Daily Papers

3D affordance grounding aims to highlight the actionable regions on 3D objects, which is crucial for robotic manipulation. Previous research primarily focused on learning affordance knowledge from static cues such as language and images, which struggle to provide sufficient dynamic interaction context that can reveal temporal and causal cues. To alleviate this predicament, we collect a comprehensive video-based 3D affordance dataset, VIDA, which contains 38K human-object-interaction videos covering 16 affordance types, 38 object categories, and 22K point clouds. Based on VIDA, we propose a strong baseline: VideoAfford, which activates multimodal large language models with additional affordance segmentation capabilities, enabling both world knowledge reasoning and fine-grained affordance grounding within a unified framework. To enhance action understanding capability, we leverage a latent action encoder to extract dynamic interaction priors from HOI videos. Moreover, we introduce a spatial-aware loss function to enable VideoAfford to obtain comprehensive 3D spatial knowledge. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms well-established methods and exhibits strong open-world generalization with affordance reasoning abilities. All datasets and code will be publicly released to advance research in this area.

Skeleton-based action segmentation requires recognizing composable actions in untrimmed videos. Current approaches decouple this problem by first extracting local visual features from skeleton sequences and then processing them by a temporal model to classify frame-wise actions. However, their performances remain limited as the visual features cannot sufficiently express composable actions. In this context, we propose Latent Action Composition (LAC), a novel self-supervised framework aiming at learning from synthesized composable motions for skeleton-based action segmentation. LAC is composed of a novel generation module towards synthesizing new sequences. Specifically, we design a linear latent space in the generator to represent primitive motion. New composed motions can be synthesized by simply performing arithmetic operations on latent representations of multiple input skeleton sequences. LAC leverages such synthesized sequences, which have large diversity and complexity, for learning visual representations of skeletons in both sequence and frame spaces via contrastive learning. The resulting visual encoder has a high expressive power and can be effectively transferred onto action segmentation tasks by end-to-end fine-tuning without the need for additional temporal models. We conduct a study focusing on transfer-learning and we show that representations learned from pre-trained LAC outperform the state-of-the-art by a large margin on TSU, Charades, PKU-MMD datasets.

Scaling action-controllable world models is limited by the scarcity of action labels. While latent action learning promises to extract control interfaces from unlabeled video, learned latents often fail to transfer across contexts: they entangle scene-specific cues and lack a shared coordinate system. This occurs because standard objectives operate only within each clip, providing no mechanism to align action semantics across contexts. Our key insight is that although actions are unobserved, their semantic effects are observable and can serve as a shared reference. We introduce SeqΔ-REPA, a sequence-level control-effect alignment objective that anchors integrated latent action to temporal feature differences from a frozen, self-supervised video encoder. Building on this, we present Olaf-World, a pipeline that pretrains action-conditioned video world models from large-scale passive video. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method learns a more structured latent action space, leading to stronger zero-shot action transfer and more data-efficient adaptation to new control interfaces than state-of-the-art baselines.

A fundamental challenge in embodied intelligence is developing expressive and compact state representations for efficient world modeling and decision making. However, existing methods often fail to achieve this balance, yielding representations that are either overly redundant or lacking in task-critical information. We propose an unsupervised approach that learns a highly compressed two-token state representation using a lightweight encoder and a pre-trained Diffusion Transformer (DiT) decoder, capitalizing on its strong generative prior. Our representation is efficient, interpretable, and integrates seamlessly into existing VLA-based models, improving performance by 14.3% on LIBERO and 30% in real-world task success with minimal inference overhead. More importantly, we find that the difference between these tokens, obtained via latent interpolation, naturally serves as a highly effective latent action, which can be further decoded into executable robot actions. This emergent capability reveals that our representation captures structured dynamics without explicit supervision. We name our method StaMo for its ability to learn generalizable robotic Motion from compact State representation, which is encoded from static images, challenging the prevalent dependence to learning latent action on complex architectures and video data. The resulting latent actions also enhance policy co-training, outperforming prior methods by 10.4% with improved interpretability. Moreover, our approach scales effectively across diverse data sources, including real-world robot data, simulation, and human egocentric video.

Manipulating dynamic objects remains an open challenge for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, which, despite strong generalization in static manipulation, struggle in dynamic scenarios requiring rapid perception, temporal anticipation, and continuous control. We present DynamicVLA, a framework for dynamic object manipulation that integrates temporal reasoning and closed-loop adaptation through three key designs: 1) a compact 0.4B VLA using a convolutional vision encoder for spatially efficient, structurally faithful encoding, enabling fast multimodal inference; 2) Continuous Inference, enabling overlapping reasoning and execution for lower latency and timely adaptation to object motion; and 3) Latent-aware Action Streaming, which bridges the perception-execution gap by enforcing temporally aligned action execution. To fill the missing foundation of dynamic manipulation data, we introduce the Dynamic Object Manipulation (DOM) benchmark, built from scratch with an auto data collection pipeline that efficiently gathers 200K synthetic episodes across 2.8K scenes and 206 objects, and enables fast collection of 2K real-world episodes without teleoperation. Extensive evaluations demonstrate remarkable improvements in response speed, perception, and generalization, positioning DynamicVLA as a unified framework for general dynamic object manipulation across embodiments.

The development of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models has been significantly accelerated by pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, most existing end-to-end VLAs treat the VLM primarily as a multimodal encoder, directly mapping vision-language features to low-level actions. This paradigm underutilizes the VLM's potential in high-level decision making and introduces training instability, frequently degrading its rich semantic representations. To address these limitations, we introduce DIAL, a framework bridging high-level decision making and low-level motor execution through a differentiable latent intent bottleneck. Specifically, a VLM-based System-2 performs latent world modeling by synthesizing latent visual foresight within the VLM's native feature space; this foresight explicitly encodes intent and serves as the structural bottleneck. A lightweight System-1 policy then decodes this predicted intent together with the current observation into precise robot actions via latent inverse dynamics. To ensure optimization stability, we employ a two-stage training paradigm: a decoupled warmup phase where System-2 learns to predict latent futures while System-1 learns motor control under ground-truth future guidance within a unified feature space, followed by seamless end-to-end joint optimization. This enables action-aware gradients to refine the VLM backbone in a controlled manner, preserving pre-trained knowledge. Extensive experiments on the RoboCasa GR1 Tabletop benchmark show that DIAL establishes a new state-of-the-art, achieving superior performance with 10x fewer demonstrations than prior methods. Furthermore, by leveraging heterogeneous human demonstrations, DIAL learns physically grounded manipulation priors and exhibits robust zero-shot generalization to unseen objects and novel configurations during real-world deployment on a humanoid robot.

Supervised learning of skeleton sequence encoders for action recognition has received significant attention in recent times. However, learning such encoders without labels continues to be a challenging problem. While prior works have shown promising results by applying contrastive learning to pose sequences, the quality of the learned representations is often observed to be closely tied to data augmentations that are used to craft the positives. However, augmenting pose sequences is a difficult task as the geometric constraints among the skeleton joints need to be enforced to make the augmentations realistic for that action. In this work, we propose a new contrastive learning approach to train models for skeleton-based action recognition without labels. Our key contribution is a simple module, HaLP - to Hallucinate Latent Positives for contrastive learning. Specifically, HaLP explores the latent space of poses in suitable directions to generate new positives. To this end, we present a novel optimization formulation to solve for the synthetic positives with an explicit control on their hardness. We propose approximations to the objective, making them solvable in closed form with minimal overhead. We show via experiments that using these generated positives within a standard contrastive learning framework leads to consistent improvements across benchmarks such as NTU-60, NTU-120, and PKU-II on tasks like linear evaluation, transfer learning, and kNN evaluation. Our code will be made available at https://github.com/anshulbshah/HaLP.

Our objective is to develop compact video representations that are sensitive to visual change over time. To measure such time-sensitivity, we introduce a new task: chiral action recognition, where one needs to distinguish between a pair of temporally opposite actions, such as "opening vs. closing a door", "approaching vs. moving away from something", "folding vs. unfolding paper", etc. Such actions (i) occur frequently in everyday life, (ii) require understanding of simple visual change over time (in object state, size, spatial position, count . . . ), and (iii) are known to be poorly represented by many video embeddings. Our goal is to build time aware video representations which offer linear separability between these chiral pairs. To that end, we propose a self-supervised adaptation recipe to inject time-sensitivity into a sequence of frozen image features. Our model is based on an auto-encoder with a latent space with inductive bias inspired by perceptual straightening. We show that this results in a compact but time-sensitive video representation for the proposed task across three datasets: Something-Something, EPIC-Kitchens, and Charade. Our method (i) outperforms much larger video models pre-trained on large-scale video datasets, and (ii) leads to an improvement in classification performance on standard benchmarks when combined with these existing models.

Pretraining Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies on internet-scale video is appealing, yet current latent-action objectives often learn the wrong thing: they remain anchored to pixel variation rather than action-relevant state transitions, making them vulnerable to appearance bias, nuisance motion, and information leakage. We introduce VLA-JEPA, a JEPA-style pretraining framework that sidesteps these pitfalls by design. The key idea is leakage-free state prediction: a target encoder produces latent representations from future frames, while the student pathway sees only the current observation -- future information is used solely as supervision targets, never as input. By predicting in latent space rather than pixel space, VLA-JEPA learns dynamics abstractions that are robust to camera motion and irrelevant background changes. This yields a simple two-stage recipe -- JEPA pretraining followed by action-head fine-tuning -- without the multi-stage complexity of prior latent-action pipelines. Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, SimplerEnv and real-world manipulation tasks show that VLA-JEPA achieves consistent gains in generalization and robustness over existing methods.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown impressive capabilities across a wide range of robotics manipulation tasks. However, their growing model size poses significant challenges for deployment on resource-constrained robotic systems. While 1-bit pretraining has proven effective for enhancing the inference efficiency of large language models with minimal performance loss, its application to VLA models remains underexplored. In this work, we present BitVLA, the first 1-bit VLA model for robotics manipulation, in which every parameter is ternary, i.e., {-1, 0, 1}. To further reduce the memory footprint of the vision encoder, we propose the distillation-aware training strategy that compresses the full-precision encoder to 1.58-bit weights. During this process, a full-precision encoder serves as a teacher model to better align latent representations. Despite the lack of large-scale robotics pretraining, BitVLA achieves performance comparable to the state-of-the-art model OpenVLA-OFT with 4-bit post-training quantization on the LIBERO benchmark, while consuming only 29.8% of the memory. These results highlight BitVLA's promise for deployment on memory-constrained edge devices. We release the code and model weights in https://github.com/ustcwhy/BitVLA.

Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models built on pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) require extensive post-training, resulting in high computational overhead that limits scalability and deployment.We propose CogVLA, a Cognition-Aligned Vision-Language-Action framework that leverages instruction-driven routing and sparsification to improve both efficiency and performance. CogVLA draws inspiration from human multimodal coordination and introduces a 3-stage progressive architecture. 1) Encoder-FiLM based Aggregation Routing (EFA-Routing) injects instruction information into the vision encoder to selectively aggregate and compress dual-stream visual tokens, forming a instruction-aware latent representation. 2) Building upon this compact visual encoding, LLM-FiLM based Pruning Routing (LFP-Routing) introduces action intent into the language model by pruning instruction-irrelevant visually grounded tokens, thereby achieving token-level sparsity. 3) To ensure that compressed perception inputs can still support accurate and coherent action generation, we introduce V-L-A Coupled Attention (CAtten), which combines causal vision-language attention with bidirectional action parallel decoding. Extensive experiments on the LIBERO benchmark and real-world robotic tasks demonstrate that CogVLA achieves state-of-the-art performance with success rates of 97.4% and 70.0%, respectively, while reducing training costs by 2.5-fold and decreasing inference latency by 2.8-fold compared to OpenVLA. CogVLA is open-sourced and publicly available at https://github.com/JiuTian-VL/CogVLA.

Spatial perception and reasoning are crucial for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models to accomplish fine-grained manipulation tasks. However, existing approaches often lack the ability to understand and reason over the essential 3D structures necessary for precise control. To address this limitation, we propose QDepth-VLA, a general framework that augments VLA models with an auxiliary depth prediction task. A dedicated depth expert is designed to predict quantized latent tokens of depth maps obtained from a VQ-VAE encoder, enabling the model to learn depth-aware representations that capture critical geometric cues. Experimental results on the simulation benchmarks and real-world tasks demonstrate that QDepth-VLA yields strong spatial reasoning and competitive performance on manipulation tasks.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are a promising path toward embodied intelligence, yet they often overlook the predictive and temporal-causal structure underlying visual dynamics. World-model VLAs address this by predicting future frames, but waste capacity reconstructing redundant backgrounds. Latent-action VLAs encode frame-to-frame transitions compactly, but lack temporally continuous dynamic modeling and world knowledge. To overcome these limitations, we introduce CoWVLA (Chain-of-World VLA), a new "Chain of World" paradigm that unifies world-model temporal reasoning with a disentangled latent motion representation. First, a pretrained video VAE serves as a latent motion extractor, explicitly factorizing video segments into structure and motion latents. Then, during pre-training, the VLA learns from an instruction and an initial frame to infer a continuous latent motion chain and predict the segment's terminal frame. Finally, during co-fine-tuning, this latent dynamic is aligned with discrete action prediction by jointly modeling sparse keyframes and action sequences in a unified autoregressive decoder. This design preserves the world-model benefits of temporal reasoning and world knowledge while retaining the compactness and interpretability of latent actions, enabling efficient visuomotor learning. Extensive experiments on robotic simulation benchmarks show that CoWVLA outperforms existing world-model and latent-action approaches and achieves moderate computational efficiency, highlighting its potential as a more effective VLA pretraining paradigm. The project website can be found at https://fx-hit.github.io/cowvla-io.

Latent Action Models (LAMs) learn to extract action-relevant representations solely from raw observations, enabling reinforcement learning from unlabelled videos and significantly scaling available training data. However, LAMs face a critical challenge in disentangling action-relevant features from action-correlated noise (e.g., background motion). Failing to filter these distractors causes LAMs to capture spurious correlations and build sub-optimal latent action spaces. In this paper, we introduce MaskLAM -- a lightweight modification to LAM training to mitigate this issue by incorporating visual agent segmentation. MaskLAM utilises segmentation masks from pretrained foundation models to weight the LAM reconstruction loss, thereby prioritising salient information over background elements while requiring no architectural modifications. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on continuous-control MuJoCo tasks, modified with action-correlated background noise. Our approach yields up to a 4x increase in accrued rewards compared to standard baselines and a 3x improvement in the latent action quality, as evidenced by linear probe evaluation.

Learning transferable latent actions from large-scale object manipulation videos can significantly enhance generalization in downstream robotics tasks, as such representations are agnostic to different robot embodiments. Existing approaches primarily rely on visual reconstruction objectives while neglecting physical priors, leading to sub-optimal performance in learning universal representations. To address these challenges, we propose a Universal Latent Action Learning framework that takes task instructions and multiple frames as inputs, and optimizes both future frame reconstruction and action sequence prediction. Unlike prior works, incorporating action predictions (e.g., gripper or hand trajectories and orientations) allows the model to capture richer physical priors such as real-world distances and orientations, thereby enabling seamless transferability to downstream tasks. We further decompose the latent actions into learnable motion and scene tokens to distinguish the robot's active movements from environmental changes, thus filtering out irrelevant dynamics. By distilling the learned latent actions into the latest VLA models, we achieve strong performance across both simulated (SIMPLER and LIBERO) and real-world robot settings. Notably, with only 10 real-world trajectories per task collected on a Franka robot, our approach successfully completes all five challenging tasks, demonstrating strong few-shot transferability in robotic manipulation.

Generalist Vision-Language-Action models are currently hindered by the scarcity of robotic data compared to the abundance of human video demonstrations. Existing Latent Action Models attempt to leverage video data but often suffer from visual entanglement, capturing noise rather than manipulation skills. To address this, we propose Contrastive Latent Action Pretraining (CLAP), a framework that aligns the visual latent space from videos with a proprioceptive latent space from robot trajectories. By employing contrastive learning, CLAP maps video transitions onto a quantized, physically executable codebook. Building on this representation, we introduce a dual-formulation VLA framework offering both CLAP-NTP, an autoregressive model excelling at instruction following and object generalization, and CLAP-RF, a Rectified Flow-based policy designed for high-frequency, precise manipulation. Furthermore, we propose a Knowledge Matching (KM) regularization strategy to mitigate catastrophic forgetting during fine-tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CLAP significantly outperforms strong baselines, enabling the effective transfer of skills from human videos to robotic execution. Project page: https://lin-shan.com/CLAP/.

Agents capable of reasoning and planning in the real world require the ability of predicting the consequences of their actions. While world models possess this capability, they most often require action labels, that can be complex to obtain at scale. This motivates the learning of latent action models, that can learn an action space from videos alone. Our work addresses the problem of learning latent actions world models on in-the-wild videos, expanding the scope of existing works that focus on simple robotics simulations, video games, or manipulation data. While this allows us to capture richer actions, it also introduces challenges stemming from the video diversity, such as environmental noise, or the lack of a common embodiment across videos. To address some of the challenges, we discuss properties that actions should follow as well as relevant architectural choices and evaluations. We find that continuous, but constrained, latent actions are able to capture the complexity of actions from in-the-wild videos, something that the common vector quantization does not. We for example find that changes in the environment coming from agents, such as humans entering the room, can be transferred across videos. This highlights the capability of learning actions that are specific to in-the-wild videos. In the absence of a common embodiment across videos, we are mainly able to learn latent actions that become localized in space, relative to the camera. Nonetheless, we are able to train a controller that maps known actions to latent ones, allowing us to use latent actions as a universal interface and solve planning tasks with our world model with similar performance as action-conditioned baselines. Our analyses and experiments provide a step towards scaling latent action models to the real world.

Can we turn a video prediction model into a robot policy? Videos, including those of humans or teleoperated robots, capture rich physical interactions. However, most of them lack labeled actions, which limits their use in robot learning. We present Video Prediction for Robot Actions (ViPRA), a simple pretraining-finetuning framework that learns continuous robot control from these actionless videos. Instead of directly predicting actions, we train a video-language model to predict both future visual observations and motion-centric latent actions, which serve as intermediate representations of scene dynamics. We train these latent actions using perceptual losses and optical flow consistency to ensure they reflect physically grounded behavior. For downstream control, we introduce a chunked flow matching decoder that maps latent actions to robot-specific continuous action sequences, using only 100 to 200 teleoperated demonstrations. This approach avoids expensive action annotation, supports generalization across embodiments, and enables smooth, high-frequency continuous control upto 22 Hz via chunked action decoding. Unlike prior latent action works that treat pretraining as autoregressive policy learning, explicitly models both what changes and how. Our method outperforms strong baselines, with a 16% gain on the SIMPLER benchmark and a 13% improvement across real world manipulation tasks. We will release models and code at https://vipra-project.github.io

Latent action representations learned from unlabeled videos have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for pretraining vision-language-action (VLA) models without explicit robot action supervision. However, latent actions derived solely from RGB observations primarily encode appearance-driven dynamics and lack explicit 3D geometric structure, which is essential for precise and contact-rich manipulation. To address this limitation, we introduce UniLACT, a transformer-based VLA model that incorporates geometric structure through depth-aware latent pretraining, enabling downstream policies to inherit stronger spatial priors. To facilitate this process, we propose UniLARN, a unified latent action learning framework based on inverse and forward dynamics objectives that learns a shared embedding space for RGB and depth while explicitly modeling their cross-modal interactions. This formulation produces modality-specific and unified latent action representations that serve as pseudo-labels for the depth-aware pretraining of UniLACT. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world settings demonstrate the effectiveness of depth-aware unified latent action representations. UniLACT consistently outperforms RGB-based latent action baselines under in-domain and out-of-domain pretraining regimes, as well as on both seen and unseen manipulation tasks.

Latent Action Models (LAMs) enable Vision-Language-Action (VLA) systems to learn semantic action representations from large-scale unannotated data. Yet, we identify two bottlenecks of LAMs: 1) the commonly adopted end-to-end trained image encoder suffers from poor spatial understanding; 2) LAMs can be fragile when input frames are distant, leading to limited temporal perception. Such factors inevitably hinder stable and clear action modeling. To this end, we propose Farsighted-LAM, a latent action framework with geometry-aware spatial encoding and multi-scale temporal modeling, capturing structural priors and dynamic motion patterns from consecutive frames. We further propose SSM-VLA, an end-to-end VLA framework built upon Farsighted-LAM, which integrates structured perception with a visual Chain-of-Thought module to explicitly reason about environmental dynamics, enhancing decision consistency and interpretability. We validate SSM-VLA on multiple VLA tasks in both simulation and real-world settings, and achieve state-of-the-art performance. Our results demonstrate that our strategy of combining geometry-aware modeling, temporal coherence, and explicit reasoning is effective in enhancing the robustness and generalizability of embodied intelligence.

It is challenging for humans -- particularly those living with physical disabilities -- to control high-dimensional, dexterous robots. Prior work explores learning embedding functions that map a human's low-dimensional inputs (e.g., via a joystick) to complex, high-dimensional robot actions for assistive teleoperation; however, a central problem is that there are many more high-dimensional actions than available low-dimensional inputs. To extract the correct action and maximally assist their human controller, robots must reason over their context: for example, pressing a joystick down when interacting with a coffee cup indicates a different action than when interacting with knife. In this work, we develop assistive robots that condition their latent embeddings on visual inputs. We explore a spectrum of visual encoders and show that incorporating object detectors pretrained on small amounts of cheap, easy-to-collect structured data enables i) accurately and robustly recognizing the current context and ii) generalizing control embeddings to new objects and tasks. In user studies with a high-dimensional physical robot arm, participants leverage this approach to perform new tasks with unseen objects. Our results indicate that structured visual representations improve few-shot performance and are subjectively preferred by users.

The capability of performing long-horizon, language-guided robotic manipulation tasks critically relies on leveraging historical information and generating coherent action sequences. However, such capabilities are often overlooked by existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. To solve this challenge, we propose LoLA (Long Horizon Latent Action Learning), a framework designed for robot manipulation that integrates long-term multi-view observations and robot proprioception to enable multi-step reasoning and action generation. We first employ Vision-Language Models to encode rich contextual features from historical sequences and multi-view observations. We further introduces a key module, State-Aware Latent Re-representation, which transforms visual inputs and language commands into actionable robot motion space. Unlike existing VLA approaches that merely concatenate robot proprioception (e.g., joint angles) with VL embeddings, this module leverages such robot states to explicitly ground VL representations in physical scale through a learnable "embodiment-anchored" latent space. We trained LoLA on diverse robotic pre-training datasets and conducted extensive evaluations on simulation benchmarks (SIMPLER and LIBERO), as well as two real-world tasks on Franka and Bi-Manual Aloha robots. Results show that LoLA significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods (e.g., pi0), particularly in long-horizon manipulation tasks.

We introduce Latent Action Pretraining for general Action models (LAPA), an unsupervised method for pretraining Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models without ground-truth robot action labels. Existing Vision-Language-Action models require action labels typically collected by human teleoperators during pretraining, which significantly limits possible data sources and scale. In this work, we propose a method to learn from internet-scale videos that do not have robot action labels. We first train an action quantization model leveraging VQ-VAE-based objective to learn discrete latent actions between image frames, then pretrain a latent VLA model to predict these latent actions from observations and task descriptions, and finally finetune the VLA on small-scale robot manipulation data to map from latent to robot actions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing techniques that train robot manipulation policies from large-scale videos. Furthermore, it outperforms the state-of-the-art VLA model trained with robotic action labels on real-world manipulation tasks that require language conditioning, generalization to unseen objects, and semantic generalization to unseen instructions. Training only on human manipulation videos also shows positive transfer, opening up the potential for leveraging web-scale data for robotics foundation model.

Pre-training large models on vast amounts of web data has proven to be an effective approach for obtaining powerful, general models in domains such as language and vision. However, this paradigm has not yet taken hold in reinforcement learning. This is because videos, the most abundant form of embodied behavioral data on the web, lack the action labels required by existing methods for imitating behavior from demonstrations. We introduce Latent Action Policies (LAPO), a method for recovering latent action information, and thereby latent-action policies, world models, and inverse dynamics models, purely from videos. LAPO is the first method able to recover the structure of the true action space just from observed dynamics, even in challenging procedurally-generated environments. LAPO enables training latent-action policies that can be rapidly fine-tuned into expert-level policies, either offline using a small action-labeled dataset, or online with rewards. LAPO takes a first step towards pre-training powerful, generalist policies and world models on the vast amounts of videos readily available on the web.

A generalist robot should perform effectively across various environments. However, most existing approaches heavily rely on scaling action-annotated data to enhance their capabilities. Consequently, they are often limited to single physical specification and struggle to learn transferable knowledge across different embodiments and environments. To confront these limitations, we propose UniVLA, a new framework for learning cross-embodiment vision-language-action (VLA) policies. Our key innovation is to derive task-centric action representations from videos with a latent action model. This enables us to exploit extensive data across a wide spectrum of embodiments and perspectives. To mitigate the effect of task-irrelevant dynamics, we incorporate language instructions and establish a latent action model within the DINO feature space. Learned from internet-scale videos, the generalist policy can be deployed to various robots through efficient latent action decoding. We obtain state-of-the-art results across multiple manipulation and navigation benchmarks, as well as real-robot deployments. UniVLA achieves superior performance over OpenVLA with less than 1/20 of pretraining compute and 1/10 of downstream data. Continuous performance improvements are observed as heterogeneous data, even including human videos, are incorporated into the training pipeline. The results underscore UniVLA's potential to facilitate scalable and efficient robot policy learning.

We introduce iFlyBot-VLA, a large-scale Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model trained under a novel framework. The main contributions are listed as follows: (1) a latent action model thoroughly trained on large-scale human and robotic manipulation videos; (2) a dual-level action representation framework that jointly supervises both the Vision-Language Model (VLM) and the action expert during training; (3) a mixed training strategy that combines robot trajectory data with general QA and spatial QA datasets, effectively enhancing the 3D perceptual and reasoning capabilities of the VLM backbone. Specifically, the VLM is trained to predict two complementary forms of actions: latent actions, derived from our latent action model pretrained on cross-embodiment manipulation data, which capture implicit high-level intentions; and structured discrete action tokens, obtained through frequency-domain transformations of continuous control signals, which encode explicit low-level dynamics. This dual supervision aligns the representation spaces of language, vision, and action, enabling the VLM to directly contribute to action generation. Experimental results on the LIBERO Franka benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our frame-work, while real-world evaluations further show that iFlyBot-VLA achieves competitive success rates across diverse and challenging manipulation tasks. Furthermore, we plan to open-source a portion of our self-constructed dataset to support future research in the community

Temporal abstraction and efficient planning pose significant challenges in offline reinforcement learning, mainly when dealing with domains that involve temporally extended tasks and delayed sparse rewards. Existing methods typically plan in the raw action space and can be inefficient and inflexible. Latent action spaces offer a more flexible paradigm, capturing only possible actions within the behavior policy support and decoupling the temporal structure between planning and modeling. However, current latent-action-based methods are limited to discrete spaces and require expensive planning. This paper presents a unified framework for continuous latent action space representation learning and planning by leveraging latent, score-based diffusion models. We establish the theoretical equivalence between planning in the latent action space and energy-guided sampling with a pretrained diffusion model and incorporate a novel sequence-level exact sampling method. Our proposed method, LatentDiffuser, demonstrates competitive performance on low-dimensional locomotion control tasks and surpasses existing methods in higher-dimensional tasks.

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) in simulation often results in brittle and unrealistic learning outcomes. To push the agent towards more desirable solutions, prior information can be injected in the learning process through, for instance, reward shaping, expert data, or motion primitives. We propose an additional inductive bias for robot learning: latent actions learned from expert demonstration as priors in the action space. We show that these action priors can be learned from only a single open-loop gait cycle using a simple autoencoder. Using these latent action priors combined with established style rewards for imitation in DRL achieves above expert demonstration level of performance and leads to more desirable gaits. Further, action priors substantially improve the performance on transfer tasks, even leading to gait transitions for higher target speeds. Videos and code are available at https://sites.google.com/view/latent-action-priors.

Video diffusion models have recently made great progress in generation quality, but are still limited by the high memory and computational requirements. This is because current video diffusion models often attempt to process high-dimensional videos directly. To tackle this issue, we propose content-motion latent diffusion model (CMD), a novel efficient extension of pretrained image diffusion models for video generation. Specifically, we propose an autoencoder that succinctly encodes a video as a combination of a content frame (like an image) and a low-dimensional motion latent representation. The former represents the common content, and the latter represents the underlying motion in the video, respectively. We generate the content frame by fine-tuning a pretrained image diffusion model, and we generate the motion latent representation by training a new lightweight diffusion model. A key innovation here is the design of a compact latent space that can directly utilizes a pretrained image diffusion model, which has not been done in previous latent video diffusion models. This leads to considerably better quality generation and reduced computational costs. For instance, CMD can sample a video 7.7times faster than prior approaches by generating a video of 512times1024 resolution and length 16 in 3.1 seconds. Moreover, CMD achieves an FVD score of 212.7 on WebVid-10M, 27.3% better than the previous state-of-the-art of 292.4.

This paper presents RynnVLA-001, a vision-language-action(VLA) model built upon large-scale video generative pretraining from human demonstrations. We propose a novel two-stage pretraining methodology. The first stage, Ego-Centric Video Generative Pretraining, trains an Image-to-Video model on 12M ego-centric manipulation videos to predict future frames conditioned on an initial frame and a language instruction. The second stage, Human-Centric Trajectory-Aware Modeling, extends this by jointly predicting future keypoint trajectories, thereby effectively bridging visual frame prediction with action prediction. Furthermore, to enhance action representation, we propose ActionVAE, a variational autoencoder that compresses sequences of actions into compact latent embeddings, reducing the complexity of the VLA output space. When finetuned on the same downstream robotics datasets, RynnVLA-001 achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating that the proposed pretraining strategy provides a more effective initialization for VLA models.

We introduce Image-GOal Representations (IGOR), aiming to learn a unified, semantically consistent action space across human and various robots. Through this unified latent action space, IGOR enables knowledge transfer among large-scale robot and human activity data. We achieve this by compressing visual changes between an initial image and its goal state into latent actions. IGOR allows us to generate latent action labels for internet-scale video data. This unified latent action space enables the training of foundation policy and world models across a wide variety of tasks performed by both robots and humans. We demonstrate that: (1) IGOR learns a semantically consistent action space for both human and robots, characterizing various possible motions of objects representing the physical interaction knowledge; (2) IGOR can "migrate" the movements of the object in the one video to other videos, even across human and robots, by jointly using the latent action model and world model; (3) IGOR can learn to align latent actions with natural language through the foundation policy model, and integrate latent actions with a low-level policy model to achieve effective robot control. We believe IGOR opens new possibilities for human-to-robot knowledge transfer and control.

We present a framework for the unsupervised learning of neurosymbolic encoders, which are encoders obtained by composing neural networks with symbolic programs from a domain-specific language. Our framework naturally incorporates symbolic expert knowledge into the learning process, which leads to more interpretable and factorized latent representations compared to fully neural encoders. We integrate modern program synthesis techniques with the variational autoencoding (VAE) framework, in order to learn a neurosymbolic encoder in conjunction with a standard decoder. The programmatic descriptions from our encoders can benefit many analysis workflows, such as in behavior modeling where interpreting agent actions and movements is important. We evaluate our method on learning latent representations for real-world trajectory data from animal biology and sports analytics. We show that our approach offers significantly better separation of meaningful categories than standard VAEs and leads to practical gains on downstream analysis tasks, such as for behavior classification.

Despite progress, Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) are limited by a scarcity of large-scale, diverse robot data. While human manipulation videos offer a rich alternative, existing methods are forced to choose between small, precisely-labeled datasets and vast in-the-wild footage with unreliable hand tracking labels. We present JALA, a pretraining framework that learns Jointly-Aligned Latent Actions. JALA bypasses full visual dynamic reconstruction, instead learns a predictive action embedding aligned with both inverse dynamics and real actions. This yields a transition-aware, behavior-centric latent space for learning from heterogeneous human data. We scale this approach with UniHand-Mix, a 7.5M video corpus (>2,000 hours) blending laboratory and in-the-wild footage. Experiments demonstrate that JALA generates more realistic hand motions in both controlled and unconstrained scenarios, significantly improving downstream robot manipulation performance in both simulation and real-world tasks. These results indicate that jointly-aligned latent actions offer a scalable pathway for VLA pretraining from human data.

In this paper, we address the challenge of procedure planning in instructional videos, aiming to generate coherent and task-aligned action sequences from start and end visual observations. Previous work has mainly relied on text-level supervision to bridge the gap between observed states and unobserved actions, but it struggles with capturing intricate temporal relationships among actions. Building on these efforts, we propose the Masked Temporal Interpolation Diffusion (MTID) model that introduces a latent space temporal interpolation module within the diffusion model. This module leverages a learnable interpolation matrix to generate intermediate latent features, thereby augmenting visual supervision with richer mid-state details. By integrating this enriched supervision into the model, we enable end-to-end training tailored to task-specific requirements, significantly enhancing the model's capacity to predict temporally coherent action sequences. Additionally, we introduce an action-aware mask projection mechanism to restrict the action generation space, combined with a task-adaptive masked proximity loss to prioritize more accurate reasoning results close to the given start and end states over those in intermediate steps. Simultaneously, it filters out task-irrelevant action predictions, leading to contextually aware action sequences. Experimental results across three widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that our MTID achieves promising action planning performance on most metrics. The code is available at https://github.com/WiserZhou/MTID.

The target duration of a synthesized human motion is a critical attribute that requires modeling control over the motion dynamics and style. Speeding up an action performance is not merely fast-forwarding it. However, state-of-the-art techniques for human behavior synthesis have limited control over the target sequence length. We introduce the problem of generating length-aware 3D human motion sequences from textual descriptors, and we propose a novel model to synthesize motions of variable target lengths, which we dub "Length-Aware Latent Diffusion" (LADiff). LADiff consists of two new modules: 1) a length-aware variational auto-encoder to learn motion representations with length-dependent latent codes; 2) a length-conforming latent diffusion model to generate motions with a richness of details that increases with the required target sequence length. LADiff significantly improves over the state-of-the-art across most of the existing motion synthesis metrics on the two established benchmarks of HumanML3D and KIT-ML.

Vision-language models are increasingly employed as multimodal conversational agents (MCAs) for diverse conversational tasks. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely explored for adapting MCAs to various human-AI interaction scenarios. Despite showing great enhancement in generalization performance, fine-tuning MCAs via RL still faces challenges in handling the extremely large text token space. To address this, we learn a compact latent action space for RL fine-tuning instead. Specifically, we adopt the learning from observation mechanism to construct the codebook for the latent action space, where future observations are leveraged to estimate current latent actions that could further be used to reconstruct future observations. However, the scarcity of paired image-text data hinders learning a codebook with sufficient coverage. Thus, we leverage both paired image-text data and text-only data to construct the latent action space, using a cross-modal projector for transforming text embeddings into image-text embeddings. We initialize the cross-modal projector on paired image-text data, and further train it on massive text-only data with a novel cycle consistency loss to enhance its robustness. We show that our latent action based method outperforms competitive baselines on two conversation tasks across various RL algorithms.

Latent prediction--where agents learn by predicting their own latents--has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training general representations in machine learning. In reinforcement learning (RL), this approach has been explored to define auxiliary losses for a variety of settings, including reward-based and unsupervised RL, behavior cloning, and world modeling. While existing methods are typically limited to single-task learning, one-step prediction, or on-policy trajectory data, we show that temporal difference (TD) learning enables learning representations predictive of long-term latent dynamics across multiple policies from offline, reward-free transitions. Building on this, we introduce TD-JEPA, which leverages TD-based latent-predictive representations into unsupervised RL. TD-JEPA trains explicit state and task encoders, a policy-conditioned multi-step predictor, and a set of parameterized policies directly in latent space. This enables zero-shot optimization of any reward function at test time. Theoretically, we show that an idealized variant of TD-JEPA avoids collapse with proper initialization, and learns encoders that capture a low-rank factorization of long-term policy dynamics, while the predictor recovers their successor features in latent space. Empirically, TD-JEPA matches or outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on locomotion, navigation, and manipulation tasks across 13 datasets in ExoRL and OGBench, especially in the challenging setting of zero-shot RL from pixels.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve preliminary generalization through pretraining on large scale robot teleoperation datasets. However, acquiring datasets that comprehensively cover diverse tasks and environments is extremely costly and difficult to scale. In contrast, human demonstration videos offer a rich and scalable source of diverse scenes and manipulation behaviors, yet their lack of explicit action supervision hinders direct utilization. Prior work leverages VQ-VAE based frameworks to learn latent actions from human videos in an unsupervised manner. Nevertheless, since the training objective primarily focuses on reconstructing visual appearances rather than capturing inter-frame dynamics, the learned representations tend to rely on spurious visual cues, leading to shortcut learning and entangled latent representations that hinder transferability. To address this, we propose ConLA, an unsupervised pretraining framework for learning robotic policies from human videos. ConLA introduces a contrastive disentanglement mechanism that leverages action category priors and temporal cues to isolate motion dynamics from visual content, effectively mitigating shortcut learning. Extensive experiments show that ConLA achieves strong performance across diverse benchmarks. Notably, by pretraining solely on human videos, our method for the first time surpasses the performance obtained with real robot trajectory pretraining, highlighting its ability to extract pure and semantically consistent latent action representations for scalable robot learning.

Embodied action planning is a core challenge in robotics, requiring models to generate precise actions from visual observations and language instructions. While video generation world models are promising, their reliance on pixel-level reconstruction often introduces visual redundancies that hinder action decoding and generalization. Latent world models offer a compact, motion-aware representation, but overlook the fine-grained details critical for precise manipulation. To overcome these limitations, we propose MoWM, a mixture-of-world-model framework that fuses representations from hybrid world models for embodied action planning. Our approach uses motion-aware representations from a latent model as a high-level prior, which guides the extraction of fine-grained visual features from the pixel space model. This design allows MoWM to highlight the informative visual details needed for action decoding. Extensive evaluations on the CALVIN benchmark demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art task success rates and superior generalization. We also provide a comprehensive analysis of the strengths of each feature space, offering valuable insights for future research in embodied planning. The code is available at: https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/MoWM.

We introduce Genie, the first generative interactive environment trained in an unsupervised manner from unlabelled Internet videos. The model can be prompted to generate an endless variety of action-controllable virtual worlds described through text, synthetic images, photographs, and even sketches. At 11B parameters, Genie can be considered a foundation world model. It is comprised of a spatiotemporal video tokenizer, an autoregressive dynamics model, and a simple and scalable latent action model. Genie enables users to act in the generated environments on a frame-by-frame basis despite training without any ground-truth action labels or other domain-specific requirements typically found in the world model literature. Further the resulting learned latent action space facilitates training agents to imitate behaviors from unseen videos, opening the path for training generalist agents of the future.

A unified video and action model holds significant promise for robotics, where videos provide rich scene information for action prediction, and actions provide dynamics information for video prediction. However, effectively combining video generation and action prediction remains challenging, and current video generation-based methods struggle to match the performance of direct policy learning in action accuracy and inference speed. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Unified Video Action model (UVA), which jointly optimizes video and action predictions to achieve both high accuracy and efficient action inference. The key lies in learning a joint video-action latent representation and decoupling video-action decoding. The joint latent representation bridges the visual and action domains, effectively modeling the relationship between video and action sequences. Meanwhile, the decoupled decoding, powered by two lightweight diffusion heads, enables high-speed action inference by bypassing video generation during inference. Such a unified framework further enables versatile functionality through masked input training. By selectively masking actions or videos, a single model can tackle diverse tasks beyond policy learning, such as forward and inverse dynamics modeling and video generation. Via an extensive set of experiments, we demonstrate that UVA can serve as a general-purpose solution for a wide range of robotics tasks, such as policy learning, forward/inverse dynamics and video observation prediction, without compromising performance compared to methods tailored for specific applications. Results are best viewed on https://unified-video-action-model.github.io/.

Mapping behavioral actions to neural activity is a fundamental goal of neuroscience. As our ability to record large neural and behavioral data increases, there is growing interest in modeling neural dynamics during adaptive behaviors to probe neural representations. In particular, neural latent embeddings can reveal underlying correlates of behavior, yet, we lack non-linear techniques that can explicitly and flexibly leverage joint behavior and neural data. Here, we fill this gap with a novel method, CEBRA, that jointly uses behavioral and neural data in a hypothesis- or discovery-driven manner to produce consistent, high-performance latent spaces. We validate its accuracy and demonstrate our tool's utility for both calcium and electrophysiology datasets, across sensory and motor tasks, and in simple or complex behaviors across species. It allows for single and multi-session datasets to be leveraged for hypothesis testing or can be used label-free. Lastly, we show that CEBRA can be used for the mapping of space, uncovering complex kinematic features, and rapid, high-accuracy decoding of natural movies from visual cortex.

Effective interaction modeling and behavior prediction of dynamic agents play a significant role in interactive motion planning for autonomous robots. Although existing methods have improved prediction accuracy, few research efforts have been devoted to enhancing prediction model interpretability and out-of-distribution (OOD) generalizability. This work addresses these two challenging aspects by designing a variational auto-encoder framework that integrates graph-based representations and time-sequence models to efficiently capture spatio-temporal relations between interactive agents and predict their dynamics. Our model infers dynamic interaction graphs in a latent space augmented with interpretable edge features that characterize the interactions. Moreover, we aim to enhance model interpretability and performance in OOD scenarios by disentangling the latent space of edge features, thereby strengthening model versatility and robustness. We validate our approach through extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world datasets. The results show superior performance compared to existing methods in modeling spatio-temporal relations, motion prediction, and identifying time-invariant latent features.

This study focuses on a novel task in text-to-image (T2I) generation, namely action customization. The objective of this task is to learn the co-existing action from limited data and generalize it to unseen humans or even animals. Experimental results show that existing subject-driven customization methods fail to learn the representative characteristics of actions and struggle in decoupling actions from context features, including appearance. To overcome the preference for low-level features and the entanglement of high-level features, we propose an inversion-based method Action-Disentangled Identifier (ADI) to learn action-specific identifiers from the exemplar images. ADI first expands the semantic conditioning space by introducing layer-wise identifier tokens, thereby increasing the representational richness while distributing the inversion across different features. Then, to block the inversion of action-agnostic features, ADI extracts the gradient invariance from the constructed sample triples and masks the updates of irrelevant channels. To comprehensively evaluate the task, we present an ActionBench that includes a variety of actions, each accompanied by meticulously selected samples. Both quantitative and qualitative results show that our ADI outperforms existing baselines in action-customized T2I generation. Our project page is at https://adi-t2i.github.io/ADI.

Recent advances in video diffusion have enabled the development of "world models" capable of simulating interactive environments. However, these models are largely restricted to single-agent settings, failing to control multiple agents simultaneously in a scene. In this work, we tackle a fundamental issue of action binding in existing video diffusion models, which struggle to associate specific actions with their corresponding subjects. For this purpose, we propose ActionParty, an action controllable multi-subject world model for generative video games. It introduces subject state tokens, i.e. latent variables that persistently capture the state of each subject in the scene. By jointly modeling state tokens and video latents with a spatial biasing mechanism, we disentangle global video frame rendering from individual action-controlled subject updates. We evaluate ActionParty on the Melting Pot benchmark, demonstrating the first video world model capable of controlling up to seven players simultaneously across 46 diverse environments. Our results show significant improvements in action-following accuracy and identity consistency, while enabling robust autoregressive tracking of subjects through complex interactions.

Latent variable generative models have emerged as powerful tools for generative tasks including image and video synthesis. These models are enabled by pretrained autoencoders that map high resolution data into a compressed lower dimensional latent space, where the generative models can subsequently be developed while requiring fewer computational resources. Despite their effectiveness, the direct application of latent variable models to higher dimensional domains such as videos continues to pose challenges for efficient training and inference. In this paper, we propose an autoencoder that projects volumetric data onto a four-plane factorized latent space that grows sublinearly with the input size, making it ideal for higher dimensional data like videos. The design of our factorized model supports straightforward adoption in a number of conditional generation tasks with latent diffusion models (LDMs), such as class-conditional generation, frame prediction, and video interpolation. Our results show that the proposed four-plane latent space retains a rich representation needed for high-fidelity reconstructions despite the heavy compression, while simultaneously enabling LDMs to operate with significant improvements in speed and memory.

Inspired by the remarkable success of Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) for image synthesis, we study LDM for text-to-video generation, which is a formidable challenge due to the computational and memory constraints during both model training and inference. A single LDM is usually only capable of generating a very limited number of video frames. Some existing works focus on separate prediction models for generating more video frames, which suffer from additional training cost and frame-level jittering, however. In this paper, we propose a framework called "Reuse and Diffuse" dubbed VidRD to produce more frames following the frames already generated by an LDM. Conditioned on an initial video clip with a small number of frames, additional frames are iteratively generated by reusing the original latent features and following the previous diffusion process. Besides, for the autoencoder used for translation between pixel space and latent space, we inject temporal layers into its decoder and fine-tune these layers for higher temporal consistency. We also propose a set of strategies for composing video-text data that involve diverse content from multiple existing datasets including video datasets for action recognition and image-text datasets. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves good results in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Our project page is available https://anonymous0x233.github.io/ReuseAndDiffuse/{here}.

We present a GAN-based Transformer for general action-conditioned 3D human motion generation, including not only single-person actions but also multi-person interactive actions. Our approach consists of a powerful Action-conditioned motion TransFormer (ActFormer) under a GAN training scheme, equipped with a Gaussian Process latent prior. Such a design combines the strong spatio-temporal representation capacity of Transformer, superiority in generative modeling of GAN, and inherent temporal correlations from the latent prior. Furthermore, ActFormer can be naturally extended to multi-person motions by alternately modeling temporal correlations and human interactions with Transformer encoders. To further facilitate research on multi-person motion generation, we introduce a new synthetic dataset of complex multi-person combat behaviors. Extensive experiments on NTU-13, NTU RGB+D 120, BABEL and the proposed combat dataset show that our method can adapt to various human motion representations and achieve superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods on both single-person and multi-person motion generation tasks, demonstrating a promising step towards a general human motion generator.

Imitation learning from human motion capture (MoCap) data provides a promising way to train humanoid robots. However, due to differences in morphology, such as varying degrees of joint freedom and force limits, exact replication of human behaviors may not be feasible for humanoid robots. Consequently, incorporating physically infeasible MoCap data in training datasets can adversely affect the performance of the robot policy. To address this issue, we propose a bi-level optimization-based imitation learning framework that alternates between optimizing both the robot policy and the target MoCap data. Specifically, we first develop a generative latent dynamics model using a novel self-consistent auto-encoder, which learns sparse and structured motion representations while capturing desired motion patterns in the dataset. The dynamics model is then utilized to generate reference motions while the latent representation regularizes the bi-level motion imitation process. Simulations conducted with a realistic model of a humanoid robot demonstrate that our method enhances the robot policy by modifying reference motions to be physically consistent.

Despite rapid advances in video generative models, robust metrics for evaluating visual and temporal correctness of complex human actions remain elusive. Critically, existing pure-vision encoders and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are strongly appearance-biased, lack temporal understanding, and thus struggle to discern intricate motion dynamics and anatomical implausibilities in generated videos. We tackle this gap by introducing a novel evaluation metric derived from a learned latent space of real-world human actions. Our method first captures the nuances, constraints, and temporal smoothness of real-world motion by fusing appearance-agnostic human skeletal geometry features with appearance-based features. We posit that this combined feature space provides a robust representation of action plausibility. Given a generated video, our metric quantifies its action quality by measuring the distance between its underlying representations and this learned real-world action distribution. For rigorous validation, we develop a new multi-faceted benchmark specifically designed to probe temporally challenging aspects of human action fidelity. Through extensive experiments, we show that our metric achieves substantial improvement of more than 68% compared to existing state-of-the-art methods on our benchmark, performs competitively on established external benchmarks, and has a stronger correlation with human perception. Our in-depth analysis reveals critical limitations in current video generative models and establishes a new standard for advanced research in video generation.

Though recent advances in multimodal models have demonstrated strong capabilities and opportunities in unified understanding and generation, the development of unified motion-language models remains underexplored. To enable such models with high-fidelity human motion, two core challenges must be addressed. The first is the reconstruction gap between the continuous motion modality and discrete representation in an autoregressive manner, and the second is the degradation of language intelligence during unified training. Inspired by the mixture of experts, we propose MotionGPT3, a bimodal motion-language model that treats human motion as a second modality, decoupling motion modeling via separate model parameters and enabling both effective cross-modal interaction and efficient multimodal scaling training. To preserve language intelligence, the text branch retains the original structure and parameters of the pretrained language model, while a new motion branch is integrated via a shared attention mechanism, enabling bidirectional information flow between two modalities. We first employ a motion Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to encode raw human motion into latent representations. Based on this continuous latent space, the motion branch predicts motion latents directly from intermediate hidden states using a diffusion head, bypassing discrete tokenization. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves competitive performance on both motion understanding and generation tasks while preserving strong language capabilities, establishing a unified bimodal motion diffusion framework within an autoregressive manner.

Recent video generation models largely rely on video autoencoders that compress pixel-space videos into latent representations. However, existing video autoencoders suffer from three major limitations: (1) fixed-rate compression that wastes tokens on simple videos, (2) inflexible CNN architectures that prevent variable-length latent modeling, and (3) deterministic decoders that struggle to recover appropriate details from compressed latents. To address these issues, we propose One-Dimensional Diffusion Video Autoencoder (One-DVA), a transformer-based framework for adaptive 1D encoding and diffusion-based decoding. The encoder employs query-based vision transformers to extract spatiotemporal features and produce latent representations, while a variable-length dropout mechanism dynamically adjusts the latent length. The decoder is a pixel-space diffusion transformer that reconstructs videos with the latents as input conditions. With a two-stage training strategy, One-DVA achieves performance comparable to 3D-CNN VAEs on reconstruction metrics at identical compression ratios. More importantly, it supports adaptive compression and thus can achieve higher compression ratios. To better support downstream latent generation, we further regularize the One-DVA latent distribution for generative modeling and fine-tune its decoder to mitigate artifacts caused by the generation process.

While a general embodied agent must function as a unified system, current methods are built on isolated models for understanding, world modeling, and control. This fragmentation prevents unifying multimodal generative capabilities and hinders learning from large-scale, heterogeneous data. In this paper, we propose Motus, a unified latent action world model that leverages existing general pretrained models and rich, sharable motion information. Motus introduces a Mixture-of-Transformer (MoT) architecture to integrate three experts (i.e., understanding, video generation, and action) and adopts a UniDiffuser-style scheduler to enable flexible switching between different modeling modes (i.e., world models, vision-language-action models, inverse dynamics models, video generation models, and video-action joint prediction models). Motus further leverages the optical flow to learn latent actions and adopts a recipe with three-phase training pipeline and six-layer data pyramid, thereby extracting pixel-level "delta action" and enabling large-scale action pretraining. Experiments show that Motus achieves superior performance against state-of-the-art methods in both simulation (a +15% improvement over X-VLA and a +45% improvement over Pi0.5) and real-world scenarios(improved by +11~48%), demonstrating unified modeling of all functionalities and priors significantly benefits downstream robotic tasks.

Modern Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) typically operate in low-level Variational Autoencoder (VAE) latent spaces that are primarily optimized for pixel-level reconstruction. To unify vision generation and understanding, a burgeoning trend is to adopt high-dimensional features from representation encoders as generative latents. However, we empirically identify two fundamental obstacles in this paradigm: (1) the discriminative feature space lacks compact regularization, making diffusion models prone to off-manifold latents that lead to inaccurate object structures; and (2) the encoder's inherently weak pixel-level reconstruction hinders the generator from learning accurate fine-grained geometry and texture. In this paper, we propose a systematic framework to adapt understanding-oriented encoder features for generative tasks. We introduce a semantic-pixel reconstruction objective to regularize the latent space, enabling the compression of both semantic information and fine-grained details into a highly compact representation (96 channels with 16x16 spatial downsampling). This design ensures that the latent space remains semantically rich and achieves state-of-the-art image reconstruction, while remaining compact enough for accurate generation. Leveraging this representation, we design a unified Text-to-Image (T2I) and image editing model. Benchmarking against various feature spaces, we demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction, faster convergence, and substantial performance gains in both T2I and editing tasks, validating that representation encoders can be effectively adapted into robust generative components.

We introduce Genie Envisioner (GE), a unified world foundation platform for robotic manipulation that integrates policy learning, evaluation, and simulation within a single video-generative framework. At its core, GE-Base is a large-scale, instruction-conditioned video diffusion model that captures the spatial, temporal, and semantic dynamics of real-world robotic interactions in a structured latent space. Built upon this foundation, GE-Act maps latent representations to executable action trajectories through a lightweight, flow-matching decoder, enabling precise and generalizable policy inference across diverse embodiments with minimal supervision. To support scalable evaluation and training, GE-Sim serves as an action-conditioned neural simulator, producing high-fidelity rollouts for closed-loop policy development. The platform is further equipped with EWMBench, a standardized benchmark suite measuring visual fidelity, physical consistency, and instruction-action alignment. Together, these components establish Genie Envisioner as a scalable and practical foundation for instruction-driven, general-purpose embodied intelligence. All code, models, and benchmarks will be released publicly.

Weakly-supervised action localization aims to recognize and localize action instancese in untrimmed videos with only video-level labels. Most existing models rely on multiple instance learning(MIL), where the predictions of unlabeled instances are supervised by classifying labeled bags. The MIL-based methods are relatively well studied with cogent performance achieved on classification but not on localization. Generally, they locate temporal regions by the video-level classification but overlook the temporal variations of feature semantics. To address this problem, we propose a novel attention-based hierarchically-structured latent model to learn the temporal variations of feature semantics. Specifically, our model entails two components, the first is an unsupervised change-points detection module that detects change-points by learning the latent representations of video features in a temporal hierarchy based on their rates of change, and the second is an attention-based classification model that selects the change-points of the foreground as the boundaries. To evaluate the effectiveness of our model, we conduct extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, THUMOS-14 and ActivityNet-v1.3. The experiments show that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, and even achieves comparable performance with fully-supervised methods.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models pre-trained on large, diverse datasets show remarkable potential for general-purpose robotic manipulation. However, a primary bottleneck remains in adapting these models to downstream tasks, especially when the robot's embodiment or the task itself differs from the pre-training data. This discrepancy leads to a significant mismatch in action distributions, demanding extensive data and compute for effective fine-tuning. To address this challenge, we introduce Align-Then-stEer (\texttt{ATE)}, a novel, data-efficient, and plug-and-play adaptation framework. ATE first aligns disparate action spaces by constructing a unified latent space, where a variational autoencoder constrained by reverse KL divergence embeds adaptation actions into modes of the pre-training action latent distribution. Subsequently, it steers the diffusion- or flow-based VLA's generation process during fine-tuning via a guidance mechanism that pushes the model's output distribution towards the target domain. We conduct extensive experiments on cross-embodiment and cross-task manipulation in both simulation and real world. Compared to direct fine-tuning of representative VLAs, our method improves the average multi-task success rate by up to 9.8\% in simulation and achieves a striking 32\% success rate gain in a real-world cross-embodiment setting. Our work presents a general and lightweight solution that greatly enhances the practicality of deploying VLA models to new robotic platforms and tasks.

Current video-based Masked Autoencoders (MAEs) primarily focus on learning effective spatiotemporal representations from a visual perspective, which may lead the model to prioritize general spatial-temporal patterns but often overlook nuanced semantic attributes like specific interactions or sequences that define actions - such as action-specific features that align more closely with human cognition for space-time correspondence. This can limit the model's ability to capture the essence of certain actions that are contextually rich and continuous. Humans are capable of mapping visual concepts, object view invariance, and semantic attributes available in static instances to comprehend natural dynamic scenes or videos. Existing MAEs for videos and static images rely on separate datasets for videos and images, which may lack the rich semantic attributes necessary for fully understanding the learned concepts, especially when compared to using video and corresponding sampled frame images together. To this end, we propose CrossVideoMAE an end-to-end self-supervised cross-modal contrastive learning MAE that effectively learns both video-level and frame-level rich spatiotemporal representations and semantic attributes. Our method integrates mutual spatiotemporal information from videos with spatial information from sampled frames within a feature-invariant space, while encouraging invariance to augmentations within the video domain. This objective is achieved through jointly embedding features of visible tokens and combining feature correspondence within and across modalities, which is critical for acquiring rich, label-free guiding signals from both video and frame image modalities in a self-supervised manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our approach.

Text-to-motion generation has advanced rapidly, yet two challenges persist. First, existing motion autoencoders compress each frame into a single monolithic latent vector, entangling trajectory and per-joint rotations in an unstructured representation that downstream generators struggle to model faithfully. Second, text-to-motion, pose-conditioned generation, and long-horizon sequential synthesis typically require separate models or task-specific mechanisms, with autoregressive approaches suffering from severe error accumulation over extended rollouts. We present PRISM, addressing each challenge with a dedicated contribution. (1) A joint-factorized motion latent space: each body joint occupies its own token, forming a structured 2D grid (time joints) compressed by a causal VAE with forward-kinematics supervision. This simple change to the latent space -- without modifying the generator -- substantially improves generation quality, revealing that latent space design has been an underestimated bottleneck. (2) Noise-free condition injection: each latent token carries its own timestep embedding, allowing conditioning frames to be injected as clean tokens (timestep0) while the remaining tokens are denoised. This unifies text-to-motion and pose-conditioned generation in a single model, and directly enables autoregressive segment chaining for streaming synthesis. Self-forcing training further suppresses drift in long rollouts. With these two components, we train a single motion generation foundation model that seamlessly handles text-to-motion, pose-conditioned generation, autoregressive sequential generation, and narrative motion composition, achieving state-of-the-art on HumanML3D, MotionHub, BABEL, and a 50-scenario user study.

Recent breakthroughs in video autoencoders (Video AEs) have advanced video generation, but existing methods fail to efficiently model spatio-temporal redundancies in dynamics, resulting in suboptimal compression factors. This shortfall leads to excessive training costs for downstream tasks. To address this, we introduce Hi-VAE, an efficient video autoencoding framework that hierarchically encode coarse-to-fine motion representations of video dynamics and formulate the decoding process as a conditional generation task. Specifically, Hi-VAE decomposes video dynamics into two latent spaces: Global Motion, capturing overarching motion patterns, and Detailed Motion, encoding high-frequency spatial details. Using separate self-supervised motion encoders, we compress video latents into compact motion representations to reduce redundancy significantly. A conditional diffusion decoder then reconstructs videos by combining hierarchical global and detailed motions, enabling high-fidelity video reconstructions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Hi-VAE achieves a high compression factor of 1428times, almost 30times higher than baseline methods (e.g., Cosmos-VAE at 48times), validating the efficiency of our approach. Meanwhile, Hi-VAE maintains high reconstruction quality at such high compression rates and performs effectively in downstream generative tasks. Moreover, Hi-VAE exhibits interpretability and scalability, providing new perspectives for future exploration in video latent representation and generation.

Latent generative modeling, where a pretrained autoencoder maps pixels into a latent space for the diffusion process, has become the standard strategy for Diffusion Transformers (DiT); however, the autoencoder component has barely evolved. Most DiTs continue to rely on the original VAE encoder, which introduces several limitations: outdated backbones that compromise architectural simplicity, low-dimensional latent spaces that restrict information capacity, and weak representations that result from purely reconstruction-based training and ultimately limit generative quality. In this work, we explore replacing the VAE with pretrained representation encoders (e.g., DINO, SigLIP, MAE) paired with trained decoders, forming what we term Representation Autoencoders (RAEs). These models provide both high-quality reconstructions and semantically rich latent spaces, while allowing for a scalable transformer-based architecture. Since these latent spaces are typically high-dimensional, a key challenge is enabling diffusion transformers to operate effectively within them. We analyze the sources of this difficulty, propose theoretically motivated solutions, and validate them empirically. Our approach achieves faster convergence without auxiliary representation alignment losses. Using a DiT variant equipped with a lightweight, wide DDT head, we achieve strong image generation results on ImageNet: 1.51 FID at 256x256 (no guidance) and 1.13 at both 256x256 and 512x512 (with guidance). RAE offers clear advantages and should be the new default for diffusion transformer training.

A photorealistic and immersive human avatar experience demands capturing fine, person-specific details such as cloth and hair dynamics, subtle facial expressions, and characteristic motion patterns. Achieving this requires large, high-quality datasets, which often introduce ambiguities and spurious correlations when very similar poses correspond to different appearances. Models that fit these details during training can overfit and produce unstable, abrupt appearance changes for novel poses. We propose a 3D Gaussian Splatting avatar model with a spatial MLP backbone that is conditioned on both pose and an appearance latent. The latent is learned during training by an encoder, yielding a compact representation that improves reconstruction quality and helps disambiguate pose-driven renderings. At driving time, our predictor autoregressively infers the latent, producing temporally smooth appearance evolution and improved stability. Overall, our method delivers a robust and practical path to high-fidelity, stable avatar driving.

How to learn discriminative video representation from unlabeled videos is challenging but crucial for video analysis. The latest attempts seek to learn a representation model by predicting the appearance contents in the masked regions. However, simply masking and recovering appearance contents may not be sufficient to model temporal clues as the appearance contents can be easily reconstructed from a single frame. To overcome this limitation, we present Masked Motion Encoding (MME), a new pre-training paradigm that reconstructs both appearance and motion information to explore temporal clues. In MME, we focus on addressing two critical challenges to improve the representation performance: 1) how to well represent the possible long-term motion across multiple frames; and 2) how to obtain fine-grained temporal clues from sparsely sampled videos. Motivated by the fact that human is able to recognize an action by tracking objects' position changes and shape changes, we propose to reconstruct a motion trajectory that represents these two kinds of change in the masked regions. Besides, given the sparse video input, we enforce the model to reconstruct dense motion trajectories in both spatial and temporal dimensions. Pre-trained with our MME paradigm, the model is able to anticipate long-term and fine-grained motion details. Code is available at https://github.com/XinyuSun/MME.

Prevailing Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) for robotic manipulation are built upon vision-language backbones pretrained on large-scale, but disconnected static web data. As a result, despite improved semantic generalization, the policy must implicitly infer complex physical dynamics and temporal dependencies solely from robot trajectories. This reliance creates an unsustainable data burden, necessitating continuous, large-scale expert data collection to compensate for the lack of innate physical understanding. We contend that while vision-language pretraining effectively captures semantic priors, it remains blind to physical causality. A more effective paradigm leverages video to jointly capture semantics and visual dynamics during pretraining, thereby isolating the remaining task of low-level control. To this end, we introduce mimic-video, a novel Video-Action Model (VAM) that pairs a pretrained Internet-scale video model with a flow matching-based action decoder conditioned on its latent representations. The decoder serves as an Inverse Dynamics Model (IDM), generating low-level robot actions from the latent representation of video-space action plans. Our extensive evaluation shows that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on simulated and real-world robotic manipulation tasks, improving sample efficiency by 10x and convergence speed by 2x compared to traditional VLA architectures.

Visual-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a popular paradigm for learning robot manipulation policies that can follow language instructions and generalize to novel scenarios. Recent work has begun to explore the incorporation of latent actions, an abstract representation of visual change between two frames, into VLA pre-training. In this paper, we introduce villa-X, a novel Visual-Language-Latent-Action (ViLLA) framework that advances latent action modeling for learning generalizable robot manipulation policies. Our approach improves both how latent actions are learned and how they are incorporated into VLA pre-training. Together, these contributions enable villa-X to achieve superior performance across simulated environments including SIMPLER and LIBERO, as well as on two real-world robot setups including gripper and dexterous hand manipulation. We believe the ViLLA paradigm holds significant promise, and that our villa-X provides a strong foundation for future research.

Temporal action abstractions, along with belief state representations, are a powerful knowledge sharing mechanism for sequential decision making. In this work, we propose a novel view that treats inducing temporal action abstractions as a sequence compression problem. To do so, we bring a subtle but critical component of LLM training pipelines -- input tokenization via byte pair encoding (BPE) -- to the seemingly distant task of learning skills of variable time span in continuous control domains. We introduce an approach called Primitive Sequence Encoding (PRISE) that combines continuous action quantization with BPE to learn powerful action abstractions. We empirically show that high-level skills discovered by PRISE from a multitask set of robotic manipulation demonstrations significantly boost the performance of both multitask imitation learning as well as few-shot imitation learning on unseen tasks. Our code will be released at https://github.com/FrankZheng2022/PRISE.

Action localization networks are often structured as a feature encoder sub-network and a localization sub-network, where the feature encoder learns to transform an input video to features that are useful for the localization sub-network to generate reliable action proposals. While some of the encoded features may be more useful for generating action proposals, prior action localization approaches do not include any attention mechanism that enables the localization sub-network to attend more to the more important features. In this paper, we propose a novel attention mechanism, the Class Semantics-based Attention (CSA), that learns from the temporal distribution of semantics of action classes present in an input video to find the importance scores of the encoded features, which are used to provide attention to the more useful encoded features. We demonstrate on two popular action detection datasets that incorporating our novel attention mechanism provides considerable performance gains on competitive action detection models (e.g., around 6.2% improvement over BMN action detection baseline to obtain 47.5% mAP on the THUMOS-14 dataset), and a new state-of-the-art of 36.25% mAP on the ActivityNet v1.3 dataset. Further, the CSA localization model family which includes BMN-CSA, was part of the second-placed submission at the 2021 ActivityNet action localization challenge. Our attention mechanism outperforms prior self-attention modules such as the squeeze-and-excitation in action detection task. We also observe that our attention mechanism is complementary to such self-attention modules in that performance improvements are seen when both are used together.

Visual generative models (e.g., diffusion models) typically operate in compressed latent spaces to balance training efficiency and sample quality. In parallel, there has been growing interest in leveraging high-quality pre-trained visual representations, either by aligning them inside VAEs or directly within the generative model. However, adapting such representations remains challenging due to fundamental mismatches between understanding-oriented features and generation-friendly latent spaces. Representation encoders benefit from high-dimensional latents that capture diverse hypotheses for masked regions, whereas generative models favor low-dimensional latents that must faithfully preserve injected noise. This discrepancy has led prior work to rely on complex objectives and architectures. In this work, we propose FAE (Feature Auto-Encoder), a simple yet effective framework that adapts pre-trained visual representations into low-dimensional latents suitable for generation using as little as a single attention layer, while retaining sufficient information for both reconstruction and understanding. The key is to couple two separate deep decoders: one trained to reconstruct the original feature space, and a second that takes the reconstructed features as input for image generation. FAE is generic; it can be instantiated with a variety of self-supervised encoders (e.g., DINO, SigLIP) and plugged into two distinct generative families: diffusion models and normalizing flows. Across class-conditional and text-to-image benchmarks, FAE achieves strong performance. For example, on ImageNet 256x256, our diffusion model with CFG attains a near state-of-the-art FID of 1.29 (800 epochs) and 1.70 (80 epochs). Without CFG, FAE reaches the state-of-the-art FID of 1.48 (800 epochs) and 2.08 (80 epochs), demonstrating both high quality and fast learning.

Animation retargetting applies sparse motion description (e.g., keypoint sequences) to a character mesh to produce a semantically plausible and temporally coherent full-body mesh sequence. Existing approaches come with restrictions -- they require access to template-based shape priors or artist-designed deformation rigs, suffer from limited generalization to unseen motion and/or shapes, or exhibit motion jitter. We propose Self-supervised Motion Fields (SMF), a self-supervised framework that is trained with only sparse motion representations, without requiring dataset-specific annotations, templates, or rigs. At the heart of our method are Kinetic Codes, a novel autoencoder-based sparse motion encoding, that exposes a semantically rich latent space, simplifying large-scale training. Our architecture comprises dedicated spatial and temporal gradient predictors, which are jointly trained in an end-to-end fashion. The combined network, regularized by the Kinetic Codes' latent space, has good generalization across both unseen shapes and new motions. We evaluated our method on unseen motion sampled from AMASS, D4D, Mixamo, and raw monocular video for animation transfer on various characters with varying shapes and topology. We report a new SoTA on the AMASS dataset in the context of generalization to unseen motion. Code, weights, and supplementary are available on the project webpage at https://motionfields.github.io/

Recent advances in diffusion transformers have empowered video generation models to generate high-quality video clips from texts or images. However, world models with the ability to predict long-horizon futures from past observations and actions remain underexplored, especially for general-purpose scenarios and various forms of actions. To bridge this gap, we introduce Astra, an interactive general world model that generates real-world futures for diverse scenarios (e.g., autonomous driving, robot grasping) with precise action interactions (e.g., camera motion, robot action). We propose an autoregressive denoising architecture and use temporal causal attention to aggregate past observations and support streaming outputs. We use a noise-augmented history memory to avoid over-reliance on past frames to balance responsiveness with temporal coherence. For precise action control, we introduce an action-aware adapter that directly injects action signals into the denoising process. We further develop a mixture of action experts that dynamically route heterogeneous action modalities, enhancing versatility across diverse real-world tasks such as exploration, manipulation, and camera control. Astra achieves interactive, consistent, and general long-term video prediction and supports various forms of interactions. Experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate the improvements of Astra in fidelity, long-range prediction, and action alignment over existing state-of-the-art world models.

Recent advances in latent diffusion models have demonstrated their effectiveness for high-resolution image synthesis. However, the properties of the latent space from tokenizer for better learning and generation of diffusion models remain under-explored. Theoretically and empirically, we find that improved generation quality is closely tied to the latent distributions with better structure, such as the ones with fewer Gaussian Mixture modes and more discriminative features. Motivated by these insights, we propose MAETok, an autoencoder (AE) leveraging mask modeling to learn semantically rich latent space while maintaining reconstruction fidelity. Extensive experiments validate our analysis, demonstrating that the variational form of autoencoders is not necessary, and a discriminative latent space from AE alone enables state-of-the-art performance on ImageNet generation using only 128 tokens. MAETok achieves significant practical improvements, enabling a gFID of 1.69 with 76x faster training and 31x higher inference throughput for 512x512 generation. Our findings show that the structure of the latent space, rather than variational constraints, is crucial for effective diffusion models. Code and trained models are released.

Temporal action segmentation is crucial for understanding long-form videos. Previous works on this task commonly adopt an iterative refinement paradigm by using multi-stage models. We propose a novel framework via denoising diffusion models, which nonetheless shares the same inherent spirit of such iterative refinement. In this framework, action predictions are iteratively generated from random noise with input video features as conditions. To enhance the modeling of three striking characteristics of human actions, including the position prior, the boundary ambiguity, and the relational dependency, we devise a unified masking strategy for the conditioning inputs in our framework. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, i.e., GTEA, 50Salads, and Breakfast, are performed and the proposed method achieves superior or comparable results to state-of-the-art methods, showing the effectiveness of a generative approach for action segmentation.

Temporal action localization (TAL), which involves recognizing and locating action instances, is a challenging task in video understanding. Most existing approaches directly predict action classes and regress offsets to boundaries, while overlooking the discrepant importance of each frame. In this paper, we propose an Action Sensitivity Learning framework (ASL) to tackle this task, which aims to assess the value of each frame and then leverage the generated action sensitivity to recalibrate the training procedure. We first introduce a lightweight Action Sensitivity Evaluator to learn the action sensitivity at the class level and instance level, respectively. The outputs of the two branches are combined to reweight the gradient of the two sub-tasks. Moreover, based on the action sensitivity of each frame, we design an Action Sensitive Contrastive Loss to enhance features, where the action-aware frames are sampled as positive pairs to push away the action-irrelevant frames. The extensive studies on various action localization benchmarks (i.e., MultiThumos, Charades, Ego4D-Moment Queries v1.0, Epic-Kitchens 100, Thumos14 and ActivityNet1.3) show that ASL surpasses the state-of-the-art in terms of average-mAP under multiple types of scenarios, e.g., single-labeled, densely-labeled and egocentric.

Vision-based robotic policies often struggle with even minor viewpoint changes, underscoring the need for view-invariant visual representations. This challenge becomes more pronounced in real-world settings, where viewpoint variability is unavoidable and can significantly disrupt policy performance. Existing methods typically learn invariance from multi-view observations at the scene level, but such approaches rely on visual appearance and fail to incorporate the physical dynamics essential for robust generalization. We propose View-Invariant Latent Action (VILA), which models a latent action capturing transition patterns across trajectories to learn view-invariant representations grounded in physical dynamics. VILA aligns these latent actions across viewpoints using an action-guided objective based on ground-truth action sequences. Experiments in both simulation and the real world show that VILA-based policies generalize effectively to unseen viewpoints and transfer well to new tasks, establishing VILA as a strong pretraining framework that improves robustness and downstream learning performance.

Early action prediction deals with inferring the ongoing action from partially-observed videos, typically at the outset of the video. We propose a bottleneck-based attention model that captures the evolution of the action, through progressive sampling over fine-to-coarse scales. Our proposed Temporal Progressive (TemPr) model is composed of multiple attention towers, one for each scale. The predicted action label is based on the collective agreement considering confidences of these towers. Extensive experiments over four video datasets showcase state-of-the-art performance on the task of Early Action Prediction across a range of encoder architectures. We demonstrate the effectiveness and consistency of TemPr through detailed ablations.

Human motion synthesis conditioned on textual input has gained significant attention in recent years due to its potential applications in various domains such as gaming, film production, and virtual reality. Conditioned Motion synthesis takes a text input and outputs a 3D motion corresponding to the text. While previous works have explored motion synthesis using raw motion data and latent space representations with diffusion models, these approaches often suffer from high training and inference times. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework that utilizes Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in the latent space to enable faster training and inference while achieving results comparable to those of the state-of-the-art diffusion methods. We perform experiments on the HumanML3D, HumanAct12 benchmarks and demonstrate that a remarkably simple GAN in the latent space achieves a FID of 0.482 with more than 91% in FLOPs reduction compared to latent diffusion model. Our work opens up new possibilities for efficient and high-quality motion synthesis using latent space GANs.

The task of face reenactment is to transfer the head motion and facial expressions from a driving video to the appearance of a source image, which may be of a different person (cross-reenactment). Most existing methods are CNN-based and estimate optical flow from the source image to the current driving frame, which is then inpainted and refined to produce the output animation. We propose a transformer-based encoder for computing a set-latent representation of the source image(s). We then predict the output color of a query pixel using a transformer-based decoder, which is conditioned with keypoints and a facial expression vector extracted from the driving frame. Latent representations of the source person are learned in a self-supervised manner that factorize their appearance, head pose, and facial expressions. Thus, they are perfectly suited for cross-reenactment. In contrast to most related work, our method naturally extends to multiple source images and can thus adapt to person-specific facial dynamics. We also propose data augmentation and regularization schemes that are necessary to prevent overfitting and support generalizability of the learned representations. We evaluated our approach in a randomized user study. The results indicate superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art in terms of motion transfer quality and temporal consistency.

Generative models serve as powerful tools for modeling the real world, with mainstream diffusion models, particularly those based on the latent diffusion model paradigm, achieving remarkable progress across various tasks, such as image and video synthesis. Latent diffusion models are typically trained using Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), interacting with VAE latents rather than the real samples. While this generative paradigm speeds up training and inference, the quality of the generated outputs is limited by the latents' quality. Traditional VAE latents are often seen as spatial compression in pixel space and lack explicit semantic representations, which are essential for modeling the real world. In this paper, we introduce ReaLS (Representation-Aligned Latent Space), which integrates semantic priors to improve generation performance. Extensive experiments show that fundamental DiT and SiT trained on ReaLS can achieve a 15% improvement in FID metric. Furthermore, the enhanced semantic latent space enables more perceptual downstream tasks, such as segmentation and depth estimation.

Human motion prediction is a classical problem in computer vision and computer graphics, which has a wide range of practical applications. Previous effects achieve great empirical performance based on an encoding-decoding style. The methods of this style work by first encoding previous motions to latent representations and then decoding the latent representations into predicted motions. However, in practice, they are still unsatisfactory due to several issues, including complicated loss constraints, cumbersome training processes, and scarce switch of different categories of motions in prediction. In this paper, to address the above issues, we jump out of the foregoing style and propose a novel framework from a new perspective. Specifically, our framework works in a masked completion fashion. In the training stage, we learn a motion diffusion model that generates motions from random noise. In the inference stage, with a denoising procedure, we make motion prediction conditioning on observed motions to output more continuous and controllable predictions. The proposed framework enjoys promising algorithmic properties, which only needs one loss in optimization and is trained in an end-to-end manner. Additionally, it accomplishes the switch of different categories of motions effectively, which is significant in realistic tasks, e.g., the animation task. Comprehensive experiments on benchmarks confirm the superiority of the proposed framework. The project page is available at https://lhchen.top/Human-MAC.

We present X-UniMotion, a unified and expressive implicit latent representation for whole-body human motion, encompassing facial expressions, body poses, and hand gestures. Unlike prior motion transfer methods that rely on explicit skeletal poses and heuristic cross-identity adjustments, our approach encodes multi-granular motion directly from a single image into a compact set of four disentangled latent tokens -- one for facial expression, one for body pose, and one for each hand. These motion latents are both highly expressive and identity-agnostic, enabling high-fidelity, detailed cross-identity motion transfer across subjects with diverse identities, poses, and spatial configurations. To achieve this, we introduce a self-supervised, end-to-end framework that jointly learns the motion encoder and latent representation alongside a DiT-based video generative model, trained on large-scale, diverse human motion datasets. Motion-identity disentanglement is enforced via 2D spatial and color augmentations, as well as synthetic 3D renderings of cross-identity subject pairs under shared poses. Furthermore, we guide motion token learning with auxiliary decoders that promote fine-grained, semantically aligned, and depth-aware motion embeddings. Extensive experiments show that X-UniMotion outperforms state-of-the-art methods, producing highly expressive animations with superior motion fidelity and identity preservation.

A key challenge with procedure planning in instructional videos lies in how to handle a large decision space consisting of a multitude of action types that belong to various tasks. To understand real-world video content, an AI agent must proficiently discern these action types (e.g., pour milk, pour water, open lid, close lid, etc.) based on brief visual observation. Moreover, it must adeptly capture the intricate semantic relation of the action types and task goals, along with the variable action sequences. Recently, notable progress has been made via the integration of diffusion models and visual representation learning to address the challenge. However, existing models employ rudimentary mechanisms to utilize task information to manage the decision space. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a simple yet effective enhancement - a masked diffusion model. The introduced mask acts akin to a task-oriented attention filter, enabling the diffusion/denoising process to concentrate on a subset of action types. Furthermore, to bolster the accuracy of task classification, we harness more potent visual representation learning techniques. In particular, we learn a joint visual-text embedding, where a text embedding is generated by prompting a pre-trained vision-language model to focus on human actions. We evaluate the method on three public datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple metrics. Code is available at https://github.com/ffzzy840304/Masked-PDPP.

Being able to simulate the outcomes of actions in varied environments will revolutionize the development of generalist agents at scale. However, modeling these world dynamics, especially for dexterous robotics tasks, poses significant challenges due to limited data coverage and scarce action labels. As an endeavor towards this end, we introduce DreamDojo, a foundation world model that learns diverse interactions and dexterous controls from 44k hours of egocentric human videos. Our data mixture represents the largest video dataset to date for world model pretraining, spanning a wide range of daily scenarios with diverse objects and skills. To address the scarcity of action labels, we introduce continuous latent actions as unified proxy actions, enhancing interaction knowledge transfer from unlabeled videos. After post-training on small-scale target robot data, DreamDojo demonstrates a strong understanding of physics and precise action controllability. We also devise a distillation pipeline that accelerates DreamDojo to a real-time speed of 10.81 FPS and further improves context consistency. Our work enables several important applications based on generative world models, including live teleoperation, policy evaluation, and model-based planning. Systematic evaluation on multiple challenging out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks verifies the significance of our method for simulating open-world, contact-rich tasks, paving the way for general-purpose robot world models.

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions is crucial for their practical applications, yet the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. This paper presents a novel framework that leverages sparse autoencoders (SAE) to interpret how instruction following works in these models. We demonstrate how the features we identify can effectively steer model outputs to align with given instructions. Through analysis of SAE latent activations, we identify specific latents responsible for instruction following behavior. Our findings reveal that instruction following capabilities are encoded by a distinct set of instruction-relevant SAE latents. These latents both show semantic proximity to relevant instructions and demonstrate causal effects on model behavior. Our research highlights several crucial factors for achieving effective steering performance: precise feature identification, the role of final layer, and optimal instruction positioning. Additionally, we demonstrate that our methodology scales effectively across SAEs and LLMs of varying sizes.

Despite recent progress in reinforcement learning (RL) from raw pixel data, sample inefficiency continues to present a substantial obstacle. Prior works have attempted to address this challenge by creating self-supervised auxiliary tasks, aiming to enrich the agent's learned representations with control-relevant information for future state prediction. However, these objectives are often insufficient to learn representations that can represent the optimal policy or value function, and they often consider tasks with small, abstract discrete action spaces and thus overlook the importance of action representation learning in continuous control. In this paper, we introduce TACO: Temporal Action-driven Contrastive Learning, a simple yet powerful temporal contrastive learning approach that facilitates the concurrent acquisition of latent state and action representations for agents. TACO simultaneously learns a state and an action representation by optimizing the mutual information between representations of current states paired with action sequences and representations of the corresponding future states. Theoretically, TACO can be shown to learn state and action representations that encompass sufficient information for control, thereby improving sample efficiency. For online RL, TACO achieves 40% performance boost after one million environment interaction steps on average across nine challenging visual continuous control tasks from Deepmind Control Suite. In addition, we show that TACO can also serve as a plug-and-play module adding to existing offline visual RL methods to establish the new state-of-the-art performance for offline visual RL across offline datasets with varying quality.

We introduce the task of human motion unlearning to prevent the synthesis of toxic animations while preserving the general text-to-motion generative performance. Unlearning toxic motions is challenging as those can be generated from explicit text prompts and from implicit toxic combinations of safe motions (e.g., ``kicking" is ``loading and swinging a leg"). We propose the first motion unlearning benchmark by filtering toxic motions from the large and recent text-to-motion datasets of HumanML3D and Motion-X. We propose baselines, by adapting state-of-the-art image unlearning techniques to process spatio-temporal signals. Finally, we propose a novel motion unlearning model based on Latent Code Replacement, which we dub LCR. LCR is training-free and suitable to the discrete latent spaces of state-of-the-art text-to-motion diffusion models. LCR is simple and consistently outperforms baselines qualitatively and quantitatively. Project page: https://www.pinlab.org/hmu{https://www.pinlab.org/hmu}.

Behavioural cloning uses a dataset of demonstrations to learn a behavioural policy. To overcome various learning and policy adaptation problems, we propose to use latent space to index a demonstration dataset, instantly access similar relevant experiences, and copy behavior from these situations. Actions from a selected similar situation can be performed by the agent until representations of the agent's current situation and the selected experience diverge in the latent space. Thus, we formulate our control problem as a search problem over a dataset of experts' demonstrations. We test our approach on BASALT MineRL-dataset in the latent representation of a Video PreTraining model. We compare our model to state-of-the-art Minecraft agents. Our approach can effectively recover meaningful demonstrations and show human-like behavior of an agent in the Minecraft environment in a wide variety of scenarios. Experimental results reveal that performance of our search-based approach is comparable to trained models, while allowing zero-shot task adaptation by changing the demonstration examples.

Latent diffusion models (LDMs) enable high-fidelity synthesis by operating in learned latent spaces. However, training state-of-the-art LDMs requires complex staging: a tokenizer must be trained first, before the diffusion model can be trained in the frozen latent space. We propose UNITE - an autoencoder architecture for unified tokenization and latent diffusion. UNITE consists of a Generative Encoder that serves as both image tokenizer and latent generator via weight sharing. Our key insight is that tokenization and generation can be viewed as the same latent inference problem under different conditioning regimes: tokenization infers latents from fully observed images, whereas generation infers them from noise together with text or class conditioning. Motivated by this, we introduce a single-stage training procedure that jointly optimizes both tasks via two forward passes through the same Generative Encoder. The shared parameters enable gradients to jointly shape the latent space, encouraging a "common latent language". Across image and molecule modalities, UNITE achieves near state of the art performance without adversarial losses or pretrained encoders (e.g., DINO), reaching FID 2.12 and 1.73 for Base and Large models on ImageNet 256 x 256. We further analyze the Generative Encoder through the lenses of representation alignment and compression. These results show that single stage joint training of tokenization & generation from scratch is feasible.

This work aims at advancing temporal action detection (TAD) using an encoder-decoder framework with action queries, similar to DETR, which has shown great success in object detection. However, the framework suffers from several problems if directly applied to TAD: the insufficient exploration of inter-query relation in the decoder, the inadequate classification training due to a limited number of training samples, and the unreliable classification scores at inference. To this end, we first propose a relational attention mechanism in the decoder, which guides the attention among queries based on their relations. Moreover, we propose two losses to facilitate and stabilize the training of action classification. Lastly, we propose to predict the localization quality of each action query at inference in order to distinguish high-quality queries. The proposed method, named ReAct, achieves the state-of-the-art performance on THUMOS14, with much lower computational costs than previous methods. Besides, extensive ablation studies are conducted to verify the effectiveness of each proposed component. The code is available at https://github.com/sssste/React.

Recent advancements in video autoencoders (Video AEs) have significantly improved the quality and efficiency of video generation. In this paper, we propose a novel and compact video autoencoder, VidTwin, that decouples video into two distinct latent spaces: Structure latent vectors, which capture overall content and global movement, and Dynamics latent vectors, which represent fine-grained details and rapid movements. Specifically, our approach leverages an Encoder-Decoder backbone, augmented with two submodules for extracting these latent spaces, respectively. The first submodule employs a Q-Former to extract low-frequency motion trends, followed by downsampling blocks to remove redundant content details. The second averages the latent vectors along the spatial dimension to capture rapid motion. Extensive experiments show that VidTwin achieves a high compression rate of 0.20% with high reconstruction quality (PSNR of 28.14 on the MCL-JCV dataset), and performs efficiently and effectively in downstream generative tasks. Moreover, our model demonstrates explainability and scalability, paving the way for future research in video latent representation and generation. Our code has been released at https://github.com/microsoft/VidTok/tree/main/vidtwin.

We present a VAE architecture for encoding and generating high dimensional sequential data, such as video or audio. Our deep generative model learns a latent representation of the data which is split into a static and dynamic part, allowing us to approximately disentangle latent time-dependent features (dynamics) from features which are preserved over time (content). This architecture gives us partial control over generating content and dynamics by conditioning on either one of these sets of features. In our experiments on artificially generated cartoon video clips and voice recordings, we show that we can convert the content of a given sequence into another one by such content swapping. For audio, this allows us to convert a male speaker into a female speaker and vice versa, while for video we can separately manipulate shapes and dynamics. Furthermore, we give empirical evidence for the hypothesis that stochastic RNNs as latent state models are more efficient at compressing and generating long sequences than deterministic ones, which may be relevant for applications in video compression.

This work introduces MotionLCM, extending controllable motion generation to a real-time level. Existing methods for spatial control in text-conditioned motion generation suffer from significant runtime inefficiency. To address this issue, we first propose the motion latent consistency model (MotionLCM) for motion generation, building upon the latent diffusion model (MLD). By employing one-step (or few-step) inference, we further improve the runtime efficiency of the motion latent diffusion model for motion generation. To ensure effective controllability, we incorporate a motion ControlNet within the latent space of MotionLCM and enable explicit control signals (e.g., pelvis trajectory) in the vanilla motion space to control the generation process directly, similar to controlling other latent-free diffusion models for motion generation. By employing these techniques, our approach can generate human motions with text and control signals in real-time. Experimental results demonstrate the remarkable generation and controlling capabilities of MotionLCM while maintaining real-time runtime efficiency.

We propose a new formulation of temporal action detection (TAD) with denoising diffusion, DiffTAD in short. Taking as input random temporal proposals, it can yield action proposals accurately given an untrimmed long video. This presents a generative modeling perspective, against previous discriminative learning manners. This capability is achieved by first diffusing the ground-truth proposals to random ones (i.e., the forward/noising process) and then learning to reverse the noising process (i.e., the backward/denoising process). Concretely, we establish the denoising process in the Transformer decoder (e.g., DETR) by introducing a temporal location query design with faster convergence in training. We further propose a cross-step selective conditioning algorithm for inference acceleration. Extensive evaluations on ActivityNet and THUMOS show that our DiffTAD achieves top performance compared to previous art alternatives. The code will be made available at https://github.com/sauradip/DiffusionTAD.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has revolutionized visual representation learning, but has not achieved the robustness of human vision. A reason for this could be that SSL does not leverage all the data available to humans during learning. When learning about an object, humans often purposefully turn or move around objects and research suggests that these interactions can substantially enhance their learning. Here we explore whether such object-related actions can boost SSL. For this, we extract the actions performed to change from one ego-centric view of an object to another in four video datasets. We then introduce a new loss function to learn visual and action embeddings by aligning the performed action with the representations of two images extracted from the same clip. This permits the performed actions to structure the latent visual representation. Our experiments show that our method consistently outperforms previous methods on downstream category recognition. In our analysis, we find that the observed improvement is associated with a better viewpoint-wise alignment of different objects from the same category. Overall, our work demonstrates that embodied interactions with objects can improve SSL of object categories.

Autoencoder (AE) is the key to the success of latent diffusion models for image and video generation, reducing the denoising resolution and improving efficiency. However, the power of AE has long been underexplored in terms of network design, compression ratio, and training strategy. In this work, we systematically examine the architecture design choices and optimize the computation distribution to obtain a series of efficient and high-compression video AEs that can decode in real time even on mobile devices. We also propose an omni-training objective to unify the design of plain Autoencoder and image-conditioned I2V VAE, achieving multifunctionality in a single VAE network but with enhanced quality. In addition, we propose a novel latent consistency loss that provides stable improvements in reconstruction quality. Latent consistency loss outperforms prior auxiliary losses including LPIPS, GAN and DWT in terms of both quality improvements and simplicity. H3AE achieves ultra-high compression ratios and real-time decoding speed on GPU and mobile, and outperforms prior arts in terms of reconstruction metrics by a large margin. We finally validate our AE by training a DiT on its latent space and demonstrate fast, high-quality text-to-video generation capability.

Recent developments in Large Language Models pre-trained on extensive corpora have shown significant success in various natural language processing tasks with minimal fine-tuning. This success offers new promise for robotics, which has long been constrained by the high cost of action-labeled data. We ask: given the abundant video data containing interaction-related knowledge available as a rich "corpus", can a similar generative pre-training approach be effectively applied to enhance robot learning? The key challenge is to identify an effective representation for autoregressive pre-training that benefits robot manipulation tasks. Inspired by the way humans learn new skills through observing dynamic environments, we propose that effective robotic learning should emphasize motion-related knowledge, which is closely tied to low-level actions and is hardware-agnostic, facilitating the transfer of learned motions to actual robot actions. To this end, we introduce Moto, which converts video content into latent Motion Token sequences by a Latent Motion Tokenizer, learning a bridging "language" of motion from videos in an unsupervised manner. We pre-train Moto-GPT through motion token autoregression, enabling it to capture diverse visual motion knowledge. After pre-training, Moto-GPT demonstrates the promising ability to produce semantically interpretable motion tokens, predict plausible motion trajectories, and assess trajectory rationality through output likelihood. To transfer learned motion priors to real robot actions, we implement a co-fine-tuning strategy that seamlessly bridges latent motion token prediction and real robot control. Extensive experiments show that the fine-tuned Moto-GPT exhibits superior robustness and efficiency on robot manipulation benchmarks, underscoring its effectiveness in transferring knowledge from video data to downstream visual manipulation tasks.

The field of visual representation learning has seen explosive growth in the past years, but its benefits in robotics have been surprisingly limited so far. Prior work uses generic visual representations as a basis to learn (task-specific) robot action policies (e.g., via behavior cloning). While the visual representations do accelerate learning, they are primarily used to encode visual observations. Thus, action information has to be derived purely from robot data, which is expensive to collect! In this work, we present a scalable alternative where the visual representations can help directly infer robot actions. We observe that vision encoders express relationships between image observations as distances (e.g., via embedding dot product) that could be used to efficiently plan robot behavior. We operationalize this insight and develop a simple algorithm for acquiring a distance function and dynamics predictor, by fine-tuning a pre-trained representation on human collected video sequences. The final method is able to substantially outperform traditional robot learning baselines (e.g., 70% success v.s. 50% for behavior cloning on pick-place) on a suite of diverse real-world manipulation tasks. It can also generalize to novel objects, without using any robot demonstrations during train time. For visualizations of the learned policies please check: https://agi-labs.github.io/manipulate-by-seeing/.

We present a universal motion representation that encompasses a comprehensive range of motor skills for physics-based humanoid control. Due to the high-dimensionality of humanoid control as well as the inherent difficulties in reinforcement learning, prior methods have focused on learning skill embeddings for a narrow range of movement styles (e.g. locomotion, game characters) from specialized motion datasets. This limited scope hampers its applicability in complex tasks. Our work closes this gap, significantly increasing the coverage of motion representation space. To achieve this, we first learn a motion imitator that can imitate all of human motion from a large, unstructured motion dataset. We then create our motion representation by distilling skills directly from the imitator. This is achieved using an encoder-decoder structure with a variational information bottleneck. Additionally, we jointly learn a prior conditioned on proprioception (humanoid's own pose and velocities) to improve model expressiveness and sampling efficiency for downstream tasks. Sampling from the prior, we can generate long, stable, and diverse human motions. Using this latent space for hierarchical RL, we show that our policies solve tasks using natural and realistic human behavior. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our motion representation by solving generative tasks (e.g. strike, terrain traversal) and motion tracking using VR controllers.

Vision-Language Action (VLA) models significantly advance robotic manipulation by leveraging the strong perception capabilities of pretrained vision-language models (VLMs). By integrating action modules into these pretrained models, VLA methods exhibit improved generalization. However, training them from scratch is costly. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective distillation-based framework that equips VLMs with action-execution capability by transferring knowledge from pretrained small action models. Our architecture retains the original VLM structure, adding only an action token and a state encoder to incorporate physical inputs. To distill action knowledge, we adopt a two-stage training strategy. First, we perform lightweight alignment by mapping VLM hidden states into the action space of the small action model, enabling effective reuse of its pretrained action decoder and avoiding expensive pretraining. Second, we selectively fine-tune the language model, state encoder, and action modules, enabling the system to integrate multimodal inputs with precise action generation. Specifically, the action token provides the VLM with a direct handle for predicting future actions, while the state encoder allows the model to incorporate robot dynamics not captured by vision alone. This design yields substantial efficiency gains over training large VLA models from scratch. Compared with previous state-of-the-art methods, our method achieves 97.3% average success rate on LIBERO (11.8% improvement) and 93.5% on LIBERO-LONG (24.5% improvement). In real-world experiments across five manipulation tasks, our method consistently outperforms the teacher model, achieving 82.0% success rate (17% improvement), which demonstrate that action distillation effectively enables VLMs to generate precise actions while substantially reducing training costs.

We present the B-spline Encoded Action Sequence Tokenizer (BEAST), a novel action tokenizer that encodes action sequences into compact discrete or continuous tokens using B-splines. In contrast to existing action tokenizers based on vector quantization or byte pair encoding, BEAST requires no separate tokenizer training and consistently produces tokens of uniform length, enabling fast action sequence generation via parallel decoding. Leveraging our B-spline formulation, BEAST inherently ensures generating smooth trajectories without discontinuities between adjacent segments. We extensively evaluate BEAST by integrating it with three distinct model architectures: a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) with continuous tokens, a decoder-only Transformer with discrete tokens, and Florence-2, a pretrained Vision-Language Model with an encoder-decoder architecture, demonstrating BEAST's compatibility and scalability with large pretrained models. We evaluate BEAST across three established benchmarks consisting of 166 simulated tasks and on three distinct robot settings with a total of 8 real-world tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that BEAST (i) significantly reduces both training and inference computational costs, and (ii) consistently generates smooth, high-frequency control signals suitable for continuous control tasks while (iii) reliably achieves competitive task success rates compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) holds promise as a means to learn high-reward policies from a static dataset, without the need for further environment interactions. However, a key challenge in offline RL lies in effectively stitching portions of suboptimal trajectories from the static dataset while avoiding extrapolation errors arising due to a lack of support in the dataset. Existing approaches use conservative methods that are tricky to tune and struggle with multi-modal data (as we show) or rely on noisy Monte Carlo return-to-go samples for reward conditioning. In this work, we propose a novel approach that leverages the expressiveness of latent diffusion to model in-support trajectory sequences as compressed latent skills. This facilitates learning a Q-function while avoiding extrapolation error via batch-constraining. The latent space is also expressive and gracefully copes with multi-modal data. We show that the learned temporally-abstract latent space encodes richer task-specific information for offline RL tasks as compared to raw state-actions. This improves credit assignment and facilitates faster reward propagation during Q-learning. Our method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on the D4RL benchmarks, particularly excelling in long-horizon, sparse-reward tasks.

The autoregressive world model exhibits robust generalization capabilities in vectorized scene understanding but encounters difficulties in deriving actions due to insufficient uncertainty modeling and self-delusion. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of deriving decisions from an autoregressive world model by addressing these challenges through the formulation of multiple probabilistic hypotheses. We propose LatentDriver, a framework models the environment's next states and the ego vehicle's possible actions as a mixture distribution, from which a deterministic control signal is then derived. By incorporating mixture modeling, the stochastic nature of decisionmaking is captured. Additionally, the self-delusion problem is mitigated by providing intermediate actions sampled from a distribution to the world model. Experimental results on the recently released close-loop benchmark Waymax demonstrate that LatentDriver surpasses state-of-the-art reinforcement learning and imitation learning methods, achieving expert-level performance. The code and models will be made available at https://github.com/Sephirex-X/LatentDriver.

In spite of the remarkable potential of Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) in image generation, the desired properties and optimal design of the autoencoders have been underexplored. In this work, we analyze the role of autoencoders in LDMs and identify three key properties: latent smoothness, perceptual compression quality, and reconstruction quality. We demonstrate that existing autoencoders fail to simultaneously satisfy all three properties, and propose Variational Masked AutoEncoders (VMAEs), taking advantage of the hierarchical features maintained by Masked AutoEncoders. We integrate VMAEs into the LDM framework, introducing Latent Diffusion Models with Masked AutoEncoders (LDMAEs). Our code is available at https://github.com/isno0907/ldmae.

Commercial video generation models have exhibited realistic, high-fidelity results but are still restricted to limited access. One crucial obstacle for large-scale applications is the expensive training and inference cost. In this paper, we argue that videos contain much more redundant information than images, thus can be encoded by very few motion latents based on a content image. Towards this goal, we design an image-conditioned VAE to encode a video to an extremely compressed motion latent space. This magic Reducio charm enables 64x reduction of latents compared to a common 2D VAE, without sacrificing the quality. Training diffusion models on such a compact representation easily allows for generating 1K resolution videos. We then adopt a two-stage video generation paradigm, which performs text-to-image and text-image-to-video sequentially. Extensive experiments show that our Reducio-DiT achieves strong performance in evaluation, though trained with limited GPU resources. More importantly, our method significantly boost the efficiency of video LDMs both in training and inference. We train Reducio-DiT in around 3.2K training hours in total and generate a 16-frame 1024*1024 video clip within 15.5 seconds on a single A100 GPU. Code released at https://github.com/microsoft/Reducio-VAE .

Robust perception and dynamics modeling are fundamental to real-world robotic policy learning. Recent methods employ video diffusion models (VDMs) to enhance robotic policies, improving their understanding and modeling of the physical world. However, existing approaches overlook the coherent and physically consistent motion representations inherently encoded across frames in VDMs. To this end, we propose Video2Act, a framework that efficiently guides robotic action learning by explicitly integrating spatial and motion-aware representations. Building on the inherent representations of VDMs, we extract foreground boundaries and inter-frame motion variations while filtering out background noise and task-irrelevant biases. These refined representations are then used as additional conditioning inputs to a diffusion transformer (DiT) action head, enabling it to reason about what to manipulate and how to move. To mitigate inference inefficiency, we propose an asynchronous dual-system design, where the VDM functions as the slow System 2 and the DiT head as the fast System 1, working collaboratively to generate adaptive actions. By providing motion-aware conditions to System 1, Video2Act maintains stable manipulation even with low-frequency updates from the VDM. For evaluation, Video2Act surpasses previous state-of-the-art VLA methods by 7.7% in simulation and 21.7% in real-world tasks in terms of average success rate, further exhibiting strong generalization capabilities.

Many motion-centric video analysis tasks, such as atomic actions, detecting atypical motor behavior in individuals with autism, or analyzing articulatory motion in real-time MRI of human speech, require efficient and interpretable temporal modeling. Capturing temporal dynamics is a central challenge in video analysis, often requiring significant computational resources and fine-grained annotations that are not widely available. This paper presents MOOSE (Motion Flow Over Spatial Space), a novel temporally-centric video encoder explicitly integrating optical flow with spatial embeddings to model temporal information efficiently, inspired by human perception of motion. Unlike prior models, MOOSE takes advantage of rich, widely available pre-trained visual and optical flow encoders instead of training video models from scratch. This significantly reduces computational complexity while enhancing temporal interpretability. Our primary contributions includes (1) proposing a computationally efficient temporally-centric architecture for video understanding (2) demonstrating enhanced interpretability in modeling temporal dynamics; and (3) achieving state-of-the-art performance on diverse benchmarks, including clinical, medical, and standard action recognition datasets, confirming the broad applicability and effectiveness of our approach.

Synthesizing natural human motions that enable a 3D human avatar to walk and reach for arbitrary goals in 3D space remains an unsolved problem with many applications. Existing methods (data-driven or using reinforcement learning) are limited in terms of generalization and motion naturalness. A primary obstacle is the scarcity of training data that combines locomotion with goal reaching. To address this, we introduce WANDR, a data-driven model that takes an avatar's initial pose and a goal's 3D position and generates natural human motions that place the end effector (wrist) on the goal location. To solve this, we introduce novel intention features that drive rich goal-oriented movement. Intention guides the agent to the goal, and interactively adapts the generation to novel situations without needing to define sub-goals or the entire motion path. Crucially, intention allows training on datasets that have goal-oriented motions as well as those that do not. WANDR is a conditional Variational Auto-Encoder (c-VAE), which we train using the AMASS and CIRCLE datasets. We evaluate our method extensively and demonstrate its ability to generate natural and long-term motions that reach 3D goals and generalize to unseen goal locations. Our models and code are available for research purposes at wandr.is.tue.mpg.de.

Multimodal generative models require a unified approach to handle both discrete data (e.g., text and code) and continuous data (e.g., image, audio, video). In this work, we propose Latent Language Modeling (LatentLM), which seamlessly integrates continuous and discrete data using causal Transformers. Specifically, we employ a variational autoencoder (VAE) to represent continuous data as latent vectors and introduce next-token diffusion for autoregressive generation of these vectors. Additionally, we develop sigma-VAE to address the challenges of variance collapse, which is crucial for autoregressive modeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of LatentLM across various modalities. In image generation, LatentLM surpasses Diffusion Transformers in both performance and scalability. When integrated into multimodal large language models, LatentLM provides a general-purpose interface that unifies multimodal generation and understanding. Experimental results show that LatentLM achieves favorable performance compared to Transfusion and vector quantized models in the setting of scaling up training tokens. In text-to-speech synthesis, LatentLM outperforms the state-of-the-art VALL-E 2 model in speaker similarity and robustness, while requiring 10x fewer decoding steps. The results establish LatentLM as a highly effective and scalable approach to advance large multimodal models.

Generative recommendation (GR) is an emerging paradigm where user actions are tokenized into discrete token patterns and autoregressively generated as predictions. However, existing GR models tokenize each action independently, assigning the same fixed tokens to identical actions across all sequences without considering contextual relationships. This lack of context-awareness can lead to suboptimal performance, as the same action may hold different meanings depending on its surrounding context. To address this issue, we propose ActionPiece to explicitly incorporate context when tokenizing action sequences. In ActionPiece, each action is represented as a set of item features, which serve as the initial tokens. Given the action sequence corpora, we construct the vocabulary by merging feature patterns as new tokens, based on their co-occurrence frequency both within individual sets and across adjacent sets. Considering the unordered nature of feature sets, we further introduce set permutation regularization, which produces multiple segmentations of action sequences with the same semantics. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that ActionPiece consistently outperforms existing action tokenization methods, improving NDCG@10 by 6.00% to 12.82%.

We propose Latent-Shift -- an efficient text-to-video generation method based on a pretrained text-to-image generation model that consists of an autoencoder and a U-Net diffusion model. Learning a video diffusion model in the latent space is much more efficient than in the pixel space. The latter is often limited to first generating a low-resolution video followed by a sequence of frame interpolation and super-resolution models, which makes the entire pipeline very complex and computationally expensive. To extend a U-Net from image generation to video generation, prior work proposes to add additional modules like 1D temporal convolution and/or temporal attention layers. In contrast, we propose a parameter-free temporal shift module that can leverage the spatial U-Net as is for video generation. We achieve this by shifting two portions of the feature map channels forward and backward along the temporal dimension. The shifted features of the current frame thus receive the features from the previous and the subsequent frames, enabling motion learning without additional parameters. We show that Latent-Shift achieves comparable or better results while being significantly more efficient. Moreover, Latent-Shift can generate images despite being finetuned for T2V generation.

We present EB-JEPA, an open-source library for learning representations and world models using Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs). JEPAs learn to predict in representation space rather than pixel space, avoiding the pitfalls of generative modeling while capturing semantically meaningful features suitable for downstream tasks. Our library provides modular, self-contained implementations that illustrate how representation learning techniques developed for image-level self-supervised learning can transfer to video, where temporal dynamics add complexity, and ultimately to action-conditioned world models, where the model must additionally learn to predict the effects of control inputs. Each example is designed for single-GPU training within a few hours, making energy-based self-supervised learning accessible for research and education. We provide ablations of JEA components on CIFAR-10. Probing these representations yields 91% accuracy, indicating that the model learns useful features. Extending to video, we include a multi-step prediction example on Moving MNIST that demonstrates how the same principles scale to temporal modeling. Finally, we show how these representations can drive action-conditioned world models, achieving a 97% planning success rate on the Two Rooms navigation task. Comprehensive ablations reveal the critical importance of each regularization component for preventing representation collapse. Code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/eb_jepa.

Spatio-temporal contexts are crucial in understanding human actions in videos. Recent state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (ConvNet) based action recognition systems frequently involve 3D spatio-temporal ConvNet filters, chunking videos into fixed length clips and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks. Such architectures are designed to take advantage of both short term and long term temporal contexts, but also requires the accumulation of a predefined number of video frames (e.g., to construct video clips for 3D ConvNet filters, to generate enough inputs for LSTMs). For applications that require low-latency online predictions of fast-changing action scenes, a new action recognition system is proposed in this paper. Termed "Weighted Multi-Region Convolutional Neural Network" (WMR ConvNet), the proposed system is LSTM-free, and is based on 2D ConvNet that does not require the accumulation of video frames for 3D ConvNet filtering. Unlike early 2D ConvNets that are based purely on RGB frames and optical flow frames, the WMR ConvNet is designed to simultaneously capture multiple spatial and short term temporal cues (e.g., human poses, occurrences of objects in the background) with both the primary region (foreground) and secondary regions (mostly background). On both the UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets, the proposed WMR ConvNet achieves the state-of-the-art performance among competing low-latency algorithms. Furthermore, WMR ConvNet even outperforms the 3D ConvNet based C3D algorithm that requires video frame accumulation. In an ablation study with the optical flow ConvNet stream removed, the ablated WMR ConvNet nevertheless outperforms competing algorithms.

This paper proposes a new type of generative model that is able to quickly learn a latent representation without an encoder. This is achieved using empirical Bayes to calculate the expectation of the posterior, which is implemented by initialising a latent vector with zeros, then using the gradient of the log-likelihood of the data with respect to this zero vector as new latent points. The approach has similar characteristics to autoencoders, but with a simpler architecture, and is demonstrated in a variational autoencoder equivalent that permits sampling. This also allows implicit representation networks to learn a space of implicit functions without requiring a hypernetwork, retaining their representation advantages across datasets. The experiments show that the proposed method converges faster, with significantly lower reconstruction error than autoencoders, while requiring half the parameters.

We study pre-training representations for decision-making using video data, which is abundantly available for tasks such as game agents and software testing. Even though significant empirical advances have been made on this problem, a theoretical understanding remains absent. We initiate the theoretical investigation into principled approaches for representation learning and focus on learning the latent state representations of the underlying MDP using video data. We study two types of settings: one where there is iid noise in the observation, and a more challenging setting where there is also the presence of exogenous noise, which is non-iid noise that is temporally correlated, such as the motion of people or cars in the background. We study three commonly used approaches: autoencoding, temporal contrastive learning, and forward modeling. We prove upper bounds for temporal contrastive learning and forward modeling in the presence of only iid noise. We show that these approaches can learn the latent state and use it to do efficient downstream RL with polynomial sample complexity. When exogenous noise is also present, we establish a lower bound result showing that the sample complexity of learning from video data can be exponentially worse than learning from action-labeled trajectory data. This partially explains why reinforcement learning with video pre-training is hard. We evaluate these representational learning methods in two visual domains, yielding results that are consistent with our theoretical findings.

Human motion stylization aims to revise the style of an input motion while keeping its content unaltered. Unlike existing works that operate directly in pose space, we leverage the latent space of pretrained autoencoders as a more expressive and robust representation for motion extraction and infusion. Building upon this, we present a novel generative model that produces diverse stylization results of a single motion (latent) code. During training, a motion code is decomposed into two coding components: a deterministic content code, and a probabilistic style code adhering to a prior distribution; then a generator massages the random combination of content and style codes to reconstruct the corresponding motion codes. Our approach is versatile, allowing the learning of probabilistic style space from either style labeled or unlabeled motions, providing notable flexibility in stylization as well. In inference, users can opt to stylize a motion using style cues from a reference motion or a label. Even in the absence of explicit style input, our model facilitates novel re-stylization by sampling from the unconditional style prior distribution. Experimental results show that our proposed stylization models, despite their lightweight design, outperform the state-of-the-art in style reenactment, content preservation, and generalization across various applications and settings. Project Page: https://murrol.github.io/GenMoStyle

While recent vision-language-action models trained on diverse robot datasets exhibit promising generalization capabilities with limited in-domain data, their reliance on compact action heads to predict discretized or continuous actions constrains adaptability to heterogeneous action spaces. We present Dita, a scalable framework that leverages Transformer architectures to directly denoise continuous action sequences through a unified multimodal diffusion process. Departing from prior methods that condition denoising on fused embeddings via shallow networks, Dita employs in-context conditioning -- enabling fine-grained alignment between denoised actions and raw visual tokens from historical observations. This design explicitly models action deltas and environmental nuances. By scaling the diffusion action denoiser alongside the Transformer's scalability, Dita effectively integrates cross-embodiment datasets across diverse camera perspectives, observation scenes, tasks, and action spaces. Such synergy enhances robustness against various variances and facilitates the successful execution of long-horizon tasks. Evaluations across extensive benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art or comparative performance in simulation. Notably, Dita achieves robust real-world adaptation to environmental variances and complex long-horizon tasks through 10-shot finetuning, using only third-person camera inputs. The architecture establishes a versatile, lightweight and open-source baseline for generalist robot policy learning. Project Page: https://robodita.github.io.

We explore a novel video creation experience, namely Video Creation by Demonstration. Given a demonstration video and a context image from a different scene, we generate a physically plausible video that continues naturally from the context image and carries out the action concepts from the demonstration. To enable this capability, we present delta-Diffusion, a self-supervised training approach that learns from unlabeled videos by conditional future frame prediction. Unlike most existing video generation controls that are based on explicit signals, we adopts the form of implicit latent control for maximal flexibility and expressiveness required by general videos. By leveraging a video foundation model with an appearance bottleneck design on top, we extract action latents from demonstration videos for conditioning the generation process with minimal appearance leakage. Empirically, delta-Diffusion outperforms related baselines in terms of both human preference and large-scale machine evaluations, and demonstrates potentials towards interactive world simulation. Sampled video generation results are available at https://delta-diffusion.github.io/.

Generative modeling, representation learning, and classification are three core problems in machine learning (ML), yet their state-of-the-art (SoTA) solutions remain largely disjoint. In this paper, we ask: Can a unified principle address all three? Such unification could simplify ML pipelines and foster greater synergy across tasks. We introduce Latent Zoning Network (LZN) as a step toward this goal. At its core, LZN creates a shared Gaussian latent space that encodes information across all tasks. Each data type (e.g., images, text, labels) is equipped with an encoder that maps samples to disjoint latent zones, and a decoder that maps latents back to data. ML tasks are expressed as compositions of these encoders and decoders: for example, label-conditional image generation uses a label encoder and image decoder; image embedding uses an image encoder; classification uses an image encoder and label decoder. We demonstrate the promise of LZN in three increasingly complex scenarios: (1) LZN can enhance existing models (image generation): When combined with the SoTA Rectified Flow model, LZN improves FID on CIFAR10 from 2.76 to 2.59-without modifying the training objective. (2) LZN can solve tasks independently (representation learning): LZN can implement unsupervised representation learning without auxiliary loss functions, outperforming the seminal MoCo and SimCLR methods by 9.3% and 0.2%, respectively, on downstream linear classification on ImageNet. (3) LZN can solve multiple tasks simultaneously (joint generation and classification): With image and label encoders/decoders, LZN performs both tasks jointly by design, improving FID and achieving SoTA classification accuracy on CIFAR10. The code and trained models are available at https://github.com/microsoft/latent-zoning-networks. The project website is at https://zinanlin.me/blogs/latent_zoning_networks.html.

World models aim to learn action-controlled prediction models and have proven essential for the development of intelligent agents. However, most existing world models rely heavily on substantial action-labeled data and costly training, making it challenging to adapt to novel environments with heterogeneous actions through limited interactions. This limitation can hinder their applicability across broader domains. To overcome this challenge, we propose AdaWorld, an innovative world model learning approach that enables efficient adaptation. The key idea is to incorporate action information during the pretraining of world models. This is achieved by extracting latent actions from videos in a self-supervised manner, capturing the most critical transitions between frames. We then develop an autoregressive world model that conditions on these latent actions. This learning paradigm enables highly adaptable world models, facilitating efficient transfer and learning of new actions even with limited interactions and finetuning. Our comprehensive experiments across multiple environments demonstrate that AdaWorld achieves superior performance in both simulation quality and visual planning.

Latent space exploration is a technique that discovers interpretable latent directions and manipulates latent codes to edit various attributes in images generated by generative adversarial networks (GANs). However, in previous work, spatial control is limited to simple transformations (e.g., translation and rotation), and it is laborious to identify appropriate latent directions and adjust their parameters. In this paper, we tackle the problem of editing the StyleGAN image layout by annotating the image directly. To do so, we propose an interactive framework for manipulating latent codes in accordance with the user inputs. In our framework, the user annotates a StyleGAN image with locations they want to move or not and specifies a movement direction by mouse dragging. From these user inputs and initial latent codes, our latent transformer based on a transformer encoder-decoder architecture estimates the output latent codes, which are fed to the StyleGAN generator to obtain a result image. To train our latent transformer, we utilize synthetic data and pseudo-user inputs generated by off-the-shelf StyleGAN and optical flow models, without manual supervision. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our method over existing methods.

In this work, we present Conditional Adversarial Latent Models (CALM), an approach for generating diverse and directable behaviors for user-controlled interactive virtual characters. Using imitation learning, CALM learns a representation of movement that captures the complexity and diversity of human motion, and enables direct control over character movements. The approach jointly learns a control policy and a motion encoder that reconstructs key characteristics of a given motion without merely replicating it. The results show that CALM learns a semantic motion representation, enabling control over the generated motions and style-conditioning for higher-level task training. Once trained, the character can be controlled using intuitive interfaces, akin to those found in video games.