Daily Papers

Knowledge-grounded dialogue systems aim to generate informative, contextually relevant responses by conditioning on external knowledge sources. However, most existing approaches focus exclusively on English, lack explicit citation mechanisms for verifying factual claims, and offer limited transparency into model decision-making. We present XKD-Dial, a progressive four-stage training pipeline for explainable, knowledge-grounded dialogue generation in a bilingual (English-Hindi) setting, comprising: (1) multilingual adaptation, (2) English dialogue SFT with citation grounding, (3) bilingual dialogue SFT, and (4) GRPO alignment with citation-aware rewards. We evaluate six models spanning encoder-decoder (250M-3B) and decoder-only (1B-7B) architectures at every pipeline stage. Our key contributions are: (i) three post-hoc explainability analyses - cross-attention alignment, Integrated Gradients attribution, and occlusion-based causal grounding - applied systematically across the training trajectory to reveal how citation behaviour is learned, not only whether it is learned; (ii) citation-grounded SFT reduces hallucination to 0.0% for encoder-decoder models from Stage 2 onward; (iii) the progressive pipeline prevents catastrophic forgetting while improving Hindi capabilities; (iv) smaller models match larger models on English after SFT; and (v) GRPO provides marginal improvement over well-designed SFT for structured citation tasks. We evaluate across six automatic metrics (BLEU, ROUGE, BERTScore, FactScore, Citation-F1, and hallucination rate).

Vision language models (VLM) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various downstream tasks. However, understanding fine-grained visual-linguistic concepts, such as attributes and inter-object relationships, remains a significant challenge. While several benchmarks aim to evaluate VLMs in finer granularity, their primary focus remains on the linguistic aspect, neglecting the visual dimension. Here, we highlight the importance of evaluating VLMs from both a textual and visual perspective. We introduce a progressive pipeline to synthesize images that vary in a specific attribute while ensuring consistency in all other aspects. Utilizing this data engine, we carefully design a benchmark, SPEC, to diagnose the comprehension of object size, position, existence, and count. Subsequently, we conduct a thorough evaluation of four leading VLMs on SPEC. Surprisingly, their performance is close to random guess, revealing significant limitations. With this in mind, we propose a simple yet effective approach to optimize VLMs in fine-grained understanding, achieving significant improvements on SPEC without compromising the zero-shot performance. Results on two additional fine-grained benchmarks also show consistent improvements, further validating the transferability of our approach. Code and data are available at https://github.com/wjpoom/SPEC.

Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in short-form video understanding, yet translating long-form cinematic videos into detailed, temporally grounded scripts remains a significant challenge. This paper introduces the novel video-to-script (V2S) task, aiming to generate hierarchical, scene-by-scene scripts encompassing character actions, dialogues, expressions, and audio cues. To facilitate this, we construct a first-of-its-kind human-annotated benchmark and propose a temporally-aware hierarchical evaluation framework. Furthermore, we present OmniScript, an 8B-parameter omni-modal (audio-visual) language model tailored for long-form narrative comprehension. OmniScript is trained via a progressive pipeline that leverages chain-of-thought supervised fine-tuning for plot and character reasoning, followed by reinforcement learning using temporally segmented rewards. Extensive experiments demonstrate that despite its parameter efficiency, OmniScript significantly outperforms larger open-source models and achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art proprietary models, including Gemini 3-Pro, in both temporal localization and multi-field semantic accuracy.

Directly producing planning results from raw sensors has been a long-desired solution for autonomous driving and has attracted increasing attention recently. Most existing end-to-end autonomous driving methods factorize this problem into perception, motion prediction, and planning. However, we argue that the conventional progressive pipeline still cannot comprehensively model the entire traffic evolution process, e.g., the future interaction between the ego car and other traffic participants and the structural trajectory prior. In this paper, we explore a new paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving, where the key is to predict how the ego car and the surroundings evolve given past scenes. We propose GenAD, a generative framework that casts autonomous driving into a generative modeling problem. We propose an instance-centric scene tokenizer that first transforms the surrounding scenes into map-aware instance tokens. We then employ a variational autoencoder to learn the future trajectory distribution in a structural latent space for trajectory prior modeling. We further adopt a temporal model to capture the agent and ego movements in the latent space to generate more effective future trajectories. GenAD finally simultaneously performs motion prediction and planning by sampling distributions in the learned structural latent space conditioned on the instance tokens and using the learned temporal model to generate futures. Extensive experiments on the widely used nuScenes benchmark show that the proposed GenAD achieves state-of-the-art performance on vision-centric end-to-end autonomous driving with high efficiency. Code: https://github.com/wzzheng/GenAD.

Recent advances in large language models, particularly following GPT-4o, have sparked increasing interest in developing omni-modal models capable of understanding more modalities. While some open-source alternatives have emerged, there is still a notable lag behind specialized single-modality models in performance. In this paper, we present Ola, an Omni-modal language model that achieves competitive performance across image, video, and audio understanding compared to specialized counterparts. The core design of Ola lies in its progressive modality alignment strategy that extends the supporting modality of the language model progressively. Our training pipeline begins with the most distinct modalities: image and text, then gradually expands the skill sets of the model using speech data that connects language and audio knowledge, and video data that connects all modalities. The progressive learning pipeline also enables us to maintain a relatively small size of the cross-modal alignment data, making developing omni-modal from existing vision-language models easy and less costly. Moreover, to unlock an advanced interactive experience like GPT-4o, we further design a sentence-wise decoding solution for streaming speech generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Ola surpasses existing open omni-modal LLMs across all modalities while achieving highly competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art specialized models of similar sizes. We aim to make Ola a fully open omni-modal understanding solution to advance future research in this emerging field. Model weights, code, and data are open-sourced at https://github.com/Ola-Omni/Ola.

With the explosive growth of digital entertainment, automated video summarization has become indispensable for applications such as content indexing, personalized recommendation, and efficient media archiving. Automatic synopsis generation for long-form videos, such as movies and TV series, presents a significant challenge for existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs). While proficient at single-image captioning, these general-purpose models often exhibit critical failures in long-duration contexts, primarily a lack of ID-consistent character identification and a fractured narrative coherence. To overcome these limitations, we propose MovieTeller, a novel framework for generating movie synopses via tool-augmented progressive abstraction. Our core contribution is a training-free, tool-augmented, fact-grounded generation process. Instead of requiring costly model fine-tuning, our framework directly leverages off-the-shelf models in a plug-and-play manner. We first invoke a specialized face recognition model as an external "tool" to establish Factual Groundings--precise character identities and their corresponding bounding boxes. These groundings are then injected into the prompt to steer the VLM's reasoning, ensuring the generated scene descriptions are anchored to verifiable facts. Furthermore, our progressive abstraction pipeline decomposes the summarization of a full-length movie into a multi-stage process, effectively mitigating the context length limitations of current VLMs. Experiments demonstrate that our approach yields significant improvements in factual accuracy, character consistency, and overall narrative coherence compared to end-to-end baselines.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) prevails in Large Language Models. It mainly consists of retrieval and generation. The retrieval modules (a.k.a. retrievers) aim to find useful information used to facilitate generation modules (a.k.a. generators). As such, generators' performance largely depends on the effectiveness and efficiency of retrievers. However, the retrieval paradigm that we design and use remains flat, which treats the retrieval procedures as a one-off deal with constant granularity. Despite effectiveness, we argue that they suffer from two limitations: (1) flat retrieval exerts a significant burden on one retriever; (2) constant granularity limits the ceiling of retrieval performance. In this work, we propose a progressive retrieval paradigm with coarse-to-fine granularity for RAG, termed FunnelRAG, so as to balance effectiveness and efficiency. Specifically, FunnelRAG establishes a progressive retrieval pipeline by collaborating coarse-to-fine granularity, large-to-small quantity, and low-to-high capacity, which can relieve the burden on one retriever and also promote the ceiling of retrieval performance. Extensive experiments manifest that FunnelRAG achieves comparable retrieval performance while the time overhead is reduced by nearly 40 percent.

Accurate classification of computed tomography (CT) images is essential for diagnosis and treatment planning, but existing methods often struggle with the subtle and spatially diverse nature of pathological features. Current approaches typically process images uniformly, limiting their ability to detect localized abnormalities that require focused analysis. We introduce UGPL, an uncertainty-guided progressive learning framework that performs a global-to-local analysis by first identifying regions of diagnostic ambiguity and then conducting detailed examination of these critical areas. Our approach employs evidential deep learning to quantify predictive uncertainty, guiding the extraction of informative patches through a non-maximum suppression mechanism that maintains spatial diversity. This progressive refinement strategy, combined with an adaptive fusion mechanism, enables UGPL to integrate both contextual information and fine-grained details. Experiments across three CT datasets demonstrate that UGPL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving improvements of 3.29%, 2.46%, and 8.08% in accuracy for kidney abnormality, lung cancer, and COVID-19 detection, respectively. Our analysis shows that the uncertainty-guided component provides substantial benefits, with performance dramatically increasing when the full progressive learning pipeline is implemented. Our code is available at: https://github.com/shravan-18/UGPL

As web platforms evolve towards greater personalization and emotional complexity, conversational agents must transcend superficial empathy to demonstrate identity-aware emotional reasoning. However, existing systems face two limitations: (1) reliance on situation-centric datasets lacking persistent user identity, which hampers the capture of personalized affective nuances; and (2) dependence on opaque, coarse reward signals that hinder development of verifiable empathetic reasoning. To address these gaps, we introduce KardiaBench, a large-scale user-grounded benchmark comprising 178,080 QA pairs across 22,080 multi-turn conversations anchored to 671 real-world profiles. The dataset is constructed via a model-in-the-loop pipeline with iterative rubric-guided refinement to ensure psychological plausibility and persona consistency. This progressive empathy pipeline that integrates user comprehension, contextual reasoning, and emotion perception into conversations, followed by iterative critique and rubric-based refinement to ensure psychological plausibility, emotional fidelity, and persona consistency. Building on this, we propose Kardia-R1, a framework that trains models for interpretable, stepwise empathetic cognition. Kardia-R1 leverages Rubric-as-Judge Empathetic Reinforcement Learning (Rubric-ERL), a GRPO-based method that uses explainable, human-aligned rubric rewards to tightly couple user understanding, emotional inference, and supportive response generation. Extensive experiments across four LLM backbones demonstrate that Kardia-R1 consistently outperforms othet methods in emotion accuracy, empathy, relevance, persona consistency, and safety. Our dataset and model will be released at https://github.com/JhCircle/Kardia-R1.

Diffusion-based generative models have revolutionized object-oriented image editing, yet their deployment in realistic object removal and insertion remains hampered by challenges such as the intricate interplay of physical effects and insufficient paired training data. In this work, we introduce OmniPaint, a unified framework that re-conceptualizes object removal and insertion as interdependent processes rather than isolated tasks. Leveraging a pre-trained diffusion prior along with a progressive training pipeline comprising initial paired sample optimization and subsequent large-scale unpaired refinement via CycleFlow, OmniPaint achieves precise foreground elimination and seamless object insertion while faithfully preserving scene geometry and intrinsic properties. Furthermore, our novel CFD metric offers a robust, reference-free evaluation of context consistency and object hallucination, establishing a new benchmark for high-fidelity image editing. Project page: https://yeates.github.io/OmniPaint-Page/

Capturing spatial relationships from visual inputs is a cornerstone of human-like general intelligence. Several previous studies have tried to enhance the spatial awareness of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) by adding extra expert encoders, which brings extra overhead and usually harms general capabilities. To enhance the spatial ability in general architectures, we introduce Visual Spatial Tuning (VST), a comprehensive framework to cultivate VLMs with human-like visuospatial abilities, from spatial perception to reasoning. We first attempt to enhance spatial perception in VLMs by constructing a large-scale dataset termed VST-P, which comprises 4.1 million samples spanning 19 skills across single views, multiple images, and videos. Then, we present VST-R, a curated dataset with 135K samples that instruct models to reason in space. In particular, we adopt a progressive training pipeline: supervised fine-tuning to build foundational spatial knowledge, followed by reinforcement learning to further improve spatial reasoning abilities. Without the side-effect to general capabilities, the proposed VST consistently achieves state-of-the-art results on several spatial benchmarks, including 34.8% on MMSI-Bench and 61.2% on VSIBench. It turns out that the Vision-Language-Action models can be significantly enhanced with the proposed spatial tuning paradigm, paving the way for more physically grounded AI.

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promising results, yet existing approaches struggle to effectively handle both temporal and spatial localization simultaneously. This challenge stems from two key issues: first, incorporating spatial-temporal localization introduces a vast number of coordinate combinations, complicating the alignment of linguistic and visual coordinate representations; second, encoding fine-grained temporal and spatial information during video feature compression is inherently difficult. To address these issues, we propose LLaVA-ST, a MLLM for fine-grained spatial-temporal multimodal understanding. In LLaVA-ST, we propose Language-Aligned Positional Embedding, which embeds the textual coordinate special token into the visual space, simplifying the alignment of fine-grained spatial-temporal correspondences. Additionally, we design the Spatial-Temporal Packer, which decouples the feature compression of temporal and spatial resolutions into two distinct point-to-region attention processing streams. Furthermore, we propose ST-Align dataset with 4.3M training samples for fine-grained spatial-temporal multimodal understanding. With ST-align, we present a progressive training pipeline that aligns the visual and textual feature through sequential coarse-to-fine stages.Additionally, we introduce an ST-Align benchmark to evaluate spatial-temporal interleaved fine-grained understanding tasks, which include Spatial-Temporal Video Grounding (STVG) , Event Localization and Captioning (ELC) and Spatial Video Grounding (SVG). LLaVA-ST achieves outstanding performance on 11 benchmarks requiring fine-grained temporal, spatial, or spatial-temporal interleaving multimodal understanding. Our code, data and benchmark will be released at Our code, data and benchmark will be released at https://github.com/appletea233/LLaVA-ST .

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) encode visual inputs as dense sequences of patch-level tokens to capture fine-grained semantics. These visual tokens often outnumber their textual counterparts by a large margin, leading to substantial computational overhead and limiting the scalability of LVLMs in practice. Previous efforts have explored visual token reduction either prior to or within the large language models (LLMs). However, most in-LLM reduction approaches rely on text-conditioned interactions, implicitly assuming that textual tokens can reliably capture the importance of visual tokens. In this work, we revisit this assumption and reveal causal, semantic, and spatial forms of cross-modal misalignment. These misalignments undermine the effectiveness of text-guided visual token reduction. To address this, we introduce VisionDrop, a training-free, visual-only pruning framework that selects informative visual tokens based on intra-modal (visual-to-visual) attention, without relying on textual signals. To further suppress redundancy throughout the model hierarchy, we treat the visual encoder and the LLM as a unified system and design a progressive pruning pipeline. Our method performs dominant token selection and lightweight contextual merging at multiple stages, enabling fine-grained visual information to be retained even under aggressive token budgets. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks show that VisionDrop achieves consistent improvements over existing approaches, despite requiring no additional training or complex modifications. Notably, when integrated with LLaVA-NeXT-7B, VisionDrop achieves a 2.7x reduction in inference latency and 6x in FLOPs, while retaining 95.71% of the original performance.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown substantial progress in natural language understanding and generation, proving valuable especially in the medical field. Despite advancements, challenges persist due to the complexity and diversity inherent in medical tasks, which can be categorized as knowledge-intensive tasks and alignment-required tasks. Previous approaches either ignore the latter task or focus on a minority of tasks and hence lose generalization. To address these drawbacks, we propose a progressive fine-tuning pipeline. This pipeline employs a Knowledge Aggregator and a Noise aggregator to encode diverse knowledge in the first stage and filter out detrimental information. In the second stage, we drop the Noise Aggregator to avoid the interference of suboptimal representation and leverage an additional alignment module optimized towards an orthogonal direction to the knowledge space to mitigate knowledge forgetting. Based on this two-stage paradigm, we proposed a Medical LLM through decoupling Clinical Alignment and Knowledge Aggregation (MedCare), which is designed to achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on over 20 medical tasks, as well as SOTA results on specific medical alignment tasks. Various model sizes of MedCare (1.8B, 7B, 14B) all demonstrate significant improvements over existing models with similar model sizes.

Preference alignment has emerged as an effective strategy to enhance the performance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) following supervised fine-tuning. While existing preference alignment methods predominantly target hallucination factors, they overlook the factors essential for multi-modal comprehension capabilities, often narrowing their improvements on hallucination mitigation. To bridge this gap, we propose Instruction-oriented Preference Alignment (IPA), a scalable framework designed to automatically construct alignment preferences grounded in instruction fulfillment efficacy. Our method involves an automated preference construction coupled with a dedicated verification process that identifies instruction-oriented factors, avoiding significant variability in response representations. Additionally, IPA incorporates a progressive preference collection pipeline, further recalling challenging samples through model self-evolution and reference-guided refinement. Experiments conducted on Qwen2VL-7B demonstrate IPA's effectiveness across multiple benchmarks, including hallucination evaluation, visual question answering, and text understanding tasks, highlighting its capability to enhance general comprehension.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have gained significant attention due to their strong multimodal understanding capability. However, existing works rely heavily on modality-specific encoders, which usually differ in architecture and are limited to common modalities. In this paper, we present OneLLM, an MLLM that aligns eight modalities to language using a unified framework. We achieve this through a unified multimodal encoder and a progressive multimodal alignment pipeline. In detail, we first train an image projection module to connect a vision encoder with LLM. Then, we build a universal projection module (UPM) by mixing multiple image projection modules and dynamic routing. Finally, we progressively align more modalities to LLM with the UPM. To fully leverage the potential of OneLLM in following instructions, we also curated a comprehensive multimodal instruction dataset, including 2M items from image, audio, video, point cloud, depth/normal map, IMU and fMRI brain activity. OneLLM is evaluated on 25 diverse benchmarks, encompassing tasks such as multimodal captioning, question answering and reasoning, where it delivers excellent performance. Code, data, model and online demo are available at https://github.com/csuhan/OneLLM

Current mobile GUI agent benchmarks systematically fail to assess memory capabilities, with only 5.2-11.8% memory-related tasks and no cross-session learning evaluation. We introduce MemGUI-Bench, a comprehensive memory-centric benchmark with pass@k and staged LLM-as-judge evaluation. Our contributions include: (1) a systematic memory taxonomy analyzing 11 agents across 5 architectures; (2) 128 tasks across 26 applications where 89.8% challenge memory through cross-temporal and cross-spatial retention; (3) MemGUI-Eval, an automated pipeline with Progressive Scrutiny and 7 hierarchical metrics; and (4) RQ-driven assessment of 11 state-of-the-art agents. Our experiments reveal significant memory deficits across all evaluated systems, identify 5 distinct failure modes, and synthesize 5 actionable design implications. All resources including code, benchmark, and evaluation results will be \textit{fully open-sourced and continuously maintained} at https://lgy0404.github.io/MemGUI-Bench/.

In recent years, multimodal large models have continued to improve on general benchmarks. However, in real-world content moderation and adversarial settings, mainstream models still suffer from degraded generalization and catastrophic forgetting because of limited fine-grained visual perception and insufficient modeling of long-tail noise. In this paper, we present Xuanwu VL-2B as a case study of how general multimodal models can be developed into an industrial-grade foundation model for content ecosystems. The model adopts a compact InternViT-300M + MLP + Qwen3 1.7B architecture, balancing fine-grained visual perception, language-semantic alignment, and deployment cost within an approximately 2B-parameter budget. To balance business specialization with the retention of general capabilities, we developed a data iteration and curation mechanism and trained the model through a progressive three-stage pipeline: pre-training, mid-training, and post-training. Ablation studies and offline business evaluations show that Xuanwu VL-2B achieves an average score of 67.90 across seven OpenCompass multimodal metrics (vs. 64.27 for InternVL 3.5 2B), an average recall of 94.38% over seven independent business moderation tasks, and a weighted overall recall of 82.82% on policy-violating text in challenging adversarial OCR scenarios, outperforming Gemini-2.5-Pro (76.72%). These results show that, under a limited parameter budget, Xuanwu VL-2B achieves a practical balance among business alignment, visual perception, general capability retention, and deployment cost.

Multi-task visual grounding (MTVG) includes two sub-tasks, i.e., Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) and Referring Expression Segmentation (RES). The existing representative approaches generally follow the research pipeline which mainly consists of three core procedures, including independent feature extraction for visual and linguistic modalities, respectively, cross-modal interaction module, and independent prediction heads for different sub-tasks. Albeit achieving remarkable performance, this research line has two limitations: 1) The linguistic content has not been fully injected into the entire visual backbone for boosting more effective visual feature extraction and it needs an extra cross-modal interaction module; 2) The relationship between REC and RES tasks is not effectively exploited to help the collaborative prediction for more accurate output. To deal with these problems, in this paper, we propose a Progressive Language-guided Visual Learning framework for multi-task visual grounding, called PLVL, which not only finely mine the inherent feature expression of the visual modality itself but also progressively inject the language information to help learn linguistic-related visual features. In this manner, our PLVL does not need additional cross-modal fusion module while fully introducing the language guidance. Furthermore, we analyze that the localization center for REC would help identify the to-be-segmented object region for RES to some extent. Inspired by this investigation, we design a multi-task head to accomplish collaborative predictions for these two sub-tasks. Extensive experiments conducted on several benchmark datasets comprehensively substantiate that our PLVL obviously outperforms the representative methods in both REC and RES tasks. https://github.com/jcwang0602/PLVL

Web-based 'deep research' agents aim to solve complex question - answering tasks through long-horizon interactions with online tools. These tasks remain challenging, as the underlying language models are often not optimized for long-horizon reasoning and exploration. Prior work has proposed workflows for constructing instruction-tuning datasets, often leveraging knowledge graphs. However, such methods typically lack fine-grained control over difficulty and quality, yielding synthetic data that falls short of capturing the complexity required for long-horizon reasoning. Furthermore, many studies conflate data and training effects by comparing models trained under different optimization recipes, making it difficult to isolate and evaluate the effectiveness of the data itself. We introduce a two-pronged data synthesis pipeline that generates question - answer pairs by progressively increasing task complexity until a frontier baseline web agent fails. The baseline agent plays multiple roles in this process: attempting the questions, validating factuality, checking for alternative answers, and enforcing filtering. To evaluate the effectiveness of our synthesis methods, we adopt a controlled training setup based on distillation from strong web agents. Experiments across multiple web-based benchmarks show that our dataset - despite being smaller - enables the training of more effective web agents than existing datasets. In particular, our data exhibits twice the diversity in tool-use actions, allowing models trained on it to achieve stronger performance while avoiding repetitive tool-calling behaviors.

The diffusion transformer (DiT) architecture has attracted significant attention in image generation, achieving better fidelity, performance, and diversity. However, most existing DiT - based image generation methods focus on global - aware synthesis, and regional prompt control has been less explored. In this paper, we propose a coarse - to - fine generation pipeline for regional prompt - following generation. Specifically, we first utilize the powerful large language model (LLM) to generate both high - level descriptions of the image (such as content, topic, and objects) and low - level descriptions (such as details and style). Then, we explore the influence of cross - attention layers at different depths. We find that deeper layers are always responsible for high - level content control, while shallow layers handle low - level content control. Various prompts are injected into the proposed regional cross - attention control for coarse - to - fine generation. By using the proposed pipeline, we enhance the controllability of DiT - based image generation. Extensive quantitative and qualitative results show that our pipeline can improve the performance of the generated images.

Recently, the advent of pre-trained large-scale language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 have significantly advanced the machine's natural language understanding capabilities. This breakthrough has allowed us to seamlessly integrate these open-source LLMs into a unified robot simulator environment to help robots accurately understand and execute human natural language instructions. To this end, in this work, we introduce a realistic robotic manipulation simulator and build a Robotic Manipulation with Progressive Reasoning Tasks (RM-PRT) benchmark on this basis. Specifically, the RM-PRT benchmark builds a new high-fidelity digital twin scene based on Unreal Engine 5, which includes 782 categories, 2023 objects, and 15K natural language instructions generated by ChatGPT for a detailed evaluation of robot manipulation. We propose a general pipeline for the RM-PRT benchmark that takes as input multimodal prompts containing natural language instructions and automatically outputs actions containing the movement and position transitions. We set four natural language understanding tasks with progressive reasoning levels and evaluate the robot's ability to understand natural language instructions in two modes of adsorption and grasping. In addition, we also conduct a comprehensive analysis and comparison of the differences and advantages of 10 different LLMs in instruction understanding and generation quality. We hope the new simulator and benchmark will facilitate future research on language-guided robotic manipulation. Project website: https://necolizer.github.io/RM-PRT/ .

Emerging Metaverse applications demand accessible, accurate, and easy-to-use tools for 3D digital human creations in order to depict different cultures and societies as if in the physical world. Recent large-scale vision-language advances pave the way to for novices to conveniently customize 3D content. However, the generated CG-friendly assets still cannot represent the desired facial traits for human characteristics. In this paper, we present DreamFace, a progressive scheme to generate personalized 3D faces under text guidance. It enables layman users to naturally customize 3D facial assets that are compatible with CG pipelines, with desired shapes, textures, and fine-grained animation capabilities. From a text input to describe the facial traits, we first introduce a coarse-to-fine scheme to generate the neutral facial geometry with a unified topology. We employ a selection strategy in the CLIP embedding space, and subsequently optimize both the details displacements and normals using Score Distillation Sampling from generic Latent Diffusion Model. Then, for neutral appearance generation, we introduce a dual-path mechanism, which combines the generic LDM with a novel texture LDM to ensure both the diversity and textural specification in the UV space. We also employ a two-stage optimization to perform SDS in both the latent and image spaces to significantly provides compact priors for fine-grained synthesis. Our generated neutral assets naturally support blendshapes-based facial animations. We further improve the animation ability with personalized deformation characteristics by learning the universal expression prior using the cross-identity hypernetwork. Notably, DreamFace can generate of realistic 3D facial assets with physically-based rendering quality and rich animation ability from video footage, even for fashion icons or exotic characters in cartoons and fiction movies.

Automatic 3D facial texture generation has gained significant interest recently. Existing approaches may not support the traditional physically based rendering pipeline or rely on 3D data captured by Light Stage. Our key contribution is a progressive latent space refinement approach that can bootstrap from 3D Morphable Models (3DMMs)-based texture maps generated from facial images to generate high-quality and diverse PBR textures, including albedo, normal, and roughness. It starts with enhancing Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for text-guided and diverse texture generation. To this end, we design a self-supervised paradigm to overcome the reliance on ground truth 3D textures and train the generative model with only entangled texture maps. Besides, we foster mutual enhancement between GANs and Score Distillation Sampling (SDS). SDS boosts GANs with more generative modes, while GANs promote more efficient optimization of SDS. Furthermore, we introduce an edge-aware SDS for multi-view consistent facial structure. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing 3D texture generation methods regarding photo-realistic quality, diversity, and efficiency.

Reconstructing articulated 3D objects from a single image requires jointly inferring object geometry, part structure, and motion parameters from limited visual evidence. A key difficulty lies in the entanglement between motion cues and object structure, which makes direct articulation regression unstable. Existing methods address this challenge through multi-view supervision, retrieval-based assembly, or auxiliary video generation, often sacrificing scalability or efficiency. We present MonoArt, a unified framework grounded in progressive structural reasoning. Rather than predicting articulation directly from image features, MonoArt progressively transforms visual observations into canonical geometry, structured part representations, and motion-aware embeddings within a single architecture. This structured reasoning process enables stable and interpretable articulation inference without external motion templates or multi-stage pipelines. Extensive experiments on PartNet-Mobility demonstrate that OM achieves state-of-the-art performance in both reconstruction accuracy and inference speed. The framework further generalizes to robotic manipulation and articulated scene reconstruction.

The success of the machine learning field has reliably depended on training on large datasets. While effective, this trend comes at an extraordinary cost. This is due to two deeply intertwined factors: the size of models and the size of datasets. While promising research efforts focus on reducing the size of models, the other half of the equation remains fairly mysterious. Indeed, it is surprising that the standard approach to training remains to iterate over and over, uniformly sampling the training dataset. In this paper we explore a series of alternative training paradigms that leverage insights from hard-data-mining and dropout, simple enough to implement and use that can become the new training standard. The proposed Progressive Data Dropout reduces the number of effective epochs to as little as 12.4% of the baseline. This savings actually do not come at any cost for accuracy. Surprisingly, the proposed method improves accuracy by up to 4.82%. Our approach requires no changes to model architecture or optimizer, and can be applied across standard training pipelines, thus posing an excellent opportunity for wide adoption. Code can be found here: https://github.com/bazyagami/LearningWithRevision

Spatial reasoning remains a fundamental challenge for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), with current approaches struggling to achieve robust performance despite recent advances. We identify that this limitation stems from a critical gap: existing methods attempt to learn spatial reasoning directly without establishing the hierarchical foundations of perception and understanding. To address this challenge, we present a comprehensive methodology for building spatial intelligence progressively. We introduce SpatialLadder-26k, a multimodal dataset containing 26,610 samples spanning object localization, single image, multi-view, and video spatial reasoning tasks, constructed through a standardized pipeline that ensures systematic coverage across modalities. Building on this dataset, we design a three-stage progressive training framework that (1) establishes spatial perception through object localization, (2) develops spatial understanding through multi-dimensional spatial tasks, and (3) strengthens complex reasoning via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. This approach yields SpatialLadder, a 3B-parameter model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on spatial reasoning benchmarks, with 23.4% average improvement over the base model, surpassing GPT-4o by 20.8% and Gemini-2.0-Flash by 10.1%. Notably, SpatialLadder maintains strong generalization with 7.2% improvement on out-of-domain benchmarks, demonstrating that progressive training from perception to reasoning is essential for robust spatial intelligence.

Diffusion models have achieved significant progress in both image and video generation while still suffering from huge computation costs. As an effective solution, flow matching aims to reflow the diffusion process of diffusion models into a straight line for a few-step and even one-step generation. However, in this paper, we suggest that the original training pipeline of flow matching is not optimal and introduce two techniques to improve it. Firstly, we introduce progressive reflow, which progressively reflows the diffusion models in local timesteps until the whole diffusion progresses, reducing the difficulty of flow matching. Second, we introduce aligned v-prediction, which highlights the importance of direction matching in flow matching over magnitude matching. Experimental results on SDv1.5 and SDXL demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, for example, conducting on SDv1.5 achieves an FID of 10.70 on MSCOCO2014 validation set with only 4 sampling steps, close to our teacher model (32 DDIM steps, FID = 10.05).

Multimodal molecular models often suffer from 3D conformer unreliability and modality collapse, limiting their robustness and generalization. We propose MuMo, a structured multimodal fusion framework that addresses these challenges in molecular representation through two key strategies. To reduce the instability of conformer-dependent fusion, we design a Structured Fusion Pipeline (SFP) that combines 2D topology and 3D geometry into a unified and stable structural prior. To mitigate modality collapse caused by naive fusion, we introduce a Progressive Injection (PI) mechanism that asymmetrically integrates this prior into the sequence stream, preserving modality-specific modeling while enabling cross-modal enrichment. Built on a state space backbone, MuMo supports long-range dependency modeling and robust information propagation. Across 29 benchmark tasks from Therapeutics Data Commons (TDC) and MoleculeNet, MuMo achieves an average improvement of 2.7% over the best-performing baseline on each task, ranking first on 22 of them, including a 27% improvement on the LD50 task. These results validate its robustness to 3D conformer noise and the effectiveness of multimodal fusion in molecular representation. The code is available at: github.com/selmiss/MuMo.

Vision-Language Models (VLM) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, showing promise for end-to-end autonomous driving systems. Chain-of-Thought (CoT), as VLM's widely used reasoning strategy, is facing critical challenges. Existing textual CoT has a large gap between text semantic space and trajectory physical space. Although the recent approach utilizes future image to replace text as CoT process, it lacks clear planning-oriented objective guidance to generate images with accurate scene evolution. To address these, we innovatively propose MindDriver, a progressive multimodal reasoning framework that enables VLM to imitate human-like progressive thinking for autonomous driving. MindDriver presents semantic understanding, semantic-to-physical space imagination, and physical-space trajectory planning. To achieve aligned reasoning processes in MindDriver, we develop a feedback-guided automatic data annotation pipeline to generate aligned multimodal reasoning training data. Furthermore, we develop a progressive reinforcement fine-tuning method to optimize the alignment through progressive high- level reward-based learning. MindDriver demonstrates superior performance in both nuScences open-loop and Bench2Drive closed-loop evaluation. Codes are available at https://github.com/hotdogcheesewhite/MindDriver.

Semi-dense feature matching methods have shown strong performance in challenging scenarios. However, the existing pipeline relies on a global search across the entire feature map to establish coarse matches, limiting further improvements in accuracy and efficiency. Motivated by this limitation, we propose a novel pipeline, CasP, which leverages cascaded correspondence priors for guidance. Specifically, the matching stage is decomposed into two progressive phases, bridged by a region-based selective cross-attention mechanism designed to enhance feature discriminability. In the second phase, one-to-one matches are determined by restricting the search range to the one-to-many prior areas identified in the first phase. Additionally, this pipeline benefits from incorporating high-level features, which helps reduce the computational costs of low-level feature extraction. The acceleration gains of CasP increase with higher resolution, and our lite model achieves a speedup of sim2.2times at a resolution of 1152 compared to the most efficient method, ELoFTR. Furthermore, extensive experiments demonstrate its superiority in geometric estimation, particularly with impressive cross-domain generalization. These advantages highlight its potential for latency-sensitive and high-robustness applications, such as SLAM and UAV systems. Code is available at https://github.com/pq-chen/CasP.

Generating high-dimensional visual modalities is a computationally intensive task. A common solution is progressive generation, where the outputs are synthesized in a coarse-to-fine spectral autoregressive manner. While diffusion models benefit from the coarse-to-fine nature of denoising, explicit multi-stage architectures are rarely adopted. These architectures have increased the complexity of the overall approach, introducing the need for a custom diffusion formulation, decomposition-dependent stage transitions, add-hoc samplers, or a model cascade. Our contribution, Decomposable Flow Matching (DFM), is a simple and effective framework for the progressive generation of visual media. DFM applies Flow Matching independently at each level of a user-defined multi-scale representation (such as Laplacian pyramid). As shown by our experiments, our approach improves visual quality for both images and videos, featuring superior results compared to prior multistage frameworks. On Imagenet-1k 512px, DFM achieves 35.2% improvements in FDD scores over the base architecture and 26.4% over the best-performing baseline, under the same training compute. When applied to finetuning of large models, such as FLUX, DFM shows faster convergence speed to the training distribution. Crucially, all these advantages are achieved with a single model, architectural simplicity, and minimal modifications to existing training pipelines.

We present BLOCK, an open-source bi-stage character-to-skin pipeline that generates pixel-perfect Minecraft skins from arbitrary character concepts. BLOCK decomposes the problem into (i) a 3D preview synthesis stage driven by a large multimodal model (MLLM) with a carefully designed prompt-and-reference template, producing a consistent dual-panel (front/back) oblique-view Minecraft-style preview; and (ii) a skin decoding stage based on a fine-tuned FLUX.2 model that translates the preview into a skin atlas image. We further propose EvolveLoRA, a progressive LoRA curriculum (text-to-image rightarrow image-to-image rightarrow preview-to-skin) that initializes each phase from the previous adapter to improve stability and efficiency. BLOCK is released with all prompt templates and fine-tuned weights to support reproducible character-to-skin generation.

The Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3) advances visual understanding with Promptable Concept Segmentation (PCS) across images and videos, but its unified architecture (shared vision backbone, DETR-style detector, dense-memory tracker) remains prohibitive for on-device use. We present EfficientSAM3, a family of efficient models built on Progressive Hierarchical Distillation (PHD) that transfers capability from SAM3 to lightweight students in three stages: (1) Encoder Distillation aligns image features via prompt-in-the-loop training on SA-1B; (2) Temporal Memory Distillation replaces dense memory with a compact Perceiver-based module trained on SA-V to compress and retrieve spatiotemporal features efficiently; and (3) End-to-End Fine-Tuning refines the full pipeline on the official SAM3 PCS data to preserve concept-level performance. PHD yields a spectrum of student variants using RepViT, TinyViT, and EfficientViT backbones, enabling on-device concept segmentation and tracking while maintaining high fidelity to teacher behavior. We benchmark on popular VOS datasets, and compare with varies of releated work, achieing strong performance-efficiency trade-offs.

Text-to-image diffusion models (T2I) use a latent representation of a text prompt to guide the image generation process. However, the process by which the encoder produces the text representation is unknown. We propose the Diffusion Lens, a method for analyzing the text encoder of T2I models by generating images from its intermediate representations. Using the Diffusion Lens, we perform an extensive analysis of two recent T2I models. Exploring compound prompts, we find that complex scenes describing multiple objects are composed progressively and more slowly compared to simple scenes; Exploring knowledge retrieval, we find that representation of uncommon concepts requires further computation compared to common concepts, and that knowledge retrieval is gradual across layers. Overall, our findings provide valuable insights into the text encoder component in T2I pipelines.

While explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) equips Large Language Models (LLMs) with strong reasoning capabilities, it requires models to verbalize every intermediate step in text tokens, constraining the model thoughts to the discrete vocabulary space. Recently, reasoning in continuous latent space has emerged as a promising alternative, enabling more robust inference and flexible computation beyond discrete token constraints. However, current latent paradigms often suffer from feature collapse and instability, stemming from distribution mismatches when recurrently using hidden states as the input embeddings, or alignment issues when relying on assistant models. To address this, we propose Latent Thoughts Tuning (LT-Tuning), a framework that redefines how latent thoughts are constructed and deployed. Instead of relying solely on raw hidden states, our method introduces a Context-Prediction-Fusion mechanism that jointly leveraging contextual hidden states and predictive semantic guidance from the vocabulary embedding space. Combined with a progressive three-stage curriculum learning pipeline, LT-Tuning also enables dynamically switching between latent and explicit thinking modes. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing latent reasoning baselines, effectively mitigating feature collapse and achieving robust reasoning accuracy.

We present InSpatio-WorldFM, an open-source real-time frame model for spatial intelligence. Unlike video-based world models that rely on sequential frame generation and incur substantial latency due to window-level processing, InSpatio-WorldFM adopts a frame-based paradigm that generates each frame independently, enabling low-latency real-time spatial inference. By enforcing multi-view spatial consistency through explicit 3D anchors and implicit spatial memory, the model preserves global scene geometry while maintaining fine-grained visual details across viewpoint changes. We further introduce a progressive three-stage training pipeline that transforms a pretrained image diffusion model into a controllable frame model and finally into a real-time generator through few-step distillation. Experimental results show that InSpatio-WorldFM achieves strong multi-view consistency while supporting interactive exploration on consumer-grade GPUs, providing an efficient alternative to traditional video-based world models for real-time world simulation.

Rendering high-fidelity images from sparse point clouds is still challenging. Existing learning-based approaches suffer from either hole artifacts, missing details, or expensive computations. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to render high-quality images from sparse points. This method first attempts to bridge the 3D Gaussian Splatting and point cloud rendering, which includes several cascaded modules. We first use a regressor to estimate Gaussian properties in a point-wise manner, the estimated properties are used to rasterize neural feature descriptors into 2D planes which are extracted from a multiscale extractor. The projected feature volume is gradually decoded toward the final prediction via a multiscale and progressive decoder. The whole pipeline experiences a two-stage training and is driven by our well-designed progressive and multiscale reconstruction loss. Experiments on different benchmarks show the superiority of our method in terms of rendering qualities and the necessities of our main components.

Single-image 3D scene reconstruction presents significant challenges due to its inherently ill-posed nature and limited input constraints. Recent advances have explored two promising directions: multiview generative models that train on 3D consistent datasets but struggle with out-of-distribution generalization, and 3D scene inpainting and completion frameworks that suffer from cross-view inconsistency and suboptimal error handling, as they depend exclusively on depth data or 3D smoothness, which ultimately degrades output quality and computational performance. Building upon these approaches, we present GaussVideoDreamer, which advances generative multimedia approaches by bridging the gap between image, video, and 3D generation, integrating their strengths through two key innovations: (1) A progressive video inpainting strategy that harnesses temporal coherence for improved multiview consistency and faster convergence. (2) A 3D Gaussian Splatting consistency mask to guide the video diffusion with 3D consistent multiview evidence. Our pipeline combines three core components: a geometry-aware initialization protocol, Inconsistency-Aware Gaussian Splatting, and a progressive video inpainting strategy. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves 32% higher LLaVA-IQA scores and at least 2x speedup compared to existing methods while maintaining robust performance across diverse scenes.

We present Qianfan-VL, a series of multimodal large language models ranging from 3B to 70B parameters, achieving state-of-the-art performance through innovative domain enhancement techniques. Our approach employs multi-stage progressive training and high-precision data synthesis pipelines, which prove to be critical technologies for enhancing domain-specific capabilities while maintaining strong general performance. Qianfan-VL achieves comparable results to leading open-source models on general benchmarks, with state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks such as CCBench, SEEDBench IMG, ScienceQA, and MMStar. The domain enhancement strategy delivers significant advantages in OCR and document understanding, validated on both public benchmarks (OCRBench 873, DocVQA 94.75%) and in-house evaluations. Notably, Qianfan-VL-8B and 70B variants incorporate long chain-of-thought capabilities, demonstrating superior performance on mathematical reasoning (MathVista 78.6%) and logical inference tasks. All models are trained entirely on Baidu's Kunlun P800 chips, validating the capability of large-scale AI infrastructure to train SOTA-level multimodal models with over 90% scaling efficiency on 5000 chips for a single task. This work establishes an effective methodology for developing domain-enhanced multimodal models suitable for diverse enterprise deployment scenarios.

Although subject-driven generation has been extensively explored in image generation due to its wide applications, it still has challenges in data scalability and subject expansibility. For the first challenge, moving from curating single-subject datasets to multiple-subject ones and scaling them is particularly difficult. For the second, most recent methods center on single-subject generation, making it hard to apply when dealing with multi-subject scenarios. In this study, we propose a highly-consistent data synthesis pipeline to tackle this challenge. This pipeline harnesses the intrinsic in-context generation capabilities of diffusion transformers and generates high-consistency multi-subject paired data. Additionally, we introduce UNO, which consists of progressive cross-modal alignment and universal rotary position embedding. It is a multi-image conditioned subject-to-image model iteratively trained from a text-to-image model. Extensive experiments show that our method can achieve high consistency while ensuring controllability in both single-subject and multi-subject driven generation.

In the realm of digital creativity, our potential to craft intricate 3D worlds from imagination is often hampered by the limitations of existing digital tools, which demand extensive expertise and efforts. To narrow this disparity, we introduce CLAY, a 3D geometry and material generator designed to effortlessly transform human imagination into intricate 3D digital structures. CLAY supports classic text or image inputs as well as 3D-aware controls from diverse primitives (multi-view images, voxels, bounding boxes, point clouds, implicit representations, etc). At its core is a large-scale generative model composed of a multi-resolution Variational Autoencoder (VAE) and a minimalistic latent Diffusion Transformer (DiT), to extract rich 3D priors directly from a diverse range of 3D geometries. Specifically, it adopts neural fields to represent continuous and complete surfaces and uses a geometry generative module with pure transformer blocks in latent space. We present a progressive training scheme to train CLAY on an ultra large 3D model dataset obtained through a carefully designed processing pipeline, resulting in a 3D native geometry generator with 1.5 billion parameters. For appearance generation, CLAY sets out to produce physically-based rendering (PBR) textures by employing a multi-view material diffusion model that can generate 2K resolution textures with diffuse, roughness, and metallic modalities. We demonstrate using CLAY for a range of controllable 3D asset creations, from sketchy conceptual designs to production ready assets with intricate details. Even first time users can easily use CLAY to bring their vivid 3D imaginations to life, unleashing unlimited creativity.

Diffusion models have revolutionized text-to-image generation with its exceptional quality and creativity. However, its multi-step sampling process is known to be slow, often requiring tens of inference steps to obtain satisfactory results. Previous attempts to improve its sampling speed and reduce computational costs through distillation have been unsuccessful in achieving a functional one-step model. In this paper, we explore a recent method called Rectified Flow, which, thus far, has only been applied to small datasets. The core of Rectified Flow lies in its reflow procedure, which straightens the trajectories of probability flows, refines the coupling between noises and images, and facilitates the distillation process with student models. We propose a novel text-conditioned pipeline to turn Stable Diffusion (SD) into an ultra-fast one-step model, in which we find reflow plays a critical role in improving the assignment between noise and images. Leveraging our new pipeline, we create, to the best of our knowledge, the first one-step diffusion-based text-to-image generator with SD-level image quality, achieving an FID (Frechet Inception Distance) of 23.3 on MS COCO 2017-5k, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art technique, progressive distillation, by a significant margin (37.2 rightarrow 23.3 in FID). By utilizing an expanded network with 1.7B parameters, we further improve the FID to 22.4. We call our one-step models InstaFlow. On MS COCO 2014-30k, InstaFlow yields an FID of 13.1 in just 0.09 second, the best in leq 0.1 second regime, outperforming the recent StyleGAN-T (13.9 in 0.1 second). Notably, the training of InstaFlow only costs 199 A100 GPU days. Project page:~https://github.com/gnobitab/InstaFlow.

We propose a multi-scale GAN model to hallucinate realistic context (forehead, hair, neck, clothes) and background pixels automatically from a single input face mask. Instead of swapping a face on to an existing picture, our model directly generates realistic context and background pixels based on the features of the provided face mask. Unlike face inpainting algorithms, it can generate realistic hallucinations even for a large number of missing pixels. Our model is composed of a cascaded network of GAN blocks, each tasked with hallucination of missing pixels at a particular resolution while guiding the synthesis process of the next GAN block. The hallucinated full face image is made photo-realistic by using a combination of reconstruction, perceptual, adversarial and identity preserving losses at each block of the network. With a set of extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in hallucinating context and background pixels from face masks varying in facial pose, expression and lighting, collected from multiple datasets subject disjoint with our training data. We also compare our method with two popular face swapping and face completion methods in terms of visual quality and recognition performance. Additionally, we analyze our cascaded pipeline and compare it with the recently proposed progressive growing of GANs.

Recent advances in video insertion based on diffusion models are impressive. However, existing methods rely on complex control signals but struggle with subject consistency, limiting their practical applicability. In this paper, we focus on the task of Mask-free Video Insertion and aim to resolve three key challenges: data scarcity, subject-scene equilibrium, and insertion harmonization. To address the data scarcity, we propose a new data pipeline InsertPipe, constructing diverse cross-pair data automatically. Building upon our data pipeline, we develop OmniInsert, a novel unified framework for mask-free video insertion from both single and multiple subject references. Specifically, to maintain subject-scene equilibrium, we introduce a simple yet effective Condition-Specific Feature Injection mechanism to distinctly inject multi-source conditions and propose a novel Progressive Training strategy that enables the model to balance feature injection from subjects and source video. Meanwhile, we design the Subject-Focused Loss to improve the detailed appearance of the subjects. To further enhance insertion harmonization, we propose an Insertive Preference Optimization methodology to optimize the model by simulating human preferences, and incorporate a Context-Aware Rephraser module during reference to seamlessly integrate the subject into the original scenes. To address the lack of a benchmark for the field, we introduce InsertBench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising diverse scenes with meticulously selected subjects. Evaluation on InsertBench indicates OmniInsert outperforms state-of-the-art closed-source commercial solutions. The code will be released.

Recent advancements in Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) underscore the importance of scaling by increasing image-text paired data, achieving impressive performance on general tasks. Despite their effectiveness in broad applications, generalist models are primarily trained on web-scale datasets dominated by natural images, resulting in the sacrifice of specialized capabilities for domain-specific tasks that require extensive domain prior knowledge. Moreover, directly integrating expert models tailored for specific domains is challenging due to the representational gap and imbalanced optimization between the generalist model and experts. To address these challenges, we introduce Chimera, a scalable and low-cost multi-modal pipeline designed to boost the ability of existing LMMs with domain-specific experts. Specifically, we design a progressive training strategy to integrate features from expert models into the input of a generalist LMM. To address the imbalanced optimization caused by the well-aligned general visual encoder, we introduce a novel Generalist-Specialist Collaboration Masking (GSCM) mechanism. This results in a versatile model that excels across the chart, table, math, and document domains, achieving state-of-the-art performance on multi-modal reasoning and visual content extraction tasks, both of which are challenging tasks for assessing existing LMMs.

Image-based virtual try-on (VTON) aims to synthesize photorealistic images of a person wearing specified garments. Despite significant progress, building a universal VTON framework that can flexibly handle diverse and complex tasks remains a major challenge. Recent methods explore multi-task VTON frameworks guided by textual instructions, yet they still face two key limitations: (1) semantic gap between text instructions and reference images, and (2) data scarcity in complex scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose UniFit, a universal VTON framework driven by a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). Specifically, we introduce an MLLM-Guided Semantic Alignment Module (MGSA), which integrates multimodal inputs using an MLLM and a set of learnable queries. By imposing a semantic alignment loss, MGSA captures cross-modal semantic relationships and provides coherent and explicit semantic guidance for the generative process, thereby reducing the semantic gap. Moreover, by devising a two-stage progressive training strategy with a self-synthesis pipeline, UniFit is able to learn complex tasks from limited data. Extensive experiments show that UniFit not only supports a wide range of VTON tasks, including multi-garment and model-to-model try-on, but also achieves state-of-the-art performance. The source code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/zwplus/UniFit.

In recent years, the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly advanced, extending their capabilities to multimodal tasks through Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, video understanding remains a challenging area due to the dynamic and information-dense nature of videos. Existing models struggle with the trade-off between spatial resolution and temporal coverage when processing video content. We present Keye-VL-1.5, which addresses fundamental challenges in video comprehension through three key innovations. First, we introduce a novel Slow-Fast video encoding strategy that dynamically allocates computational resources based on inter-frame similarity, processing key frames with significant visual changes at higher resolution (Slow pathway) while handling relatively static frames with increased temporal coverage at lower resolution (Fast pathway). Second, we implement a progressive four-stage pre-training methodology that systematically extends the model's context length from 8K to 128K tokens, enabling processing of longer videos and more complex visual content. Third, we develop a comprehensive post-training pipeline focusing on reasoning enhancement and human preference alignment, incorporating a 5-step chain-of-thought data construction process, iterative GSPO-based reinforcement learning with progressive prompt hinting for difficult cases, and alignment training. Through extensive evaluation on public benchmarks and rigorous internal human assessment, Keye-VL-1.5 demonstrates significant improvements over existing models, particularly excelling in video understanding tasks while maintaining competitive performance on general multimodal benchmarks.

Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have attracted increasing research attention due to their powerful visual understanding capabilities. While they have achieved impressive results on various vision tasks, their performance on chart-to-code generation remains suboptimal. This task requires MLLMs to generate executable code that can reproduce a given chart, demanding not only precise visual understanding but also accurate translation of visual elements into structured code. Directly prompting MLLMs to perform this complex task often yields unsatisfactory results. To address this challenge, we propose {ChartIR}, an iterative refinement method based on structured instruction. First, we distinguish two tasks: visual understanding and code translation. To accomplish the visual understanding component, we design two types of structured instructions: description and difference. The description instruction captures the visual elements of the reference chart, while the difference instruction characterizes the discrepancies between the reference chart and the generated chart. These instructions effectively transform visual features into language representations, thereby facilitating the subsequent code translation process. Second, we decompose the overall chart generation pipeline into two stages: initial code generation and iterative refinement, enabling progressive enhancement of the final output. Experimental results show that, compared to other method, our method achieves superior performance on both the open-source model Qwen2-VL and the closed-source model GPT-4o.

Recent Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) demonstrate promising capabilities in unifying visual understanding and generative modeling, enabling both accurate content understanding and flexible editing. However, current approaches treat "what to see" and "how to edit" separately: they either perform isolated object segmentation or utilize segmentation masks merely as conditional prompts for local edit generation tasks, often relying on multiple disjointed models. To bridge these gaps, we introduce FOCUS, a unified LVLM that integrates segmentation-aware perception and controllable object-centric generation within an end-to-end framework. FOCUS employs a dual-branch visual encoder to simultaneously capture global semantic context and fine-grained spatial details. In addition, we leverage a MoVQGAN-based visual tokenizer to produce discrete visual tokens that enhance generation quality. To enable accurate and controllable image editing, we propose a progressive multi-stage training pipeline, where segmentation masks are jointly optimized and used as spatial condition prompts to guide the diffusion decoder. This strategy aligns visual encoding, segmentation, and generation modules, effectively bridging segmentation-aware perception with fine-grained visual synthesis. Extensive experiments across three core tasks, including multimodal understanding, referring segmentation accuracy, and controllable image generation, demonstrate that FOCUS achieves strong performance by jointly optimizing visual perception and generative capabilities.

Recently, 3D reconstruction and generation have demonstrated impressive novel view synthesis results, achieving high fidelity and efficiency. However, a notable conditioning gap can be observed between these two fields, e.g., scalable 3D scene reconstruction often requires densely captured views, whereas 3D generation typically relies on a single or no input view, which significantly limits their applications. We found that the source of this phenomenon lies in the misalignment between 3D constraints and generative priors. To address this problem, we propose a reconstruction-driven video diffusion model that learns to condition video frames on artifact-prone RGB-D renderings. Moreover, we propose a cyclical fusion pipeline that iteratively adds restoration frames from the generative model to the training set, enabling progressive expansion and addressing the viewpoint saturation limitations seen in previous reconstruction and generation pipelines. Our evaluation, including view synthesis from sparse view and masked input, validates the effectiveness of our approach. More details at https://genfusion.sibowu.com.

While existing generation and unified models excel at general image generation, they struggle with tasks requiring deep reasoning, planning, and precise data-to-visual mapping abilities beyond general scenarios. To push beyond the existing limitations, we introduce a new and challenging task: creative table visualization, requiring the model to generate an infographic that faithfully and aesthetically visualizes the data from a given table. To address this challenge, we propose ShowTable, a pipeline that synergizes MLLMs with diffusion models via a progressive self-correcting process. The MLLM acts as the central orchestrator for reasoning the visual plan and judging visual errors to provide refined instructions, the diffusion execute the commands from MLLM, achieving high-fidelity results. To support this task and our pipeline, we introduce three automated data construction pipelines for training different modules. Furthermore, we introduce TableVisBench, a new benchmark with 800 challenging instances across 5 evaluation dimensions, to assess performance on this task. Experiments demonstrate that our pipeline, instantiated with different models, significantly outperforms baselines, highlighting its effective multi-modal reasoning, generation, and error correction capabilities.

Existing large audio-language models perceive the world as "mono"-a single stream of audio that ignores the critical spatial dimension ("where") required for universal audio scene analysis (ASA). To bridge this gap, we first introduce a hierarchical framework for audio scene analysis. Guided by this framework, we introduce a system that enables large audio-language models (LALMs) to understand and reason about the complex acoustic world. Our system endows LALMs with universal spatial understanding through four key innovations: (1) A scalable simulation pipeline that synthesizes high-quality First-Order-Ambisonics(FOA) data; (2) A unified model framework that integrates universal spatial encoding with a dense hybrid projection mechanism to bridge the modality gap; (3) A progressive training curriculum that evolves from representation alignment to reinforcement learning-based reasoning; and (4) A comprehensive benchmark for audio scene analysis (ASA) designed to rigorously evaluate atomic perception, relational integration, and cognitive reasoning capabilities, on which our model demonstrates comparatively strong capability for spatial understanding. Our work provides a clear pathway for leveraging the powerful reasoning abilities of LALMs towards holistic ASA, advancing from "mono" semantic recognition to spatial intelligence.

In this work, we propose Image-to-Image Rectified Flow Reformulation (I2I-RFR), a practical plug-in reformulation that recasts standard I2I regression networks as continuous-time transport models. While pixel-wise I2I regression is simple, stable, and easy to adapt across tasks, it often over-smooths ill-posed and multimodal targets, whereas generative alternatives often require additional components, task-specific tuning, and more complex training and inference pipelines. Our method augments the backbone input by channel-wise concatenation with a noise-corrupted version of the ground-truth target and optimizes a simple t-reweighted pixel loss. This objective admits a rectified-flow interpretation via an induced velocity field, enabling ODE-based progressive refinement at inference time while largely preserving the standard supervised training pipeline. In most cases, adopting I2I-RFR requires only expanding the input channels, and inference can be performed with a few explicit solver steps (e.g., 3 steps) without distillation. Extensive experiments across multiple image-to-image translation and video restoration tasks show that I2I-RFR generally improves performance across a wide range of tasks and backbones, with particularly clear gains in perceptual quality and detail preservation. Overall, I2I-RFR provides a lightweight way to incorporate continuous-time refinement into conventional I2I models without requiring a heavy generative pipeline.

We present Qwen-Image, an image generation foundation model in the Qwen series that achieves significant advances in complex text rendering and precise image editing. To address the challenges of complex text rendering, we design a comprehensive data pipeline that includes large-scale data collection, filtering, annotation, synthesis, and balancing. Moreover, we adopt a progressive training strategy that starts with non-text-to-text rendering, evolves from simple to complex textual inputs, and gradually scales up to paragraph-level descriptions. This curriculum learning approach substantially enhances the model's native text rendering capabilities. As a result, Qwen-Image not only performs exceptionally well in alphabetic languages such as English, but also achieves remarkable progress on more challenging logographic languages like Chinese. To enhance image editing consistency, we introduce an improved multi-task training paradigm that incorporates not only traditional text-to-image (T2I) and text-image-to-image (TI2I) tasks but also image-to-image (I2I) reconstruction, effectively aligning the latent representations between Qwen2.5-VL and MMDiT. Furthermore, we separately feed the original image into Qwen2.5-VL and the VAE encoder to obtain semantic and reconstructive representations, respectively. This dual-encoding mechanism enables the editing module to strike a balance between preserving semantic consistency and maintaining visual fidelity. Qwen-Image achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating its strong capabilities in both image generation and editing across multiple benchmarks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate enhanced capabilities and reliability by reasoning more, evolving from Chain-of-Thought prompting to product-level solutions like OpenAI o1. Despite various efforts to improve LLM reasoning, high-quality long-chain reasoning data and optimized training pipelines still remain inadequately explored in vision-language tasks. In this paper, we present Insight-V, an early effort to 1) scalably produce long and robust reasoning data for complex multi-modal tasks, and 2) an effective training pipeline to enhance the reasoning capabilities of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs). Specifically, to create long and structured reasoning data without human labor, we design a two-step pipeline with a progressive strategy to generate sufficiently long and diverse reasoning paths and a multi-granularity assessment method to ensure data quality. We observe that directly supervising MLLMs with such long and complex reasoning data will not yield ideal reasoning ability. To tackle this problem, we design a multi-agent system consisting of a reasoning agent dedicated to performing long-chain reasoning and a summary agent trained to judge and summarize reasoning results. We further incorporate an iterative DPO algorithm to enhance the reasoning agent's generation stability and quality. Based on the popular LLaVA-NeXT model and our stronger base MLLM, we demonstrate significant performance gains across challenging multi-modal benchmarks requiring visual reasoning. Benefiting from our multi-agent system, Insight-V can also easily maintain or improve performance on perception-focused multi-modal tasks.

Despite the remarkable generation quality of video Diffusion Transformer (DiT) models, their practical deployment is severely hindered by extensive computational requirements. This inefficiency stems from two key challenges: the quadratic complexity of self-attention with respect to token length and the multi-step nature of diffusion models. To address these limitations, we present Jenga, a novel inference pipeline that combines dynamic attention carving with progressive resolution generation. Our approach leverages two key insights: (1) early denoising steps do not require high-resolution latents, and (2) later steps do not require dense attention. Jenga introduces a block-wise attention mechanism that dynamically selects relevant token interactions using 3D space-filling curves, alongside a progressive resolution strategy that gradually increases latent resolution during generation. Experimental results demonstrate that Jenga achieves substantial speedups across multiple state-of-the-art video diffusion models while maintaining comparable generation quality (8.83times speedup with 0.01\% performance drop on VBench). As a plug-and-play solution, Jenga enables practical, high-quality video generation on modern hardware by reducing inference time from minutes to seconds -- without requiring model retraining. Code: https://github.com/dvlab-research/Jenga

This paper presents a general scheme for enhancing the convergence and performance of DETR (DEtection TRansformer). We investigate the slow convergence problem in transformers from a new perspective, suggesting that it arises from the self-attention that introduces no structural bias over inputs. To address this issue, we explore incorporating position relation prior as attention bias to augment object detection, following the verification of its statistical significance using a proposed quantitative macroscopic correlation (MC) metric. Our approach, termed Relation-DETR, introduces an encoder to construct position relation embeddings for progressive attention refinement, which further extends the traditional streaming pipeline of DETR into a contrastive relation pipeline to address the conflicts between non-duplicate predictions and positive supervision. Extensive experiments on both generic and task-specific datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Under the same configurations, Relation-DETR achieves a significant improvement (+2.0% AP compared to DINO), state-of-the-art performance (51.7% AP for 1x and 52.1% AP for 2x settings), and a remarkably faster convergence speed (over 40% AP with only 2 training epochs) than existing DETR detectors on COCO val2017. Moreover, the proposed relation encoder serves as a universal plug-in-and-play component, bringing clear improvements for theoretically any DETR-like methods. Furthermore, we introduce a class-agnostic detection dataset, SA-Det-100k. The experimental results on the dataset illustrate that the proposed explicit position relation achieves a clear improvement of 1.3% AP, highlighting its potential towards universal object detection. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/xiuqhou/Relation-DETR.

Effective and efficient access to relevant information is essential for disaster management. However, no retrieval model is specialized for disaster management, and existing general-domain models fail to handle the varied search intents inherent to disaster management scenarios, resulting in inconsistent and unreliable performance. To this end, we introduce DMRetriever, the first series of dense retrieval models (33M to 7.6B) tailored for this domain. It is trained through a novel three-stage framework of bidirectional attention adaptation, unsupervised contrastive pre-training, and difficulty-aware progressive instruction fine-tuning, using high-quality data generated through an advanced data refinement pipeline. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that DMRetriever achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across all six search intents at every model scale. Moreover, DMRetriever is highly parameter-efficient, with 596M model outperforming baselines over 13.3 X larger and 33M model exceeding baselines with only 7.6% of their parameters. All codes, data, and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/KaiYin97/DMRETRIEVER

Realistic digital garment modeling remains a labor-intensive task due to the intricate process of translating 2D sewing patterns into high-fidelity, simulation-ready 3D garments. We introduce GarmageNet, a unified generative framework that automates the creation of 2D sewing patterns, the construction of sewing relationships, and the synthesis of 3D garment initializations compatible with physics-based simulation. Central to our approach is Garmage, a novel garment representation that encodes each panel as a structured geometry image, effectively bridging the semantic and geometric gap between 2D structural patterns and 3D garment shapes. GarmageNet employs a latent diffusion transformer to synthesize panel-wise geometry images and integrates GarmageJigsaw, a neural module for predicting point-to-point sewing connections along panel contours. To support training and evaluation, we build GarmageSet, a large-scale dataset comprising over 10,000 professionally designed garments with detailed structural and style annotations. Our method demonstrates versatility and efficacy across multiple application scenarios, including scalable garment generation from multi-modal design concepts (text prompts, sketches, photographs), automatic modeling from raw flat sewing patterns, pattern recovery from unstructured point clouds, and progressive garment editing using conventional instructions-laying the foundation for fully automated, production-ready pipelines in digital fashion. Project page: https://style3d.github.io/garmagenet.

Scaling up deep neural network capacity has been known as an effective approach to improving model quality for several different machine learning tasks. In many cases, increasing model capacity beyond the memory limit of a single accelerator has required developing special algorithms or infrastructure. These solutions are often architecture-specific and do not transfer to other tasks. To address the need for efficient and task-independent model parallelism, we introduce GPipe, a pipeline parallelism library that allows scaling any network that can be expressed as a sequence of layers. By pipelining different sub-sequences of layers on separate accelerators, GPipe provides the flexibility of scaling a variety of different networks to gigantic sizes efficiently. Moreover, GPipe utilizes a novel batch-splitting pipelining algorithm, resulting in almost linear speedup when a model is partitioned across multiple accelerators. We demonstrate the advantages of GPipe by training large-scale neural networks on two different tasks with distinct network architectures: (i) Image Classification: We train a 557-million-parameter AmoebaNet model and attain a top-1 accuracy of 84.4% on ImageNet-2012, (ii) Multilingual Neural Machine Translation: We train a single 6-billion-parameter, 128-layer Transformer model on a corpus spanning over 100 languages and achieve better quality than all bilingual models.

Model parallelism has become a necessity for training modern large-scale deep language models. In this work, we identify a new and orthogonal dimension from existing model parallel approaches: it is possible to perform pipeline parallelism within a single training sequence for Transformer-based language models thanks to its autoregressive property. This enables a more fine-grained pipeline compared with previous work. With this key idea, we design TeraPipe, a high-performance token-level pipeline parallel algorithm for synchronous model-parallel training of Transformer-based language models. We develop a novel dynamic programming-based algorithm to calculate the optimal pipelining execution scheme given a specific model and cluster configuration. We show that TeraPipe can speed up the training by 5.0x for the largest GPT-3 model with 175 billion parameters on an AWS cluster with 48 p3.16xlarge instances compared with state-of-the-art model-parallel methods. The code for reproduction can be found at https://github.com/zhuohan123/terapipe

Pipeline parallelism is one of the key components for large-scale distributed training, yet its efficiency suffers from pipeline bubbles which were deemed inevitable. In this work, we introduce a scheduling strategy that, to our knowledge, is the first to successfully achieve zero pipeline bubbles under synchronous training semantics. The key idea behind this improvement is to split the backward computation into two parts, one that computes gradient for the input and another that computes for the parameters. Based on this idea, we handcraft novel pipeline schedules that significantly outperform the baseline methods. We further develop an algorithm that automatically finds an optimal schedule based on specific model configuration and memory limit. Additionally, to truly achieve zero bubble, we introduce a novel technique to bypass synchronizations during the optimizer step. Experimental evaluations show that our method outperforms the 1F1B schedule up to 23% in throughput under a similar memory limit. This number can be further pushed to 31% when the memory constraint is relaxed. We believe our results mark a major step forward in harnessing the true potential of pipeline parallelism. We open sourced our implementation based on the popular Megatron-LM repository on https://github.com/sail-sg/zero-bubble-pipeline-parallelism.

Learning to solve complex sequences of tasks--while both leveraging transfer and avoiding catastrophic forgetting--remains a key obstacle to achieving human-level intelligence. The progressive networks approach represents a step forward in this direction: they are immune to forgetting and can leverage prior knowledge via lateral connections to previously learned features. We evaluate this architecture extensively on a wide variety of reinforcement learning tasks (Atari and 3D maze games), and show that it outperforms common baselines based on pretraining and finetuning. Using a novel sensitivity measure, we demonstrate that transfer occurs at both low-level sensory and high-level control layers of the learned policy.

Text-to-3D generation is to craft a 3D object according to a natural language description. This can significantly reduce the workload for manually designing 3D models and provide a more natural way of interaction for users. However, this problem remains challenging in recovering the fine-grained details effectively and optimizing a large-size 3D output efficiently. Inspired by the success of progressive learning, we propose a Multi-Scale Triplane Network (MTN) and a new progressive learning strategy. As the name implies, the Multi-Scale Triplane Network consists of four triplanes transitioning from low to high resolution. The low-resolution triplane could serve as an initial shape for the high-resolution ones, easing the optimization difficulty. To further enable the fine-grained details, we also introduce the progressive learning strategy, which explicitly demands the network to shift its focus of attention from simple coarse-grained patterns to difficult fine-grained patterns. Our experiment verifies that the proposed method performs favorably against existing methods. For even the most challenging descriptions, where most existing methods struggle to produce a viable shape, our proposed method consistently delivers. We aspire for our work to pave the way for automatic 3D prototyping via natural language descriptions.

The transition to hydrogen powered transportation requires regionally tailored yet scalable infrastructure planning. This study presents the first Texas specific, multi-period mixed integer optimization model for hydrogen transportation from 2025 to 2050, addressing challenges in infrastructure phasing, asset coordination, and multimodal logistics. The framework introduces three innovations: (1) phased deployment with delayed investment constraints, (2) dynamic modeling of fleet aging and replacement, and (3) a clustering-based hub structure enabling adaptive two-stage hydrogen delivery. Simulations show pipeline deployment supports up to 94.8% of hydrogen flow by 2050 under high demand, reducing transport costs by 23% compared to vehicle-based systems. However, one-year construction delays reduce pipeline coverage by over 60%, shifting reliance to costlier road transport. While the study focuses on Texas, its modular design and adaptable inputs apply to other regions. It provides a tool for policy makers and stakeholders to manage hydrogen transitions under logistical and economic constraints.

Knowledge distillation is an effective way to transfer knowledge from a strong teacher to an efficient student model. Ideally, we expect the better the teacher is, the better the student. However, this expectation does not always come true. It is common that a better teacher model results in a bad student via distillation due to the nonnegligible gap between teacher and student. To bridge the gap, we propose PROD, a PROgressive Distillation method, for dense retrieval. PROD consists of a teacher progressive distillation and a data progressive distillation to gradually improve the student. We conduct extensive experiments on five widely-used benchmarks, MS MARCO Passage, TREC Passage 19, TREC Document 19, MS MARCO Document and Natural Questions, where PROD achieves the state-of-the-art within the distillation methods for dense retrieval. The code and models will be released.

Large language models (LLMs), while driving a new wave of interactive AI applications across numerous domains, suffer from high inference costs and heavy cloud dependency. Motivated by the redundancy phenomenon in linguistics, we propose a progressive inference paradigm over cloud and edge, i.e., firstly generating the sketch of the answer by LLMs at cloud, and then conducting parallel extension to fill in details by small models (SLMs) at edge. Progressive inference offers potential benefits to improve throughput and reduce inference latency while facing key implementation challenges, including decreased response quality from SLMs, a tradeoff between the brevity and comprehensiveness of sketches, as well as increased latency caused by network transmission and edge inference. In this work, we propose and implement PICE, an LLM serving system with semantic-level cloud-edge collaboration, enhancing inference throughput and quality through dynamic inference task scheduling, ensemble learning, and parallel edge inference. Extensive testbed experiments illustrate that our approach achieves 1.5-2times throughput enhancement and up to 43% latency reduction, while also potentially enhancing the quality compared to SOTA systems.

Diffusion models have revolutionized text-to-image generation, but their real-world applications are hampered by the extensive time needed for hundreds of diffusion steps. Although progressive distillation has been proposed to speed up diffusion sampling to 2-8 steps, it still falls short in one-step generation, and necessitates training multiple student models, which is highly parameter-extensive and time-consuming. To overcome these limitations, we introduce High-frequency-Promoting Adaptation (HiPA), a parameter-efficient approach to enable one-step text-to-image diffusion. Grounded in the insight that high-frequency information is essential but highly lacking in one-step diffusion, HiPA focuses on training one-step, low-rank adaptors to specifically enhance the under-represented high-frequency abilities of advanced diffusion models. The learned adaptors empower these diffusion models to generate high-quality images in just a single step. Compared with progressive distillation, HiPA achieves much better performance in one-step text-to-image generation (37.3 rightarrow 23.8 in FID-5k on MS-COCO 2017) and 28.6x training speed-up (108.8 rightarrow 3.8 A100 GPU days), requiring only 0.04% training parameters (7,740 million rightarrow 3.3 million). We also demonstrate HiPA's effectiveness in text-guided image editing, inpainting and super-resolution tasks, where our adapted models consistently deliver high-quality outputs in just one diffusion step. The source code will be released.

Diffusion models have emerged as dominant performers for image generation. To support training large diffusion models, this paper studies pipeline parallel training of diffusion models and proposes DiffusionPipe, a synchronous pipeline training system that advocates innovative pipeline bubble filling technique, catering to structural characteristics of diffusion models. State-of-the-art diffusion models typically include trainable (the backbone) and non-trainable (e.g., frozen input encoders) parts. We first unify optimal stage partitioning and pipeline scheduling of single and multiple backbones in representative diffusion models with a dynamic programming approach. We then propose to fill the computation of non-trainable model parts into idle periods of the pipeline training of the backbones by an efficient greedy algorithm, thus achieving high training throughput. Extensive experiments show that DiffusionPipe can achieve up to 1.41x speedup over pipeline parallel methods and 1.28x speedup over data parallel training on popular diffusion models.

Data and pipeline parallelism are ubiquitous for training of Large Language Models (LLM) on distributed nodes. Driven by the need for cost-effective training, recent work explores efficient communication arrangement for end to end training. Motivated by LLM's resistance to layer skipping and layer reordering, in this paper, we explore stage (several consecutive layers) skipping in pipeline training, and challenge the conventional practice of sequential pipeline execution. We derive convergence and throughput constraints (guidelines) for pipelining with skipping and swapping pipeline stages. Based on these constraints, we propose SkipPipe, the first partial pipeline framework to reduce the end-to-end training time for LLMs while preserving the convergence. The core of SkipPipe is a path scheduling algorithm that optimizes the paths for individual microbatches and reduces idle time (due to microbatch collisions) on the distributed nodes, complying with the given stage skipping ratio. We extensively evaluate SkipPipe on LLaMa models from 500M to 8B parameters on up to 20 nodes. Our results show that SkipPipe reduces training iteration time by up to 55% compared to full pipeline. Our partial pipeline training also improves resistance to layer omission during inference, experiencing a drop in perplexity of only 7% when running only half the model. Our code is available at https://github.com/gensyn-ai/skippipe.

Environments are the bottleneck for self-improving agents. Current terminal benchmarks were built for evaluation, not training; reinforcement learning requires a scalable pipeline, not just a dataset. We introduce Endless Terminals, a fully autonomous pipeline that procedurally generates terminal-use tasks without human annotation. The pipeline has four stages: generating diverse task descriptions, building and validating containerized environments, producing completion tests, and filtering for solvability. From this pipeline we obtain 3255 tasks spanning file operations, log management, data processing, scripting, and database operations. We train agents using vanilla PPO with binary episode level rewards and a minimal interaction loop: no retrieval, multi-agent coordination, or specialized tools. Despite this simplicity, models trained on Endless Terminals show substantial gains: on our held-out dev set, Llama-3.2-3B improves from 4.0% to 18.2%, Qwen2.5-7B from 10.7% to 53.3%, and Qwen3-8B-openthinker-sft from 42.6% to 59.0%. These improvements transfer to human-curated benchmarks: models trained on Endless Terminals show substantial gains on held out human curated benchmarks: on TerminalBench 2.0, Llama-3.2-3B improves from 0.0% to 2.2%, Qwen2.5-7B from 2.2% to 3.4%, and Qwen3-8B-openthinker-sft from 1.1% to 6.7%, in each case outperforming alternative approaches including models with more complex agentic scaffolds. These results demonstrate that simple RL succeeds when environments scale.

Envision an AI capable of functioning in human-like settings, moving beyond mere observation to actively understand, anticipate, and proactively respond to unfolding events. Towards this vision, we focus on the innovative task where, given ego-streaming video input, an assistant proactively answers diverse, evolving questions at the opportune moment, while maintaining synchronized perception and reasoning. This task embodies three key properties: (1) Proactive Coherence, (2) Just-in-Time Responsiveness, and (3) Synchronized Efficiency. To evaluate and address these properties, we first introduce ESTP-Bench (Ego Streaming Proactive Benchmark) alongside the ESTP-F1 metric-a novel framework designed for their rigorous assessment. Secondly, we propose a comprehensive technical pipeline to enable models to tackle this challenging task. This pipeline comprises: (1) a data engine, (2) a multi-stage training strategy, and (3) a proactive dynamic compression technique. Our proposed model effectively addresses these critical properties while outperforming multiple baselines across diverse online and offline benchmarks. Project Page:https://zhangyl4.github.io/publications/eyes-wide-open/

With the increasing scale of models, the need for efficient distributed training has become increasingly urgent. Recently, many synchronous pipeline parallelism approaches have been proposed to improve training throughput. However, these approaches still suffer from two major issues, i.e., pipeline bubbles caused by periodic flushing and extra communication due to the increasing number of pipeline stages. To this end, we propose BitPipe, a bidirectional interleaved pipeline parallelism for accelerating large models training. Specifically, a hybrid scheme of fusing interleaved pipelines with bidirectional pipelines is proposed to reduce the computational time of each single micro-batch and multiply the number of devices executing simultaneously. A V-shaped schedule with eager gradient synchronization is introduced to reduce and overlap the communication between devices. Experiments conducted on up to 32 GPUs show that BitPipe improves the training throughput of GPT-style and BERT-style models by 1.05x-1.28x compared to the state-of-the-art synchronous approaches. The code of our implementation is available at https://github.com/wuhouming/BitPipe.

PipeDream is a Deep Neural Network(DNN) training system for GPUs that parallelizes computation by pipelining execution across multiple machines. Its pipeline parallel computing model avoids the slowdowns faced by data-parallel training when large models and/or limited network bandwidth induce high communication-to-computation ratios. PipeDream reduces communication by up to 95% for large DNNs relative to data-parallel training, and allows perfect overlap of communication and computation. PipeDream keeps all available GPUs productive by systematically partitioning DNN layers among them to balance work and minimize communication, versions model parameters for backward pass correctness, and schedules the forward and backward passes of different inputs in round-robin fashion to optimize "time to target accuracy". Experiments with five different DNNs on two different clusters show that PipeDream is up to 5x faster in time-to-accuracy compared to data-parallel training.