Rethinking the Personalized Relaxed Initialization in the Federated Learning: Consistency and Generalization

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed paradigm that coordinates massive local clients to collaboratively train a global model via stage-wise local training processes on the heterogeneous dataset. Previous works have implicitly studied that FL suffers from the ``client-drift'' problem, which is caused by the inconsistent optimum across local clients. However, till now it still lacks solid theoretical analysis to explain the impact of this local inconsistency. To alleviate the negative impact of ``client drift'' and explore its substance in FL, in this paper, we first propose an efficient FL algorithm FedInit, which allows employing the personalized relaxed initialization state at the beginning of each local training stage. Specifically, FedInit initializes the local state by moving away from the current global state towards the reverse direction of the latest local state. Moreover, to further understand how inconsistency disrupts performance in FL, we introduce the excess risk analysis and study the divergence term to investigate the test error in FL. Our studies show that optimization error is not sensitive to this local inconsistency, while it mainly affects the generalization error bound. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate its efficiency. The proposed FedInit method could achieve comparable results compared to several advanced benchmarks without any additional training or communication costs. Meanwhile, the stage-wise personalized relaxed initialization could also be incorporated into several current advanced algorithms to achieve higher generalization performance in the FL paradigm.

FORGE:Fine-grained Multimodal Evaluation for Manufacturing Scenarios

The manufacturing sector is increasingly adopting Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to transition from simple perception to autonomous execution, yet current evaluations fail to reflect the rigorous demands of real-world manufacturing environments. Progress is hindered by data scarcity and a lack of fine-grained domain semantics in existing datasets. To bridge this gap, we introduce FORGE. Wefirst construct a high-quality multimodal dataset that combines real-world 2D images and 3D point clouds, annotated with fine-grained domain semantics (e.g., exact model numbers). We then evaluate 18 state-of-the-art MLLMs across three manufacturing tasks, namely workpiece verification, structural surface inspection, and assembly verification, revealing significant performance gaps. Counter to conventional understanding, the bottleneck analysis shows that visual grounding is not the primary limiting factor. Instead, insufficient domain-specific knowledge is the key bottleneck, setting a clear direction for future research. Beyond evaluation, we show that our structured annotations can serve as an actionable training resource: supervised fine-tuning of a compact 3B-parameter model on our data yields up to 90.8% relative improvement in accuracy on held-out manufacturing scenarios, providing preliminary evidence for a practical pathway toward domain-adapted manufacturing MLLMs. The code and datasets are available at https://ai4manufacturing.github.io/forge-web.

Evolution of Video Generative Foundations

The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) has revolutionized video generation, enabling systems ranging from proprietary pioneers like OpenAI's Sora, Google's Veo3, and Bytedance's Seedance to powerful open-source contenders like Wan and HunyuanVideo to synthesize temporally coherent and semantically rich videos. These advancements pave the way for building "world models" that simulate real-world dynamics, with applications spanning entertainment, education, and virtual reality. However, existing reviews on video generation often focus on narrow technical fields, e.g., Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and diffusion models, or specific tasks (e. g., video editing), lacking a comprehensive perspective on the field's evolution, especially regarding Auto-Regressive (AR) models and integration of multimodal information. To address these gaps, this survey firstly provides a systematic review of the development of video generation technology, tracing its evolution from early GANs to dominant diffusion models, and further to emerging AR-based and multimodal techniques. We conduct an in-depth analysis of the foundational principles, key advancements, and comparative strengths/limitations. Then, we explore emerging trends in multimodal video generation, emphasizing the integration of diverse data types to enhance contextual awareness. Finally, by bridging historical developments and contemporary innovations, this survey offers insights to guide future research in video generation and its applications, including virtual/augmented reality, personalized education, autonomous driving simulations, digital entertainment, and advanced world models, in this rapidly evolving field. For more details, please refer to the project at https://github.com/sjtuplayer/Awesome-Video-Foundations.

VideoTIR: Accurate Understanding for Long Videos with Efficient Tool-Integrated Reasoning

Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often suffer from hallucinations in long video understanding (LVU), primarily due to the imbalance between textual and visual tokens. Observing that MLLMs handle short visual inputs well, recent LVU works alleviate hallucinations by automatically parsing the vast visual data into manageable segments that can be effectively processed by MLLMs. SFT-based tool-calling methods can serve this purpose, but they typically require vast amounts of fine-grained, high-quality data and suffer from constrained tool-calling trajectories. We propose a novel VideoTIR that leverages Reinforcement Learning (RL) to encourage proper usage of comprehensive multi-level toolkits for efficient long video understanding. VideoTIR explores both Zero-RL and SFT cold-starting to enable MLLMs to retrieve and focus on meaningful video segments/images/regions, enhancing long video understanding both accurately and efficiently. To reduce redundant tool-calling, we propose Toolkit Action Grouped Policy Optimization (TAGPO), which enhances the efficiency of the calling process through stepwise reward assignment and reuse of failed rollouts. Additionally, we develop a sandbox-based trajectory synthesis framework to generate high-quality trajectories data. Extensive experiments on three long-video QA benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method.

PSDesigner: Automated Graphic Design with a Human-Like Creative Workflow

Graphic design is a creative and innovative process that plays a crucial role in applications such as e-commerce and advertising. However, developing an automated design system that can faithfully translate user intentions into editable design files remains an open challenge. Although recent studies have leveraged powerful text-to-image models and MLLMs to assist graphic design, they typically simplify professional workflows, resulting in limited flexibility and intuitiveness. To address these limitations, we propose PSDesigner, an automated graphic design system that emulates the creative workflow of human designers. Building upon multiple specialized components, PSDesigner collects theme-related assets based on user instructions, and autonomously infers and executes tool calls to manipulate design files, such as integrating new assets or refining inferior elements. To endow the system with strong tool-use capabilities, we construct a design dataset, CreativePSD, which contains a large amount of high-quality PSD design files annotated with operation traces across a wide range of design scenarios and artistic styles, enabling models to learn expert design procedures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PSDesigner outperforms existing methods across diverse graphic design tasks, empowering non-specialists to conveniently create production-quality designs.

Heuristic-inspired Reasoning Priors Facilitate Data-Efficient Referring Object Detection

Most referring object detection (ROD) models, especially the modern grounding detectors, are designed for data-rich conditions, yet many practical deployments, such as robotics, augmented reality, and other specialized domains, would face severe label scarcity. In such regimes, end-to-end grounding detectors need to learn spatial and semantic structure from scratch, wasting precious samples. We ask a simple question: Can explicit reasoning priors help models learn more efficiently when data is scarce? To explore this, we first introduce a Data-efficient Referring Object Detection (De-ROD) task, which is a benchmark protocol for measuring ROD performance in low-data and few-shot settings. We then propose the HeROD (Heuristic-inspired ROD), a lightweight, model-agnostic framework that injects explicit, heuristic-inspired spatial and semantic reasoning priors, which are interpretable signals derived based on the referring phrase, into 3 stages of a modern DETR-style pipeline: proposal ranking, prediction fusion, and Hungarian matching. By biasing both training and inference toward plausible candidates, these priors promise to improve label efficiency and convergence performance. On RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg, HeROD consistently outperforms strong grounding baselines in scarce-label regimes. More broadly, our results suggest that integrating simple, interpretable reasoning priors provides a practical and extensible path toward better data-efficient vision-language understanding.

UniICL: Systematizing Unified Multimodal In-context Learning through a Capability-Oriented Taxonomy

In-context Learning enables training-free adaptation via demonstrations but remains highly sensitive to example selection and formatting. In unified multimodal models spanning understanding and generation, this sensitivity is exacerbated by cross-modal interference and varying cognitive demands. Consequently, In-context Learning efficacy is often non-monotonic and highly task-dependent. To diagnose these behaviors, we introduce a six-level capability-oriented taxonomy that categorizes the functional role of demonstrations from basic perception to high-order discernment. Guided by this cognitive framework, we construct UniICL-760K, a large-scale corpus featuring curated 8-shot In-context Learning episodes across 15 subtasks, alongside UniICL-Bench for rigorous, controlled evaluation. As an architectural intervention to stabilize few-shot adaptation, we propose the Context-Adaptive Prototype Modulator, a lightweight, plug-and-play module. Evaluations on UniICL-Bench show that our approach yields highly competitive unified results, outperforming larger-parameter multimodal large language model baselines on most understanding In-context Learning tasks. Data and code will be available soon at https://github.com/xuyicheng-zju/UniICL.

Multinoulli Extension: A Lossless Continuous Relaxation for Partition-Constrained Subset Selection

Identifying the most representative subset for a close-to-submodular objective while satisfying the predefined partition constraint is a fundamental task with numerous applications in machine learning. However, the existing distorted local-search methods are often hindered by their prohibitive query complexities and the rigid requirement for prior knowledge of difficult-to-obtain structural parameters. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel algorithm titled Multinoulli-SCG, which not only is parameter-free, but also can achieve the same approximation guarantees as the distorted local-search methods with significantly fewer function evaluations. More specifically, when the objective function is monotone $α$-weakly DR-submodular or $(γ,β)$-weakly submodular, our Multinoulli-SCG algorithm can attain a value of $(1-e^{-α})\text{OPT}-ε$ or $(\frac{γ^{2}(1-e^{-(β(1-γ)+γ^2)})}{β(1-γ)+γ^2})\text{OPT}-ε$ with only $O(1/ε^{2})$ function evaluations, where OPT denotes the optimal value. The cornerstone of our Multinoulli-SCG algorithm is an innovative continuous-relaxation framework named Multinoulli Extension(ME), which can effectively convert the discrete subset selection problem subject to partition constraints into a solvable continuous maximization focused on learning the optimal multinoulli priors across the concerned partition. In sharp contrast with the well-established multi-linear extension for submodular subset selection, a notable advantage of our proposed ME is its intrinsic capacity to provide a lossless rounding scheme for any set function. Furthermore, based on our proposed ME, we also present two novel online algorithms, namely, Multinoulli-OSCG and Multinoulli-OSGA, for the unexplored online subset selection problems over partition constraints.

TimeAPN: Adaptive Amplitude-Phase Non-Stationarity Normalization for Time Series Forecasting

Non-stationarity is a fundamental challenge in multivariate long-term time series forecasting, often manifested as rapid changes in amplitude and phase. These variations lead to severe distribution shifts and consequently degrade predictive performance. Existing normalization-based methods primarily rely on first- and second-order statistics, implicitly assuming that distributions evolve smoothly and overlooking fine-grained temporal dynamics. To address these limitations, we propose TimeAPN, an Adaptive Amplitude-Phase Non-Stationarity Normalization framework that explicitly models and predicts non-stationary factors from both the time and frequency domains. Specifically, TimeAPN first models the mean sequence jointly in the time and frequency domains, and then forecasts its evolution over future horizons. Meanwhile, phase information is extracted in the frequency domain, and the phase discrepancy between the predicted and ground-truth future sequences is explicitly modeled to capture temporal misalignment. Furthermore, TimeAPN incorporates amplitude information into an adaptive normalization mechanism, enabling the model to effectively account for abrupt fluctuations in signal energy. The predicted non-stationary factors are subsequently integrated with the backbone forecasting outputs through a collaborative de-normalization process to reconstruct the final non-stationary time series. The proposed framework is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated with various forecasting backbones. Extensive experiments on seven real-world multivariate datasets demonstrate that TimeAPN consistently improves long-term forecasting accuracy across multiple prediction horizons and outperforms state-of-the-art reversible normalization methods.

GlyphPrinter: Region-Grouped Direct Preference Optimization for Glyph-Accurate Visual Text Rendering

Generating accurate glyphs for visual text rendering is essential yet challenging. Existing methods typically enhance text rendering by training on a large amount of high-quality scene text images, but the limited coverage of glyph variations and excessive stylization often compromise glyph accuracy, especially for complex or out-of-domain characters. Some methods leverage reinforcement learning to alleviate this issue, yet their reward models usually depend on text recognition systems that are insensitive to fine-grained glyph errors, so images with incorrect glyphs may still receive high rewards. Inspired by Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), we propose GlyphPrinter, a preference-based text rendering method that eliminates reliance on explicit reward models. However, the standard DPO objective only models overall preference between two samples, which is insufficient for visual text rendering where glyph errors typically occur in localized regions. To address this issue, we construct the GlyphCorrector dataset with region-level glyph preference annotations and propose Region-Grouped DPO (R-GDPO), a region-based objective that optimizes inter- and intra-sample preferences over annotated regions, substantially enhancing glyph accuracy. Furthermore, we introduce Regional Reward Guidance, an inference strategy that samples from an optimal distribution with controllable glyph accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed GlyphPrinter outperforms existing methods in glyph accuracy while maintaining a favorable balance between stylization and precision.