Research

• Lack of holistic evaluation for multimodal video understanding1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Existing benchmarks only cover partial dimensions, limiting systematic diagnosis of models' capabilities across temporal, spatial, and reasoning tasks.

  • OmniCompass: A Holistic Benchmark for Omni-Modal Video Grounding and Understandingraises · addresses
• Closed systems for generalist computer-use agents1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Frontier implementations are largely closed, hindering systematic study and community-driven improvements in agent design.

  • OpenGCUA: Toward a Fully Open Stack for Generalist Computer Useraises · addresses
• Structural limitations in decision-making models1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Current models often fail to handle null outcomes, permutation invariance, scalability with candidate sets, and reusable computation for recurring alternatives.

  • Jeva: System One Models from First Principlesraises · addresses
• Inefficient context management for long-horizon agents1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Agents repeatedly process interaction histories instead of organizing context around reusable progress, leading to inefficiency and reduced performance.

  • Pack Light, CarryOn: Building Object-Oriented Context for Long-Horizon Agentsraises · addresses
• Inadequate evaluation for real-world AI delivery tasks1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Existing benchmarks focus on well-specified tasks, while real-world delivery requires handling ambiguity, live systems, and unstated constraints.

  • FDE-Gym: The Last Mile of AI Deliveryraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

• Sensing communication16+23.1%
• Federated learning40+8.1%
• Agents497−0.6%
• Frontier LLMs430−7.5%
• Learning verifiable rewards165−17.5%
• Forecasting time75−17.6%
• Inference & serving247−18.5%
• Character recognition OCR15−21.1%

• arXiv cs.LGOct 19▲ 4

  Text-to-Image Generative Modeling Without Language Pretraining

  Keshigeyan Chandrasegaran, Yue Zhao, Armin W. Thomas, Ehsan Adeli, Jiajun Wu +3

  Modern text-to-image (T2I) systems use internet-scale language pretraining for text-conditioned image generation. We ask whether language pretraining is necessary for strong T2I generation. We introduce Halcyon, a family of early-fusion multimodal autoregressive models pretrained entirely from scratch on GPIC, a dataset of 100M image-text pairs. Halcyon-0.52B outperforms LlamaGen-XL/8 (48.0 vs. 63.3 gFD) with 18.2$\times$ less pretraining compute. Further, Halcyon-1.6B outperforms JiT-T2I-XXL/8++ (35.3 vs. 41.0 gFD) with 275$\times$ less pretraining compute. Controlled experiments show that text-only pretraining does not improve T2I generation. Halcyon also learns image captioning by replacing caption dropout with I2T supervision, maintaining competitive T2I generation quality under the same pretraining budget. We show that strong T2I systems can be trained from scratch without internet-scale language pretraining. Code and models are available at https://cs.stanford.edu/~keshik/halcyon

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 19

  Can It Actually Work? Synthesizing Functional CAD Mechanisms

  Wenqian Zhang, Yangyi Huang, Zigeng Xu, Weiyang Liu, Zhen Liu

  While LLM agents can generate visually plausible CAD assemblies, these designs often fail to fulfill their intended physical functions. We study functional CAD design, a setting where agents interpret underspecified requests to construct and iteratively revise mechanisms that satisfy functional requirements in physical simulation. Verifying these requirements is nontrivial: different candidate mechanisms may realize the same function through entirely different components, controls, and operating sequences. To bridge this gap, we propose FunCAD-Harness, a framework that translates abstract requirements into candidate-specific physical tests and uses simulation feedback to guide design revisions. To systematically evaluate this capability, we introduce FunCADBench, a benchmark spanning 46 mechanism families with interdependent and multi-step operations. Experiments across frontier LLM agents show that FunCAD-Harness exposes subtle mechanical failures invisible to visual inspection, substantially improving functional success rates over standard simulation-augmented baselines. Ultimately, our work marks a step toward CAD agents capable of translating human intent into working…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 19▲ 86

  OpenVLHarness: Real World Visual Agentic Tool-Use with Multimodal Memory

  Yu Zhou, Cheng-Fu Yang, Rui Sun, Di Wu, Sibo Peng +6

  Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress on visual reasoning, yet many tasks require evidence that is difficult to obtain through internal reasoning alone: our controlled study on 22 benchmarks shows that simply increasing the inference budget of the base model yields only modest gains. Such tasks demand grounded perception, external knowledge, and numerical measurements obtained through heterogeneous tools, whose outputs must be made interpretable to the model and retained across reasoning steps. We introduce OpenVLHarness, a multimodal reasoning harness organized around a capability layer and persistent multimodal memory. The capability layer combines task-level tool interfaces with evidence rendering, providing consistent access to heterogeneous backends and converting their outputs into model-readable observations. Persistent multimodal memory retains the corresponding images, structured data, and web references as addressable artifacts throughout each query. A coding interface executes generated programs over stored data, enabling computations that combine results from multiple tools. Together, these mechanisms support an iterative process of…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 19

  VideoMaMa++: Temporally Consistent Video Matting via Preserve-and-Refine Token

  Sangbeom Lim, Seoung Wug Oh, Heeji Yoon, Seungryong Kim, Joon-Young Lee

  Diffusion-based video matting has recently emerged as a leading approach, leveraging video diffusion priors from internet-scale pretraining to achieve strong zero-shot generalization from limited synthetic data. However, the heavy compute of these diffusion backbones limits inference to a short chunk of just 6 to 24 frames, so even ordinary videos span multiple chunks. Because each chunk is matted independently from coarse mask guidance, existing methods fail to maintain consistency across chunk boundaries, producing flickering edges and discontinuous transparency. We address this with a mask-guided diffusion-matting framework built on two ideas. The RGB and mask conditioning are represented as separate token streams that interact through full spatio-temporal self-attention, letting the model adaptively combine fine RGB texture with coarse mask layout rather than committing to a fixed channel-wise fusion. On top of this, we propose a novel pair of learnable embeddings, the preserve token and the refine token, that act as a per-frame conditioning interface and enable a sliding-window inference scheme in which already-generated mattes are propagated across chunk boundaries for…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 19

  Reinforcement Learning with Visually Attributable On-Policy Self-Distillation

  Shiao Xie, Siyu Chen, Jianwei Lv, Xiandong Li, Yujin Wang

  Multimodal reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) provides reliable task-level supervision, yet offers limited guidance for localizing errors in visual reasoning. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) complements this supervision with dense token-level corrections from a privileged teacher equipped with an evidence-centered visual view. However, the resulting corrections may conflate visual evidence with non-visual shifts induced by linguistic priors, response style, or the privileged view itself. We formalize this phenomenon as privileged-correction contamination: a token-level correction is contaminated when its update direction cannot be consistently attributed to the privileged visual evidence. Directly distilling contaminated corrections may therefore reinforce erroneous token-level updates. To address this issue, we propose reinforcement learning with visually attributable on-policy self-distillation, an evidence-consistent paradigm that augments task-level RLVR supervision with privileged token-level corrections grounded in visual evidence. We instantiate this paradigm with Visual-Attribution Gating (VAG), which uses the verifier-derived advantage as the…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 19

  Ropedia W0: Scaling Loco-Manipulation World Models across Embodiments with Human Experience

  Tianqi Liu, Hanfei Zhao, Qifeng Liang, Hui En Pang, Jiarui Xu +10

  World models enable embodied agents to anticipate action consequences, yet jointly modeling locomotion and manipulation across diverse embodiments remains challenging due to heterogeneous action spaces and limited multimodal supervision. We present Ropedia W0, the first egocentric loco-manipulation world foundation model spanning humans and robots with diverse embodiments. We curate Xp-Data, comprising 10k hours of egocentric human data and 3k hours of robot data with unified multimodal annotations and systematic quality control. A unified kinematic representation encodes locomotion through camera poses and manipulation through projected skeletons, with robot skeletons combining embodiment-specific forward kinematics with extensive manual keypoint annotation and correction. We also introduce Xp-Teleop, a long-horizon loco-manipulation benchmark based on high-quality dexterous humanoid teleoperation data. Evaluations demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across five cross-embodiment benchmarks (DreamDojo, $Ψ_0$, $ω$-HOME, Xp-Teleop, and AgiBot) and on held-out human egocentric video, from zero-shot inference to few-shot and full-data post-training. Scaling human pre-training…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 19▲ 25

  InfiniDream: Open-Ended Photorealistic 3D Worlds Through Procedural Generation

  Yi-Chuan Huang, Hao-Jen Chien, Zheng-Hui Huang, Yu-Lun Liu, Kaipeng Zhang +1

  Procedural generation plays a key role in synthetic data creation and game development, offering greater controllability, editability, and diversity than static mesh representations. However, VLM-based code generation often produces relatively simple 3D assets, while sophisticated photorealistic procedural systems require extensive manual development. Existing VLM-guided procedural methods remain largely constrained by predefined factories and APIs, limiting their ability to create novel asset types. We introduce InfiniDream, a VLM-driven framework for open-ended procedural 3D world generation. First, we propose Symbolically Constrained Asset Generation, which leverages existing procedural algorithms to create novel, photorealistic assets while preserving editability and seed-based diversity. Second, we develop an end-to-end text-to-world pipeline that combines semantic scene planning with Deterministic Frustum-Guided Grid Placement to construct large-scale 3D worlds with precise object placement, procedural population, and animation. Extensive evaluations on 100 object and 20 scene generation tasks demonstrate improvements across four perceptual metrics. Diversity analysis,…

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• arXiv cs.ROOct 19

  CoopUQ: Robust Multi-Robot Social Navigation via Uncertainty-Aware Cooperative Forecasting

  Zehao Wang, Jianpeng Yao, Yuping Wang, Yiping Li, Jiaqi Li +7

  Reinforcement learning enables mobile robots to make fast and scalable navigation decisions in constrained human-shared environments. However, directly extending single-robot approaches to multi-robot settings often fails to ensure safety and efficiency, especially under occlusions and out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios, where individual robots may overlook potential risks or make inaccurate predictions. Leveraging cooperation effectively for both prediction and navigation remains a major challenge. We propose CoopUQ, a multi-robot social navigation framework that bridges uncertainty-aware cooperative occupancy forecasting and robust decision making. CoopUQ predicts future occupancy grid maps through cross-robot spatiotemporal feature fusion and further leverages forecasts and their uncertainty to guide policy via constrained multi-agent reinforcement learning, where the cost penalizes navigation through regions predicted to be occupied or highly uncertain. This design enables the policy to adapt its risk sensitivity under distribution shifts. Experimental results across multiple Unity3D-based simulation environments with both in-distribution and OOD settings, including diverse…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 19▲ 23

  Manga2Animate: An Agentic Framework for Faithful Manga Animation with Script and Storyboard Planning

  Sheng-Wei Zhang, Hsi-An Chen, Yan-Ting Liou, Chih-Hsuan Chen, Shih-Chen Tseng +1

  Adapting existing manga into coherent animation that stays faithful to the source is a valuable yet challenging task. Existing methods either access the manga mainly through text, losing its characters and art style, or feed manga pages directly into video generation models, which misinterpret the manga's structure and produce incorrect storylines. In this paper, we propose Manga2Animate, a multi-agent framework that grounds every stage of generation in the source manga. We decompose the task into two intermediate representations, an animation script and a visual storyboard. Each representation is produced by a creator agent and reviewed against the source panels by a paired reviewer agent. We tailor representation-specific selection and dual-level feedback to progressively refine both before synthesizing the final animation. Extensive experiments and a user study demonstrate that Manga2Animate produces animations more faithful to the source manga and more consistent across shots than state-of-the-art approaches. Project page: https://annchenn.github.io/Manga2Animate/

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 19

  GenOlympiad: Benchmarking Frontier Image Models at Their Capability Boundaries

  Xi Hu, Martin Bell, Liang Zheng

  Text-to-image models have made tremendous progress and can produce high-quality images. However, a question which would be asked in any other discipline is where the frontier models fall short. We introduce GenOlympiad, a benchmark which provides the most challenging text prompts from nine capability axes for stress-testing frontier text-to-image models. The assessed capabilities include generating large quantities, performing deep reasoning, ensuring hard physical consistency, following complex rules and so on. The prompts are designed such that prompt alignment is visually verifiable (e.g., counting) instead of relying on subjectiveness (e.g., style). Based on this, we develop an automated evaluation framework which decomposes the prompt into easy and hard questions, and for most hard questions, draws help lines to ground evidence for accurate grading. We evaluate 20+ strong text-to-image models, including Nano Banana Pro, GPT-Image-2.5, Seedream-5.0 and so on. We report that even the best-performing T2I model (Nano Banana Pro) only achieves a strict score of 23.9 out of 100 and that coding models such as GPT-6 Astra have higher prompt alignment scores (but not as visually…

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• arXiv cs.ROOct 19▲ 16

  Where is Physical RSI capability from? An Observational Scaling Law of LLM-as-policy

  Zekai Li, Jiayi Yu, Jinlu Zhang, Luyang Niu, Zekun Qi +6

  In this paper, we systematically investigate the mechanisms, scaling behavior, and generalization of physical Recursive self-improvement. We introduce PhysRSI-eval to quantify physical RSI through a five-axis metric: First-Attempt Performance, Efficiency, Success, Budget and Improvement from failure. Different VLMs are evaluated on 18 manipulation tasks under a fixed interaction budget. The analysis of experimental results motivates the Physical Barrel Hypothesis: different capabilities may constrain different parts of improvement. The five-axis metrics also distinguish systems with close public benchmark averages and show that high scores need not come with early or efficient gains. We study observational scaling from two perspectives: predicting the relative performance of VLM agents from their public capabilities, and forecasting later progress from early physical feedback. Together, these analyses ask how quickly and how far an agent can improve. Moreover, we conduct workspace interventions and then analyze what improvement leaves behind. Removing history reduces late-round success, frozen workspaces remain useful on unseen layouts, and three cross-task cases achieve success…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 19

  WeAct: Dynamic Weight Switching as Agent Actions

  Rui Shi, Xunjian Yin, Jiacheng Sang, Zichuan Liu, Shuyan Zhou

  Long-horizon agents must learn heterogeneous capabilities from interleaved trajectories. Updating shared parameters to learn new capabilities can degrade previously acquired ones, resulting in catastrophic forgetting. As a trajectory unfolds, different stages may require different capabilities, yet conventional joint training and static adapter merging maintain a fixed parameter configuration throughout execution. We introduce WeAct (Weight-level Internal Actions), which trains independent capability-specific LoRA adapters over a frozen backbone and adds adapter selection to the agent's action space. These internal actions use the model's native tool-calling interface for on-demand capability composition in a shared context. Across eight deep-research benchmarks, Qwen3-32B with WeAct improves average accuracy by 6.2% relative to full fine-tuning counterparts despite using less compute, and by 27.5% relative to the strongest static LoRA-merging method. WeAct also supports modular continual adaptation, by adding a new code computation adapter to expand the agent's capabilities and updating the existing writing adapter to improve report quality. Both updates leave the backbone and…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 19

  Train An Imaginative Agent

  Jiaxin Ge, Junyi Zhang, Tianning Chai, Hanjun Yoo, Chenyang Wang +7

  A seemingly reasonable push in Sokoban can make the puzzle unsolvable. To avoid such mistakes, an agent has to anticipate the consequences of its actions before execution, especially when feedback from the real environment is sparse or actions are irreversible. We introduce Agentic Imagination (Agima), a training framework that trains an agent to imagine before acting, i.e. to be imaginative. Agima trains a single omni model to propose actions, generate images of their outcomes, and then reason over these imagined futures to decide what to execute in the real environment. Rather than committing to a single plan, the agent can simulate a sequence of actions, explore alternatives, and compare possible futures. We first use supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to unify policy and world modeling within a single omni model. This enables the agent to predict future outcomes and perform basic forms of imagination, such as forward thinking and counterfactual branching. We then use agentic reinforcement learning (RL) to teach the agent to reason with its imagined futures and use them effectively for planning. Across four environments spanning Maze2D, Sokoban, Pacman, and PushT, Agima generalizes…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 19▲ 28

  AnyGoal: On World Model Generalization Beyond Expert Rollouts

  Heejeong Nam, Divyat Mahajan, Quentin Le Lidec, Randall Balestriero, David Klindt

  The goal of a world model is to capture the dynamics of an environment. This has the great appeal that it allows agents to plan and simulate a course of actions with the help of a world model. For these uses to be reliable, however, the learned dynamics must behave well beyond the specific state-action combinations observed in expert rollouts. Despite this, the relationship between data coverage, dynamics generalization, and downstream planning performance remains underexplored. We study this relationship through the lens of compositional generalization: can a world model recombine familiar state and action factors into valid dynamics? To answer this, we introduce AnyGoal, a benchmark of goal-shifted task variants built from widely used world-model environments, together with an open-source library. Each task is designed to be within reach of a world model that has learned the underlying dynamics: individual state factors and actions remain within their training support, but their combinations are underrepresented in expert trajectories. Across multiple environments and world model families, we find that current models consistently exhibit failures under these recombinations. By…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 19

  LatComm: Reusable Context Compression for Latent Communication between Large Language Models

  Huawei Lin, Jinting Liu, Tan Yu, Weijie Zhao

  Systems that combine several large language models (LLMs) often use one context for many questions. When the context is passed between models as text, the receiving model processes all of its tokens again for every question. Avoiding this cost requires a context representation that is compact, reusable across questions, and readable by a different LLM. Existing compression and latent communication methods each provide only some of these properties. We introduce LatComm, a Latent Communication interface that provides all three by separating encoding from reading: the context is encoded once without the question, and the receiver selects what to read for each question. A frozen context encoder LLM compresses the context into a fixed-size packet and sends it to a different frozen receiver LLM, which reads the packet through cross-attention, with gates computed from its prompt. On 12 multiple-choice question-answering datasets, LatComm improves average accuracy over single-vector baselines by up to 10.2 points. On QuALITY, it reduces the receiver's input by 57x and answers the questions of an article 3x faster.

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• arXiv math.OCOct 19

  Newton-Based Methods for Bilevel Optimization Beyond Lower-Level Strong Convexity

  Youran Dong, Junfeng Yang, Wei Yao, Jin Zhang

  Bilevel optimization provides a framework for machine learning tasks such as hyperparameter optimization, data reweighting, and meta-learning. Existing Newton-based bilevel methods typically rely on the classical hypergradient formula, which is generally unavailable when lower-level solutions are nonunique and the lower-level Hessian is singular. We develop two Newton-based methods beyond lower-level strong convexity by exploiting curvature shared by the lower-level and multiplier updates. Newton-based GALET handles potentially singular lower-level curvature under a positive spectral-gap condition, exploiting its range structure to avoid the squared-Hessian multiplier system used in GALET. Newton-based BAMM uses a strongly convex aggregation model when the lower-level objective is convex and the upper-level objective is strongly convex in the lower-level variable. We establish convergence guarantees and improved complexity bounds relative to GALET and sl-BAMM under the corresponding assumptions. We further introduce GNBO, a generalized Newton-based framework that captures the shared-curvature structure of the proposed methods and several existing Newton and quasi-Newton bilevel…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 19

  SpecKCast: Spectral Kalman Forecasting for Diffusion Acceleration

  Javad Rajabi, Hakki Can Karaimer, David B. Lindell, Babak Taati, Michael S. Brown

  Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) achieve high-fidelity image and video generation, but they suffer from substantial inference costs due to repeated transformer evaluations across many denoising steps. Feature caching reduces this cost by reusing features across denoising steps. Recent forecasting methods extend this idea by extrapolating features to skipped steps instead of reusing them. However, existing forecasting methods extrapolate the features they predict uniformly, even though the spatial-frequency components of these features change most at different stages of denoising. They also overlook that denoising progresses nonuniformly, so equal step intervals can correspond to very different amounts of change. These mismatches amplify forecast errors as more steps are skipped, limiting the achievable acceleration. We propose SpecKCast, a training-free method that forecasts the model output in the frequency domain. SpecKCast applies a 2D discrete cosine transform (DCT) to the output and tracks each coefficient with a lightweight Kalman filter along a band-specific time coordinate derived from the noise schedule. The filter tracks each coefficient's value and rate of change, and the…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 19

  Same Simulation, Different Evidence: Where Retrieved Tool Output Costs LLM Agents Accuracy

  Ke Zhang, Sahchit Chundur, Jerry Peprah Owusu, Mohammad Javad Abdolhosseini Qomi, Maziar Raissi

  LLM agents that compute the right answer can still answer wrongly. Agent harnesses increasingly keep long tool outputs out of the context window, saving them to files that the agent searches or reads on demand. We ask where this costs accuracy with a real scientific tool: PHREEQC, a widely used geochemistry simulator from the USGS, whose reports reach 846.8k characters and whose determinism lets every printed value be traced. Agents use it to answer 158 execution-verified multiple-choice items. When agents read the simulator's report through a section index rather than in context, GPT-5.1 and GPT-5.2 lose 11.3 and 7.9 points of accuracy, while Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 show no detectable cost. Re-running all 11,007 logged simulator calls shows that both GPT models compute the keyed value about as often as before; what changes is the evidence they answer from. Under retrieval they often skip the report, answer from their own higher-precision output files, and misround to a neighboring option, a failure we call evidence substitution. With the simulation held fixed, retrieval still costs GPT-5.2 9.4 points. For GPT-5.4, more frequent correct simulations mask an…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 19▲ 27

  Kronecker Delta Rule for Long Context Linear Attention

  Anamaria-Roberta Hartl, Levente Zólyomi, Michael List, Günter Klambauer, Sebastian Böck +1

  We propose KronLSTM, a linear attention architecture based on the Kronecker Delta Rule, a novel update rule for associative matrix memories. KronLSTM extends the xLSTM family with a memory-revision mechanism that corrects targeted associations while modifying the memory only along a single direction in matrix space. This minimally invasive memory revision reduces interference with previously stored information compared with delta-rule updates, making it particularly well suited for long-context language modeling. The resulting memory dynamics can be mathematically described as a Markov chain that converges to a steady-state distribution, while the expected norm of the memory matrix remains uniformly bounded throughout the entire input sequence. Hence, KronLSTM ensures stable memory dynamics without requiring additional normalization and stabilization mechanisms for the memory state. Experiments show that KronLSTM is competitive with, and often outperforms, existing linear attention architectures, including models of the (Gated) DeltaNet family, with particularly strong performance on long context benchmarks. These results establish the Kronecker Delta Rule as an effective and…

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• arXiv quant-phOct 19

  Supervised Learning with Quantum Hamiltonian Embeddings

  Riccardo Molteni, Minjun Jeon, Paolo Braccia, Abhinav Deshpande, Vedran Dunjko +6

  Machine learning is widely regarded as a promising application in which quantum computing could offer a computational advantage. However, general quantum machine learning models with provable guarantees on performance, trainability, and efficient inference remain limited. In this work, we introduce quantum Hamiltonian embeddings, a supervised learning framework in which a classical training dataset is encoded into a single effective, parameterized Hamiltonian. Training optimizes the parameters of this data-dependent Hamiltonian, whose approximate ground state defines the classification rule. Once the ground state has been approximated using a quantum algorithm, inference can be performed either classically using a classical representation of the learned state, or with a quantum representation of the state. We establish efficient methods for gradient estimation and prove favorable generalization guarantees. Furthermore, under standard cryptographic assumptions, we show that Hamiltonian embeddings can realize hypothesis functions beyond the reach of efficient classical algorithms. We then demonstrate the framework at scale on IBM Heron processors using a standard benchmark dataset.…

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