University of Bristol
Abstract:Accurate channel state information (CSI) is essential for reliable multiuser MIMO operation. In 5G NR, reciprocity-based beamforming via uplink Sounding Reference Signals (SRS) face resource and coverage constraints, motivating sparse non-uniform SRS allocation. Prior masked-autoencoder (MAE) approaches improve coverage but overfit to training masks and degrade under unseen distortions (e.g., additional masking, interference, clipping, non-Gaussian noise). We propose a diffusion-based channel inpainting framework that integrates system-model knowledge at inference via a likelihood-gradient term, enabling a single trained model to adapt across mismatched conditions. On standardized CDL channels, the score-based diffusion variant consistently outperforms a UNet score-model baseline and the one-step MAE under distribution shift, with improvements up to 14 dB NMSE in challenging settings (e.g., Laplace noise, user interference), while retaining competitive accuracy under matched conditions. These results demonstrate that diffusion-guided inpainting is a robust and generalizable approach for super-capacity SRS design in 5G NR systems.
Abstract:We introduce Emu3.5, a large-scale multimodal world model that natively predicts the next state across vision and language. Emu3.5 is pre-trained end-to-end with a unified next-token prediction objective on a corpus of vision-language interleaved data containing over 10 trillion tokens, primarily derived from sequential frames and transcripts of internet videos. The model naturally accepts interleaved vision-language inputs and generates interleaved vision-language outputs. Emu3.5 is further post-trained with large-scale reinforcement learning to enhance multimodal reasoning and generation. To improve inference efficiency, we propose Discrete Diffusion Adaptation (DiDA), which converts token-by-token decoding into bidirectional parallel prediction, accelerating per-image inference by about 20x without sacrificing performance. Emu3.5 exhibits strong native multimodal capabilities, including long-horizon vision-language generation, any-to-image (X2I) generation, and complex text-rich image generation. It also exhibits generalizable world-modeling abilities, enabling spatiotemporally consistent world exploration and open-world embodied manipulation across diverse scenarios and tasks. For comparison, Emu3.5 achieves performance comparable to Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (Nano Banana) on image generation and editing tasks and demonstrates superior results on a suite of interleaved generation tasks. We open-source Emu3.5 at https://github.com/baaivision/Emu3.5 to support community research.
Abstract:We investigate the phenomenon of posterior collapse in variational autoencoders (VAEs) from the perspective of statistical physics, and reveal that it constitutes a phase transition governed jointly by data structure and model hyper-parameters. By analyzing the stability of the trivial solution associated with posterior collapse, we identify a critical hyper-parameter threshold. This critical boundary, separating meaningful latent inference from collapse, is characterized by a discontinuity in the KL divergence between the approximate posterior and the prior distribution. We validate this critical behavior on both synthetic and real-world datasets, confirming the existence of a phase transition. Our results demonstrate that posterior collapse is not merely an optimization failure, but rather an emerging phase transition arising from the interplay between data structure and variational constraints. This perspective offers new insights into the trainability and representational capacity of deep generative models.




Abstract:The global shift towards renewable energy presents unprecedented challenges for the electricity industry, making regulatory reasoning and compliance increasingly vital. Grid codes, the regulations governing grid operations, are complex and often lack automated interpretation solutions, which hinders industry expansion and undermines profitability for electricity companies. We introduce GridCodex, an end to end framework for grid code reasoning and compliance that leverages large language models and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Our framework advances conventional RAG workflows through multi stage query refinement and enhanced retrieval with RAPTOR. We validate the effectiveness of GridCodex with comprehensive benchmarks, including automated answer assessment across multiple dimensions and regulatory agencies. Experimental results showcase a 26.4% improvement in answer quality and more than a 10 fold increase in recall rate. An ablation study further examines the impact of base model selection.
Abstract:Expressive behaviors in robots are critical for effectively conveying their emotional states during interactions with humans. In this work, we present a framework that autonomously generates realistic and diverse robotic emotional expressions based on expert human demonstrations captured in Mixed Reality (MR). Our system enables experts to teleoperate a virtual robot from a first-person perspective, capturing their facial expressions, head movements, and upper-body gestures, and mapping these behaviors onto corresponding robotic components including eyes, ears, neck, and arms. Leveraging a flow-matching-based generative process, our model learns to produce coherent and varied behaviors in real-time in response to moving objects, conditioned explicitly on given emotional states. A preliminary test validated the effectiveness of our approach for generating autonomous expressions.
Abstract:We developed a pipeline for registering pre-surgery Magnetic Resonance (MR) images and post-resection Ultrasound (US) images. Our approach leverages unpaired style transfer using 3D CycleGAN to generate synthetic T1 images, thereby enhancing registration performance. Additionally, our registration process employs both affine and local deformable transformations for a coarse-to-fine registration. The results demonstrate that our approach improves the consistency between MR and US image pairs in most cases.
Abstract:This paper presents DDTracking, a novel deep generative framework for diffusion MRI tractography that formulates streamline propagation as a conditional denoising diffusion process. In DDTracking, we introduce a dual-pathway encoding network that jointly models local spatial encoding (capturing fine-scale structural details at each streamline point) and global temporal dependencies (ensuring long-range consistency across the entire streamline). Furthermore, we design a conditional diffusion model module, which leverages the learned local and global embeddings to predict streamline propagation orientations for tractography in an end-to-end trainable manner. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation across diverse, independently acquired dMRI datasets, including both synthetic and clinical data. Experiments on two well-established benchmarks with ground truth (ISMRM Challenge and TractoInferno) demonstrate that DDTracking largely outperforms current state-of-the-art tractography methods. Furthermore, our results highlight DDTracking's strong generalizability across heterogeneous datasets, spanning varying health conditions, age groups, imaging protocols, and scanner types. Collectively, DDTracking offers anatomically plausible and robust tractography, presenting a scalable, adaptable, and end-to-end learnable solution for broad dMRI applications. Code is available at: https://github.com/yishengpoxiao/DDtracking.git




Abstract:Recommender systems are among the most impactful applications of artificial intelligence, serving as critical infrastructure connecting users, merchants, and platforms. However, most current industrial systems remain heavily reliant on historical co-occurrence patterns and log-fitting objectives, i.e., optimizing for past user interactions without explicitly modeling user intent. This log-fitting approach often leads to overfitting to narrow historical preferences, failing to capture users' evolving and latent interests. As a result, it reinforces filter bubbles and long-tail phenomena, ultimately harming user experience and threatening the sustainability of the whole recommendation ecosystem. To address these challenges, we rethink the overall design paradigm of recommender systems and propose RecGPT, a next-generation framework that places user intent at the center of the recommendation pipeline. By integrating large language models (LLMs) into key stages of user interest mining, item retrieval, and explanation generation, RecGPT transforms log-fitting recommendation into an intent-centric process. To effectively align general-purpose LLMs to the above domain-specific recommendation tasks at scale, RecGPT incorporates a multi-stage training paradigm, which integrates reasoning-enhanced pre-alignment and self-training evolution, guided by a Human-LLM cooperative judge system. Currently, RecGPT has been fully deployed on the Taobao App. Online experiments demonstrate that RecGPT achieves consistent performance gains across stakeholders: users benefit from increased content diversity and satisfaction, merchants and the platform gain greater exposure and conversions. These comprehensive improvement results across all stakeholders validates that LLM-driven, intent-centric design can foster a more sustainable and mutually beneficial recommendation ecosystem.
Abstract:Cinematography, the fundamental visual language of film, is essential for conveying narrative, emotion, and aesthetic quality. While recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate strong general visual understanding, their proficiency in comprehending the nuanced cinematic grammar embedded within individual shots remains largely unexplored and lacks robust evaluation. This critical gap limits both fine-grained visual comprehension and the precision of AI-assisted video generation. To address this, we introduce \textbf{ShotBench}, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for cinematic language understanding. It features over 3.5k expert-annotated QA pairs from images and video clips, meticulously curated from over 200 acclaimed (predominantly Oscar-nominated) films and spanning eight key cinematography dimensions. Our evaluation of 24 leading VLMs on ShotBench reveals their substantial limitations: even the top-performing model achieves less than 60\% average accuracy, particularly struggling with fine-grained visual cues and complex spatial reasoning. To catalyze advancement in this domain, we construct \textbf{ShotQA}, a large-scale multimodal dataset comprising approximately 70k cinematic QA pairs. Leveraging ShotQA, we develop \textbf{ShotVL} through supervised fine-tuning and Group Relative Policy Optimization. ShotVL significantly outperforms all existing open-source and proprietary models on ShotBench, establishing new \textbf{state-of-the-art} performance. We open-source our models, data, and code to foster rapid progress in this crucial area of AI-driven cinematic understanding and generation.




Abstract:This paper presents a general-purpose video super-resolution (VSR) method, dubbed VSR-HE, specifically designed to enhance the perceptual quality of compressed content. Targeting scenarios characterized by heavy compression, the method upscales low-resolution videos by a ratio of four, from 180p to 720p or from 270p to 1080p. VSR-HE adopts hierarchical encoding transformer blocks and has been sophisticatedly optimized to eliminate a wide range of compression artifacts commonly introduced by H.265/HEVC encoding across various quantization parameter (QP) levels. To ensure robustness and generalization, the model is trained and evaluated under diverse compression settings, allowing it to effectively restore fine-grained details and preserve visual fidelity. The proposed VSR-HE has been officially submitted to the ICME 2025 Grand Challenge on VSR for Video Conferencing (Team BVI-VSR), under both the Track 1 (General-Purpose Real-World Video Content) and Track 2 (Talking Head Videos).