Rethinking the Practicality of Vision-language-action Model: A Comprehensive Benchmark and An Improved Baseline

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a generalist robotic agent. However, existing VLAs are hindered by excessive parameter scales, prohibitive pre-training requirements, and limited applicability to diverse embodiments. To improve the practicality of VLAs, we propose a comprehensive benchmark and an improved baseline. First, we propose CEBench, a new benchmark spanning diverse embodiments in both simulation and the real world with consideration of domain randomization. We collect 14.4k simulated trajectories and 1.6k real-world expert-curated trajectories to support training on CEBench. Second, using CEBench as our testbed, we study three critical aspects of VLAs' practicality and offer several key findings. Informed by these findings, we introduce LLaVA-VLA, a lightweight yet powerful VLA designed for practical deployment on consumer-grade GPUs. Architecturally, it integrates a compact VLM backbone with multi-view perception, proprioceptive tokenization, and action chunking. To eliminate reliance on costly pre-training, LLaVA-VLA adopts a two-stage training paradigm including post-training and fine-tuning. Furthermore, LLaVA-VLA extends the action space to unify navigation and manipulation. Experiments across embodiments demonstrate the capabilities of generalization and versatility of LLaVA-VLA , while real-world mobile manipulation experiments establish it as the first end-to-end VLA model for mobile manipulation. We will open-source all datasets, codes, and checkpoints upon acceptance to foster reproducibility and future research.

How Do Lexical Senses Correspond Between Spoken German and German Sign Language?

Sign language lexicographers construct bilingual dictionaries by establishing word-to-sign mappings, where polysemous and homonymous words corresponding to different signs across contexts are often underrepresented. A usage-based approach examining how word senses map to signs can identify such novel mappings absent from current dictionaries, enriching lexicographic resources. We address this by analyzing German and German Sign Language (Deutsche Gebärdensprache, DGS), manually annotating 1,404 word use-to-sign ID mappings derived from 32 words from the German Word Usage Graph (D-WUG) and 49 signs from the Digital Dictionary of German Sign Language (DW-DGS). We identify three correspondence types: Type 1 (one-to-many), Type 2 (many-to-one), and Type 3 (one-to-one), plus No Match cases. We evaluate computational methods: Exact Match (EM) and Semantic Similarity (SS) using SBERT embeddings. SS substantially outperforms EM overall 88.52% vs. 71.31%), with dramatic gains for Type 1 (+52.1 pp). Our work establishes the first annotated dataset for cross-modal sense correspondence and reveals which correspondence patterns are computationally identifiable. Our code and dataset are made publicly available.

BSoNet: Deep Learning Solution for Optimizing Image Quality of Portable Backscatter Imaging Systems

Portable backscatter imaging systems (PBI) integrate an X-ray source and detector in a single unit, utilizing Compton scattering photons to rapidly acquire superficial or shallow structural information of an inspected object through single-sided imaging. The application of this technology overcomes the limitations of traditional transmission X-ray detection, offering greater flexibility and portability, making it the preferred tool for the rapid and accurate identification of potential threats in scenarios such as borders, ports, and industrial nondestructive security inspections. However, the image quality is significantly compromised due to the limited number of Compton backscattered photons. The insufficient photon counts result primarily from photon absorption in materials, the pencil-beam scanning design, and short signal sampling times. It therefore yields severe image noise and an extremely low signal-to-noise ratio, greatly reducing the accuracy and reliability of PBI systems. To address these challenges, this paper introduces BSoNet, a novel deep learning-based approach specifically designed to optimize the image quality of PBI systems. The approach significantly enhances image clarity, recognition, and contrast while meeting practical application requirements. It transforms PBI systems into more effective and reliable inspection tools, contributing significantly to strengthening security protection.

NECromancer: Breathing Life into Skeletons via BVH Animation

Motion tokenization is a key component of generalizable motion models, yet most existing approaches are restricted to species-specific skeletons, limiting their applicability across diverse morphologies. We propose NECromancer (NEC), a universal motion tokenizer that operates directly on arbitrary BVH skeletons. NEC consists of three components: (1) an Ontology-aware Skeletal Graph Encoder (OwO) that encodes structural priors from BVH files, including joint semantics, rest-pose offsets, and skeletal topology, into skeletal embeddings; (2) a Topology-Agnostic Tokenizer (TAT) that compresses motion sequences into a universal, topology-invariant discrete representation; and (3) the Unified BVH Universe (UvU), a large-scale dataset aggregating BVH motions across heterogeneous skeletons. Experiments show that NEC achieves high-fidelity reconstruction under substantial compression and effectively disentangles motion from skeletal structure. The resulting token space supports cross-species motion transfer, composition, denoising, generation with token-based models, and text-motion retrieval, establishing a unified framework for motion analysis and synthesis across diverse morphologies. Demo page: https://animotionlab.github.io/NECromancer/

DiMo: Discrete Diffusion Modeling for Motion Generation and Understanding

Prior masked modeling motion generation methods predominantly study text-to-motion. We present DiMo, a discrete diffusion-style framework, which extends masked modeling to bidirectional text--motion understanding and generation. Unlike GPT-style autoregressive approaches that tokenize motion and decode sequentially, DiMo performs iterative masked token refinement, unifying Text-to-Motion (T2M), Motion-to-Text (M2T), and text-free Motion-to-Motion (M2M) within a single model. This decoding paradigm naturally enables a quality-latency trade-off at inference via the number of refinement steps.We further improve motion token fidelity with residual vector quantization (RVQ) and enhance alignment and controllability with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML show strong motion quality and competitive bidirectional understanding under a unified framework. In addition, we demonstrate model ability in text-free motion completion, text-guided motion prediction and motion caption correction without architectural change.Additional qualitative results are available on our project page: https://animotionlab.github.io/DiMo/.

A Linearization of DFT Spectrum for Precision Power Measurement in Presence of Interharmonics

The presence of interharmonics in power systems can lead to asynchronous sampling, a phenomenon further aggravated by shifts in the fundamental frequency, which significantly degrades the accuracy of power measurements. Under such asynchronous conditions, interharmonics lose orthogonality with the fundamental and harmonic components, giving rise to additional power components. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a linearization algorithm based on DFT spectrum analysis for precise power measurement in systems containing interharmonics. The proposed approach constructs a system of linear equations from the DFT spectrum and solves it through efficient matrix operations, enabling accurate extraction of interharmonic components near the fundamental and harmonic frequencies (with a frequency interval $\geq$1 Hz). This allows for precise measurement of power across the fundamental, harmonic, interharmonic, and cross-power bands, as well as total power. Test results demonstrate that the proposed method accurately computes various power components under diverse conditions--including varying interharmonic/fundamental/harmonic intervals, fundamental frequency deviations, and noise. Compared to existing methods such as fast Fourier transform (FFT), Windowed interpolation FFT, and Matrix pencil-Singular value decomposition, the proposed technique reduces estimation error by several times to multiple folds and exhibits improved robustness, while maintaining a computational time of only 7 ms for processing 10-power-line-cycle (200 ms) data.

Malicious Repurposing of Open Science Artefacts by Using Large Language Models

The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has fuelled enthusiasm about their role in advancing scientific discovery, with studies exploring LLMs that autonomously generate and evaluate novel research ideas. However, little attention has been given to the possibility that such models could be exploited to produce harmful research by repurposing open science artefacts for malicious ends. We fill the gap by introducing an end-to-end pipeline that first bypasses LLM safeguards through persuasion-based jailbreaking, then reinterprets NLP papers to identify and repurpose their artefacts (datasets, methods, and tools) by exploiting their vulnerabilities, and finally assesses the safety of these proposals using our evaluation framework across three dimensions: harmfulness, feasibility of misuse, and soundness of technicality. Overall, our findings demonstrate that LLMs can generate harmful proposals by repurposing ethically designed open artefacts; however, we find that LLMs acting as evaluators strongly disagree with one another on evaluation outcomes: GPT-4.1 assigns higher scores (indicating greater potential harms, higher soundness and feasibility of misuse), Gemini-2.5-pro is markedly stricter, and Grok-3 falls between these extremes. This indicates that LLMs cannot yet serve as reliable judges in a malicious evaluation setup, making human evaluation essential for credible dual-use risk assessment.

Semantic contrastive learning for orthogonal X-ray computed tomography reconstruction

X-ray computed tomography (CT) is widely used in medical imaging, with sparse-view reconstruction offering an effective way to reduce radiation dose. However, ill-posed conditions often result in severe streak artifacts. Recent advances in deep learning-based methods have improved reconstruction quality, but challenges still remain. To address these challenges, we propose a novel semantic feature contrastive learning loss function that evaluates semantic similarity in high-level latent spaces and anatomical similarity in shallow latent spaces. Our approach utilizes a three-stage U-Net-based architecture: one for coarse reconstruction, one for detail refinement, and one for semantic similarity measurement. Tests on a chest dataset with orthogonal projections demonstrate that our method achieves superior reconstruction quality and faster processing compared to other algorithms. The results show significant improvements in image quality while maintaining low computational complexity, making it a practical solution for orthogonal CT reconstruction.

Simple Yet Effective Selective Imputation for Incomplete Multi-view Clustering

Incomplete multi-view data, where different views suffer from missing and unbalanced observations, pose significant challenges for clustering. Existing imputation-based methods attempt to estimate missing views to restore data associations, but indiscriminate imputation often introduces noise and bias, especially when the available information is insufficient. Imputation-free methods avoid this risk by relying solely on observed data, but struggle under severe incompleteness due to the lack of cross-view complementarity. To address this issue, we propose Informativeness-based Selective imputation Multi-View Clustering (ISMVC). Our method evaluates the imputation-relevant informativeness of each missing position based on intra-view similarity and cross-view consistency, and selectively imputes only when sufficient support is available. Furthermore, we integrate this selection with a variational autoencoder equipped with a mixture-of-Gaussians prior to learn clustering-friendly latent representations. By performing distribution-level imputation, ISMVC not only stabilizes the aggregation of posterior distributions but also explicitly models imputation uncertainty, enabling robust fusion and preventing overconfident reconstructions. Compared with existing cautious imputation strategies that depend on training dynamics or model feedback, our method is lightweight, data-driven, and model-agnostic. It can be readily integrated into existing IMC models as a plug-in module. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets under a more realistic and challenging unbalanced missing scenario demonstrate that our method outperforms both imputation-based and imputation-free approaches.

SWiT-4D: Sliding-Window Transformer for Lossless and Parameter-Free Temporal 4D Generation

Despite significant progress in 4D content generation, the conversion of monocular videos into high-quality animated 3D assets with explicit 4D meshes remains considerably challenging. The scarcity of large-scale, naturally captured 4D mesh datasets further limits the ability to train generalizable video-to-4D models from scratch in a purely data-driven manner. Meanwhile, advances in image-to-3D generation, supported by extensive datasets, offer powerful prior models that can be leveraged. To better utilize these priors while minimizing reliance on 4D supervision, we introduce SWiT-4D, a Sliding-Window Transformer for lossless, parameter-free temporal 4D mesh generation. SWiT-4D integrates seamlessly with any Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based image-to-3D generator, adding spatial-temporal modeling across video frames while preserving the original single-image forward process, enabling 4D mesh reconstruction from videos of arbitrary length. To recover global translation, we further introduce an optimization-based trajectory module tailored for static-camera monocular videos. SWiT-4D demonstrates strong data efficiency: with only a single short (<10s) video for fine-tuning, it achieves high-fidelity geometry and stable temporal consistency, indicating practical deployability under extremely limited 4D supervision. Comprehensive experiments on both in-domain zoo-test sets and challenging out-of-domain benchmarks (C4D, Objaverse, and in-the-wild videos) show that SWiT-4D consistently outperforms existing baselines in temporal smoothness. Project page: https://animotionlab.github.io/SWIT4D/