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Oct 19

Seek Before You Move: Evidence Seeking for Progress Grounding in Vision-Language Navigation

Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) requires agents to continuously ground task progress from long-horizon instructions and partial egocentric observations. Existing VLM-based navigation agents typically reason only over available observations and may remain confident even when task-relevant evidence is missing. For example, an agent may confidently proceed forward and get lost even though the landmark indicating the next turn lies outside its current field of view. We term this failure mode Progress Myopia: the agent fails to recognize unreliable progress grounding and continues acting on insufficient evidence. To address it, we propose SeekVLN, an evidence-seeking framework that couples semantic progress reasoning with active acquisition of task-relevant observations. SeekVLN is trained in two stages: First, Future-guided Reverse Generation (FRG) uses future expert actions to augment offline expert trajectories with supplementary views and evidence annotations. Supervised fine-tuning on these trajectories establishes a prior for evidence seeking and progress reasoning without additional expert interaction. However, imitation alone does not reveal whether seeking improves subsequent navigation. We therefore introduce Counterfactual Contrastive Policy Optimization (C2PO) for reinforcement fine-tuning. By comparing each evidence-seeking branch with a counterfactual direct-navigation branch from the same state, C2PO uses a contrastive reward to assign credit to seeking decisions based on subsequent navigation benefit. Experiments on simulated benchmarks show that SeekVLN achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving success rate by 12.7% and 7.5% over the base model on R2R-CE and RxR-CE, respectively. Both simulated and real-world evaluations exhibit human-like evidence-seeking behaviors for more reliable progress grounding.

  • 11 authors
·
Sep 28

Cycle-World: Mitigating Error Accumulation in Long-term Video World Models via Reverse-Prediction Cycle Consistency

Autoregressive diffusion models have enabled high-quality video generation, yet their sequential nature inherently suffers from error accumulation. In long-horizon video synthesis, minor prediction deviations compound over time, inevitably leading to unconstrained generative drift, structural collapse, and severe visual degradation. To address this, we propose Cycle-World, a novel framework designed for stable and temporally consistent long-video generation. Our approach tackles error drift by enforcing strict temporal reversibility across both the training and inference phases. Theoretically, we demonstrate that forward generative drift can be strictly bottlenecked by a cycle-consistency objective. During training, we integrate an efficient reverse-prediction model to implicitly embed causal constraints into the forward generator, compelling it to produce reversible sequences that tightly adhere to the natural video manifold. At inference time, we repurpose this frozen reverse model as a runtime corrector. Through gradient-based cycle guidance, it iteratively refines the generated latent representations, actively suppressing accumulated errors before they are committed to the historical context. Extensive experiments on the VBench benchmark demonstrate that Cycle-World's dual-phase synergy significantly mitigates error drift, achieving state-of-the-art overall generation quality and long-horizon temporal consistency in 60-second synthesis.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 12

Enfold: Folding World Model Imagination into Predictive Representations for Ultra-Efficient Embodied Control

World generative models are typically used through what they produce: a rendered future, a video-conditioned action, or latent context computed by a costly generative branch. We argue that their more reusable asset is the computation that constructs a future. As a generator transforms a corrupted future into a coherent trajectory, its intermediate states organize appearance, spatial layout, and interaction across levels of abstraction. Can this future-generative computation be internalized in a representation inferred from the present alone? We present Enfold, which transfers this computation into a representation predicted from the current visual context and language instruction. During training, multi-level states exposed as the generator processes the observed future supervise a current-only encoder. The learned representation is fed back to condition future generation and is read by task heads without allowing task gradients to reshape the encoder. At deployment, action prediction no longer executes the generator. Across LIBERO, RoboTwin2.0, and real-robot tasks, Enfold supports strong control while reducing action latency by 3.7times relative to Fast--WAM, Enfold-Flash reaches 10.1times. Representation analyses show that it suppresses nuisance variation and preferentially captures changes that emerge over longer horizons. When the current scene is altered by human intervention, both the generated continuation and the executed actions adapt, which is inconsistent with fixed trajectory replay. These results recast a world generator as a source of predictive control representations: its future need not be materialized at every step if its internal structure can be enfolded into the present.

  • 13 authors
·
Aug 5 3

Generate, but Verify: Reducing Hallucination in Vision-Language Models with Retrospective Resampling

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at visual understanding but often suffer from visual hallucinations, where they generate descriptions of nonexistent objects, actions, or concepts, posing significant risks in safety-critical applications. Existing hallucination mitigation methods typically follow one of two paradigms: generation adjustment, which modifies decoding behavior to align text with visual inputs, and post-hoc verification, where external models assess and correct outputs. While effective, generation adjustment methods often rely on heuristics and lack correction mechanisms, while post-hoc verification is complicated, typically requiring multiple models and tending to reject outputs rather than refine them. In this work, we introduce REVERSE, a unified framework that integrates hallucination-aware training with on-the-fly self-verification. By leveraging a new hallucination-verification dataset containing over 1.3M semi-synthetic samples, along with a novel inference-time retrospective resampling technique, our approach enables VLMs to both detect hallucinations during generation and dynamically revise those hallucinations. Our evaluations show that REVERSE achieves state-of-the-art hallucination reduction, outperforming the best existing methods by up to 12% on CHAIR-MSCOCO and 28% on HaloQuest. Our dataset, model, and code are available at: https://reverse-vlm.github.io.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 17, 2025 2

EnerVerse: Envisioning Embodied Future Space for Robotics Manipulation

We introduce EnerVerse, a comprehensive framework for embodied future space generation specifically designed for robotic manipulation tasks. EnerVerse seamlessly integrates convolutional and bidirectional attention mechanisms for inner-chunk space modeling, ensuring low-level consistency and continuity. Recognizing the inherent redundancy in video data, we propose a sparse memory context combined with a chunkwise unidirectional generative paradigm to enable the generation of infinitely long sequences. To further augment robotic capabilities, we introduce the Free Anchor View (FAV) space, which provides flexible perspectives to enhance observation and analysis. The FAV space mitigates motion modeling ambiguity, removes physical constraints in confined environments, and significantly improves the robot's generalization and adaptability across various tasks and settings. To address the prohibitive costs and labor intensity of acquiring multi-camera observations, we present a data engine pipeline that integrates a generative model with 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS). This pipeline leverages the generative model's robust generalization capabilities and the spatial constraints provided by 4DGS, enabling an iterative enhancement of data quality and diversity, thus creating a data flywheel effect that effectively narrows the sim-to-real gap. Finally, our experiments demonstrate that the embodied future space generation prior substantially enhances policy predictive capabilities, resulting in improved overall performance, particularly in long-range robotic manipulation tasks.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 3, 2025 3

Time-Reversal Provides Unsupervised Feedback to LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically trained to predict in the forward direction of time. However, recent works have shown that prompting these models to look back and critique their own generations can produce useful feedback. Motivated by this, we explore the question of whether LLMs can be empowered to think (predict and score) backwards to provide unsupervised feedback that complements forward LLMs. Towards this, we introduce Time Reversed Language Models (TRLMs), which can score and generate queries when conditioned on responses, effectively functioning in the reverse direction of time. Further, to effectively infer in the response to query direction, we pre-train and fine-tune a language model (TRLM-Ba) in the reverse token order from scratch. We show empirically (and theoretically in a stylized setting) that time-reversed models can indeed complement forward model predictions when used to score the query given response for re-ranking multiple forward generations. We obtain up to 5\% improvement on the widely used AlpacaEval Leaderboard over the competent baseline of best-of-N re-ranking using self log-perplexity scores. We further show that TRLM scoring outperforms conventional forward scoring of response given query, resulting in significant gains in applications such as citation generation and passage retrieval. We next leverage the generative ability of TRLM to augment or provide unsupervised feedback to input safety filters of LLMs, demonstrating a drastic reduction in false negative rate with negligible impact on false positive rates against several attacks published on the popular JailbreakBench leaderboard.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 3, 2024

Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations

Creating noise from data is easy; creating data from noise is generative modeling. We present a stochastic differential equation (SDE) that smoothly transforms a complex data distribution to a known prior distribution by slowly injecting noise, and a corresponding reverse-time SDE that transforms the prior distribution back into the data distribution by slowly removing the noise. Crucially, the reverse-time SDE depends only on the time-dependent gradient field (\aka, score) of the perturbed data distribution. By leveraging advances in score-based generative modeling, we can accurately estimate these scores with neural networks, and use numerical SDE solvers to generate samples. We show that this framework encapsulates previous approaches in score-based generative modeling and diffusion probabilistic modeling, allowing for new sampling procedures and new modeling capabilities. In particular, we introduce a predictor-corrector framework to correct errors in the evolution of the discretized reverse-time SDE. We also derive an equivalent neural ODE that samples from the same distribution as the SDE, but additionally enables exact likelihood computation, and improved sampling efficiency. In addition, we provide a new way to solve inverse problems with score-based models, as demonstrated with experiments on class-conditional generation, image inpainting, and colorization. Combined with multiple architectural improvements, we achieve record-breaking performance for unconditional image generation on CIFAR-10 with an Inception score of 9.89 and FID of 2.20, a competitive likelihood of 2.99 bits/dim, and demonstrate high fidelity generation of 1024 x 1024 images for the first time from a score-based generative model.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 26, 2020 1

Forewarned is Forearmed: Leveraging LLMs for Data Synthesis through Failure-Inducing Exploration

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly benefited from training on diverse, high-quality task-specific data, leading to impressive performance across a range of downstream applications. Current methods often rely on human-annotated data or predefined task templates to direct powerful LLMs in synthesizing task-relevant data for effective model training. However, this dependence on manually designed components may constrain the scope of generated data, potentially overlooking critical edge cases or novel scenarios that could challenge the model. In this paper, we present a novel approach, ReverseGen, designed to automatically generate effective training samples that expose the weaknesses of LLMs. Specifically, we introduce a dedicated proposer trained to produce queries that lead target models to generate unsatisfactory responses. These failure-inducing queries are then used to construct training data, helping to address the models' shortcomings and improve overall performance. Our approach is flexible and can be applied to models of various scales (3B, 7B, and 8B). We evaluate ReverseGen on three key applications (safety, honesty, and math), demonstrating that our generated data is both highly effective and diverse. Models fine-tuned with ReverseGen-generated data consistently outperform those trained on human-annotated or general model-generated data, offering a new perspective on data synthesis for task-specific LLM enhancement.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 22, 2024

Cognitively Inspired Energy-Based World Models

One of the predominant methods for training world models is autoregressive prediction in the output space of the next element of a sequence. In Natural Language Processing (NLP), this takes the form of Large Language Models (LLMs) predicting the next token; in Computer Vision (CV), this takes the form of autoregressive models predicting the next frame/token/pixel. However, this approach differs from human cognition in several respects. First, human predictions about the future actively influence internal cognitive processes. Second, humans naturally evaluate the plausibility of predictions regarding future states. Based on this capability, and third, by assessing when predictions are sufficient, humans allocate a dynamic amount of time to make a prediction. This adaptive process is analogous to System 2 thinking in psychology. All these capabilities are fundamental to the success of humans at high-level reasoning and planning. Therefore, to address the limitations of traditional autoregressive models lacking these human-like capabilities, we introduce Energy-Based World Models (EBWM). EBWM involves training an Energy-Based Model (EBM) to predict the compatibility of a given context and a predicted future state. In doing so, EBWM enables models to achieve all three facets of human cognition described. Moreover, we developed a variant of the traditional autoregressive transformer tailored for Energy-Based models, termed the Energy-Based Transformer (EBT). Our results demonstrate that EBWM scales better with data and GPU Hours than traditional autoregressive transformers in CV, and that EBWM offers promising early scaling in NLP. Consequently, this approach offers an exciting path toward training future models capable of System 2 thinking and intelligently searching across state spaces.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 13, 2024 7

MVISTA-4D: View-Consistent 4D World Model with Test-Time Action Inference for Robotic Manipulation

World-model-based imagine-then-act becomes a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation, yet existing approaches typically support either purely image-based forecasting or reasoning over partial 3D geometry, limiting their ability to predict complete 4D scene dynamics. This work proposes a novel embodied 4D world model that enables geometrically consistent, arbitrary-view RGBD generation: given only a single-view RGBD observation as input, the model imagines the remaining viewpoints, which can then be back-projected and fused to assemble a more complete 3D structure across time. To efficiently learn the multi-view, cross-modality generation, we explicitly design cross-view and cross-modality feature fusion that jointly encourage consistency between RGB and depth and enforce geometric alignment across views. Beyond prediction, converting generated futures into actions is often handled by inverse dynamics, which is ill-posed because multiple actions can explain the same transition. We address this with a test-time action optimization strategy that backpropagates through the generative model to infer a trajectory-level latent best matching the predicted future, and a residual inverse dynamics model that turns this trajectory prior into accurate executable actions. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate strong performance on both 4D scene generation and downstream manipulation, and ablations provide practical insights into the key design choices.

  • 11 authors
·
Feb 10

FrameMorrow: Future-guided Frame Selection with Prospective Tokens for Long-Horizon Video Generation

Long-horizon video generation requires models to effectively leverage an increasingly long generation history. As the generated history grows, retaining all previous content becomes increasingly expensive and redundant, making effective historical selection essential. Existing approaches often determine historical relevance based on the current content. However, information relevant to the present is not necessarily useful for future generation, while seemingly less relevant history may become important later. Our key insight is that historical information should be selected according to its relevance to future information needs. Capturing these needs does not require generating the full future; instead, a compact representation of what becomes important next is sufficient to guide historical selection. Building on this insight, we propose FrameMorrow, a prospective frame selector that predicts a small set of prospective tokens representing future information needs and uses them to identify relevant information from history. FrameMorrow selects explicit historical frames rather than model-specific internal states, enabling plug-and-play integration across diverse generators, including closed-source models, with little additional inference cost. We evaluate FrameMorrow across five benchmarks and 11 generative models spanning long-video generation, interactive generation, and action-conditioned world models. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements in long-range consistency, visual quality, and action alignment across diverse generation settings.

ConFu: Contemplate the Future for Better Speculative Sampling

Speculative decoding has emerged as a powerful approach to accelerate large language model (LLM) inference by employing lightweight draft models to propose candidate tokens that are subsequently verified by the target model. The effectiveness of this paradigm critically depends on the quality of the draft model. While recent advances such as the EAGLE series achieve state-of-the-art speedup, existing draft models remain limited by error accumulation: they condition only on the current prefix, causing their predictions to drift from the target model over steps. In this work, we propose ConFu (Contemplate the Future), a novel speculative decoding framework that enables draft models to anticipate the future direction of generation. ConFu introduces (i) contemplate tokens and soft prompts that allow the draft model to leverage future-oriented signals from the target model at negligible cost, (ii) a dynamic contemplate token mechanism with MoE to enable context-aware future prediction, and (iii) a training framework with anchor token sampling and future prediction replication that learns robust future prediction. Experiments demonstrate that ConFu improves token acceptance rates and generation speed over EAGLE-3 by 8--11% across various downstream tasks with Llama-3 3B and 8B models. We believe our work is the first to bridge speculative decoding with continuous reasoning tokens, offering a new direction for accelerating LLM inference.

qualcomm Qualcomm
·
Mar 9 2

IDOL: Inverse-Dynamics-Guided Future Prediction for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving has emerged as a compelling paradigm for learning planning directly from sensor observations, while recent world-model-based approaches further enrich this paradigm by enabling explicit reasoning about how the scene may evolve in the future. Yet future prediction alone does not guarantee better planning unless the predicted evolution can be converted into planning-relevant trajectory updates. Many current methods still forecast future scene states without explicitly decoding the motion implications hidden in state transitions. As a result, future reasoning often remains descriptively useful but only weakly coupled to executable motion generation. To address this limitation, we propose IDOL, an inverse-dynamics-guided future prediction framework for world-model-based end-to-end planning in latent BEV space, where inverse dynamics serves as the key bridge between future prediction and trajectory optimization. IDOL first predicts multiple future latent scene states with a BEV world model, then applies an inverse dynamics model to adjacent latent futures to decode transition-aware trajectory features and recover planning-relevant motion deltas that explain how the latent world evolves over time. These inverse-dynamics-derived signals are used to optimize the planned trajectory, turning future forecasting from passive scene anticipation into actionable planning guidance. A lightweight closed-loop refinement module further improves long-horizon consistency by reusing the optimized trajectory for another round of future-aware reasoning. By introducing inverse dynamics into latent future reasoning, IDOL tightens the coupling between world modeling and planning. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM v1 and NAVSIM v2 benchmarks show that IDOL achieves state-of-the-art performance among comparable methods.

  • 3 authors
·
May 28

The Principles of Diffusion Models

This monograph presents the core principles that have guided the development of diffusion models, tracing their origins and showing how diverse formulations arise from shared mathematical ideas. Diffusion modeling starts by defining a forward process that gradually corrupts data into noise, linking the data distribution to a simple prior through a continuum of intermediate distributions. The goal is to learn a reverse process that transforms noise back into data while recovering the same intermediates. We describe three complementary views. The variational view, inspired by variational autoencoders, sees diffusion as learning to remove noise step by step. The score-based view, rooted in energy-based modeling, learns the gradient of the evolving data distribution, indicating how to nudge samples toward more likely regions. The flow-based view, related to normalizing flows, treats generation as following a smooth path that moves samples from noise to data under a learned velocity field. These perspectives share a common backbone: a time-dependent velocity field whose flow transports a simple prior to the data. Sampling then amounts to solving a differential equation that evolves noise into data along a continuous trajectory. On this foundation, the monograph discusses guidance for controllable generation, efficient numerical solvers, and diffusion-motivated flow-map models that learn direct mappings between arbitrary times. It provides a conceptual and mathematically grounded understanding of diffusion models for readers with basic deep-learning knowledge.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 23, 2025 3

Re-Thinking Inverse Graphics With Large Language Models

Inverse graphics -- the task of inverting an image into physical variables that, when rendered, enable reproduction of the observed scene -- is a fundamental challenge in computer vision and graphics. Disentangling an image into its constituent elements, such as the shape, color, and material properties of the objects of the 3D scene that produced it, requires a comprehensive understanding of the environment. This requirement limits the ability of existing carefully engineered approaches to generalize across domains. Inspired by the zero-shot ability of large language models (LLMs) to generalize to novel contexts, we investigate the possibility of leveraging the broad world knowledge encoded in such models in solving inverse-graphics problems. To this end, we propose the Inverse-Graphics Large Language Model (IG-LLM), an inverse-graphics framework centered around an LLM, that autoregressively decodes a visual embedding into a structured, compositional 3D-scene representation. We incorporate a frozen pre-trained visual encoder and a continuous numeric head to enable end-to-end training. Through our investigation, we demonstrate the potential of LLMs to facilitate inverse graphics through next-token prediction, without the use of image-space supervision. Our analysis opens up new possibilities for precise spatial reasoning about images that exploit the visual knowledge of LLMs. We will release our code and data to ensure the reproducibility of our investigation and to facilitate future research at https://ig-llm.is.tue.mpg.de/

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 23, 2024

Antagonising explanation and revealing bias directly through sequencing and multimodal inference

Deep generative models produce data according to a learned representation, e.g. diffusion models, through a process of approximation computing possible samples. Approximation can be understood as reconstruction and the large datasets used to train models as sets of records in which we represent the physical world with some data structure (photographs, audio recordings, manuscripts). During the process of reconstruction, e.g., image frames develop each timestep towards a textual input description. While moving forward in time, frame sets are shaped according to learned bias and their production, we argue here, can be considered as going back in time; not by inspiration on the backward diffusion process but acknowledging culture is specifically marked in the records. Futures of generative modelling, namely in film and audiovisual arts, can benefit by dealing with diffusion systems as a process to compute the future by inevitably being tied to the past, if acknowledging the records as to capture fields of view at a specific time, and to correlate with our own finite memory ideals. Models generating new data distributions can target video production as signal processors and by developing sequences through timelines we ourselves also go back to decade-old algorithmic and multi-track methodologies revealing the actual predictive failure of contemporary approaches to synthesis in moving image, both as relevant to composition and not explanatory.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 25, 2023

Video-Mirai: Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models Need Foresight

Causal video generators must predict from the past, but they need not learn only from it. In streaming autoregressive video diffusion, each emitted segment becomes a commitment that future segments must preserve. Standard training, however, only asks each causal state to explain the present. This creates what we call a representation-level planning gap: states that fit the current segment may discard identity, layout, and motion information needed for a consistent future. We introduce Video-Mirai, a training-only method that closes this gap without changing causal inference: the generator rolls out causally, a frozen foresight encoder reads the completed rollout non-causally, and a lightweight predictor distills the resulting stopped-gradient targets into causal states. Future frames supervise representations, never generator inputs. At inference, the encoder and predictor are discarded, leaving the original architecture, per-step FLOPs, and KV-cache behavior unchanged. Video-Mirai improves a strong Causal-Forcing baseline on 5-second VBench from 83.8 to 84.6 in terms of Total Score. On 30-second rollouts beyond the training horizon, subject consistency improves from 84.9 to 88.5 and background consistency from 90.2 to 91.9. Ablations identify future-conditioned targets as the key ingredient, and probes show that future frames become more decodable from current features. Causality should constrain inference, not representation supervision. Our study highlights that visual autoregressive models need foresight. Project page: https://y0uroy.github.io/Video-Mirai.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 1

NFIG: Autoregressive Image Generation with Next-Frequency Prediction

Autoregressive models have achieved promising results in natural language processing. However, for image generation tasks, they encounter substantial challenges in effectively capturing long-range dependencies, managing computational costs, and most crucially, defining meaningful autoregressive sequences that reflect natural image hierarchies. To address these issues, we present Next-Frequency Image Generation (NFIG), a novel framework that decomposes the image generation process into multiple frequency-guided stages. Our approach first generates low-frequency components to establish global structure with fewer tokens, then progressively adds higher-frequency details, following the natural spectral hierarchy of images. This principled autoregressive sequence not only improves the quality of generated images by better capturing true causal relationships between image components, but also significantly reduces computational overhead during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NFIG achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer steps, offering a more efficient solution for image generation, with 1.25times speedup compared to VAR-d20 while achieving better performance (FID: 2.81) on the ImageNet-256 benchmark. We hope that our insight of incorporating frequency-domain knowledge to guide autoregressive sequence design will shed light on future research. We will make our code publicly available upon acceptance of the paper.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 10, 2025

ProAR: Learning Prospective Reasoning with Autoregressive Video Models

Autoregressive (AR) video models excel at causal generation, but their reliance on next-chunk prediction confines them to a short-sighted, reactive paradigm. This limitation is particularly consequential for reasoning-oriented generation, where achieving a target outcome through valid intermediate states matters more than local visual plausibility. To address this challenge, we propose Learning Prospective Reasoning with Autoregressive Video Models (ProAR), a novel framework that transforms autoregressive video generation into a goal-oriented reasoning process. ProAR introduces two key components: (1) To anchor generation to the long-range outcome, we integrate goal-frame prediction into the autoregressive loop via an asymmetric attention mask, enabling the predicted goal frame to guide the generation of intermediate states without being disrupted by them. (2) To guide short-range transitions, we introduce future representation self-alignment to encourage current hidden states to anticipate upcoming temporal dynamics. By leveraging teacher-forcing in AR training, we extract clean future representations in a single forward pass and align current representations with them using a lightweight, training-only predictor. Together, these two mechanisms seamlessly combine explicit, sparse target supervision with implicit, dense step-wise guidance, promoting coherent, goal-directed reasoning progress with modest computational cost. Experiments show that ProAR's complementary components consistently improve performance across diverse visual reasoning benchmarks. The framework proves highly training-efficient, surpassing fully trained standard AR baselines using only 25% of the training steps. This paradigm also demonstrates promising applicability to embodied reasoning tasks.

ucdavis UC Davis
·
Oct 1 3

Diffusion Models Generate Images Like Painters: an Analytical Theory of Outline First, Details Later

How do diffusion generative models convert pure noise into meaningful images? In a variety of pretrained diffusion models (including conditional latent space models like Stable Diffusion), we observe that the reverse diffusion process that underlies image generation has the following properties: (i) individual trajectories tend to be low-dimensional and resemble 2D `rotations'; (ii) high-variance scene features like layout tend to emerge earlier, while low-variance details tend to emerge later; and (iii) early perturbations tend to have a greater impact on image content than later perturbations. To understand these phenomena, we derive and study a closed-form solution to the probability flow ODE for a Gaussian distribution, which shows that the reverse diffusion state rotates towards a gradually-specified target on the image manifold. It also shows that generation involves first committing to an outline, and then to finer and finer details. We find that this solution accurately describes the initial phase of image generation for pretrained models, and can in principle be used to make image generation more efficient by skipping reverse diffusion steps. Finally, we use our solution to characterize the image manifold in Stable Diffusion. Our viewpoint reveals an unexpected similarity between generation by GANs and diffusion and provides a conceptual link between diffusion and image retrieval.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 4, 2023

Turning Trash into Treasure: Accelerating Inference of Large Language Models with Token Recycling

The rapid growth in the parameters of large language models (LLMs) has made inference latency a fundamental bottleneck, limiting broader application of LLMs. Speculative decoding represents a lossless approach to accelerate inference through a guess-and-verify paradigm, leveraging the parallel capabilities of modern hardware. Some speculative decoding methods rely on additional structures to guess draft tokens, such as small models or parameter-efficient architectures, which need extra training before use. Alternatively, retrieval-based train-free techniques build libraries from pre-existing corpora or by n-gram generation. However, they face challenges like large storage requirements, time-consuming retrieval, and limited adaptability. Observing that candidate tokens generated during the decoding process are likely to reoccur in future sequences, we propose Token Recycling. This approach stores candidate tokens in an adjacency matrix and employs a breadth-first search (BFS)-like algorithm on the matrix to construct a draft tree. The tree is then validated through tree attention. New candidate tokens from the decoding process are then used to update the matrix. Token Recycling requires \textless2MB of additional storage and achieves approximately 2x speedup across all sizes of LLMs. It significantly outperforms existing train-free methods by 30\% and even a training method by 25\%. It can be directly applied to any existing LLMs and tasks without the need for adaptation.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 16, 2024 2

Generative Pre-Trained Diffusion Paradigm for Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasting

In recent years, generative pre-trained paradigms such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision Models (LVMs) have achieved revolutionary advancements and widespread real-world applications. Particularly, the emergence of pre-trained LLMs-based temporal works, compared to previous deep model approaches, has demonstrated superior generalization and robustness, showcasing the potential of generative pre-trained paradigms as foundation models for time series. However, those LLMs-based works mainly focus on cross-modal research, i.e., leveraging the language capabilities of LLMs in time series contexts. Although they have achieved impressive performance, there still exist the issues of concept drift caused by differences in data distribution and inflexibility caused by misalignment of dimensions. To this end, inspired by recent work on LVMs, we reconsider the paradigm of time series modeling. In this paper, we comprehensively explore, for the first time, the effectiveness and superiority of the Generative Pre-trained Diffusion (GPD) paradigm in real-world multivariate time series forecasting (TSF). Specifically, to mitigate performance bias introduced by sophisticated networks, we propose a straightforward MLP diffusion network for unconditional modeling of time series. Then we employ a zero-shot and tuning-free method to predict (generate) future data using historical data as prompts. The GPD paradigm is established on the time series modality, effectively preventing the phenomenon of concept drift, and enabling flexible forecasting of arbitrary lengths. We demonstrate that the GPD paradigm achieves comprehensive performance and generalization comparable to current SOTA LLM-based and deep model paradigms on mainstream benchmarks and various TSF tasks. Extensive experiments validate the potential of the GPD paradigm and its assistance in future related research.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 4, 2024

Parallel Decoding via Hidden Transfer for Lossless Large Language Model Acceleration

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks. However, the substantial number of parameters in LLMs contributes to significant latency during model inference. This is particularly evident when utilizing autoregressive decoding methods, which generate one token in a single forward process, thereby not fully capitalizing on the parallel computing capabilities of GPUs. In this paper, we propose a novel parallel decoding approach, namely hidden transfer, which decodes multiple successive tokens simultaneously in a single forward pass. The idea is to transfer the intermediate hidden states of the previous context to the pseudo hidden states of the future tokens to be generated, and then the pseudo hidden states will pass the following transformer layers thereby assimilating more semantic information and achieving superior predictive accuracy of the future tokens. Besides, we use the novel tree attention mechanism to simultaneously generate and verify multiple candidates of output sequences, which ensure the lossless generation and further improves the generation efficiency of our method. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. We conduct a lot of analytic experiments to prove our motivation. In terms of acceleration metrics, we outperform all the single-model acceleration techniques, including Medusa and Self-Speculative decoding.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 18, 2024 2

Steered Diffusion: A Generalized Framework for Plug-and-Play Conditional Image Synthesis

Conditional generative models typically demand large annotated training sets to achieve high-quality synthesis. As a result, there has been significant interest in designing models that perform plug-and-play generation, i.e., to use a predefined or pretrained model, which is not explicitly trained on the generative task, to guide the generative process (e.g., using language). However, such guidance is typically useful only towards synthesizing high-level semantics rather than editing fine-grained details as in image-to-image translation tasks. To this end, and capitalizing on the powerful fine-grained generative control offered by the recent diffusion-based generative models, we introduce Steered Diffusion, a generalized framework for photorealistic zero-shot conditional image generation using a diffusion model trained for unconditional generation. The key idea is to steer the image generation of the diffusion model at inference time via designing a loss using a pre-trained inverse model that characterizes the conditional task. This loss modulates the sampling trajectory of the diffusion process. Our framework allows for easy incorporation of multiple conditions during inference. We present experiments using steered diffusion on several tasks including inpainting, colorization, text-guided semantic editing, and image super-resolution. Our results demonstrate clear qualitative and quantitative improvements over state-of-the-art diffusion-based plug-and-play models while adding negligible additional computational cost.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 29, 2023

InternVLA-A1.5: Unifying Understanding, Latent Foresight, and Action for Compositional Generalization

Unified models for robot manipulation aim to equip one policy with both the semantic priors of pretrained VLMs and the physical dynamics learned through future prediction. In practice, existing designs tend to erode the semantics of the pretrained backbone, suffer interference among heterogeneous objectives, and learn future prediction from scratch in pixel space, leaving the dynamics priors of pretrained video generators unexploited. We present InternVLA-A1.5, which builds the policy on a native VLM backbone that keeps training on VQA and subtask prediction, and attaches a lightweight unified expert for continuous action generation. Future prediction is recast as a latent-querying problem, where a small set of learnable foresight tokens condenses the task-relevant future into a compact latent code under the supervision of a frozen pretrained video generation model, so the policy inherits world-model dynamics priors without ever learning pixel-level generation. The video branch is discarded at inference, keeping real-time control. Pretrained on 1.2M robot episodes and 3M multimodal samples, InternVLA-A1.5 achieves the best overall results on all six simulation benchmarks. In the real world, the preserved semantics deliver the strongest compositional generalization on held-out instruction bindings, and the two designs together sustain long-horizon execution.

HERMES++: Toward a Unified Driving World Model for 3D Scene Understanding and Generation

Driving world models serve as a pivotal technology for autonomous driving by simulating environmental dynamics. However, existing approaches predominantly focus on future scene generation, often overlooking comprehensive 3D scene understanding. Conversely, while Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive reasoning capabilities, they lack the capacity to predict future geometric evolution, creating a significant disparity between semantic interpretation and physical simulation. To bridge this gap, we propose HERMES++, a unified driving world model that integrates 3D scene understanding and future geometry prediction within a single framework. Our approach addresses the distinct requirements of these tasks through synergistic designs. First, a BEV representation consolidates multi-view spatial information into a structure compatible with LLMs. Second, we introduce LLM-enhanced world queries to facilitate knowledge transfer from the understanding branch. Third, a Current-to-Future Link is designed to bridge the temporal gap, conditioning geometric evolution on semantic context. Finally, to enforce structural integrity, we employ a Joint Geometric Optimization strategy that integrates explicit geometric constraints with implicit latent regularization to align internal representations with geometry-aware priors. Extensive evaluations on multiple benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our method. HERMES++ achieves strong performance, outperforming specialist approaches in both future point cloud prediction and 3D scene understanding tasks. The model and code will be publicly released at https://github.com/H-EmbodVis/HERMESV2.

H-EmbodVis H-EmbodVis
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Apr 29 2

Multiverse: Your Language Models Secretly Decide How to Parallelize and Merge Generation

Autoregressive Large Language Models (AR-LLMs) frequently exhibit implicit parallelism in sequential generation. Inspired by this, we introduce Multiverse, a new generative model that enables natively parallel generation. Multiverse internalizes a MapReduce paradigm, generating automatically through three stages: (i) a Map stage for adaptive task decomposition, (ii) a Process stage for parallel subtask execution, and (iii) a Reduce stage for lossless result synthesis. Next, we build a real-world Multiverse reasoning model with co-design of data, algorithm, and system, enabling rapid and seamless transfer from frontier AR-LLMs. Starting from sequential reasoning chains, we create Multiverse 1K by converting them into structured training data using an automated LLM-assisted pipeline, avoiding costly human annotations. Algorithmically, we design Multiverse Attention to separate parallel reasoning steps while keeping compatibility with causal attention for efficient training. Systematically, we implement Multiverse Engine to enable parallel inference. It features a dedicated scheduler that dynamically switches between sequential and parallel generation, triggered directly by the model. After a 3-hour fine-tuning with 1K examples, our Multiverse-32B stands as the only open-sourced non-AR model achieving performance on par with leading AR-LLMs of the same scale, evidenced by AIME24 & 25 scores of 54% and 46%, respectively. Moreover, our budget control experiments show that Multiverse-32B exhibits superior scaling, outperforming AR-LLMs by 1.87% on average using the same context length. Such scaling further leads to practical efficiency gain, achieving up to 2x speedup across varying batch sizes. We have open-sourced the entire Multiverse ecosystem, including data, model weights, engine, supporting tools, as well as complete data curation prompts and detailed training and evaluation recipes.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 11, 2025 2

Towards Practical Plug-and-Play Diffusion Models

Diffusion-based generative models have achieved remarkable success in image generation. Their guidance formulation allows an external model to plug-and-play control the generation process for various tasks without finetuning the diffusion model. However, the direct use of publicly available off-the-shelf models for guidance fails due to their poor performance on noisy inputs. For that, the existing practice is to fine-tune the guidance models with labeled data corrupted with noises. In this paper, we argue that this practice has limitations in two aspects: (1) performing on inputs with extremely various noises is too hard for a single guidance model; (2) collecting labeled datasets hinders scaling up for various tasks. To tackle the limitations, we propose a novel strategy that leverages multiple experts where each expert is specialized in a particular noise range and guides the reverse process of the diffusion at its corresponding timesteps. However, as it is infeasible to manage multiple networks and utilize labeled data, we present a practical guidance framework termed Practical Plug-And-Play (PPAP), which leverages parameter-efficient fine-tuning and data-free knowledge transfer. We exhaustively conduct ImageNet class conditional generation experiments to show that our method can successfully guide diffusion with small trainable parameters and no labeled data. Finally, we show that image classifiers, depth estimators, and semantic segmentation models can guide publicly available GLIDE through our framework in a plug-and-play manner. Our code is available at https://github.com/riiid/PPAP.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 12, 2022

The Past Frames the Future: Memory for Autoregressive Video Generation

Advances in generative models have improved video fidelity, enabling long-horizon generation, interactive world modeling, and evolving visual environments. Autoregressive (AR) video generation extends visual sequences through causal rollouts. However, a fundamental bottleneck emerges: as the generated sequence expands, practical models must operate under strictly bounded context windows, storage, and computational limits. Consequently, critical historical information, e.g., entity identities, dynamic states, and intervention-induced causal changes, often leaves the active context long before its relevance diminishes. Overcoming this limitation and maintaining temporal persistence constitutes a fundamental memory problem. We present a systematic and comprehensive review of memory mechanisms in AR video generation. We formulate memory operationally as persistent historical information maintained across outer AR steps, capable of influencing future generation even after the originating evidence is no longer locally accessible. Building upon this unified framework, we organize the literature through five complementary perspectives: (I) Forms, the representational carriers of history; (II) Functions, the specific semantic and physical information requiring preservation; (III) Operations, the lifecycle of writing, reading, updating, managing, and integrating memory; (IV) Learning, the optimization of memory behaviors under closed-loop rollouts; and (V) Evaluation, the paradigms for diagnosing genuine memory capabilities. We conclude by synthesizing open challenges, including composable and resource-aware memory architectures, trustworthy state updating, self-rollout learning, and standardized evaluation. By bridging representations, mechanisms, and learning paradigms, this paper establishes a structured foundation for developing reliable, memory-conditioned video generation systems.

  • 25 authors
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Sep 22 2

Unfolding Scientific Papers into Multi-Turn Generation Trajectories for Continued Pre-Training

A recent line of synthetic-data work reconstructs the thinking behind existing text rather than rewriting the text itself, but it operates on short web passages, recovers only local thoughts, and leaves the structure of whole documents untouched. Scientific papers are written to a clear and largely uniform structure and make a natural substrate for lifting this paradigm to the document level. We present a pipeline that unfolds each paper into a multi-turn generation trajectory in which a teacher model reconstructs the writing process of the whole paper: a writing request, a global plan, and pre-writing deliberation for each section. All section texts and the abstract are kept verbatim from the source paper. We apply the pipeline to 1.8M quality-filtered arXiv papers and obtain a 60B-token corpus for continued pre-training (CPT) that is roughly twice the source text. The same reverse construction extends to instruction data and evaluation. We build an SFT dataset of 200K samples using answers derived from paper text. We also use held-out papers to construct PAW-Bench, a benchmark of 2,940 academic writing tasks with per-task rubrics and checklists. In controlled experiments, CPT on our corpus followed by SFT on public datasets improves writing performance while preserving general reasoning and improving long document reading. Replacing part of the writing SFT data with our synthetic instruction data further improves performance on PAW-Bench.

  • 7 authors
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Sep 6

Your LLM Knows the Future: Uncovering Its Multi-Token Prediction Potential

Autoregressive language models are constrained by their inherently sequential nature, generating one token at a time. This paradigm limits inference speed and parallelism, especially during later stages of generation when the direction and semantics of text are relatively certain. In this work, we propose a novel framework that leverages the inherent knowledge of vanilla autoregressive language models about future tokens, combining techniques to realize this potential and enable simultaneous prediction of multiple subsequent tokens. Our approach introduces several key innovations: (1) a masked-input formulation where multiple future tokens are jointly predicted from a common prefix; (2) a gated LoRA formulation that preserves the original LLM's functionality, while equipping it for multi-token prediction; (3) a lightweight, learnable sampler module that generates coherent sequences from the predicted future tokens; (4) a set of auxiliary training losses, including a consistency loss, to enhance the coherence and accuracy of jointly generated tokens; and (5) a speculative generation strategy that expands tokens quadratically in the future while maintaining high fidelity. Our method achieves significant speedups through supervised fine-tuning on pretrained models. For example, it generates code and math nearly 5x faster, and improves general chat and knowledge tasks by almost 2.5x. These gains come without any loss in quality.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 15, 2025

InterleaveThinker: Reinforcing Agentic Interleaved Generation

Recent image generators have demonstrated impressive photorealism and instruction-following capabilities in single-image generation and editing. However, constrained by their architectures, they cannot achieve interleaved generation (text-image sequence), which has crucial applications in visual narratives, guidance, and embodied manipulation. Even the latest open-source Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) exhibit limited performance in this regard. In this paper, we introduce InterleaveThinker, the first multi-agent pipeline designed to endow any existing image generator with interleaved generation capabilities. Specifically, we employ a planner agent to organize the image-text input sequence, instructing the image generator on the required execution at each step. Subsequently, we introduce a critic agent to evaluate the generator's outputs, identify samples that deviate from the planned instructions, and refine the instructions for regeneration. To implement this pipeline, we construct the Interleave-Planner-SFT-80k and Interleave-Critic-SFT-112k to perform a format cold-start. Then we develop Interleave-Critic-RL-13k to reinforce the step-wise instruction correction capability within a generation trajectory using GRPO. Since a single interleaved generation trajectory may involve over 25 generator calls, optimizing the entire trajectory is computationally impractical. Therefore, we propose accuracy reward and step-wise reward, allowing single-step RL to effectively guide the entire generation trajectory. The results show that InterleaveThinker improves performance across various image generators. On interleaved generation benchmarks, it achieves performance comparable to Nano Banana and GPT-5. Surprisingly, it also significantly enhances the base model on reasoning-based benchmarks; for example, on 4-step FLUX.2-klein, we observe substantial gains on WISE and RISE.

  • 7 authors
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Jun 10 3

MiniWAM: Learning Compact Future Targets for Efficient World-Action Modeling

World modeling has emerged as an effective co-training objective for robot policies, giving rise to World Action Models (WAMs) that jointly predict actions and future states. However, most WAMs predict future states in the native representation space of pretrained visual backbones, resulting in high-dimensional targets with substantial training cost. We introduce MiniWAM, which instead predicts compact future representations learned from privileged current-future transitions. To construct these targets, we propose Predictive Representations via Inverse Spatiotemporal Modeling (PRISM), which combines inverse-dynamics supervision with feature reconstruction to emphasize control-relevant transition information while preserving useful future-state information. With the learned PRISM encoder frozen, MiniWAM is trained to jointly predict the resulting targets and robot actions from current observations. With 65times fewer native future feature tokens, MiniWAM consistently outperforms native future-feature prediction with both DINOv3 and WAN2.1 VAE features, while achieving up to an 8times speedup in world-action training. At 0.25B parameters, MiniWAM is already competitive with substantially larger WAMs on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and RoboTwin 2.0 simulation benchmarks. Representation analyses further show that PRISM contributes behavioral structure beyond feature reconstruction alone. These results demonstrate that effective world-action modeling does not require predicting native visual futures, and that compact predictive representations provide a strong and substantially more efficient target for policy learning. The project page is available at: https://j1dan.github.io/MiniWAM.

  • 8 authors
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Oct 7

Generation as Auxiliary Supervision: Enhancing Visual Understanding at Zero Inference Overhead via Decoupled Embedding Prediction

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, visual understanding and generation are typically treated as divergent objectives. Existing unified frameworks often rely on discrete visual tokenization or diffusion objectives whose generative targets differ from the continuous representations consumed by visual understanding models, making direct transfer to enhance existing pretrained MLLMs non-trivial. In this work, we present GAS, a generation-guided training framework that reinterprets visual generation as auxiliary supervision for representation learning. Concretely, GAS adapts Next Embedding Prediction (NEP) as a cross-modal generation paradigm within a decoupled Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture. By maintaining a shared lower trunk and parallel upper layers, GAS lets generation losses enrich the shared visual pathway with finer spatial precision and stronger visual retention while shielding the upper understanding layers from direct generation gradients. To maximize this synergy, we further construct highly correlated generation tasks that demand deep cognitive grounding rather than generic synthesis alone. Across model scales and training stages, GAS improves aggregate multimodal understanding, with its most reliable gains on perception and spatial comprehension. Crucially, because the auxiliary generation branch is discarded after training, these gains incur zero inference overhead. Extensive controlled comparisons and representation-level analyses further clarify when and why generation-guided training benefits understanding, and demonstrate the feasibility of generation-guided training as a practical route to stronger multimodal understanding.

ByteDance ByteDance
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Aug 11 1

When to Pre-Train Graph Neural Networks? From Data Generation Perspective!

In recent years, graph pre-training has gained significant attention, focusing on acquiring transferable knowledge from unlabeled graph data to improve downstream performance. Despite these recent endeavors, the problem of negative transfer remains a major concern when utilizing graph pre-trained models to downstream tasks. Previous studies made great efforts on the issue of what to pre-train and how to pre-train by designing a variety of graph pre-training and fine-tuning strategies. However, there are cases where even the most advanced "pre-train and fine-tune" paradigms fail to yield distinct benefits. This paper introduces a generic framework W2PGNN to answer the crucial question of when to pre-train (i.e., in what situations could we take advantage of graph pre-training) before performing effortful pre-training or fine-tuning. We start from a new perspective to explore the complex generative mechanisms from the pre-training data to downstream data. In particular, W2PGNN first fits the pre-training data into graphon bases, each element of graphon basis (i.e., a graphon) identifies a fundamental transferable pattern shared by a collection of pre-training graphs. All convex combinations of graphon bases give rise to a generator space, from which graphs generated form the solution space for those downstream data that can benefit from pre-training. In this manner, the feasibility of pre-training can be quantified as the generation probability of the downstream data from any generator in the generator space. W2PGNN offers three broad applications: providing the application scope of graph pre-trained models, quantifying the feasibility of pre-training, and assistance in selecting pre-training data to enhance downstream performance. We provide a theoretically sound solution for the first application and extensive empirical justifications for the latter two applications.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 29, 2023

A Frame is Worth One Token: Efficient Generative World Modeling with Delta Tokens

Anticipating diverse future states is a central challenge in video world modeling. Discriminative world models produce a deterministic prediction that implicitly averages over possible futures, while existing generative world models remain computationally expensive. Recent work demonstrates that predicting the future in the feature space of a vision foundation model (VFM), rather than a latent space optimized for pixel reconstruction, requires significantly fewer world model parameters. However, most such approaches remain discriminative. In this work, we introduce DeltaTok, a tokenizer that encodes the VFM feature difference between consecutive frames into a single continuous "delta" token, and DeltaWorld, a generative world model operating on these tokens to efficiently generate diverse plausible futures. Delta tokens reduce video from a three-dimensional spatio-temporal representation to a one-dimensional temporal sequence, for example yielding a 1,024x token reduction with 512x512 frames. This compact representation enables tractable multi-hypothesis training, where many futures are generated in parallel and only the best is supervised. At inference, this leads to diverse predictions in a single forward pass. Experiments on dense forecasting tasks demonstrate that DeltaWorld forecasts futures that more closely align with real-world outcomes, while having over 35x fewer parameters and using 2,000x fewer FLOPs than existing generative world models. Code and weights: https://deltatok.github.io.

amazon Amazon
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Apr 5 2

ViD-GPT: Introducing GPT-style Autoregressive Generation in Video Diffusion Models

With the advance of diffusion models, today's video generation has achieved impressive quality. But generating temporal consistent long videos is still challenging. A majority of video diffusion models (VDMs) generate long videos in an autoregressive manner, i.e., generating subsequent clips conditioned on last frames of previous clip. However, existing approaches all involve bidirectional computations, which restricts the receptive context of each autoregression step, and results in the model lacking long-term dependencies. Inspired from the huge success of large language models (LLMs) and following GPT (generative pre-trained transformer), we bring causal (i.e., unidirectional) generation into VDMs, and use past frames as prompt to generate future frames. For Causal Generation, we introduce causal temporal attention into VDM, which forces each generated frame to depend on its previous frames. For Frame as Prompt, we inject the conditional frames by concatenating them with noisy frames (frames to be generated) along the temporal axis. Consequently, we present Video Diffusion GPT (ViD-GPT). Based on the two key designs, in each autoregression step, it is able to acquire long-term context from prompting frames concatenated by all previously generated frames. Additionally, we bring the kv-cache mechanism to VDMs, which eliminates the redundant computation from overlapped frames, significantly boosting the inference speed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our ViD-GPT achieves state-of-the-art performance both quantitatively and qualitatively on long video generation. Code will be available at https://github.com/Dawn-LX/Causal-VideoGen.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 16, 2024

Future Token Prediction -- Causal Language Modelling with Per-Token Semantic State Vector for Multi-Token Prediction

Causal decoder-only transformer models used for generative language modelling, such as Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), are trained to predict the next token in a sequence based only on its previous tokens. Despite this simple training objective, they have proved to be powerful AI tools. However, only predicting the next token results in top layer embedding vectors that are highly token-focused. There may be benefits in generating embedding vectors at each token position that better capture the overall meaning of longer sequences of future text. Recent studies matching brain scans with deep language models suggest that humans also predict upcoming words when listening or reading but consider multiple future tokens rather than just one. This research investigates a new pretraining method called Future Token Prediction (FTP). In FTP, a large transformer encoder generates top layer embedding vectors for each token position, which, instead of being passed to a language head, are linearly and expansively projected to a pseudo-sequence, which is cross attended to by a small transformer decoder to predict the next N tokens forward from that position in the sequence. The top layer embedding vectors from FTP models exhibit distinct properties compared to those from standard GPT models, varying smoothly along a text sequence as measured by cosine similarity between adjacent tokens. Text generated by FTP models show improved topic coherence compared to standard GPT-like models trained with the same prediction perplexity for the next single token. The vectors are shown to better represent the topic of text based on the results of text classification examples. On a toy, but complex, coding problem, FTP networks produce significantly better results than GPT networks.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 23, 2024

Merlin:Empowering Multimodal LLMs with Foresight Minds

Humans possess the remarkable ability to foresee the future to a certain extent based on present observations, a skill we term as foresight minds. However, this capability remains largely under explored within existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), hindering their capacity to learn the fundamental principles of how things operate and the intentions behind the observed subjects. To address this issue, we introduce the integration of future modeling into the existing learning frameworks of MLLMs. By utilizing the subject trajectory, a highly structured representation of a consecutive frame sequence, as a learning objective, we aim to bridge the gap between the past and the future. We propose two innovative methods to empower MLLMs with foresight minds, Foresight Pre-Training (FPT) and Foresight Instruction-Tuning (FIT), which are inspired by the modern learning paradigm of LLMs. Specifically, FPT jointly training various tasks centered on trajectories, enabling MLLMs to learn how to attend and predict entire trajectories from a given initial observation. Then, FIT requires MLLMs to first predict trajectories of related objects and then reason about potential future events based on them. Aided by FPT and FIT, we build a novel and unified MLLM named Merlin that supports multi-images input and analysis about potential actions of multiple objects for the future reasoning. Experimental results show Merlin powerful foresight minds with impressive performance on both future reasoning and visual comprehension tasks.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 30, 2023 1

WanPE: Towards Cinematic Prompt Enhancement for Modern Text-to-Video Generation

Video generation begins in text space by authoring a cinematic screenplay, then materializes into pixels. As contemporary video generators scale to 30 seconds and faithfully follow complex conditions, the textual prompt largely directs the production, planning how actions, camera trajectories, lighting, and sound unfold across multi-shot sequences. In this paper, we present WanPE, a 397B-parameter prompt enhancement model trained on 1.05M real-world videos to master director-level cinematic planning. WanPE formulates shot-level cinematic plans via video-grounded reverse construction and employs Semantic-Consistency GRPO (SC-GRPO) to faithfully preserve user requirements across shots and over time. To benchmark this capability, we curate WanPEval, a human-annotated testbed covering durations from 5 to 30 seconds across varying intent granularities, supported by approximately 11K blind pairwise assessments. When powering Wan3.0's video generator, WanPE-397B boosts human preference over raw user prompts by 10.66-18.84 points at 5-15 seconds and by a dramatic 50.86 points in the 30-second arena. Ablation studies show that reverse construction demonstrates clear superiority over forward rewriting, while SC-GRPO robustly preserves semantic fidelity across model scales. Ultimately, WanPE leads all evaluated commercial offerings at 5-15 seconds and remains competitive with Seedance 2.5 at 30 seconds.

  • 30 authors
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Sep 23 1

RepFlow: Reciprocal Supervision Improves Generation and Representation in Flow Models

Generative models learn visual structure through denoising, yet their internal states are entangled with both noise level and network depth, making it difficult to obtain a stable visual representation from the generator itself. We introduce RepFlow, which learns such a representation from the generator's evolving computation and uses it to guide generation. Specifically, a separate timestep-free encoder is trained, through a timestep-conditioned predictor, to recover generator states across depths and noise levels from masked clean images. By excluding the reference noise and masked-out content from the encoder's input, we encourage the encoder to distill visual information that is recoverable from the visible image context and predictive of generator states. The representation learned from the generator's evolving states is then fed back to guide and improve the generator, whose updated states provide supervision for further representation learning, forming a reciprocal learning process. This reciprocal process improves multi-step generation and representation quality, as measured by frozen linear probing on ImageNet with latent-space SiT and pixel-space JiT, without an externally pretrained representation teacher. Across the two unconditional settings, FID decreases by 19.2--40.8% relative to native training, while linear-probe accuracy improves by 6.80--10.04 percentage points over the best searched raw generator features. The learned representation also serves as a distributional metric for one-step JiT post-training, extending its role from instance-level alignment to distribution-level supervision.

  • 4 authors
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Sep 26

Gen-Searcher: Reinforcing Agentic Search for Image Generation

Recent image generation models have shown strong capabilities in generating high-fidelity and photorealistic images. However, they are fundamentally constrained by frozen internal knowledge, thus often failing on real-world scenarios that are knowledge-intensive or require up-to-date information. In this paper, we present Gen-Searcher, as the first attempt to train a search-augmented image generation agent, which performs multi-hop reasoning and search to collect the textual knowledge and reference images needed for grounded generation. To achieve this, we construct a tailored data pipeline and curate two high-quality datasets, Gen-Searcher-SFT-10k and Gen-Searcher-RL-6k, containing diverse search-intensive prompts and corresponding ground-truth synthesis images. We further introduce KnowGen, a comprehensive benchmark that explicitly requires search-grounded external knowledge for image generation and evaluates models from multiple dimensions. Based on these resources, we train Gen-Searcher with SFT followed by agentic reinforcement learning with dual reward feedback, which combines text-based and image-based rewards to provide more stable and informative learning signals for GRPO training. Experiments show that Gen-Searcher brings substantial gains, improving Qwen-Image by around 16 points on KnowGen and 15 points on WISE. We hope this work can serve as an open foundation for search agents in image generation, and we fully open-source our data, models, and code.

  • 10 authors
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Mar 30 4

MatterGPT: A Generative Transformer for Multi-Property Inverse Design of Solid-State Materials

Inverse design of solid-state materials with desired properties represents a formidable challenge in materials science. Although recent generative models have demonstrated potential, their adoption has been hindered by limitations such as inefficiency, architectural constraints and restricted open-source availability. The representation of crystal structures using the SLICES (Simplified Line-Input Crystal-Encoding System) notation as a string of characters enables the use of state-of-the-art natural language processing models, such as Transformers, for crystal design. Drawing inspiration from the success of GPT models in generating coherent text, we trained a generative Transformer on the next-token prediction task to generate solid-state materials with targeted properties. We demonstrate MatterGPT's capability to generate de novo crystal structures with targeted single properties, including both lattice-insensitive (formation energy) and lattice-sensitive (band gap) properties. Furthermore, we extend MatterGPT to simultaneously target multiple properties, addressing the complex challenge of multi-objective inverse design of crystals. Our approach showcases high validity, uniqueness, and novelty in generated structures, as well as the ability to generate materials with properties beyond the training data distribution. This work represents a significant step forward in computational materials discovery, offering a powerful and open tool for designing materials with tailored properties for various applications in energy, electronics, and beyond.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 14, 2024

A Decoupled Basis-Vector-Driven Generative Framework for Dynamic Multi-Objective Optimization

Dynamic multi-objective optimization requires continuous tracking of moving Pareto fronts. Existing methods struggle with irregular mutations and data sparsity, primarily facing three challenges: the non-linear coupling of dynamic modes, negative transfer from outdated historical data, and the cold-start problem during environmental switches. To address these issues, this paper proposes a decoupled basis-vector-driven generative framework (DB-GEN). First, to resolve non-linear coupling, the framework employs the discrete wavelet transform to separate evolutionary trajectories into low-frequency trends and high-frequency details. Second, to mitigate negative transfer, it learns transferable basis vectors via sparse dictionary learning rather than directly memorizing historical instances. Recomposing these bases under a topology-aware contrastive constraint constructs a structured latent manifold. Finally, to overcome the cold-start problem, a surrogate-assisted search paradigm samples initial populations from this manifold. Pre-trained on 120 million solutions, DB-GEN performs direct online inference without retraining or fine-tuning. This zero-shot generation process executes in milliseconds, requiring approximately 0.2 seconds per environmental change. Experimental results demonstrate that DB-GEN improves tracking accuracy across various dynamic benchmarks compared to existing algorithms.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 31

Closing the Loop: Training-Free Revisit Consistency for Autoregressive Generative Rendering

Recent conditional video generation models have shown promising potentials to transform 3D engine renderings, such as depth maps and untextured geometry, into photorealistic videos for gaming and immersive content creation. These applications require long-horizon auto-regressive generation that continuously synthesizes new frames while preserving a persistent 3D world. Auto-regressive generators synthesize video chunk by chunk with a bounded KV cache, so when the camera revisits a location after its context has been evicted, the model often regenerates inconsistent appearance, even though the conditioning renderings (e.g., depth) remain perfectly aligned with the underlying geometry.We address this revisit inconsistency without any post-training by exploiting correspondences the 3D engine already provides: temporal correspondence retrieves pose-matched historical latent chunks into the KV cache as loop-closure memory, while spatial correspondence from camera pose and depth reprojection biases token-level attention toward geometrically corresponding regions of the retrieved chunks. We demonstrate our method on loop-closure trajectories mined from TartanAir and TartanGround dataset to mirror complicate real-world application scenarios, where it outperforms existing training-free baselines on revisit consistency without losing overall video quality. Project Page: https://wenchao-m.github.io/ClosetheLoop.github.io/

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 22

EvoGen-Harness: Learning Where and How to Evolve Image-Generation Harnesses

Modern text-to-image (T2I) systems can be improved without modifying generator parameters by adapting the external system around frozen generators. However, existing approaches typically optimize a predefined dimension, such as prompts, routing, or workflows, restricting the space in which generation failures can be corrected. Allowing multiple generator-external responsibilities to evolve provides a broader adaptation space, but introduces a new challenge: visual feedback reveals what failed, but not where persistent evolution should occur or how this space should be explored efficiently. We introduce EvoGen-Harness, a generator-agnostic framework for multi-responsibility image-generation harness evolution, together with Trace (Trajectory-Relative Attribution and Coordinated Evolution). Trace aggregates evidence across stochastic executions, uses failure attribution as a search prior to focus candidate updates, and progressively re-attributes residual failures to coordinate evolution across responsibilities, while No-Patch and held-out validation prevent unnecessary or harmful updates. Across GenEval2, T2I-CompBench++, and WISE, EvoGen-Harness improves over the strongest evaluated baselines by +0.2633, +0.0720, and +0.0752, respectively, while achieving 87.9-91.4% attribution recall, 94.8% No-Patch accuracy, and only 1.9% regression. These results demonstrate that attribution-guided multi-responsibility evolution can substantially enhance frozen T2I systems beyond single-dimension adaptation.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 29

MLP Memory: Language Modeling with Retriever-pretrained External Memory

While modern decoder-only LLMs achieve superior performance across various domains, hallucinations have risen to be a common problem in their generated text, hindering their application in knowledge-intensive tasks. Retriever-augmented generation (RAG) offers a solution, but the non-parametric nature of the retriever hinders its deep interaction with LLM. In this work, we propose to decouple memorization from the LLM decoder using a pretrained, differentiable external memory. The external memory is an MLP pretrained by imitating the behavior of a retriever on the entire pretraining dataset. Our resulting architecture, which comprises a transformer decoder and an external MLP memory pretrained on language modeling and retriever imitation respectively, demonstrates strong perplexity and performance on downstream tasks. Experiments show our architecture exhibits steeper power-law scaling with model size, achieving 17.5% and 24.1% improvement on WikiText-103 and Web datasets compared to decoder-only models while benefiting from added training without overfitting. We demonstrate superior performance on three hallucination benchmarks and nine memory-intensive tasks. Additionally, our approach delivers 80times speedup over kNN-LM (500M tokens) and 1.3times faster inference than decoder-only models. Unlike kNN-LM, which impairs reasoning, our MLP memory improves StrategyQA performance. We will open-source our code and models in the future.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 3, 2025

DreamClear: High-Capacity Real-World Image Restoration with Privacy-Safe Dataset Curation

Image restoration (IR) in real-world scenarios presents significant challenges due to the lack of high-capacity models and comprehensive datasets. To tackle these issues, we present a dual strategy: GenIR, an innovative data curation pipeline, and DreamClear, a cutting-edge Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based image restoration model. GenIR, our pioneering contribution, is a dual-prompt learning pipeline that overcomes the limitations of existing datasets, which typically comprise only a few thousand images and thus offer limited generalizability for larger models. GenIR streamlines the process into three stages: image-text pair construction, dual-prompt based fine-tuning, and data generation & filtering. This approach circumvents the laborious data crawling process, ensuring copyright compliance and providing a cost-effective, privacy-safe solution for IR dataset construction. The result is a large-scale dataset of one million high-quality images. Our second contribution, DreamClear, is a DiT-based image restoration model. It utilizes the generative priors of text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models and the robust perceptual capabilities of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to achieve photorealistic restoration. To boost the model's adaptability to diverse real-world degradations, we introduce the Mixture of Adaptive Modulator (MoAM). It employs token-wise degradation priors to dynamically integrate various restoration experts, thereby expanding the range of degradations the model can address. Our exhaustive experiments confirm DreamClear's superior performance, underlining the efficacy of our dual strategy for real-world image restoration. Code and pre-trained models will be available at: https://github.com/shallowdream204/DreamClear.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 24, 2024 3

MemoGen: Can Past Experience Improve Future Text-to-Image Generation?

Modern text-to-image models have achieved strong visual synthesis, yet remain unreliable when prompts require implicit visual constraints, relational reasoning, or external knowledge. Existing retrieval-augmented and agentic generation methods mitigate this issue by acquiring external knowledge, references, or refined prompts for the current request, yet they typically treat each generation as an isolated episode and do not systematically preserve past successes or failures for future use. In this work, we ask whether a text-to-image system can continually improve from its own generation experience without updating the underlying generator. We propose MemoGen, a training-free framework that augments existing image generators with an agentic evolution layer. For each task, MemoGen explicitly infers visual requirements, retrieves external evidence and references when necessary, translates them into executable generation constraints, evaluates the generated result, and stores task understanding, reference choices, visual feedback, successful strategies, and failure lessons as reusable experience memory. Across evolution rounds, the agent retrieves relevant experience to improve similar future generations, selectively repairing previously failed cases while preserving successful ones, thereby enabling test-time self-evolution without parameter updates. Extensive experiments on knowledge-intensive and reasoning-oriented benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of this paradigm: after only two evolution rounds, MemoGen built upon the open-source Qwen-Image backbone surpasses strong proprietary systems such as Nano Banana Pro and GPT-Image-1 on WISE and Mind-Bench, showing that explicit experience memory can serve as a powerful continual learning signal for reliable text-to-image generation.

  • 13 authors
·
Jun 1

Momentum Decoding: Open-ended Text Generation As Graph Exploration

Open-ended text generation with autoregressive language models (LMs) is one of the core tasks in natural language processing. However, maximization-based decoding methods (e.g., greedy/beam search) often lead to the degeneration problem, i.e., the generated text is unnatural and contains undesirable repetitions. Existing solutions to this problem either introduce randomness prone to incoherence or require a look-ahead mechanism that demands extra computational overhead. In this study, we formulate open-ended text generation from a new perspective, i.e., we view it as an exploration process within a directed graph. Thereby, we understand the phenomenon of degeneration as circular loops within the directed graph. Based on our formulation, we propose a novel decoding method -- momentum decoding -- which encourages the LM to greedily explore new nodes outside the current graph. Meanwhile, it also allows the LM to return to the existing nodes with a momentum downgraded by a pre-defined resistance function. We extensively test our approach on three benchmarks from different domains through automatic and human evaluations. The results show that momentum decoding performs comparably with the current state of the art while enjoying notably improved inference speed and computation FLOPs. Furthermore, we conduct a detailed analysis to reveal the merits and inner workings of our approach. Our codes and other related resources are publicly available at https://github.com/gmftbyGMFTBY/MomentumDecoding.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 5, 2022

TeleWorld: Towards Dynamic Multimodal Synthesis with a 4D World Model

World models aim to endow AI systems with the ability to represent, generate, and interact with dynamic environments in a coherent and temporally consistent manner. While recent video generation models have demonstrated impressive visual quality, they remain limited in real-time interaction, long-horizon consistency, and persistent memory of dynamic scenes, hindering their evolution into practical world models. In this report, we present TeleWorld, a real-time multimodal 4D world modeling framework that unifies video generation, dynamic scene reconstruction, and long-term world memory within a closed-loop system. TeleWorld introduces a novel generation-reconstruction-guidance paradigm, where generated video streams are continuously reconstructed into a dynamic 4D spatio-temporal representation, which in turn guides subsequent generation to maintain spatial, temporal, and physical consistency. To support long-horizon generation with low latency, we employ an autoregressive diffusion-based video model enhanced with Macro-from-Micro Planning (MMPL)--a hierarchical planning method that reduces error accumulation from frame-level to segment-level-alongside efficient Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD), enabling real-time synthesis under practical computational budgets. Our approach achieves seamless integration of dynamic object modeling and static scene representation within a unified 4D framework, advancing world models toward practical, interactive, and computationally accessible systems. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TeleWorld achieves strong performance in both static and dynamic world understanding, long-term consistency, and real-time generation efficiency, positioning it as a practical step toward interactive, memory-enabled world models for multimodal generation and embodied intelligence.

  • 27 authors
·
Dec 31, 2025

Causal Diffusion Autoencoders: Toward Counterfactual Generation via Diffusion Probabilistic Models

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have become the state-of-the-art in high-quality image generation. However, DPMs have an arbitrary noisy latent space with no interpretable or controllable semantics. Although there has been significant research effort to improve image sample quality, there is little work on representation-controlled generation using diffusion models. Specifically, causal modeling and controllable counterfactual generation using DPMs is an underexplored area. In this work, we propose CausalDiffAE, a diffusion-based causal representation learning framework to enable counterfactual generation according to a specified causal model. Our key idea is to use an encoder to extract high-level semantically meaningful causal variables from high-dimensional data and model stochastic variation using reverse diffusion. We propose a causal encoding mechanism that maps high-dimensional data to causally related latent factors and parameterize the causal mechanisms among latent factors using neural networks. To enforce the disentanglement of causal variables, we formulate a variational objective and leverage auxiliary label information in a prior to regularize the latent space. We propose a DDIM-based counterfactual generation procedure subject to do-interventions. Finally, to address the limited label supervision scenario, we also study the application of CausalDiffAE when a part of the training data is unlabeled, which also enables granular control over the strength of interventions in generating counterfactuals during inference. We empirically show that CausalDiffAE learns a disentangled latent space and is capable of generating high-quality counterfactual images.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 26, 2024

Next-Latent Prediction Transformers Learn Compact World Models

Transformers replace recurrence with a memory that grows with sequence length and self-attention that enables ad-hoc look ups over past tokens. Consequently, they lack an inherent incentive to compress history into compact latent states with consistent transition rules. This often leads to learning solutions that generalize poorly. We introduce Next-Latent Prediction (NextLat), which extends standard next-token training with self-supervised predictions in the latent space. Specifically, NextLat trains a transformer to learn latent representations that are predictive of its next latent state given the next output token. Theoretically, we show that these latents provably converge to belief states, compressed information of the history necessary to predict the future. This simple auxiliary objective also injects a recurrent inductive bias into transformers, while leaving their architecture, parallel training, and inference unchanged. NextLat effectively encourages the transformer to form compact internal world models with its own belief states and transition dynamics -- a crucial property absent in standard next-token prediction transformers. Empirically, across benchmarks targeting core sequence modeling competencies -- world modeling, reasoning, planning, and language modeling -- NextLat demonstrates significant gains over standard next-token training in downstream accuracy, representation compression, and lookahead planning. NextLat stands as a simple and efficient paradigm for shaping transformer representations toward stronger generalization.

MicrosoftResearch Microsoft Research
·
Nov 8, 2025 1