Mindscape-Aware Retrieval Augmented Generation for Improved Long Context Understanding

Humans understand long and complex texts by relying on a holistic semantic representation of the content. This global view helps organize prior knowledge, interpret new information, and integrate evidence dispersed across a document, as revealed by the Mindscape-Aware Capability of humans in psychology. Current Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems lack such guidance and therefore struggle with long-context tasks. In this paper, we propose Mindscape-Aware RAG (MiA-RAG), the first approach that equips LLM-based RAG systems with explicit global context awareness. MiA-RAG builds a mindscape through hierarchical summarization and conditions both retrieval and generation on this global semantic representation. This enables the retriever to form enriched query embeddings and the generator to reason over retrieved evidence within a coherent global context. We evaluate MiA-RAG across diverse long-context and bilingual benchmarks for evidence-based understanding and global sense-making. It consistently surpasses baselines, and further analysis shows that it aligns local details with a coherent global representation, enabling more human-like long-context retrieval and reasoning.

SFTok: Bridging the Performance Gap in Discrete Tokenizers

Recent advances in multimodal models highlight the pivotal role of image tokenization in high-resolution image generation. By compressing images into compact latent representations, tokenizers enable generative models to operate in lower-dimensional spaces, thereby improving computational efficiency and reducing complexity. Discrete tokenizers naturally align with the autoregressive paradigm but still lag behind continuous ones, limiting their adoption in multimodal systems. To address this, we propose \textbf{SFTok}, a discrete tokenizer that incorporates a multi-step iterative mechanism for precise reconstruction. By integrating \textbf{self-forcing guided visual reconstruction} and \textbf{debias-and-fitting training strategy}, SFTok resolves the training-inference inconsistency in multi-step process, significantly enhancing image reconstruction quality. At a high compression rate of only 64 tokens per image, SFTok achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality on ImageNet (rFID = 1.21) and demonstrates exceptional performance in class-to-image generation tasks (gFID = 2.29).

On the Asymptotic Performance of Diagonally Loaded Detectors for Large Arrays: To Achieve CFAR and Optimality

This paper addresses two critical limitations in diagonally loaded (DL) adaptive matched filter (AMF) detector: (1) the lack of CFAR property with respect to arbitrary covariance matrices, and (2) the absence of selection criteria for optimal loading factor from the perspective of maximizing the detection probability (Pd). We provide solutions to both challenges through a comprehensive analysis for the asymptotic performance of DL-AMF under large dimensional regime (LDR) where the dimension N and sample size K tend to infinity whereas their ratio N/K converges to a constant c\in(0,1). The analytical results show that any DL detectors constructed by normalizing the random variable |a|2=|sH(R+λIN)-1y0|2 with a deterministic quantity or a random variable that converges almost surely to a deterministic value will exhibit equivalent performance under LDR. Following this idea, we derive two CFAR DL detectors: CFAR DL semi-clairvoyant matched filter (CFAR-DL-SCMF) detector and CFAR DL adaptive matched filter (CFAR-DL-AMF) detector, by normalizing |a|2 with an appropriate deterministic quantity and its consistent estimate, respectively. The theoretical analysis and simulations show that both CFAR-DL-SCMF and CFAR-DL-AMF achieve CFAR with respect to covariance matrix, target steering vector and loading factor. Furthermore, we derive the asymptotically optimal loading factor λ_opt by maximizing the explicit expression of asymptotic Pd. For practical implementation, we provide a consistent estimator for λ_opt under LDR. Based on λ_opt and its consistent estimate, we establish the optimal CFAR-DL-SCMF (opt-CFAR-DL-SCMF) and the optimal CFAR-DL-AMF (opt-CFAR-DL-AMF). Numerical examples demonstrate that the proposed opt-CFAR-DL-SCMF and opt-CFAR-DL-AMF consistently outperform EL-AMF and persymmetric AMF in both full-rank and low-rank clutter plus noise environments.

Skyra: AI-Generated Video Detection via Grounded Artifact Reasoning

The misuse of AI-driven video generation technologies has raised serious social concerns, highlighting the urgent need for reliable AI-generated video detectors. However, most existing methods are limited to binary classification and lack the necessary explanations for human interpretation. In this paper, we present Skyra, a specialized multimodal large language model (MLLM) that identifies human-perceivable visual artifacts in AI-generated videos and leverages them as grounded evidence for both detection and explanation. To support this objective, we construct ViF-CoT-4K for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), which represents the first large-scale AI-generated video artifact dataset with fine-grained human annotations. We then develop a two-stage training strategy that systematically enhances our model's spatio-temporal artifact perception, explanation capability, and detection accuracy. To comprehensively evaluate Skyra, we introduce ViF-Bench, a benchmark comprising 3K high-quality samples generated by over ten state-of-the-art video generators. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Skyra surpasses existing methods across multiple benchmarks, while our evaluation yields valuable insights for advancing explainable AI-generated video detection.

Astra: General Interactive World Model with Autoregressive Denoising

Recent advances in diffusion transformers have empowered video generation models to generate high-quality video clips from texts or images. However, world models with the ability to predict long-horizon futures from past observations and actions remain underexplored, especially for general-purpose scenarios and various forms of actions. To bridge this gap, we introduce Astra, an interactive general world model that generates real-world futures for diverse scenarios (e.g., autonomous driving, robot grasping) with precise action interactions (e.g., camera motion, robot action). We propose an autoregressive denoising architecture and use temporal causal attention to aggregate past observations and support streaming outputs. We use a noise-augmented history memory to avoid over-reliance on past frames to balance responsiveness with temporal coherence. For precise action control, we introduce an action-aware adapter that directly injects action signals into the denoising process. We further develop a mixture of action experts that dynamically route heterogeneous action modalities, enhancing versatility across diverse real-world tasks such as exploration, manipulation, and camera control. Astra achieves interactive, consistent, and general long-term video prediction and supports various forms of interactions. Experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate the improvements of Astra in fidelity, long-range prediction, and action alignment over existing state-of-the-art world models.

JPEG-Inspired Cloud-Edge Holography

Computer-generated holography (CGH) presents a transformative solution for near-eye displays in augmented and virtual reality. Recent advances in deep learning have greatly improved CGH in reconstructed quality and computational efficiency. However, deploying neural CGH pipelines directly on compact, eyeglass-style devices is hindered by stringent constraints on computation and energy consumption, while cloud offloading followed by transmission with natural image codecs often distorts phase information and requires high bandwidth to maintain reconstruction quality. Neural compression methods can reduce bandwidth but impose heavy neural decoders at the edge, increasing inference latency and hardware demand. In this work, we introduce JPEG-Inspired Cloud-Edge Holography, an efficient pipeline designed around a learnable transform codec that retains the block-structured and hardware-friendly nature of JPEG. Our system shifts all heavy neural processing to the cloud, while the edge device performs only lightweight decoding without any neural inference. To further improve throughput, we implement custom CUDA kernels for entropy coding on both cloud and edge. This design achieves a peak signal-to-noise ratio of 32.15 dB at $<$ 2 bits per pixel with decode latency as low as 4.2 ms. Both numerical simulations and optical experiments confirm the high reconstruction quality of the holograms. By aligning CGH with a codec that preserves JPEG's structural efficiency while extending it with learnable components, our framework enables low-latency, bandwidth-efficient hologram streaming on resource-constrained wearable devices-using only simple block-based decoding readily supported by modern system-on-chips, without requiring neural decoders or specialized hardware.

SVG-T2I: Scaling Up Text-to-Image Latent Diffusion Model Without Variational Autoencoder

Visual generation grounded in Visual Foundation Model (VFM) representations offers a highly promising unified pathway for integrating visual understanding, perception, and generation. Despite this potential, training large-scale text-to-image diffusion models entirely within the VFM representation space remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we scale the SVG (Self-supervised representations for Visual Generation) framework, proposing SVG-T2I to support high-quality text-to-image synthesis directly in the VFM feature domain. By leveraging a standard text-to-image diffusion pipeline, SVG-T2I achieves competitive performance, reaching 0.75 on GenEval and 85.78 on DPG-Bench. This performance validates the intrinsic representational power of VFMs for generative tasks. We fully open-source the project, including the autoencoder and generation model, together with their training, inference, evaluation pipelines, and pre-trained weights, to facilitate further research in representation-driven visual generation.

A Lightweight 3D Anomaly Detection Method with Rotationally Invariant Features

3D anomaly detection (AD) is a crucial task in computer vision, aiming to identify anomalous points or regions from point cloud data. However, existing methods may encounter challenges when handling point clouds with changes in orientation and position because the resulting features may vary significantly. To address this problem, we propose a novel Rotationally Invariant Features (RIF) framework for 3D AD. Firstly, to remove the adverse effect of variations on point cloud data, we develop a Point Coordinate Mapping (PCM) technique, which maps each point into a rotationally invariant space to maintain consistency of representation. Then, to learn robust and discriminative features, we design a lightweight Convolutional Transform Feature Network (CTF-Net) to extract rotationally invariant features for the memory bank. To improve the ability of the feature extractor, we introduce the idea of transfer learning to pre-train the feature extractor with 3D data augmentation. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves the advanced performance on the Anomaly-ShapeNet dataset, with an average P-AUROC improvement of 17.7\%, and also gains the best performance on the Real3D-AD dataset, with an average P-AUROC improvement of 1.6\%. The strong generalization ability of RIF has been verified by combining it with traditional feature extraction methods on anomaly detection tasks, demonstrating great potential for industrial applications.

Continuous Autoregressive Language Models

The efficiency of large language models (LLMs) is fundamentally limited by their sequential, token-by-token generation process. We argue that overcoming this bottleneck requires a new design axis for LLM scaling: increasing the semantic bandwidth of each generative step. To this end, we introduce Continuous Autoregressive Language Models (CALM), a paradigm shift from discrete next-token prediction to continuous next-vector prediction. CALM uses a high-fidelity autoencoder to compress a chunk of K tokens into a single continuous vector, from which the original tokens can be reconstructed with over 99.9\% accuracy. This allows us to model language as a sequence of continuous vectors instead of discrete tokens, which reduces the number of generative steps by a factor of K. The paradigm shift necessitates a new modeling toolkit; therefore, we develop a comprehensive likelihood-free framework that enables robust training, evaluation, and controllable sampling in the continuous domain. Experiments show that CALM significantly improves the performance-compute trade-off, achieving the performance of strong discrete baselines at a significantly lower computational cost. More importantly, these findings establish next-vector prediction as a powerful and scalable pathway towards ultra-efficient language models. Code: https://github.com/shaochenze/calm. Project: https://shaochenze.github.io/blog/2025/CALM.

Conan: Progressive Learning to Reason Like a Detective over Multi-Scale Visual Evidence

Video reasoning, which requires multi-step deduction across frames, remains a major challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). While reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods enhance reasoning capabilities, they often rely on text-only chains that yield ungrounded or hallucinated conclusions. Conversely, frame-retrieval approaches introduce visual grounding but still struggle with inaccurate evidence localization. To address these challenges, we present Conan, a framework for evidence-grounded multi-step video reasoning. Conan identifies contextual and evidence frames, reasons over cross-frame clues, and adaptively decides when to conclude or explore further. To achieve this, we (1) construct Conan-91K, a large-scale dataset of automatically generated reasoning traces that includes frame identification, evidence reasoning, and action decision, and (2) design a multi-stage progressive cold-start strategy combined with an Identification-Reasoning-Action (AIR) RLVR training framework to jointly enhance multi-step visual reasoning. Extensive experiments on six multi-step reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that Conan surpasses the baseline Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct by an average of over 10% in accuracy, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, Conan generalizes effectively to long-video understanding tasks, validating its strong scalability and robustness.