HiTVideo: Hierarchical Tokenizers for Enhancing Text-to-Video Generation with Autoregressive Large Language Models

Text-to-video generation poses significant challenges due to the inherent complexity of video data, which spans both temporal and spatial dimensions. It introduces additional redundancy, abrupt variations, and a domain gap between language and vision tokens while generation. Addressing these challenges requires an effective video tokenizer that can efficiently encode video data while preserving essential semantic and spatiotemporal information, serving as a critical bridge between text and vision. Inspired by the observation in VQ-VAE-2 and workflows of traditional animation, we propose HiTVideo for text-to-video generation with hierarchical tokenizers. It utilizes a 3D causal VAE with a multi-layer discrete token framework, encoding video content into hierarchically structured codebooks. Higher layers capture semantic information with higher compression, while lower layers focus on fine-grained spatiotemporal details, striking a balance between compression efficiency and reconstruction quality. Our approach efficiently encodes longer video sequences (e.g., 8 seconds, 64 frames), reducing bits per pixel (bpp) by approximately 70\% compared to baseline tokenizers, while maintaining competitive reconstruction quality. We explore the trade-offs between compression and reconstruction, while emphasizing the advantages of high-compressed semantic tokens in text-to-video tasks. HiTVideo aims to address the potential limitations of existing video tokenizers in text-to-video generation tasks, striving for higher compression ratios and simplify LLMs modeling under language guidance, offering a scalable and promising framework for advancing text to video generation. Demo page: https://ziqinzhou66.github.io/project/HiTVideo.

Phi-4-Mini Technical Report: Compact yet Powerful Multimodal Language Models via Mixture-of-LoRAs

We introduce Phi-4-Mini and Phi-4-Multimodal, compact yet highly capable language and multimodal models. Phi-4-Mini is a 3.8-billion-parameter language model trained on high-quality web and synthetic data, significantly outperforming recent open-source models of similar size and matching the performance of models twice its size on math and coding tasks requiring complex reasoning. This achievement is driven by a carefully curated synthetic data recipe emphasizing high-quality math and coding datasets. Compared to its predecessor, Phi-3.5-Mini, Phi-4-Mini features an expanded vocabulary size of 200K tokens to better support multilingual applications, as well as group query attention for more efficient long-sequence generation. Phi-4-Multimodal is a multimodal model that integrates text, vision, and speech/audio input modalities into a single model. Its novel modality extension approach leverages LoRA adapters and modality-specific routers to allow multiple inference modes combining various modalities without interference. For example, it now ranks first in the OpenASR leaderboard to date, although the LoRA component of the speech/audio modality has just 460 million parameters. Phi-4-Multimodal supports scenarios involving (vision + language), (vision + speech), and (speech/audio) inputs, outperforming larger vision-language and speech-language models on a wide range of tasks. Additionally, we experiment to further train Phi-4-Mini to enhance its reasoning capabilities. Despite its compact 3.8-billion-parameter size, this experimental version achieves reasoning performance on par with or surpassing significantly larger models, including DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B.

Logic-RL: Unleashing LLM Reasoning with Rule-Based Reinforcement Learning

Inspired by the success of DeepSeek-R1, we explore the potential of rule-based reinforcement learning (RL) in large reasoning models. To analyze reasoning dynamics, we use synthetic logic puzzles as training data due to their controllable complexity and straightforward answer verification. We make some key technical contributions that lead to effective and stable RL training: a system prompt that emphasizes the thinking and answering process, a stringent format reward function that penalizes outputs for taking shortcuts, and a straightforward training recipe that achieves stable convergence. Our 7B model develops advanced reasoning skills-such as reflection, verification, and summarization-that are absent from the logic corpus. Remarkably, after training on just 5K logic problems, it demonstrates generalization abilities to the challenging math benchmarks AIME and AMC.

FloVD: Optical Flow Meets Video Diffusion Model for Enhanced Camera-Controlled Video Synthesis

This paper presents FloVD, a novel optical-flow-based video diffusion model for camera-controllable video generation. FloVD leverages optical flow maps to represent motions of the camera and moving objects. This approach offers two key benefits. Since optical flow can be directly estimated from videos, our approach allows for the use of arbitrary training videos without ground-truth camera parameters. Moreover, as background optical flow encodes 3D correlation across different viewpoints, our method enables detailed camera control by leveraging the background motion. To synthesize natural object motion while supporting detailed camera control, our framework adopts a two-stage video synthesis pipeline consisting of optical flow generation and flow-conditioned video synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over previous approaches in terms of accurate camera control and natural object motion synthesis.

MageBench: Bridging Large Multimodal Models to Agents

LMMs have shown impressive visual understanding capabilities, with the potential to be applied in agents, which demand strong reasoning and planning abilities. Nevertheless, existing benchmarks mostly assess their reasoning abilities in language part, where the chain-of-thought is entirely composed of text.We consider the scenario where visual signals are continuously updated and required along the decision making process. Such vision-in-the-chain reasoning paradigm is more aligned with the needs of multimodal agents, while being rarely evaluated. In this paper, we introduce MageBench, a reasoning capability oriented multimodal agent benchmark that, while having light-weight environments, poses significant reasoning challenges and holds substantial practical value. This benchmark currently includes three types of environments: WebUI, Sokoban, and Football, comprising a total of 483 different scenarios. It thoroughly validates the agent's knowledge and engineering capabilities, visual intelligence, and interaction skills. The results show that only a few product-level models are better than random acting, and all of them are far inferior to human-level. More specifically, we found current models severely lack the ability to modify their planning based on visual feedback, as well as visual imagination, interleaved image-text long context handling, and other abilities. We hope that our work will provide optimization directions for LMM from the perspective of being an agent. We release our code and data at https://github.com/microsoft/MageBench.

StableAnimator: High-Quality Identity-Preserving Human Image Animation

Current diffusion models for human image animation struggle to ensure identity (ID) consistency. This paper presents StableAnimator, the first end-to-end ID-preserving video diffusion framework, which synthesizes high-quality videos without any post-processing, conditioned on a reference image and a sequence of poses. Building upon a video diffusion model, StableAnimator contains carefully designed modules for both training and inference striving for identity consistency. In particular, StableAnimator begins by computing image and face embeddings with off-the-shelf extractors, respectively and face embeddings are further refined by interacting with image embeddings using a global content-aware Face Encoder. Then, StableAnimator introduces a novel distribution-aware ID Adapter that prevents interference caused by temporal layers while preserving ID via alignment. During inference, we propose a novel Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation-based optimization to further enhance the face quality. We demonstrate that solving the HJB equation can be integrated into the diffusion denoising process, and the resulting solution constrains the denoising path and thus benefits ID preservation. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show the effectiveness of StableAnimator both qualitatively and quantitatively.

LLM2CLIP: Powerful Language Model Unlocks Richer Visual Representation

CLIP is a foundational multimodal model that aligns image and text features into a shared space using contrastive learning on large-scale image-text pairs. Its strength lies in leveraging natural language as a rich supervisory signal. With the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs), we explore their potential to further enhance CLIP's multimodal representation learning. This work introduces a fine-tuning approach that integrates LLMs with the pretrained CLIP visual encoder, leveraging LLMs' advanced text understanding and open-world knowledge to improve CLIP's ability to process long and complex captions. To address the challenge of LLMs' autoregressive nature, we propose a caption-to-caption contrastive learning framework to enhance the discriminative power of their outputs. Our method achieves substantial performance gains on various downstream tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining LLMs with CLIP for enhanced multimodal learning.

REDUCIO! Generating 1024$\times$1024 Video within 16 Seconds using Extremely Compressed Motion Latents

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

LLM2CLIP: Powerful Language Model Unlock Richer Visual Representation

CLIP is one of the most important multimodal foundational models today. What powers CLIP's capabilities? The rich supervision signals provided by natural language, the carrier of human knowledge, shape a powerful cross-modal representation space. However, with the rapid advancements in large language models LLMs like GPT-4 and LLaMA, the boundaries of language comprehension and generation are continually being pushed. This raises an intriguing question: can the capabilities of LLMs be harnessed to further improve multimodal representation learning? The potential benefits of incorporating LLMs into CLIP are clear. LLMs' strong textual understanding can fundamentally improve CLIP's ability to handle image captions, drastically enhancing its ability to process long and complex texts, a well-known limitation of vanilla CLIP. Moreover, LLMs are trained on a vast corpus of text, possessing open-world knowledge. This allows them to expand on caption information during training, increasing the efficiency of the learning process. In this paper, we propose LLM2CLIP, a novel approach that embraces the power of LLMs to unlock CLIP's potential. By fine-tuning the LLM in the caption space with contrastive learning, we extract its textual capabilities into the output embeddings, significantly improving the output layer's textual discriminability. We then design an efficient training process where the fine-tuned LLM acts as a powerful teacher for CLIP's visual encoder. Thanks to the LLM's presence, we can now incorporate longer and more complex captions without being restricted by vanilla CLIP's text encoder's context window and ability limitations. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach brings substantial improvements in cross-modal tasks.

PF3plat: Pose-Free Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting

We consider the problem of novel view synthesis from unposed images in a single feed-forward. Our framework capitalizes on fast speed, scalability, and high-quality 3D reconstruction and view synthesis capabilities of 3DGS, where we further extend it to offer a practical solution that relaxes common assumptions such as dense image views, accurate camera poses, and substantial image overlaps. We achieve this through identifying and addressing unique challenges arising from the use of pixel-aligned 3DGS: misaligned 3D Gaussians across different views induce noisy or sparse gradients that destabilize training and hinder convergence, especially when above assumptions are not met. To mitigate this, we employ pre-trained monocular depth estimation and visual correspondence models to achieve coarse alignments of 3D Gaussians. We then introduce lightweight, learnable modules to refine depth and pose estimates from the coarse alignments, improving the quality of 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis. Furthermore, the refined estimates are leveraged to estimate geometry confidence scores, which assess the reliability of 3D Gaussian centers and condition the prediction of Gaussian parameters accordingly. Extensive evaluations on large-scale real-world datasets demonstrate that PF3plat sets a new state-of-the-art across all benchmarks, supported by comprehensive ablation studies validating our design choices.