Flow to the Mode: Mode-Seeking Diffusion Autoencoders for State-of-the-Art Image Tokenization

Since the advent of popular visual generation frameworks like VQGAN and latent diffusion models, state-of-the-art image generation systems have generally been two-stage systems that first tokenize or compress visual data into a lower-dimensional latent space before learning a generative model. Tokenizer training typically follows a standard recipe in which images are compressed and reconstructed subject to a combination of MSE, perceptual, and adversarial losses. Diffusion autoencoders have been proposed in prior work as a way to learn end-to-end perceptually-oriented image compression, but have not yet shown state-of-the-art performance on the competitive task of ImageNet-1K reconstruction. We propose FlowMo, a transformer-based diffusion autoencoder that achieves a new state-of-the-art for image tokenization at multiple compression rates without using convolutions, adversarial losses, spatially-aligned two-dimensional latent codes, or distilling from other tokenizers. Our key insight is that FlowMo training should be broken into a mode-matching pre-training stage and a mode-seeking post-training stage. In addition, we conduct extensive analyses and explore the training of generative models atop the FlowMo tokenizer. Our code and models will be available at http://kylesargent.github.io/flowmo .

BEHAVIOR Robot Suite: Streamlining Real-World Whole-Body Manipulation for Everyday Household Activities

Real-world household tasks present significant challenges for mobile manipulation robots. An analysis of existing robotics benchmarks reveals that successful task performance hinges on three key whole-body control capabilities: bimanual coordination, stable and precise navigation, and extensive end-effector reachability. Achieving these capabilities requires careful hardware design, but the resulting system complexity further complicates visuomotor policy learning. To address these challenges, we introduce the BEHAVIOR Robot Suite (BRS), a comprehensive framework for whole-body manipulation in diverse household tasks. Built on a bimanual, wheeled robot with a 4-DoF torso, BRS integrates a cost-effective whole-body teleoperation interface for data collection and a novel algorithm for learning whole-body visuomotor policies. We evaluate BRS on five challenging household tasks that not only emphasize the three core capabilities but also introduce additional complexities, such as long-range navigation, interaction with articulated and deformable objects, and manipulation in confined spaces. We believe that BRS's integrated robotic embodiment, data collection interface, and learning framework mark a significant step toward enabling real-world whole-body manipulation for everyday household tasks. BRS is open-sourced at https://behavior-robot-suite.github.io/

FluidNexus: 3D Fluid Reconstruction and Prediction from a Single Video

We study reconstructing and predicting 3D fluid appearance and velocity from a single video. Current methods require multi-view videos for fluid reconstruction. We present FluidNexus, a novel framework that bridges video generation and physics simulation to tackle this task. Our key insight is to synthesize multiple novel-view videos as references for reconstruction. FluidNexus consists of two key components: (1) a novel-view video synthesizer that combines frame-wise view synthesis with video diffusion refinement for generating realistic videos, and (2) a physics-integrated particle representation coupling differentiable simulation and rendering to simultaneously facilitate 3D fluid reconstruction and prediction. To evaluate our approach, we collect two new real-world fluid datasets featuring textured backgrounds and object interactions. Our method enables dynamic novel view synthesis, future prediction, and interaction simulation from a single fluid video. Project website: https://yuegao.me/FluidNexus.

Large-Scale AI in Telecom: Charting the Roadmap for Innovation, Scalability, and Enhanced Digital Experiences

This white paper discusses the role of large-scale AI in the telecommunications industry, with a specific focus on the potential of generative AI to revolutionize network functions and user experiences, especially in the context of 6G systems. It highlights the development and deployment of Large Telecom Models (LTMs), which are tailored AI models designed to address the complex challenges faced by modern telecom networks. The paper covers a wide range of topics, from the architecture and deployment strategies of LTMs to their applications in network management, resource allocation, and optimization. It also explores the regulatory, ethical, and standardization considerations for LTMs, offering insights into their future integration into telecom infrastructure. The goal is to provide a comprehensive roadmap for the adoption of LTMs to enhance scalability, performance, and user-centric innovation in telecom networks.

Why Is Spatial Reasoning Hard for VLMs? An Attention Mechanism Perspective on Focus Areas

Large Vision Language Models (VLMs) have long struggled with spatial reasoning tasks. Surprisingly, even simple spatial reasoning tasks, such as recognizing "under" or "behind" relationships between only two objects, pose significant challenges for current VLMs. In this work, we study the spatial reasoning challenge from the lens of mechanistic interpretability, diving into the model's internal states to examine the interactions between image and text tokens. By tracing attention distribution over the image through out intermediate layers, we observe that successful spatial reasoning correlates strongly with the model's ability to align its attention distribution with actual object locations, particularly differing between familiar and unfamiliar spatial relationships. Motivated by these findings, we propose ADAPTVIS based on inference-time confidence scores to sharpen the attention on highly relevant regions when confident, while smoothing and broadening the attention window to consider a wider context when confidence is lower. This training-free decoding method shows significant improvement (e.g., up to a 50 absolute point improvement) on spatial reasoning benchmarks such as WhatsUp and VSR with negligible cost. We make code and data publicly available for research purposes at https://github.com/shiqichen17/AdaptVis.

Predicate Hierarchies Improve Few-Shot State Classification

State classification of objects and their relations is core to many long-horizon tasks, particularly in robot planning and manipulation. However, the combinatorial explosion of possible object-predicate combinations, coupled with the need to adapt to novel real-world environments, makes it a desideratum for state classification models to generalize to novel queries with few examples. To this end, we propose PHIER, which leverages predicate hierarchies to generalize effectively in few-shot scenarios. PHIER uses an object-centric scene encoder, self-supervised losses that infer semantic relations between predicates, and a hyperbolic distance metric that captures hierarchical structure; it learns a structured latent space of image-predicate pairs that guides reasoning over state classification queries. We evaluate PHIER in the CALVIN and BEHAVIOR robotic environments and show that PHIER significantly outperforms existing methods in few-shot, out-of-distribution state classification, and demonstrates strong zero- and few-shot generalization from simulated to real-world tasks. Our results demonstrate that leveraging predicate hierarchies improves performance on state classification tasks with limited data.

ZeroHSI: Zero-Shot 4D Human-Scene Interaction by Video Generation

Human-scene interaction (HSI) generation is crucial for applications in embodied AI, virtual reality, and robotics. While existing methods can synthesize realistic human motions in 3D scenes and generate plausible human-object interactions, they heavily rely on datasets containing paired 3D scene and motion capture data, which are expensive and time-consuming to collect across diverse environments and interactions. We present ZeroHSI, a novel approach that enables zero-shot 4D human-scene interaction synthesis by integrating video generation and neural human rendering. Our key insight is to leverage the rich motion priors learned by state-of-the-art video generation models, which have been trained on vast amounts of natural human movements and interactions, and use differentiable rendering to reconstruct human-scene interactions. ZeroHSI can synthesize realistic human motions in both static scenes and environments with dynamic objects, without requiring any ground-truth motion data. We evaluate ZeroHSI on a curated dataset of different types of various indoor and outdoor scenes with different interaction prompts, demonstrating its ability to generate diverse and contextually appropriate human-scene interactions.

Birth and Death of a Rose

We study the problem of generating temporal object intrinsics -- temporally evolving sequences of object geometry, reflectance, and texture, such as a blooming rose -- from pre-trained 2D foundation models. Unlike conventional 3D modeling and animation techniques that require extensive manual effort and expertise, we introduce a method that generates such assets with signals distilled from pre-trained 2D diffusion models. To ensure the temporal consistency of object intrinsics, we propose Neural Templates for temporal-state-guided distillation, derived automatically from image features from self-supervised learning. Our method can generate high-quality temporal object intrinsics for several natural phenomena and enable the sampling and controllable rendering of these dynamic objects from any viewpoint, under any environmental lighting conditions, at any time of their lifespan. Project website: https://chen-geng.com/rose4d

ShapeCraft: Body-Aware and Semantics-Aware 3D Object Design

For designing a wide range of everyday objects, the design process should be aware of both the human body and the underlying semantics of the design specification. However, these two objectives present significant challenges to the current AI-based designing tools. In this work, we present a method to synthesize body-aware 3D objects from a base mesh given an input body geometry and either text or image as guidance. The generated objects can be simulated on virtual characters, or fabricated for real-world use. We propose to use a mesh deformation procedure that optimizes for both semantic alignment as well as contact and penetration losses. Using our method, users can generate both virtual or real-world objects from text, image, or sketch, without the need for manual artist intervention. We present both qualitative and quantitative results on various object categories, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.

Streaming Detection of Queried Event Start

Robotics, autonomous driving, augmented reality, and many embodied computer vision applications must quickly react to user-defined events unfolding in real time. We address this setting by proposing a novel task for multimodal video understanding-Streaming Detection of Queried Event Start (SDQES). The goal of SDQES is to identify the beginning of a complex event as described by a natural language query, with high accuracy and low latency. We introduce a new benchmark based on the Ego4D dataset, as well as new task-specific metrics to study streaming multimodal detection of diverse events in an egocentric video setting. Inspired by parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods in NLP and for video tasks, we propose adapter-based baselines that enable image-to-video transfer learning, allowing for efficient online video modeling. We evaluate three vision-language backbones and three adapter architectures on both short-clip and untrimmed video settings.