion transformer (DiT). Existing methods either inject features from only the final or a few manually selected VLM layers, or jointly train architecture-matched understanding and generation streams, making it difficult to reuse heterogeneous pretrained backbones. We introduce MoRoute, a unified multimodal video generation framework that formulates a frozen VLM and a pretrained video DiT with different architectures as heterogeneous experts connected through dynamic layer routing. For each input, a lightweight block-wise router enables every DiT block to select the VLM layer most relevant to its generation stage, thereby learning an adaptive correspondence between multimodal understanding and video synthesis. MoRoute further incorporates reference images and source videos directly into the DiT token sequence through unified in-context conditioning, preserving fine-grained visual details across diverse generation and editing tasks. Experiments on IntelligentVBench, OpenVE-Bench, and RefVIE-Bench show that MoRoute consistently surpasses the best competing method on each benchmark, improving the average score by 0.15, 0.18, and 0.34 on a 1-5 scale, respectively.
Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has become an essential tool in modern cellular biology, and generating accurate synthetic scRNA-seq data is becoming increasingly important. Although diffusion models have achieved promising results in conditional scRNA-seq generation, existing guidance strategies, including classifier guidance and classifier-free guidance (CFG), rely on an unconditional branch trained to approximate the true marginal distribution, which may retain substantial gene-specific structure and limit guidance effectiveness. Inspired by recent work showing that diffusion models can be effectively guided using intentionally degraded references, we propose a sparsity-biased classifier-free guidance (SB-CFG) strategy for scRNA-seq generation. Rather than approximating the assumed "neutral" marginal distribution, SB-CFG introduces a deliberately under-informative sparse reference for the unconditional branch, removing gene identity while preserving only coarse sparsity statistics. This "bad" reference amplifies the contrast between conditional and unconditional predictions, leading to stronger and more effective guidance during sampling. We evaluated SB-CFG as a training-free sampling modification on five publicly available scRNA-seq datasets. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements over standard CFG-based sampling in terms of marker gene expression fidelity, cell-type consistency, and sparsity preservation, indicating that SB-CFG better captures biologically meaningful gene expression patterns.
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Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has become an essential tool in modern cellular biology, and generating accurate synthetic scRNA-seq data is becoming increasingly important. Although diffusion models have achieved promising results in conditional scRNA-seq generation, existing guidance strategies, including classifier guidance and classifier-free guidance (CFG), rely on an unconditional branch trained to approximate the true marginal distribution, which may retain substantial gene-specific structure and limit guidance effectiveness. Inspired by recent work showing that diffusion models can be effectively guided using intentionally degraded references, we propose a sparsity-biased classifier-free guidance (SB-CFG) strategy for scRNA-seq generation. Rather than approximating the assumed "neutral" marginal distribution, SB-CFG introduces a deliberately under-informative sparse reference for the unconditional branch, removing gene identity while preserving only coarse sparsity statistics. This "bad" reference amplifies the contrast between conditional and unconditional predictions, leading to stronger and more effective guidance during sampling. We evaluated SB-CFG as a training-free sampling modification on five publicly available scRNA-seq datasets. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements over standard CFG-based sampling in terms of marker gene expression fidelity, cell-type consistency, and sparsity preservation, indicating that SB-CFG better captures biologically meaningful gene expression patterns.
Text-to-motion generation must produce motions that are semantically correct, temporally coherent, and physically plausible. A natural approach is to first project motion data into a structured semantic space and then train a generative model within that space. Such a paradigm has been highly successful in image generation through Representation Autoencoders (RAEs), where a frozen self-supervised encoder provides semantic features for diffusion or flow models to learn from. However, direct transfer of such a paradigm to motion space using Motion-JEPA as the frozen encoder fails dramatically. We diagnose this failure geometrically and identify two motion-specific bottlenecks: (1) the JEPA feature space is spectrally ill-conditioned, making the Gaussian-to-data transport unstable; and (2) even with a well-conditioned spectrum, flow residuals tend to align with decoder-sensitive directions, where small latent errors are amplified into large motion artifacts after decoding. Based on these insights, we propose MoRAE. MoRAE addresses the two bottlenecks separately. A compact bottleneck distills the structured JEPA representation while removing weak and redundant directions, bringing the latent spectrum into a transport-stable regime. Motion-coupled training then aligns the retained latent geometry with the decoder, making characteristic flow errors less costly after decoding. With this flow-friendly latent, a standard non-autoregressive Flow-Matching DiT achieves state-of-the-art performance.
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Text-to-motion generation must produce motions that are semantically correct, temporally coherent, and physically plausible. A natural approach is to first project motion data into a structured semantic space and then train a generative model within that space. Such a paradigm has been highly successful in image generation through Representation Autoencoders (RAEs), where a frozen self-supervised encoder provides semantic features for diffusion or flow models to learn from. However, direct transfer of such a paradigm to motion space using Motion-JEPA as the frozen encoder fails dramatically. We diagnose this failure geometrically and identify two motion-specific bottlenecks: (1) the JEPA feature space is spectrally ill-conditioned, making the Gaussian-to-data transport unstable; and (2) even with a well-conditioned spectrum, flow residuals tend to align with decoder-sensitive directions, where small latent errors are amplified into large motion artifacts after decoding. Based on these insights, we propose MoRAE. MoRAE addresses the two bottlenecks separately. A compact bottleneck distills the structured JEPA representation while removing weak and redundant directions, bringing the latent spectrum into a transport-stable regime. Motion-coupled training then aligns the retained latent geometry with the decoder, making characteristic flow errors less costly after decoding. With this flow-friendly latent, a standard non-autoregressive Flow-Matching DiT achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Differentially private (DP) training of text-conditioned generative models suffers a utility cliff at strong privacy. We revisit this problem through the geometry of rectified flows: along the straight interpolation between noise and data, the Bayes-optimal velocity is governed to leading order at the noise end by a few class-conditional moments, and increasingly sample-specific structure matters toward the data end. StraightDP exploits this heterogeneity end to end. A small budget share releases whitened class-conditional moments once, to be distilled into the weights or injected at sampling time. The rest is spent by pre-declared DP-SGD toward the data end, beyond the moments' reach. At $\varepsilon=1$ on MNIST, the released moments alone already attain $0.76$ downstream accuracy with prototype-like samples and an FID of $237$, and uniform DP-SGD attains $0.21$. The pipeline built on the release reaches $0.81$ accuracy at FID $56$ in a public latent space. Constraining per-token stream norms of the multimodal backbone leaves the pretraining loss unchanged yet improves downstream accuracy in the extreme-noise pixel-space regime, and its accuracy effect becomes monotonically more favorable as privacy strengthens. The released moments also port to frozen SD3-medium, where sampling-time injection beats DP-LoRA training at a fraction of the budget.
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Differentially private (DP) training of text-conditioned generative models suffers a utility cliff at strong privacy. We revisit this problem through the geometry of rectified flows: along the straight interpolation between noise and data, the Bayes-optimal velocity is governed to leading order at the noise end by a few class-conditional moments, and increasingly sample-specific structure matters toward the data end. StraightDP exploits this heterogeneity end to end. A small budget share releases whitened class-conditional moments once, to be distilled into the weights or injected at sampling time. The rest is spent by pre-declared DP-SGD toward the data end, beyond the moments' reach. At $\varepsilon=1$ on MNIST, the released moments alone already attain $0.76$ downstream accuracy with prototype-like samples and an FID of $237$, and uniform DP-SGD attains $0.21$. The pipeline built on the release reaches $0.81$ accuracy at FID $56$ in a public latent space. Constraining per-token stream norms of the multimodal backbone leaves the pretraining loss unchanged yet improves downstream accuracy in the extreme-noise pixel-space regime, and its accuracy effect becomes monotonically more favorable as privacy strengthens. The released moments also port to frozen SD3-medium, where sampling-time injection beats DP-LoRA training at a fraction of the budget.
Pixel-space diffusion models aim to learn an end-to-end generator directly over raw pixels. This is challenging because a single model must capture both global structure and local texture in the same high-dimensional space. While recent work improves pixel diffusion through alternative prediction targets, training objectives, and architectures, these advances typically require training a new model from scratch. We show there is a cheaper, complementary strategy: a frozen, pretrained pixel diffusion model can guide itself. Our key observation is that intermediate layers of a pretrained pixel diffusion transformer can be decoded into coarse predictions that capture the main low-frequency structure, while the final layers progressively refine local, high-frequency details. We therefore attach a lightweight prediction head to an intermediate layer, keep the backbone frozen, and use the discrepancy between the intermediate and final predictions as a self-guidance direction during sampling. To train this head, we further find that real images are not necessary. Instead, model-generated samples suffice and even outperform real images for training the head, especially in enhancing the high-frequency components that pixel diffusion tends to underfit. Across multiple pixel diffusion models on ImageNet, our Synthetic Self-Guidance (SSG) consistently improves generation while adapter training requires less than 1$%$ of full-model training compute: it reduces FID by over 50$%$ across the evaluated JiT variants without classifier-free guidance (CFG) and further improves strong baselines with CFG, e.g., JiT-H/16 from 1.86 to 1.67 and PixelREPA-H/16 from 1.81 to 1.59. Our code is available at https://github.com/zfu006/SSG.
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Pixel-space diffusion models aim to learn an end-to-end generator directly over raw pixels. This is challenging because a single model must capture both global structure and local texture in the same high-dimensional space. While recent work improves pixel diffusion through alternative prediction targets, training objectives, and architectures, these advances typically require training a new model from scratch. We show there is a cheaper, complementary strategy: a frozen, pretrained pixel diffusion model can guide itself. Our key observation is that intermediate layers of a pretrained pixel diffusion transformer can be decoded into coarse predictions that capture the main low-frequency structure, while the final layers progressively refine local, high-frequency details. We therefore attach a lightweight prediction head to an intermediate layer, keep the backbone frozen, and use the discrepancy between the intermediate and final predictions as a self-guidance direction during sampling. To train this head, we further find that real images are not necessary. Instead, model-generated samples suffice and even outperform real images for training the head, especially in enhancing the high-frequency components that pixel diffusion tends to underfit. Across multiple pixel diffusion models on ImageNet, our Synthetic Self-Guidance (SSG) consistently improves generation while adapter training requires less than 1$%$ of full-model training compute: it reduces FID by over 50$%$ across the evaluated JiT variants without classifier-free guidance (CFG) and further improves strong baselines with CFG, e.g., JiT-H/16 from 1.86 to 1.67 and PixelREPA-H/16 from 1.81 to 1.59. Our code is available at https://github.com/zfu006/SSG.
Synthetic tabular data is increasingly used in privacy-preserving data sharing, data augmentation, and to mitigate downstream classifier bias. State-of-the-art tabular diffusion models such as TabDDPM and TabSyn achieve excellent distributional fidelity but offer no mechanism for fairness; conversely, fairness-aware tabular generators (DECAF, FairTGAN, FairTabDDPM) impose explicit fairness penalties at training time, yielding modest fairness gains at substantial cost to either sample quality or downstream utility. We introduce FairDiffuseVQVAE, a two-stage architecture that decouples fidelity from fairness: a vector-quantized autoencoder with a row-level discriminator (Stage~1, no fairness terms) is followed by a DiffuseVAE-style continuous diffusion refiner that conditions on both the Stage-1 reconstruction and the protected attribute via classifier-free guidance (Stage~2). Fairness emerges as a property of the sampling distribution — uniform sampling of the protected attribute at inference time enforces demographic parity by construction, rather than from competing loss terms. On the Adult, Bank and COMPAS datasets, FairDiffuseVQVAE achieves the highest mean Demographic Parity Ratio ($0.702$, $+47%$ over FairTabDDPM) and Equalized Odds Ratio ($0.686$, $+100%$). It also attains the lowest mean pair-wise correlation error ($0.034$) of any published method, while explicitly trading $\sim$$15$ AUC points for these fairness gains.
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Synthetic tabular data is increasingly used in privacy-preserving data sharing, data augmentation, and to mitigate downstream classifier bias. State-of-the-art tabular diffusion models such as TabDDPM and TabSyn achieve excellent distributional fidelity but offer no mechanism for fairness; conversely, fairness-aware tabular generators (DECAF, FairTGAN, FairTabDDPM) impose explicit fairness penalties at training time, yielding modest fairness gains at substantial cost to either sample quality or downstream utility. We introduce FairDiffuseVQVAE, a two-stage architecture that decouples fidelity from fairness: a vector-quantized autoencoder with a row-level discriminator (Stage~1, no fairness terms) is followed by a DiffuseVAE-style continuous diffusion refiner that conditions on both the Stage-1 reconstruction and the protected attribute via classifier-free guidance (Stage~2). Fairness emerges as a property of the sampling distribution — uniform sampling of the protected attribute at inference time enforces demographic parity by construction, rather than from competing loss terms. On the Adult, Bank and COMPAS datasets, FairDiffuseVQVAE achieves the highest mean Demographic Parity Ratio ($0.702$, $+47%$ over FairTabDDPM) and Equalized Odds Ratio ($0.686$, $+100%$). It also attains the lowest mean pair-wise correlation error ($0.034$) of any published method, while explicitly trading $\sim$$15$ AUC points for these fairness gains.
As large language model (LLM) agents evolve into personalized companions, memory has emerged as a core capability. However, LLMs face a knowledge utilization problem: they may fail to act on relevant user preferences even when they are fully present in context. When an agent fails to tailor its response in a context where previously shared user preferences should matter, it is unclear whether the model failed to remember that information or remembered it but failed to use it. To isolate this breakdown, we introduce a decoupled evaluation paradigm that administers paired Know and Act tests to the same user preference. We conduct large-scale experiments across 16 systems and five memory architectures, evaluating 1,000 preferences embedded at three levels of expression strength. Our results show a large gap between Know and Act outcomes: agents often pass the recall test for a user preference but fail to reflect that same preference in the paired behavioral scenario. While memory architectures reduce this gap, utilization remains especially weak for health and therapy-related preferences, where failures to act carry the greatest real-world stakes.
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As large language model (LLM) agents evolve into personalized companions, memory has emerged as a core capability. However, LLMs face a knowledge utilization problem: they may fail to act on relevant user preferences even when they are fully present in context. When an agent fails to tailor its response in a context where previously shared user preferences should matter, it is unclear whether the model failed to remember that information or remembered it but failed to use it. To isolate this breakdown, we introduce a decoupled evaluation paradigm that administers paired Know and Act tests to the same user preference. We conduct large-scale experiments across 16 systems and five memory architectures, evaluating 1,000 preferences embedded at three levels of expression strength. Our results show a large gap between Know and Act outcomes: agents often pass the recall test for a user preference but fail to reflect that same preference in the paired behavioral scenario. While memory architectures reduce this gap, utilization remains especially weak for health and therapy-related preferences, where failures to act carry the greatest real-world stakes.
Automated vulnerability repair aims to reduce the time and effort required to patch security flaws from a vulnerability triage report. Recent agentic AI approaches have shown promising results in automated program repair. However, vulnerability repair demands richer program context than general bug repair - context that security engineers routinely assemble in practice but that existing agentic approaches do not engineer. We identify three critical gaps: code-structure context capturing cross-file data flows and memory operation patterns, runtime-execution context revealing crash semantics and memory origins, and commit-history context recovering how fragile code patterns were introduced. We present AgenticRepair, an agentic vulnerability repair framework that addresses the gaps through multi-faceted program context engineering. AgenticRepair orchestrates three specialized LLM subagents to engineer the contexts, which are then embedded into the memory of a dedicated repair subagent for context-conditioned patch synthesis. Evaluated on SEC-Bench comprising 300 real-world instances with sanitizer-based patch verification, AgenticRepair achieves a 73% success rate, substantially outperforming the strongest baseline by 29%. Our ablation study confirms that the three context facets are mutually complementary, and that multi-agent scaffolding and base-model capacity each play an essential role. Collectively, these findings establish multi-faceted program context engineering as a promising design direction for agentic vulnerability repair.
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Automated vulnerability repair aims to reduce the time and effort required to patch security flaws from a vulnerability triage report. Recent agentic AI approaches have shown promising results in automated program repair. However, vulnerability repair demands richer program context than general bug repair - context that security engineers routinely assemble in practice but that existing agentic approaches do not engineer. We identify three critical gaps: code-structure context capturing cross-file data flows and memory operation patterns, runtime-execution context revealing crash semantics and memory origins, and commit-history context recovering how fragile code patterns were introduced. We present AgenticRepair, an agentic vulnerability repair framework that addresses the gaps through multi-faceted program context engineering. AgenticRepair orchestrates three specialized LLM subagents to engineer the contexts, which are then embedded into the memory of a dedicated repair subagent for context-conditioned patch synthesis. Evaluated on SEC-Bench comprising 300 real-world instances with sanitizer-based patch verification, AgenticRepair achieves a 73% success rate, substantially outperforming the strongest baseline by 29%. Our ablation study confirms that the three context facets are mutually complementary, and that multi-agent scaffolding and base-model capacity each play an essential role. Collectively, these findings establish multi-faceted program context engineering as a promising design direction for agentic vulnerability repair.
作者Zhoujin Tian, Hao Zhang, Yao Tian, Cheng Chen, Yakun Li, Lei Zhang, Xiaofang Zhou
Long-term multimodal memory must support not only retrieving relevant information but also computing over observations accumulated across interactions. Existing systems largely emphasize retrieval memory, organizing interaction histories through summaries and indexes to return query-relevant information at multiple granularities, from high-level abstractions to underlying records. In this paper, we formulate analytic memory as a complementary abstraction that organizes recurring multimodal observations into queryable structures supporting filtering, aggregation, ranking, and temporal comparison. We present AdaMM, a framework that jointly supports retrieval and analytic memory. Rather than relying on application-defined schemas, AdaMM extracts provenance-linked attribute-value observations from dialogue, images, and contextual metadata, discovers recurring field structures, and materializes them for analytical access. At inference time, a memory-aware planner decomposes queries into retrieval and analytic operations and routes each operation to the appropriate tools. Experiments on two long-term multimodal memory benchmarks, MemEye and MemGallery, show that AdaMM improves performance by up to 11.3% and 6.9%, respectively.
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Long-term multimodal memory must support not only retrieving relevant information but also computing over observations accumulated across interactions. Existing systems largely emphasize retrieval memory, organizing interaction histories through summaries and indexes to return query-relevant information at multiple granularities, from high-level abstractions to underlying records. In this paper, we formulate analytic memory as a complementary abstraction that organizes recurring multimodal observations into queryable structures supporting filtering, aggregation, ranking, and temporal comparison. We present AdaMM, a framework that jointly supports retrieval and analytic memory. Rather than relying on application-defined schemas, AdaMM extracts provenance-linked attribute-value observations from dialogue, images, and contextual metadata, discovers recurring field structures, and materializes them for analytical access. At inference time, a memory-aware planner decomposes queries into retrieval and analytic operations and routes each operation to the appropriate tools. Experiments on two long-term multimodal memory benchmarks, MemEye and MemGallery, show that AdaMM improves performance by up to 11.3% and 6.9%, respectively.
作者Zenghuang Fu, Zhaoyang Li, Qiuyuan Ai, Haoyu Wu, Minghui Wu, Chenxu Zhao, Ante Wang, Guannan He, Changwei Wang
Self-play agents can generate training problems without questions from target benchmarks, but their curricula lack persistent state: failures affect gradients yet do not explicitly shape future practice. External skill memories preserve procedural experience but are typically learned from fixed task distributions. We introduce SESA (Self-Evolving Skill-Augmented Agent), which makes procedural memory an evolving state of tool-augmented search self-play. A challenger poses problems, while a separately parameterized solver alone retrieves skills. Informative failures are distilled into reusable skills and written back to memory. The updated memory changes solver behavior and success, which changes the challenger's reward and the distribution of future problems; the resulting frontier produces new failures that rewrite memory. This bidirectional loop makes task generation and skill memory co-evolve. Because retrieved skills shape on-policy training trajectories, their benefits can enter the model parameters as well as remain in the external bank, enabling memory-free deployment and optional inference-time retrieval. Across seven open-domain and multi-hop question-answering benchmarks, SESA improves average accuracy over SSP by 1.2--3.2 points across multiple backbones and surpasses the skill-augmented SkillRL baseline by 0.9 points under a unified evaluation protocol. On Qwen3 models, SESA-Off retains 1.8--2.2 points of improvement over SSP, while the final skill bank adds a further 0.5--1.0 points. These results show that evolving skill memory is not merely an inference-time plug-in: it changes policy learning and the future training distribution while retaining value as optional external memory. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zenghuang-Fu/SESA-Self-Evolving-Search-Agents.
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Self-play agents can generate training problems without questions from target benchmarks, but their curricula lack persistent state: failures affect gradients yet do not explicitly shape future practice. External skill memories preserve procedural experience but are typically learned from fixed task distributions. We introduce SESA (Self-Evolving Skill-Augmented Agent), which makes procedural memory an evolving state of tool-augmented search self-play. A challenger poses problems, while a separately parameterized solver alone retrieves skills. Informative failures are distilled into reusable skills and written back to memory. The updated memory changes solver behavior and success, which changes the challenger's reward and the distribution of future problems; the resulting frontier produces new failures that rewrite memory. This bidirectional loop makes task generation and skill memory co-evolve. Because retrieved skills shape on-policy training trajectories, their benefits can enter the model parameters as well as remain in the external bank, enabling memory-free deployment and optional inference-time retrieval. Across seven open-domain and multi-hop question-answering benchmarks, SESA improves average accuracy over SSP by 1.2--3.2 points across multiple backbones and surpasses the skill-augmented SkillRL baseline by 0.9 points under a unified evaluation protocol. On Qwen3 models, SESA-Off retains 1.8--2.2 points of improvement over SSP, while the final skill bank adds a further 0.5--1.0 points. These results show that evolving skill memory is not merely an inference-time plug-in: it changes policy learning and the future training distribution while retaining value as optional external memory. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zenghuang-Fu/SESA-Self-Evolving-Search-Agents.
AI agents extend large language models (LLMs) with external tools, enabling them to perform complex tasks and translate model outputs into consequential real-world actions. Yet LLMs often become substantially less safe when deployed as agents, and the source of this degradation remains poorly understood. In this paper, we identify schema-formatted tool specifications as a primary source of agent safety degradation and show, through white-box representation analysis, that they weaken the model's internal refusal signals and contribute to unsafe tool execution. Building on this finding, we propose SafeKeep, an inference-time safeguard that decouples safety judgment from tool execution: it assesses requests using flattened textual tool specifications while retaining the original schema-formatted specifications for execution. Across two representative benchmarks and four LLMs, including both white-box and black-box models, SafeKeep increases the average refusal rate for harmful requests from 23.8% to 70.6% and reduces the average attack success rate under observation-level prompt injection from 25.6% to 2.5%. It also outperforms existing safeguards and preserves task-handling capability. We release the code and data at https://github.com/snowcatsmoking/SafeKeep .
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AI agents extend large language models (LLMs) with external tools, enabling them to perform complex tasks and translate model outputs into consequential real-world actions. Yet LLMs often become substantially less safe when deployed as agents, and the source of this degradation remains poorly understood. In this paper, we identify schema-formatted tool specifications as a primary source of agent safety degradation and show, through white-box representation analysis, that they weaken the model's internal refusal signals and contribute to unsafe tool execution. Building on this finding, we propose SafeKeep, an inference-time safeguard that decouples safety judgment from tool execution: it assesses requests using flattened textual tool specifications while retaining the original schema-formatted specifications for execution. Across two representative benchmarks and four LLMs, including both white-box and black-box models, SafeKeep increases the average refusal rate for harmful requests from 23.8% to 70.6% and reduces the average attack success rate under observation-level prompt injection from 25.6% to 2.5%. It also outperforms existing safeguards and preserves task-handling capability. We release the code and data at https://github.com/snowcatsmoking/SafeKeep .
As LLMs evolve from code completion systems into autonomous scientific agents, evaluating their ability to conduct experiments has become increasingly important. Existing benchmarks typically focus on static code generation, paper replication, or final answer correctness, but do not directly assess whether agents can interpret experimental evidence and use it to guide subsequent hyperparameter decisions. To address this gap, we introduce AgentHPOBench, a sequential benchmark comprising 30 executable machine learning tasks across seven research categories. Each task begins with a validated baseline run, after which an agent performs several sequential interventions. At each step, the agent observes the accumulated configurations, metrics, and logs before proposing the next valid configuration. We evaluate 12 widely used agents and conventional HPO baselines under a unified protocol. The results show that current agents exhibit measurable experimental optimization ability across domains, but still face clear limitations in sustained iterative refinement, complex log diagnosis, and consistent progress toward reported reference performance.
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As LLMs evolve from code completion systems into autonomous scientific agents, evaluating their ability to conduct experiments has become increasingly important. Existing benchmarks typically focus on static code generation, paper replication, or final answer correctness, but do not directly assess whether agents can interpret experimental evidence and use it to guide subsequent hyperparameter decisions. To address this gap, we introduce AgentHPOBench, a sequential benchmark comprising 30 executable machine learning tasks across seven research categories. Each task begins with a validated baseline run, after which an agent performs several sequential interventions. At each step, the agent observes the accumulated configurations, metrics, and logs before proposing the next valid configuration. We evaluate 12 widely used agents and conventional HPO baselines under a unified protocol. The results show that current agents exhibit measurable experimental optimization ability across domains, but still face clear limitations in sustained iterative refinement, complex log diagnosis, and consistent progress toward reported reference performance.
Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly operate over long interaction histories, where effective reasoning requires identifying and exploiting task-relevant evidence distributed across past observations and actions. However, useful information encoded in previously computed representations is often underutilized during subsequent generation. We propose TransMem, a lightweight inference-time parametric memory module that transforms sparse historical hidden states from a frozen LLM backbone into reusable memory representations. TransMem uses a lightweight gating network to dynamically apply the latent intervention to the current hidden states, without repeatedly encoding the preceding context. To learn transferable memory utilization rather than task-specific knowledge, we introduce evidence-conditioned self-distillation. A memory-augmented student processes the full context and matches the predictive distribution of an evidence-only teacher that shares the same frozen backbone. Experiments on LoCoMo, HotpotQA, and MemoryAgentBench demonstrate consistent improvements across different model architectures and scales. TransMem yields gains of 11.58--29.25 $F_1$ on LoCoMo and 10.20--13.03 $F_1$ on HotpotQA, while improving the average MemoryAgentBench accuracy from 29.54% to 40.00%. These results establish sparse historical hidden states as an effective and efficient memory substrate for long-context LLM agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/Haodong-Lei-Ray/TransMem.
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Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly operate over long interaction histories, where effective reasoning requires identifying and exploiting task-relevant evidence distributed across past observations and actions. However, useful information encoded in previously computed representations is often underutilized during subsequent generation. We propose TransMem, a lightweight inference-time parametric memory module that transforms sparse historical hidden states from a frozen LLM backbone into reusable memory representations. TransMem uses a lightweight gating network to dynamically apply the latent intervention to the current hidden states, without repeatedly encoding the preceding context. To learn transferable memory utilization rather than task-specific knowledge, we introduce evidence-conditioned self-distillation. A memory-augmented student processes the full context and matches the predictive distribution of an evidence-only teacher that shares the same frozen backbone. Experiments on LoCoMo, HotpotQA, and MemoryAgentBench demonstrate consistent improvements across different model architectures and scales. TransMem yields gains of 11.58--29.25 $F_1$ on LoCoMo and 10.20--13.03 $F_1$ on HotpotQA, while improving the average MemoryAgentBench accuracy from 29.54% to 40.00%. These results establish sparse historical hidden states as an effective and efficient memory substrate for long-context LLM agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/Haodong-Lei-Ray/TransMem.
Tool-using LLM agents act on typed tool returns, records pairing provenance and categorical fields with numerical values. Runtime permission gates generally authorize the observed return and action, leaving the decision unprotected against small errors in how the return was bound to its source. We ask whether a candidate action stays authorized over a declared neighborhood of plausible correctly bound returns: one admissible binding fault plus bounded numerical drift. We prove that certifying the categorical and numerical channels separately does not compose: perturbations that are safe on each channel alone can jointly turn the same action unsafe. CAGE certifies this joint neighborhood directly, enumerating the discrete branches exactly and certifying the continuous perturbation within each branch. Across synthetic, policy-as-code, regulatory, and real-transaction settings, CAGE removes the in-budget false allows that accurate pointwise gates admit, while keeping a useful fraction of decisions autonomous. When the policy is executable, CAGE-Exact certifies the policy itself; otherwise CAGE-Lip and CAGE-RS certify a learned gate under an explicit, measured fidelity assumption.
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Tool-using LLM agents act on typed tool returns, records pairing provenance and categorical fields with numerical values. Runtime permission gates generally authorize the observed return and action, leaving the decision unprotected against small errors in how the return was bound to its source. We ask whether a candidate action stays authorized over a declared neighborhood of plausible correctly bound returns: one admissible binding fault plus bounded numerical drift. We prove that certifying the categorical and numerical channels separately does not compose: perturbations that are safe on each channel alone can jointly turn the same action unsafe. CAGE certifies this joint neighborhood directly, enumerating the discrete branches exactly and certifying the continuous perturbation within each branch. Across synthetic, policy-as-code, regulatory, and real-transaction settings, CAGE removes the in-budget false allows that accurate pointwise gates admit, while keeping a useful fraction of decisions autonomous. When the policy is executable, CAGE-Exact certifies the policy itself; otherwise CAGE-Lip and CAGE-RS certify a learned gate under an explicit, measured fidelity assumption.
Large language models have demonstrated strong mathematical problem-solving capabilities, yet reliably verifying their candidate answers remains challenging. Existing representative methods mainly revise outputs through natural-language reflection or assist verification by directly generating verification programs; the former may not reliably support exact computation, whereas the latter prematurely couples mathematical modeling with low-level implementation. We propose AMTFV (Agentic Mathematical Tool-Flow Verification). By introducing Mathematical Tool Flow (MTF) as an interrupt--execute--resume interface, AMTFV decouples verification modeling from concrete execution and supports exact computation through a mathematical toolbox. Specifically, the verification agent first constructs a verification workflow, encodes the mathematical objects and computational intent requiring reliable execution in an MTF request, and sends it to the mathematical toolbox agent. The latter parses the request, generates executable calls, and dispatches them to the backend for exact computation. Tool outputs then support candidate-answer adjudication, answer revision, and verification-workflow revision. We evaluate AMTFV on five challenging mathematical reasoning datasets with seven model configurations from DeepSeek, GPT, and Gemini. Experimental results show that AMTFV outperforms the representative baselines evaluated in this study overall; under an individual model configuration, it improves average accuracy over the strongest baseline by up to 8.3 percentage points, with larger gains on samples of medium and high verification complexity.
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Large language models have demonstrated strong mathematical problem-solving capabilities, yet reliably verifying their candidate answers remains challenging. Existing representative methods mainly revise outputs through natural-language reflection or assist verification by directly generating verification programs; the former may not reliably support exact computation, whereas the latter prematurely couples mathematical modeling with low-level implementation. We propose AMTFV (Agentic Mathematical Tool-Flow Verification). By introducing Mathematical Tool Flow (MTF) as an interrupt--execute--resume interface, AMTFV decouples verification modeling from concrete execution and supports exact computation through a mathematical toolbox. Specifically, the verification agent first constructs a verification workflow, encodes the mathematical objects and computational intent requiring reliable execution in an MTF request, and sends it to the mathematical toolbox agent. The latter parses the request, generates executable calls, and dispatches them to the backend for exact computation. Tool outputs then support candidate-answer adjudication, answer revision, and verification-workflow revision. We evaluate AMTFV on five challenging mathematical reasoning datasets with seven model configurations from DeepSeek, GPT, and Gemini. Experimental results show that AMTFV outperforms the representative baselines evaluated in this study overall; under an individual model configuration, it improves average accuracy over the strongest baseline by up to 8.3 percentage points, with larger gains on samples of medium and high verification complexity.
LLM agents need memory to act consistently over long interactions, yet many systems use additional LLM calls to operate that memory. Generating intermediate records and mediating their retrieval adds recurring token and time costs, while omitted or merged details can obscure the original evidence. We ask whether structured memory access requires generation at all. Zero-Mem introduces zero-token memory operations: no step outside final question answering invokes an LLM or consumes LLM input or output tokens; encoder computation is accounted for separately. Zero-Mem preserves original interaction traces as its source of record. It organizes the traces in two complementary ways. An entity--context graph exposes connections across interactions, while a temporal hierarchy preserves conversational locality and session state. For each query, Zero-Mem weighs the two views, retrieves from both, and follows their structure to recover supporting relations or surrounding context. Deterministic calibration first discards conflicting evidence and then keeps the reader's answer grounded in the retrieved traces. Only the final-QA reader invokes an LLM. Across long-memory and long-context question-answering benchmarks, Zero-Mem achieves competitive performance while eliminating LLM calls and LLM-token consumption from memory operations. With the same final-QA reader and context budget, it reduces memory-operation time cost by 57.6% relative to the fastest compared baseline. Ablations support the contribution of the two views and their query-dependent coordination. Overall, the results show that structured agent memory need not generate an intermediate representation of the past. After peer review, the code and implementation details will be available at \textcolor{blue}{https://github.com/TheMoon0815/Zero-mem}.
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LLM agents need memory to act consistently over long interactions, yet many systems use additional LLM calls to operate that memory. Generating intermediate records and mediating their retrieval adds recurring token and time costs, while omitted or merged details can obscure the original evidence. We ask whether structured memory access requires generation at all. Zero-Mem introduces zero-token memory operations: no step outside final question answering invokes an LLM or consumes LLM input or output tokens; encoder computation is accounted for separately. Zero-Mem preserves original interaction traces as its source of record. It organizes the traces in two complementary ways. An entity--context graph exposes connections across interactions, while a temporal hierarchy preserves conversational locality and session state. For each query, Zero-Mem weighs the two views, retrieves from both, and follows their structure to recover supporting relations or surrounding context. Deterministic calibration first discards conflicting evidence and then keeps the reader's answer grounded in the retrieved traces. Only the final-QA reader invokes an LLM. Across long-memory and long-context question-answering benchmarks, Zero-Mem achieves competitive performance while eliminating LLM calls and LLM-token consumption from memory operations. With the same final-QA reader and context budget, it reduces memory-operation time cost by 57.6% relative to the fastest compared baseline. Ablations support the contribution of the two views and their query-dependent coordination. Overall, the results show that structured agent memory need not generate an intermediate representation of the past. After peer review, the code and implementation details will be available at \textcolor{blue}{https://github.com/TheMoon0815/Zero-mem}.
Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) enables robots to follow instructions in previously unseen environments. Recently, a training-free paradigm has emerged: the robot queries a multimodal LLM to understand its observations and plan the next action. However, long-horizon navigation based on either image streams or dense map inevitably introduces a growing memory and reasoning bottleneck. We present HAM-VLN, a decision-coupled, agent-authored memory that equips the robot with a persistent, depth-grounded world graph. In the same model call used to select the next action, HAM-VLN also records semantic and reflective information---including room type, objects, navigation progress, and failure notes. Recent waypoints remain verbatim within a bounded window, while older history re-enters the context only through retrieval scored by relevance, recency, and salience, together with one-hop topological expansion. This design requires no additional LLM calls beyond the per-waypoint decision. Compared to previous methods, HAM-VLN not only improves various navigation metrics but also reduces the context length by more than 65%. Specifically, HAM-VLN achieves 61.0% Success Rate (SR) on VLN-CE R2R, 52.7% SR on VLN-CE RxR, and 79.7% SR on HM3D-v2 ObjectNav without any training.
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Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) enables robots to follow instructions in previously unseen environments. Recently, a training-free paradigm has emerged: the robot queries a multimodal LLM to understand its observations and plan the next action. However, long-horizon navigation based on either image streams or dense map inevitably introduces a growing memory and reasoning bottleneck. We present HAM-VLN, a decision-coupled, agent-authored memory that equips the robot with a persistent, depth-grounded world graph. In the same model call used to select the next action, HAM-VLN also records semantic and reflective information---including room type, objects, navigation progress, and failure notes. Recent waypoints remain verbatim within a bounded window, while older history re-enters the context only through retrieval scored by relevance, recency, and salience, together with one-hop topological expansion. This design requires no additional LLM calls beyond the per-waypoint decision. Compared to previous methods, HAM-VLN not only improves various navigation metrics but also reduces the context length by more than 65%. Specifically, HAM-VLN achieves 61.0% Success Rate (SR) on VLN-CE R2R, 52.7% SR on VLN-CE RxR, and 79.7% SR on HM3D-v2 ObjectNav without any training.
作者Jiwei Yang, Zhengxian Chen, Chaosheng Huang, Jun Li
Existing autonomous-driving world models typically perform dense prediction of future videos, occupancy states, BEV representations, or agent motion. We argue that planning need not reconstruct the complete future world, but only focus on scene features that affect future ego action. Based on this perspective, we propose Auto-JEPA, an action-oriented latent world model that learns continuous future driving intent through joint-embedding prediction. Given visual observations, egomotion history, and navigation commands, Auto-JEPA predicts an intent embedding aligned with the latent representation of the future ego trajectory. The predicted intent retrieves executable trajectories from a fixed trajectory memory, which are then ranked by a scene-conditioned candidate selection module. Auto-JEPA keeps the visual encoder frozen, requires no explicit perception annotations, and uses no learned trajectory generator. By optimizing only task-specific modules for trajectory representation, intent prediction, and candidate selection, Auto-JEPA achieves 91.3 PDMS on NAVSIM v1 and 89.1 EPDMS on NAVSIM v2. Semantic occlusion experiments show that masking dynamic-agent regions induces an average intent change 2.97x that of equal-area random masking. Moreover, occluding vehicles that affect future driving substantially changes the predicted intent and selected trajectory, whereas both remain essentially unchanged when non-influential vehicles are occluded. These results show that future-intent prediction encourages the model to focus on planning-relevant visual features and supports high-quality planning without dense future-world modeling.
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Existing autonomous-driving world models typically perform dense prediction of future videos, occupancy states, BEV representations, or agent motion. We argue that planning need not reconstruct the complete future world, but only focus on scene features that affect future ego action. Based on this perspective, we propose Auto-JEPA, an action-oriented latent world model that learns continuous future driving intent through joint-embedding prediction. Given visual observations, egomotion history, and navigation commands, Auto-JEPA predicts an intent embedding aligned with the latent representation of the future ego trajectory. The predicted intent retrieves executable trajectories from a fixed trajectory memory, which are then ranked by a scene-conditioned candidate selection module. Auto-JEPA keeps the visual encoder frozen, requires no explicit perception annotations, and uses no learned trajectory generator. By optimizing only task-specific modules for trajectory representation, intent prediction, and candidate selection, Auto-JEPA achieves 91.3 PDMS on NAVSIM v1 and 89.1 EPDMS on NAVSIM v2. Semantic occlusion experiments show that masking dynamic-agent regions induces an average intent change 2.97x that of equal-area random masking. Moreover, occluding vehicles that affect future driving substantially changes the predicted intent and selected trajectory, whereas both remain essentially unchanged when non-influential vehicles are occluded. These results show that future-intent prediction encourages the model to focus on planning-relevant visual features and supports high-quality planning without dense future-world modeling.
作者Hafsa Ouajdi, Francesco Giannuzzo, Alaa Boukhary, Paolo Papotti, Gerard Conangla, Adam Elwood
Agentic software-engineering and industrial systems increasingly operate through executable workflows rather than code genera- tion alone: they search artifacts, invoke tools, inspect structured observations, and query databases. Training these agents requires supervision data that captures valid tool interactions and executable workflows. However, traditional query-first data synthesis can fail because plausible user requests may not correspond to valid tool sequences, compatible parameters, or available data. To address this limitation, we propose SyntheticAgentTraceQA, an execution- first framework for generating scalable supervision data for tool- augmented agents. Our framework first constructs high-level work- flow structures, maps them to available tools through dependency- aware assignment, executes and validates the resulting traces in con- trolled environments, and only then synthesizes natural-language user tasks, teacher-generated reasoning annotations, and reference answers. We evaluate the framework across four tool ecosystems and use the resulting data to fine-tune and evaluate Qwen model variants. The results show that execution-grounded supervision improves tool execution behavior, reference-trace agreement, and answer-generation performance on the evaluated tasks. Further analysis reveals a supervision trade-off: masked supervision, which excludes reasoning annotations from the training objective, im- proves final-answer metrics, whereas full supervision, computing loss over the complete assistant output including reasoning tokens, underperforms on answer quality and does not consistently im- prove reference-trace agreement, particularly at the 9B scale. These findings highlight the importance of designing synthetic supervi- sion according to the desired capabilities of tool-augmented agents.
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Agentic software-engineering and industrial systems increasingly operate through executable workflows rather than code genera- tion alone: they search artifacts, invoke tools, inspect structured observations, and query databases. Training these agents requires supervision data that captures valid tool interactions and executable workflows. However, traditional query-first data synthesis can fail because plausible user requests may not correspond to valid tool sequences, compatible parameters, or available data. To address this limitation, we propose SyntheticAgentTraceQA, an execution- first framework for generating scalable supervision data for tool- augmented agents. Our framework first constructs high-level work- flow structures, maps them to available tools through dependency- aware assignment, executes and validates the resulting traces in con- trolled environments, and only then synthesizes natural-language user tasks, teacher-generated reasoning annotations, and reference answers. We evaluate the framework across four tool ecosystems and use the resulting data to fine-tune and evaluate Qwen model variants. The results show that execution-grounded supervision improves tool execution behavior, reference-trace agreement, and answer-generation performance on the evaluated tasks. Further analysis reveals a supervision trade-off: masked supervision, which excludes reasoning annotations from the training objective, im- proves final-answer metrics, whereas full supervision, computing loss over the complete assistant output including reasoning tokens, underperforms on answer quality and does not consistently im- prove reference-trace agreement, particularly at the 9B scale. These findings highlight the importance of designing synthetic supervi- sion according to the desired capabilities of tool-augmented agents.
Graphical user interface (GUI) agents based on large language models are increasingly deployed across mobile, web, and desktop environments. However, existing agents are typically domain-specific, limiting the deployment and user experience. This motivates the consolidation of specialized models into a single cross-environment policy. Weight merging directly merges domain-specific experts but can corrupt executable actions under expert disagreement, while on-policy distillation (OPD) avoids conflicting teacher supervision yet still treats all response tokens equally during distillation, ignoring that action tokens are the only interface between the environment and the agent. To address this, We introduce MAGA that re-allocates training signal according to the structured action. Based on the correctness of the generated action, it suppresses unnecessary or invalid distillation signals and focuses learning on erroneous actions. Besides, a training-only hint optimizes the supervision signal provided by domain-specific teachers without changing the student input. Across two model scales, MAGA achieves the highest mean success rate, outperforming the strongest baseline by 2.0% at 8B and achieves almost the same average performance with teachers.
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Graphical user interface (GUI) agents based on large language models are increasingly deployed across mobile, web, and desktop environments. However, existing agents are typically domain-specific, limiting the deployment and user experience. This motivates the consolidation of specialized models into a single cross-environment policy. Weight merging directly merges domain-specific experts but can corrupt executable actions under expert disagreement, while on-policy distillation (OPD) avoids conflicting teacher supervision yet still treats all response tokens equally during distillation, ignoring that action tokens are the only interface between the environment and the agent. To address this, We introduce MAGA that re-allocates training signal according to the structured action. Based on the correctness of the generated action, it suppresses unnecessary or invalid distillation signals and focuses learning on erroneous actions. Besides, a training-only hint optimizes the supervision signal provided by domain-specific teachers without changing the student input. Across two model scales, MAGA achieves the highest mean success rate, outperforming the strongest baseline by 2.0% at 8B and achieves almost the same average performance with teachers.
Recently Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly deployed as autonomous agents in applications such as self-reflection, retrieval-augmented generation, and scientific discovery. In these settings, agents must act based on limited observations rather than full environmental states, leading to partial observability. This introduces several key challenges: belief state inference, task objective misalignment, and planning under uncertainty. Prior approaches typically condition actions on full or summarized action-observation histories whose redundant and irrelevant information can mislead the decision making of LLM agent. Inspired by human cognition, we propose a novel neuro-symbolic fast-slow thinking (NeSyFS) framework for LLM agent, addressing the challenges introduced by partial observability in a unified approach. We use a knowledge graph (KG) to represent the belief state, providing triplets as context for every module of NeSyFS. The fast-thinking module performs reactive action, while slow-thinking conducts a new uncertainty-aware planning by following the high-level structure of twisted sequential Monte Carlo (TSMC) algorithm. To mitigate the misalignment of task objective, a reflection module is used to reflect fast-thinking actions, and also switches to the slow-thinking module whenever reactive actions repeatedly fail. Experiments on three representative benchmarks, i.e. ALFWorld, Webshop, and ScienceWorld, demonstrate significant advantages over previous methods.
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Recently Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly deployed as autonomous agents in applications such as self-reflection, retrieval-augmented generation, and scientific discovery. In these settings, agents must act based on limited observations rather than full environmental states, leading to partial observability. This introduces several key challenges: belief state inference, task objective misalignment, and planning under uncertainty. Prior approaches typically condition actions on full or summarized action-observation histories whose redundant and irrelevant information can mislead the decision making of LLM agent. Inspired by human cognition, we propose a novel neuro-symbolic fast-slow thinking (NeSyFS) framework for LLM agent, addressing the challenges introduced by partial observability in a unified approach. We use a knowledge graph (KG) to represent the belief state, providing triplets as context for every module of NeSyFS. The fast-thinking module performs reactive action, while slow-thinking conducts a new uncertainty-aware planning by following the high-level structure of twisted sequential Monte Carlo (TSMC) algorithm. To mitigate the misalignment of task objective, a reflection module is used to reflect fast-thinking actions, and also switches to the slow-thinking module whenever reactive actions repeatedly fail. Experiments on three representative benchmarks, i.e. ALFWorld, Webshop, and ScienceWorld, demonstrate significant advantages over previous methods.
作者Rongjian Gu, Wengang Zhou, Junyu Xiong, Yonghui Wang, Bing Yin, Bei Wang, Houqiang Li
Multi-page document visual question answering requires locating sparse evidence at both the page and region levels. Existing approaches typically emphasize one level over the other: page-centric methods focus on page acquisition, with region operations serving mainly as navigation aids, whereas region-centric methods assume that the relevant pages have already been supplied. Consequently, page and region selection remain disconnected rather than forming successive evidence decisions. We propose HierDoc, a hierarchical evidence-routing framework that formulates long-document evidence acquisition as two-stage set prediction from pages to regions. A page policy selects evidence pages from the full document; these pages are then parsed for semantic elements, after which a region policy selects the elements passed to a downstream answer model. Both answer-agnostic policies are optimized with stage-wise GRPO using granularity-specific structured-set rewards. The answer model receives selected full pages together with selected region crops and OCR or table text, preserving global context while emphasizing fine-grained evidence. Across the evaluated benchmarks, HierDoc achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance among open-weight systems, improving LongDocURL by 16.87% relative to the strongest reported open-weight baseline. Controlled ablations further show that selected regional evidence improves the page-only system in accuracy and F1 by 5.51% and 4.82%, respectively. These results demonstrate the benefit of organizing coarse page routing and fine-grained region routing as successive, separately optimized stages of a unified evidence-acquisition process.
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Multi-page document visual question answering requires locating sparse evidence at both the page and region levels. Existing approaches typically emphasize one level over the other: page-centric methods focus on page acquisition, with region operations serving mainly as navigation aids, whereas region-centric methods assume that the relevant pages have already been supplied. Consequently, page and region selection remain disconnected rather than forming successive evidence decisions. We propose HierDoc, a hierarchical evidence-routing framework that formulates long-document evidence acquisition as two-stage set prediction from pages to regions. A page policy selects evidence pages from the full document; these pages are then parsed for semantic elements, after which a region policy selects the elements passed to a downstream answer model. Both answer-agnostic policies are optimized with stage-wise GRPO using granularity-specific structured-set rewards. The answer model receives selected full pages together with selected region crops and OCR or table text, preserving global context while emphasizing fine-grained evidence. Across the evaluated benchmarks, HierDoc achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance among open-weight systems, improving LongDocURL by 16.87% relative to the strongest reported open-weight baseline. Controlled ablations further show that selected regional evidence improves the page-only system in accuracy and F1 by 5.51% and 4.82%, respectively. These results demonstrate the benefit of organizing coarse page routing and fine-grained region routing as successive, separately optimized stages of a unified evidence-acquisition process.
Deploying state-of-the-art deep neural networks (DNNs) at the wireless edge is severely bottlenecked by the strict energy and resource constraints of mobile devices. While federated split learning (FSL) mitigates on-device computation by offloading workloads to an edge server, this may introduce systemic overheads, while the continuous exchange of cut-layer data, and submodels still incurs significant energy consumption (EC). To address this, we propose a green quantized FSL (GQ-FSL) framework that incorporates stochastic quantization for both local collaborative training and wireless transmissions. Notably, GQ-FSL supports asymmetric precision levels for the client- and server-side submodels, effectively decoupling device energy constraints from global convergence degradation. To quantify these tradeoffs, we develop parameterized energy models for the split architecture and derive a theoretical convergence bound under statistically heterogeneous data. Building on that, we formulate a joint optimization problem to configure the DNN split point and precision levels, minimizing the total system EC while satisfying a strict target accuracy constraint. Ultimately, we demonstrate that GQ-FSL enables large-scale DNN deployment on resource-constrained devices, achieving superior energy efficiency compared to quantized federated learning and full-precision FSL.
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Deploying state-of-the-art deep neural networks (DNNs) at the wireless edge is severely bottlenecked by the strict energy and resource constraints of mobile devices. While federated split learning (FSL) mitigates on-device computation by offloading workloads to an edge server, this may introduce systemic overheads, while the continuous exchange of cut-layer data, and submodels still incurs significant energy consumption (EC). To address this, we propose a green quantized FSL (GQ-FSL) framework that incorporates stochastic quantization for both local collaborative training and wireless transmissions. Notably, GQ-FSL supports asymmetric precision levels for the client- and server-side submodels, effectively decoupling device energy constraints from global convergence degradation. To quantify these tradeoffs, we develop parameterized energy models for the split architecture and derive a theoretical convergence bound under statistically heterogeneous data. Building on that, we formulate a joint optimization problem to configure the DNN split point and precision levels, minimizing the total system EC while satisfying a strict target accuracy constraint. Ultimately, we demonstrate that GQ-FSL enables large-scale DNN deployment on resource-constrained devices, achieving superior energy efficiency compared to quantized federated learning and full-precision FSL.
作者Duy Tran Thanh, Thien-Phuc Doan, Long Nguyen-Vu, Ngo Tan Vu Khanh
Zero-shot image captioning (ZIC) describes images without paired image-caption supervision during captioner training, relying on text-only corpora and frozen pretrained image-text scorers. Existing retrieval-augmented methods score image-text alignment once, at retrieval, then commit the captioner's autoregressive beam under language-model probability alone, leaving the decoder without further visual grounding feedback. Progress has stalled, with no method improving on the strict-regime best since 2024. We propose Adjudicated Captioning, an inference-time multi-agent framework that restores grounding feedback at multiple checkpoints over an unchanged IFCap captioner. First, we install a stronger frozen Retrieval Encoder at the input. Second, between retrieval and decoding we insert a frozen Cross-Attention Verifier that re-ranks the top-9 retrievals to top-5. Third, at the output beam we attach a learned Reranker pairing TriFuse, a multilayer perceptron, with MemAttend, a memory-attended transformer, the pipeline's only learned components; both are trained self-supervised by Borda-consensus distillation across the three frozen scorers, using no paired image-caption labels and no reference captions. Under the inductive headline protocol, with rerankers fit on the disjoint COCO Karpathy validation beam and applied frozen to test, the framework reaches CIDEr 117.6 and SPICE 21.9 on COCO Karpathy, up from 108.0 and 20.3 for IFCap, a +9.6 CIDEr gain, and +7.7 above NES, the strongest synthetic-image-augmented method at 109.9, without retraining the captioner. A training-free fixed-fusion baseline reaches 115.8 CIDEr, so +7.8 of the +9.6 gain comes from the non-learned architectural intervention and the remaining +1.8 from the learned rerankers. The same recipe transfers off-COCO without captioner retraining: +8.1 CIDEr on Flickr30k Karpathy and +5.7 on NoCaps overall.
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Zero-shot image captioning (ZIC) describes images without paired image-caption supervision during captioner training, relying on text-only corpora and frozen pretrained image-text scorers. Existing retrieval-augmented methods score image-text alignment once, at retrieval, then commit the captioner's autoregressive beam under language-model probability alone, leaving the decoder without further visual grounding feedback. Progress has stalled, with no method improving on the strict-regime best since 2024. We propose Adjudicated Captioning, an inference-time multi-agent framework that restores grounding feedback at multiple checkpoints over an unchanged IFCap captioner. First, we install a stronger frozen Retrieval Encoder at the input. Second, between retrieval and decoding we insert a frozen Cross-Attention Verifier that re-ranks the top-9 retrievals to top-5. Third, at the output beam we attach a learned Reranker pairing TriFuse, a multilayer perceptron, with MemAttend, a memory-attended transformer, the pipeline's only learned components; both are trained self-supervised by Borda-consensus distillation across the three frozen scorers, using no paired image-caption labels and no reference captions. Under the inductive headline protocol, with rerankers fit on the disjoint COCO Karpathy validation beam and applied frozen to test, the framework reaches CIDEr 117.6 and SPICE 21.9 on COCO Karpathy, up from 108.0 and 20.3 for IFCap, a +9.6 CIDEr gain, and +7.7 above NES, the strongest synthetic-image-augmented method at 109.9, without retraining the captioner. A training-free fixed-fusion baseline reaches 115.8 CIDEr, so +7.8 of the +9.6 gain comes from the non-learned architectural intervention and the remaining +1.8 from the learned rerankers. The same recipe transfers off-COCO without captioner retraining: +8.1 CIDEr on Flickr30k Karpathy and +5.7 on NoCaps overall.