Daily Papers

Reinforcement learning fine-tuning on top of large, pretrained Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offers promise for highly reliable robot deployment. However, because of their scale, modern VLA models suffer from high inference latency, so the observation used to select an action is often stale by execution time, creating a distribution shift that can substantially degrade reliability and performance. Prior work has explored asynchronous policy execution to reduce the effect of latency, but these methods are mostly built on imitation learning and offer no mechanism for moving beyond the training distribution toward higher reliability. We close this gap by enabling RL fine-tuning that meets the real-time control requirements of dynamic real-world manipulation. Our approach builds on EXPO-FT, a framework for sample-efficient, reliable VLA fine-tuning with reinforcement learning, and decouples slow, expressive action generation from fast, reactive action edits: a large pretrained VLA proposes action chunks using its strong behavior prior, while a lightweight edit policy performs fast, reactive decision-making by editing actions in response to changes in state, conditioned on the latest observation. We instantiate this as Real-Time EXPO-FT, an RL framework for finetuning real-time VLA policies. On the Kinetix benchmark, Real-Time EXPO-FT enables a delayed policy to achieve the best performance among delayed and non-delayed methods in 10 out of 10 environments. On four dynamic real-world tasks, robot object passing, ball balancing, table soccer kicking, and dynamic object picking, with online robot data capped at 10 minutes, Real-Time EXPO-FT improves average policy performance from 42% to 97%, all without human intervention, demonstrating rapid, sample-efficient adaptation to challenging real-world dynamics. Website: https://pd-perry.github.io/real-time-expo-ft

Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) are transforming the field of forecasting. However, evaluating them on historical data is increasingly difficult due to the risks of train-test sample overlaps and temporal overlaps between correlated train and test time series. To address this, we introduce TS-Arena, a live forecasting platform that shifts evaluation from the known past to the unknown future. Building on the concept of continuous benchmarking, TS-Arena evaluates models on future data. Crucially, we introduce a strict forecasting pre-registration protocol: models must submit predictions before the ground-truth data physically exists. This makes test-set contamination impossible by design. The platform relies on a modular microservice architecture that harmonizes and structures data from different sources and orchestrates containerized model submissions. By enforcing a strict pre-registration protocol on live data streams, TS-Arena prevents information leakage offers a faster alternative to traditional static, infrequently repeated competitions (e.g. the M-Competitions). First empirical results derived from operating TS-Arena over one year of energy time series demonstrate that established TSFMs accumulate robust longitudinal scores over time, while the continuous nature of the benchmark simultaneously allows newcomers to demonstrate immediate competitiveness. TS-Arena provides the necessary infrastructure to assess the true generalization capabilities of modern forecasting models. The platform and corresponding code are available at https://ts-arena.live/.

Existing streaming multimodal models process observations incrementally but still follow a turn-based prefill-then-decode pattern, making them non-duplex: new observations cannot naturally enter an active generation stream. Proactive alternatives use micro-turn polling or external response gates, which fragment continuous interaction, decouple response timing from language generation, and complicate KV-cache-friendly serving. We introduce Aero Realtime, a 4B streaming multimodal model with a duplex architecture for realtime generation. Aero Realtime aligns video, audio, and textual output on a shared temporal grid, where each approximately 80-ms audio slot predicts either a lexical token or a silence token. This allows input and output to advance together, enabling one autoregressive objective to learn both when to respond and what to generate. During inference, Aero Realtime appends only the newest multimodal slot, carries forward the previous output state, and reuses the KV cache for efficient incremental execution. We further provide a complete training and serving recipe, including realtime QA construction, slot-aligned supervision, hardware-aware distributed training, and resumable inference. On four NVIDIA A6000 workstation GPUs, Aero Realtime maintains 84-ms median and 173-ms P95 processing lag over 20 minutes of a continuously streamed video, remaining within 200~ms of the source timeline. These results demonstrate the feasibility of fully aligned input-output modeling for duplex, proactive, and hardware-aligned multimodal interaction.

Tracking any point (TAP) is a fundamental yet challenging task in computer vision, requiring high precision and long-term motion reasoning. Recent attempts to combine RGB frames and event streams have shown promise, yet they typically rely on synchronous or non-adaptive fusion, leading to temporal misalignment and severe degradation when one modality fails. We introduce TAPFormer, a transformer-based framework that performs asynchronous temporal-consistent fusion of frames and events for robust and high-frequency arbitrary point tracking. Our key innovation is a Transient Asynchronous Fusion (TAF) mechanism, which explicitly models the temporal evolution between discrete frames through continuous event updates, bridging the gap between low-rate frames and high-rate events. In addition, a Cross-modal Locally Weighted Fusion (CLWF) module adaptively adjusts spatial attention according to modality reliability, yielding stable and discriminative features even under blur or low light. To evaluate our approach under realistic conditions, we construct a novel real-world frame-event TAP dataset under diverse illumination and motion conditions. Our method outperforms existing point trackers, achieving a 28.2% improvement in average pixel error within threshold. Moreover, on standard point tracking benchmarks, our tracker consistently achieves the best performance. Project website: tapformer.github.io

Tracking any point based on image frames is constrained by frame rates, leading to instability in high-speed scenarios and limited generalization in real-world applications. To overcome these limitations, we propose an image-event fusion point tracker, FE-TAP, which combines the contextual information from image frames with the high temporal resolution of events, achieving high frame rate and robust point tracking under various challenging conditions. Specifically, we designed an Evolution Fusion module (EvoFusion) to model the image generation process guided by events. This module can effectively integrate valuable information from both modalities operating at different frequencies. To achieve smoother point trajectories, we employed a transformer-based refinement strategy that updates the point's trajectories and features iteratively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, particularly improving expected feature age by 24% on EDS datasets. Finally, we qualitatively validated the robustness of our algorithm in real driving scenarios using our custom-designed high-resolution image-event synchronization device. Our source code will be released at https://github.com/ljx1002/FE-TAP.