ChineseSimpleVQA -- "See the World, Discover Knowledge": A Chinese Factuality Evaluation for Large Vision Language Models

The evaluation of factual accuracy in large vision language models (LVLMs) has lagged behind their rapid development, making it challenging to fully reflect these models' knowledge capacity and reliability. In this paper, we introduce the first factuality-based visual question-answering benchmark in Chinese, named ChineseSimpleVQA, aimed at assessing the visual factuality of LVLMs across 8 major topics and 56 subtopics. The key features of this benchmark include a focus on the Chinese language, diverse knowledge types, a multi-hop question construction, high-quality data, static consistency, and easy-to-evaluate through short answers. Moreover, we contribute a rigorous data construction pipeline and decouple the visual factuality into two parts: seeing the world (i.e., object recognition) and discovering knowledge. This decoupling allows us to analyze the capability boundaries and execution mechanisms of LVLMs. Subsequently, we evaluate 34 advanced open-source and closed-source models, revealing critical performance gaps within this field.

Latent Swap Joint Diffusion for Long-Form Audio Generation

Previous work on long-form audio generation using global-view diffusion or iterative generation demands significant training or inference costs. While recent advancements in multi-view joint diffusion for panoramic generation provide an efficient option, they struggle with spectrum generation with severe overlap distortions and high cross-view consistency costs. We initially explore this phenomenon through the connectivity inheritance of latent maps and uncover that averaging operations excessively smooth the high-frequency components of the latent map. To address these issues, we propose Swap Forward (SaFa), a frame-level latent swap framework that synchronizes multiple diffusions to produce a globally coherent long audio with more spectrum details in a forward-only manner. At its core, the bidirectional Self-Loop Latent Swap is applied between adjacent views, leveraging stepwise diffusion trajectory to adaptively enhance high-frequency components without disrupting low-frequency components. Furthermore, to ensure cross-view consistency, the unidirectional Reference-Guided Latent Swap is applied between the reference and the non-overlap regions of each subview during the early stages, providing centralized trajectory guidance. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that SaFa significantly outperforms existing joint diffusion methods and even training-based long audio generation models. Moreover, we find that it also adapts well to panoramic generation, achieving comparable state-of-the-art performance with greater efficiency and model generalizability. Project page is available at https://swapforward.github.io/.

Nearly Tight Bounds for Exploration in Streaming Multi-armed Bandits with Known Optimality Gap

We investigate the sample-memory-pass trade-offs for pure exploration in multi-pass streaming multi-armed bandits (MABs) with the *a priori* knowledge of the optimality gap $\Delta_{[2]}$. Here, and throughout, the optimality gap $\Delta_{[i]}$ is defined as the mean reward gap between the best and the $i$-th best arms. A recent line of results by Jin, Huang, Tang, and Xiao [ICML'21] and Assadi and Wang [COLT'24] have shown that if there is no known $\Delta_{[2]}$, a pass complexity of $\Theta(\log(1/\Delta_{[2]}))$ (up to $\log\log(1/\Delta_{[2]})$ terms) is necessary and sufficient to obtain the *worst-case optimal* sample complexity of $O(n/\Delta^{2}_{[2]})$ with a single-arm memory. However, our understanding of multi-pass algorithms with known $\Delta_{[2]}$ is still limited. Here, the key open problem is how many passes are required to achieve the complexity, i.e., $O( \sum_{i=2}^{n}1/\Delta^2_{[i]})$ arm pulls, with a sublinear memory size. In this work, we show that the ``right answer'' for the question is $\Theta(\log{n})$ passes (up to $\log\log{n}$ terms). We first present a lower bound, showing that any algorithm that finds the best arm with slightly sublinear memory -- a memory of $o({n}/{\text{polylog}({n})})$ arms -- and $O(\sum_{i=2}^{n}{1}/{\Delta^{2}_{[i]}}\cdot \log{(n)})$ arm pulls has to make $\Omega(\frac{\log{n}}{\log\log{n}})$ passes over the stream. We then show a nearly-matching algorithm that assuming the knowledge of $\Delta_{[2]}$, finds the best arm with $O( \sum_{i=2}^{n}1/\Delta^2_{[i]} \cdot \log{n})$ arm pulls and a *single arm* memory.

VL-Nav: Real-time Vision-Language Navigation with Spatial Reasoning

Vision-language navigation in unknown environments is crucial for mobile robots. In scenarios such as household assistance and rescue, mobile robots need to understand a human command, such as "find a person wearing black". We present a novel vision-language navigation (VL-Nav) system that integrates efficient spatial reasoning on low-power robots. Unlike prior methods that rely on a single image-level feature similarity to guide a robot, we introduce the heuristic-vision-language (HVL) spatial reasoning for goal point selection. It combines pixel-wise vision-language features and heuristic exploration to enable efficient navigation to human-instructed instances in various environments robustly. We deploy VL-Nav on a four-wheel mobile robot and conduct comprehensive navigation tasks in various environments of different scales and semantic complexities, indoors and outdoors. Remarkably, VL-Nav operates at a real-time frequency of 30 Hz with a Jetson Orin NX, highlighting its ability to conduct efficient vision-language navigation. Experimental results show that VL-Nav achieves an overall success rate of 86.3%, outperforming previous methods by 44.15%.

Balance Divergence for Knowledge Distillation

Knowledge distillation has been widely adopted in computer vision task processing, since it can effectively enhance the performance of lightweight student networks by leveraging the knowledge transferred from cumbersome teacher networks. Most existing knowledge distillation methods utilize Kullback-Leibler divergence to mimic the logit output probabilities between the teacher network and the student network. Nonetheless, these methods may neglect the negative parts of the teacher's ''dark knowledge'' because the divergence calculations may ignore the effect of the minute probabilities from the teacher's logit output. This deficiency may lead to suboptimal performance in logit mimicry during the distillation process and result in an imbalance of information acquired by the student network. In this paper, we investigate the impact of this imbalance and propose a novel method, named Balance Divergence Distillation. By introducing a compensatory operation using reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence, our method can improve the modeling of the extremely small values in the negative from the teacher and preserve the learning capacity for the positive. Furthermore, we test the impact of different temperature coefficients adjustments, which may conducted to further balance for knowledge transferring. We evaluate the proposed method on several computer vision tasks, including image classification and semantic segmentation. The evaluation results show that our method achieves an accuracy improvement of 1%~3% for lightweight students on both CIFAR-100 and ImageNet dataset, and a 4.55% improvement in mIoU for PSP-ResNet18 on the Cityscapes dataset. The experiments show that our method is a simple yet highly effective solution that can be smoothly applied to different knowledge distillation methods.

LPRnet: A self-supervised registration network for LiDAR and photogrammetric point clouds

LiDAR and photogrammetry are active and passive remote sensing techniques for point cloud acquisition, respectively, offering complementary advantages and heterogeneous. Due to the fundamental differences in sensing mechanisms, spatial distributions and coordinate systems, their point clouds exhibit significant discrepancies in density, precision, noise, and overlap. Coupled with the lack of ground truth for large-scale scenes, integrating the heterogeneous point clouds is a highly challenging task. This paper proposes a self-supervised registration network based on a masked autoencoder, focusing on heterogeneous LiDAR and photogrammetric point clouds. At its core, the method introduces a multi-scale masked training strategy to extract robust features from heterogeneous point clouds under self-supervision. To further enhance registration performance, a rotation-translation embedding module is designed to effectively capture the key features essential for accurate rigid transformations. Building upon the robust representations, a transformer-based architecture seamlessly integrates local and global features, fostering precise alignment across diverse point cloud datasets. The proposed method demonstrates strong feature extraction capabilities for both LiDAR and photogrammetric point clouds, addressing the challenges of acquiring ground truth at the scene level. Experiments conducted on two real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in solving heterogeneous point cloud registration problems.

Zero-1-to-G: Taming Pretrained 2D Diffusion Model for Direct 3D Generation

Recent advances in 2D image generation have achieved remarkable quality,largely driven by the capacity of diffusion models and the availability of large-scale datasets. However, direct 3D generation is still constrained by the scarcity and lower fidelity of 3D datasets. In this paper, we introduce Zero-1-to-G, a novel approach that addresses this problem by enabling direct single-view generation on Gaussian splats using pretrained 2D diffusion models. Our key insight is that Gaussian splats, a 3D representation, can be decomposed into multi-view images encoding different attributes. This reframes the challenging task of direct 3D generation within a 2D diffusion framework, allowing us to leverage the rich priors of pretrained 2D diffusion models. To incorporate 3D awareness, we introduce cross-view and cross-attribute attention layers, which capture complex correlations and enforce 3D consistency across generated splats. This makes Zero-1-to-G the first direct image-to-3D generative model to effectively utilize pretrained 2D diffusion priors, enabling efficient training and improved generalization to unseen objects. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and in-the-wild datasets demonstrate superior performance in 3D object generation, offering a new approach to high-quality 3D generation.

ProTracker: Probabilistic Integration for Robust and Accurate Point Tracking

In this paper, we propose ProTracker, a novel framework for robust and accurate long-term dense tracking of arbitrary points in videos. The key idea of our method is incorporating probabilistic integration to refine multiple predictions from both optical flow and semantic features for robust short-term and long-term tracking. Specifically, we integrate optical flow estimations in a probabilistic manner, producing smooth and accurate trajectories by maximizing the likelihood of each prediction. To effectively re-localize challenging points that disappear and reappear due to occlusion, we further incorporate long-term feature correspondence into our flow predictions for continuous trajectory generation. Extensive experiments show that ProTracker achieves the state-of-the-art performance among unsupervised and self-supervised approaches, and even outperforms supervised methods on several benchmarks. Our code and model will be publicly available upon publication.

FastCHGNet: Training one Universal Interatomic Potential to 1.5 Hours with 32 GPUs

Graph neural network universal interatomic potentials (GNN-UIPs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization and transfer capabilities in material discovery and property prediction. These models can accelerate molecular dynamics (MD) simulation by several orders of magnitude while maintaining \textit{ab initio} accuracy, making them a promising new paradigm in material simulations. One notable example is Crystal Hamiltonian Graph Neural Network (CHGNet), pretrained on the energies, forces, stresses, and magnetic moments from the MPtrj dataset, representing a state-of-the-art GNN-UIP model for charge-informed MD simulations. However, training the CHGNet model is time-consuming(8.3 days on one A100 GPU) for three reasons: (i) requiring multi-layer propagation to reach more distant atom information, (ii) requiring second-order derivatives calculation to finish weights updating and (iii) the implementation of reference CHGNet does not fully leverage the computational capabilities. This paper introduces FastCHGNet, an optimized CHGNet, with three contributions: Firstly, we design innovative Force/Stress Readout modules to decompose Force/Stress prediction. Secondly, we adopt massive optimizations such as kernel fusion, redundancy bypass, etc, to exploit GPU computation power sufficiently. Finally, we extend CHGNet to support multiple GPUs and propose a load-balancing technique to enhance GPU utilization. Numerical results show that FastCHGNet reduces memory footprint by a factor of 3.59. The final training time of FastCHGNet can be decreased to \textbf{1.53 hours} on 32 GPUs without sacrificing model accuracy.

iKap: Kinematics-aware Planning with Imperative Learning

Trajectory planning in robotics aims to generate collision-free pose sequences that can be reliably executed. Recently, vision-to-planning systems have garnered increasing attention for their efficiency and ability to interpret and adapt to surrounding environments. However, traditional modular systems suffer from increased latency and error propagation, while purely data-driven approaches often overlook the robot's kinematic constraints. This oversight leads to discrepancies between planned trajectories and those that are executable. To address these challenges, we propose iKap, a novel vision-to-planning system that integrates the robot's kinematic model directly into the learning pipeline. iKap employs a self-supervised learning approach and incorporates the state transition model within a differentiable bi-level optimization framework. This integration ensures the network learns collision-free waypoints while satisfying kinematic constraints, enabling gradient back-propagation for end-to-end training. Our experimental results demonstrate that iKap achieves higher success rates and reduced latency compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Besides the complete system, iKap offers a visual-to-planning network that seamlessly integrates kinematics into various controllers, providing a robust solution for robots navigating complex and dynamic environments.