An Empirical Study of World Model Quantization

World models learn an internal representation of environment dynamics, enabling agents to simulate and reason about future states within a compact latent space for tasks such as planning, prediction, and inference. However, running world models rely on hevay computational cost and memory footprint, making model quantization essential for efficient deployment. To date, the effects of post-training quantization (PTQ) on world models remain largely unexamined. In this work, we present a systematic empirical study of world model quantization using DINO-WM as a representative case, evaluating diverse PTQ methods under both weight-only and joint weight-activation settings. We conduct extensive experiments on different visual planning tasks across a wide range of bit-widths, quantization granularities, and planning horizons up to 50 iterations. Our results show that quantization effects in world models extend beyond standard accuracy and bit-width trade-offs: group-wise weight quantization can stabilize low-bit rollouts, activation quantization granularity yields inconsistent benefits, and quantization sensitivity is highly asymmetric between encoder and predictor modules. Moreover, aggressive low-bit quantization significantly degrades the alignment between the planning objective and task success, leading to failures that cannot be remedied by additional optimization. These findings reveal distinct quantization-induced failure modes in world model-based planning and provide practical guidance for deploying quantized world models under strict computational constraints. The code will be available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/noah-research/tree/master/QuantWM.

From Sequential to Spatial: Reordering Autoregression for Efficient Visual Generation

Inspired by the remarkable success of autoregressive models in language modeling, this paradigm has been widely adopted in visual generation. However, the sequential token-by-token decoding mechanism inherent in traditional autoregressive models leads to low inference efficiency.In this paper, we propose RadAR, an efficient and parallelizable framework designed to accelerate autoregressive visual generation while preserving its representational capacity. Our approach is motivated by the observation that visual tokens exhibit strong local dependencies and spatial correlations with their neighbors--a property not fully exploited in standard raster-scan decoding orders. Specifically, we organize the generation process around a radial topology: an initial token is selected as the starting point, and all other tokens are systematically grouped into multiple concentric rings according to their spatial distances from this center. Generation then proceeds in a ring-wise manner, from inner to outer regions, enabling the parallel prediction of all tokens within the same ring. This design not only preserves the structural locality and spatial coherence of visual scenes but also substantially increases parallelization. Furthermore, to address the risk of inconsistent predictions arising from simultaneous token generation with limited context, we introduce a nested attention mechanism. This mechanism dynamically refines implausible outputs during the forward pass, thereby mitigating error accumulation and preventing model collapse. By integrating radial parallel prediction with dynamic output correction, RadAR significantly improves generation efficiency.

VersatileFFN: Achieving Parameter Efficiency in LLMs via Adaptive Wide-and-Deep Reuse

The rapid scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable performance, but it also leads to prohibitive memory costs. Existing parameter-efficient approaches such as pruning and quantization mainly compress pretrained models without enhancing architectural capacity, thereby hitting the representational ceiling of the base model. In this work, we propose VersatileFFN, a novel feed-forward network (FFN) that enables flexible reuse of parameters in both width and depth dimensions within a fixed parameter budget. Inspired by the dual-process theory of cognition, VersatileFFN comprises two adaptive pathways: a width-versatile path that generates a mixture of sub-experts from a single shared FFN, mimicking sparse expert routing without increasing parameters, and a depth-versatile path that recursively applies the same FFN to emulate deeper processing for complex tokens. A difficulty-aware gating dynamically balances the two pathways, steering "easy" tokens through the efficient width-wise route and allocating deeper iterative refinement to "hard" tokens. Crucially, both pathways reuse the same parameters, so all additional capacity comes from computation rather than memory. Experiments across diverse benchmarks and model scales demonstrate the effectiveness of the method. The code will be available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/noah-research/tree/master/VersatileFFN.

Towards Lossless Ultimate Vision Token Compression for VLMs

Visual language models encounter challenges in computational efficiency and latency, primarily due to the substantial redundancy in the token representations of high-resolution images and videos. Current attention/similarity-based compression algorithms suffer from either position bias or class imbalance, leading to significant accuracy degradation. They also fail to generalize to shallow LLM layers, which exhibit weaker cross-modal interactions. To address this, we extend token compression to the visual encoder through an effective iterative merging scheme that is orthogonal in spatial axes to accelerate the computation across the entire VLM. Furthermoer, we integrate a spectrum pruning unit into LLM through an attention/similarity-free low-pass filter, which gradually prunes redundant visual tokens and is fully compatible to modern FlashAttention. On this basis, we propose Lossless Ultimate Vision tokens Compression (LUVC) framework. LUVC systematically compresses visual tokens until complete elimination at the final layer of LLM, so that the high-dimensional visual features are gradually fused into the multimodal queries. The experiments show that LUVC achieves a 2 speedup inference in language model with negligible accuracy degradation, and the training-free characteristic enables immediate deployment across multiple VLMs.

Positional Preservation Embedding for Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved strong performance on vision-language tasks, yet often suffer from inefficiencies due to redundant visual tokens. Existing token merging methods reduce sequence length but frequently disrupt spatial layouts and temporal continuity by disregarding positional relationships. In this work, we propose a novel encoding operator dubbed as \textbf{P}ositional \textbf{P}reservation \textbf{E}mbedding (\textbf{PPE}), which has the main hallmark of preservation of spatiotemporal structure during visual token compression. PPE explicitly introduces the disentangled encoding of 3D positions in the token dimension, enabling each compressed token to encapsulate different positions from multiple original tokens. Furthermore, we show that PPE can effectively support cascade clustering -- a progressive token compression strategy that leads to better performance retention. PPE is a parameter-free and generic operator that can be seamlessly integrated into existing token merging methods without any adjustments. Applied to state-of-the-art token merging framework, PPE achieves consistent improvements of $2\%\sim5\%$ across multiple vision-language benchmarks, including MMBench (general vision understanding), TextVQA (layout understanding) and VideoMME (temporal understanding). These results demonstrate that preserving positional cues is critical for efficient and effective MLLM reasoning.

Revealing the Power of Post-Training for Small Language Models via Knowledge Distillation

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has significantly advanced the capabilities of artificial intelligence across various domains. However, their massive scale and high computational costs render them unsuitable for direct deployment in resource-constrained edge environments. This creates a critical need for high-performance small models that can operate efficiently at the edge. Yet, after pre-training alone, these smaller models often fail to meet the performance requirements of complex tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce a systematic post-training pipeline that efficiently enhances small model accuracy. Our post training pipeline consists of curriculum-based supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and offline on-policy knowledge distillation. The resulting instruction-tuned model achieves state-of-the-art performance among billion-parameter models, demonstrating strong generalization under strict hardware constraints while maintaining competitive accuracy across a variety of tasks. This work provides a practical and efficient solution for developing high-performance language models on Ascend edge devices.

ViSpec: Accelerating Vision-Language Models with Vision-Aware Speculative Decoding

Speculative decoding is a widely adopted technique for accelerating inference in large language models (LLMs), yet its application to vision-language models (VLMs) remains underexplored, with existing methods achieving only modest speedups (<1.5x). This gap is increasingly significant as multimodal capabilities become central to large-scale models. We hypothesize that large VLMs can effectively filter redundant image information layer by layer without compromising textual comprehension, whereas smaller draft models struggle to do so. To address this, we introduce Vision-Aware Speculative Decoding (ViSpec), a novel framework tailored for VLMs. ViSpec employs a lightweight vision adaptor module to compress image tokens into a compact representation, which is seamlessly integrated into the draft model's attention mechanism while preserving original image positional information. Additionally, we extract a global feature vector for each input image and augment all subsequent text tokens with this feature to enhance multimodal coherence. To overcome the scarcity of multimodal datasets with long assistant responses, we curate a specialized training dataset by repurposing existing datasets and generating extended outputs using the target VLM with modified prompts. Our training strategy mitigates the risk of the draft model exploiting direct access to the target model's hidden states, which could otherwise lead to shortcut learning when training solely on target model outputs. Extensive experiments validate ViSpec, achieving, to our knowledge, the first substantial speedup in VLM speculative decoding.

RDDM: Practicing RAW Domain Diffusion Model for Real-world Image Restoration

We present the RAW domain diffusion model (RDDM), an end-to-end diffusion model that restores photo-realistic images directly from the sensor RAW data. While recent sRGB-domain diffusion methods achieve impressive results, they are caught in a dilemma between high fidelity and realistic generation. As these models process lossy sRGB inputs and neglect the accessibility of the sensor RAW images in many scenarios, e.g., in image and video capturing in edge devices, resulting in sub-optimal performance. RDDM bypasses this limitation by directly restoring images in the RAW domain, replacing the conventional two-stage image signal processing (ISP) + IR pipeline. However, a simple adaptation of pre-trained diffusion models to the RAW domain confronts the out-of-distribution (OOD) issues. To this end, we propose: (1) a RAW-domain VAE (RVAE) learning optimal latent representations, (2) a differentiable Post Tone Processing (PTP) module enabling joint RAW and sRGB space optimization. To compensate for the deficiency in the dataset, we develop a scalable degradation pipeline synthesizing RAW LQ-HQ pairs from existing sRGB datasets for large-scale training. Furthermore, we devise a configurable multi-bayer (CMB) LoRA module handling diverse RAW patterns such as RGGB, BGGR, etc. Extensive experiments demonstrate RDDM's superiority over state-of-the-art sRGB diffusion methods, yielding higher fidelity results with fewer artifacts.

OmniEval: A Benchmark for Evaluating Omni-modal Models with Visual, Auditory, and Textual Inputs

In this paper, we introduce OmniEval, a benchmark for evaluating omni-modality models like MiniCPM-O 2.6, which encompasses visual, auditory, and textual inputs. Compared with existing benchmarks, our OmniEval has several distinctive features: (i) Full-modal collaboration: We design evaluation tasks that highlight the strong coupling between audio and video, requiring models to effectively leverage the collaborative perception of all modalities; (ii) Diversity of videos: OmniEval includes 810 audio-visual synchronized videos, 285 Chinese videos and 525 English videos; (iii) Diversity and granularity of tasks: OmniEval contains 2617 question-answer pairs, comprising 1412 open-ended questions and 1205 multiple-choice questions. These questions are divided into 3 major task types and 12 sub-task types to achieve comprehensive evaluation. Among them, we introduce a more granular video localization task named Grounding. Then we conduct experiments on OmniEval with several omni-modality models. We hope that our OmniEval can provide a platform for evaluating the ability to construct and understand coherence from the context of all modalities. Codes and data could be found at https://omnieval.github.io/.

AirV2X: Unified Air-Ground Vehicle-to-Everything Collaboration

While multi-vehicular collaborative driving demonstrates clear advantages over single-vehicle autonomy, traditional infrastructure-based V2X systems remain constrained by substantial deployment costs and the creation of "uncovered danger zones" in rural and suburban areas. We present AirV2X-Perception, a large-scale dataset that leverages Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as a flexible alternative or complement to fixed Road-Side Units (RSUs). Drones offer unique advantages over ground-based perception: complementary bird's-eye-views that reduce occlusions, dynamic positioning capabilities that enable hovering, patrolling, and escorting navigation rules, and significantly lower deployment costs compared to fixed infrastructure. Our dataset comprises 6.73 hours of drone-assisted driving scenarios across urban, suburban, and rural environments with varied weather and lighting conditions. The AirV2X-Perception dataset facilitates the development and standardized evaluation of Vehicle-to-Drone (V2D) algorithms, addressing a critical gap in the rapidly expanding field of aerial-assisted autonomous driving systems. The dataset and development kits are open-sourced at https://github.com/taco-group/AirV2X-Perception.