ThermalDiffusion: Visual-to-Thermal Image-to-Image Translation for Autonomous Navigation

Autonomous systems rely on sensors to estimate the environment around them. However, cameras, LiDARs, and RADARs have their own limitations. In nighttime or degraded environments such as fog, mist, or dust, thermal cameras can provide valuable information regarding the presence of objects of interest due to their heat signature. They make it easy to identify humans and vehicles that are usually at higher temperatures compared to their surroundings. In this paper, we focus on the adaptation of thermal cameras for robotics and automation, where the biggest hurdle is the lack of data. Several multi-modal datasets are available for driving robotics research in tasks such as scene segmentation, object detection, and depth estimation, which are the cornerstone of autonomous systems. However, they are found to be lacking in thermal imagery. Our paper proposes a solution to augment these datasets with synthetic thermal data to enable widespread and rapid adaptation of thermal cameras. We explore the use of conditional diffusion models to convert existing RGB images to thermal images using self-attention to learn the thermal properties of real-world objects.

Efficient Serving of LLM Applications with Probabilistic Demand Modeling

Applications based on Large Language Models (LLMs) contains a series of tasks to address real-world problems with boosted capability, which have dynamic demand volumes on diverse backends. Existing serving systems treat the resource demands of LLM applications as a blackbox, compromising end-to-end efficiency due to improper queuing order and backend warm up latency. We find that the resource demands of LLM applications can be modeled in a general and accurate manner with Probabilistic Demand Graph (PDGraph). We then propose Hermes, which leverages PDGraph for efficient serving of LLM applications. Confronting probabilistic demand description, Hermes applies the Gittins policy to determine the scheduling order that can minimize the average application completion time. It also uses the PDGraph model to help prewarm cold backends at proper moments. Experiments with diverse LLM applications confirm that Hermes can effectively improve the application serving efficiency, reducing the average completion time by over 70% and the P95 completion time by over 80%.

Efficient Unified Caching for Accelerating Heterogeneous AI Workloads

Modern AI clusters, which host diverse workloads like data pre-processing, training and inference, often store the large-volume data in cloud storage and employ caching frameworks to facilitate remote data access. To avoid code-intrusion complexity and minimize cache space wastage, it is desirable to maintain a unified cache shared by all the workloads. However, existing cache management strategies, designed for specific workloads, struggle to handle the heterogeneous AI workloads in a cluster -- which usually exhibit heterogeneous access patterns and item storage granularities. In this paper, we propose IGTCache, a unified, high-efficacy cache for modern AI clusters. IGTCache leverages a hierarchical access abstraction, AccessStreamTree, to organize the recent data accesses in a tree structure, facilitating access pattern detection at various granularities. Using this abstraction, IGTCache applies hypothesis testing to categorize data access patterns as sequential, random, or skewed. Based on these detected access patterns and granularities, IGTCache tailors optimal cache management strategies including prefetching, eviction, and space allocation accordingly. Experimental results show that IGTCache increases the cache hit ratio by 55.6% over state-of-the-art caching frameworks, reducing the overall job completion time by 52.2%.

rStar-Coder: Scaling Competitive Code Reasoning with a Large-Scale Verified Dataset

Advancing code reasoning in large language models (LLMs) is fundamentally limited by the scarcity of high-difficulty datasets, especially those with verifiable input-output test cases necessary for rigorous solution validation at scale. We introduce rStar-Coder, which significantly improves LLM code reasoning capabilities by constructing a large-scale, verified dataset of 418K competition-level code problems, 580K long-reasoning solutions along with rich test cases of varying difficulty. This is achieved through three core contributions: (1) we curate competitive programming code problems and oracle solutions to synthesize new, solvable problems; (2) we introduce a reliable input-output test case synthesis pipeline that decouples the generation into a three-step input generation method and a mutual verification mechanism for effective output labeling; (3) we augment problems with high-quality, test-case-verified long-reasoning solutions. Extensive experiments on Qwen models (1.5B-14B) across various code reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of rStar-Coder dataset, achieving leading performance comparable to frontier reasoning LLMs with much smaller model sizes. On LiveCodeBench, rStar-Coder improves Qwen2.5-7B from 17.4% to an impressive 57.3%, and Qwen2.5-14B from 23.3% to 62.5%, surpassing o3-mini (low) by3.1%. On the more challenging USA Computing Olympiad, our 7B model achieves an average pass@1 accuracy of 16.15%, outperforming the frontier-level QWQ-32B. Code and the dataset will be released at https://github.com/microsoft/rStar.

RRTL: Red Teaming Reasoning Large Language Models in Tool Learning

While tool learning significantly enhances the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), it also introduces substantial security risks. Prior research has revealed various vulnerabilities in traditional LLMs during tool learning. However, the safety of newly emerging reasoning LLMs (RLLMs), such as DeepSeek-R1, in the context of tool learning remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose RRTL, a red teaming approach specifically designed to evaluate RLLMs in tool learning. It integrates two novel strategies: (1) the identification of deceptive threats, which evaluates the model's behavior in concealing the usage of unsafe tools and their potential risks; and (2) the use of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to force tool invocation. Our approach also includes a benchmark for traditional LLMs. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation on seven mainstream RLLMs and uncover three key findings: (1) RLLMs generally achieve stronger safety performance than traditional LLMs, yet substantial safety disparities persist across models; (2) RLLMs can pose serious deceptive risks by frequently failing to disclose tool usage and to warn users of potential tool output risks; (3) CoT prompting reveals multi-lingual safety vulnerabilities in RLLMs. Our work provides important insights into enhancing the security of RLLMs in tool learning.

Adapting World Models with Latent-State Dynamics Residuals

Simulation-to-reality reinforcement learning (RL) faces the critical challenge of reconciling discrepancies between simulated and real-world dynamics, which can severely degrade agent performance. A promising approach involves learning corrections to simulator forward dynamics represented as a residual error function, however this operation is impractical with high-dimensional states such as images. To overcome this, we propose ReDRAW, a latent-state autoregressive world model pretrained in simulation and calibrated to target environments through residual corrections of latent-state dynamics rather than of explicit observed states. Using this adapted world model, ReDRAW enables RL agents to be optimized with imagined rollouts under corrected dynamics and then deployed in the real world. In multiple vision-based MuJoCo domains and a physical robot visual lane-following task, ReDRAW effectively models changes to dynamics and avoids overfitting in low data regimes where traditional transfer methods fail.

Guiding Human-Object Interactions with Rich Geometry and Relations

Human-object interaction (HOI) synthesis is crucial for creating immersive and realistic experiences for applications such as virtual reality. Existing methods often rely on simplified object representations, such as the object's centroid or the nearest point to a human, to achieve physically plausible motions. However, these approaches may overlook geometric complexity, resulting in suboptimal interaction fidelity. To address this limitation, we introduce ROG, a novel diffusion-based framework that models the spatiotemporal relationships inherent in HOIs with rich geometric detail. For efficient object representation, we select boundary-focused and fine-detail key points from the object mesh, ensuring a comprehensive depiction of the object's geometry. This representation is used to construct an interactive distance field (IDF), capturing the robust HOI dynamics. Furthermore, we develop a diffusion-based relation model that integrates spatial and temporal attention mechanisms, enabling a better understanding of intricate HOI relationships. This relation model refines the generated motion's IDF, guiding the motion generation process to produce relation-aware and semantically aligned movements. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that ROG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the realism and semantic accuracy of synthesized HOIs.

R3-Avatar: Record and Retrieve Temporal Codebook for Reconstructing Photorealistic Human Avatars

We present R3-Avatar, incorporating a temporal codebook, to overcome the inability of human avatars to be both animatable and of high-fidelity rendering quality. Existing video-based reconstruction of 3D human avatars either focuses solely on rendering, lacking animation support, or learns a pose-appearance mapping for animating, which degrades under limited training poses or complex clothing. In this paper, we adopt a "record-retrieve-reconstruct" strategy that ensures high-quality rendering from novel views while mitigating degradation in novel poses. Specifically, disambiguating timestamps record temporal appearance variations in a codebook, ensuring high-fidelity novel-view rendering, while novel poses retrieve corresponding timestamps by matching the most similar training poses for augmented appearance. Our R3-Avatar outperforms cutting-edge video-based human avatar reconstruction, particularly in overcoming visual quality degradation in extreme scenarios with limited training human poses and complex clothing.

MouseGPT: A Large-scale Vision-Language Model for Mouse Behavior Analysis

Analyzing animal behavior is crucial in advancing neuroscience, yet quantifying and deciphering its intricate dynamics remains a significant challenge. Traditional machine vision approaches, despite their ability to detect spontaneous behaviors, fall short due to limited interpretability and reliance on manual labeling, which restricts the exploration of the full behavioral spectrum. Here, we introduce MouseGPT, a Vision-Language Model (VLM) that integrates visual cues with natural language to revolutionize mouse behavior analysis. Built upon our first-of-its-kind dataset - incorporating pose dynamics and open-vocabulary behavioral annotations across over 42 million frames of diverse psychiatric conditions - MouseGPT provides a novel, context-rich method for comprehensive behavior interpretation. Our holistic analysis framework enables detailed behavior profiling, clustering, and novel behavior discovery, offering deep insights without the need for labor - intensive manual annotation. Evaluations reveal that MouseGPT surpasses existing models in precision, adaptability, and descriptive richness, positioning it as a transformative tool for ethology and for unraveling complex behavioral dynamics in animal models.

Discovering Influential Neuron Path in Vision Transformers

Vision Transformer models exhibit immense power yet remain opaque to human understanding, posing challenges and risks for practical applications. While prior research has attempted to demystify these models through input attribution and neuron role analysis, there's been a notable gap in considering layer-level information and the holistic path of information flow across layers. In this paper, we investigate the significance of influential neuron paths within vision Transformers, which is a path of neurons from the model input to output that impacts the model inference most significantly. We first propose a joint influence measure to assess the contribution of a set of neurons to the model outcome. And we further provide a layer-progressive neuron locating approach that efficiently selects the most influential neuron at each layer trying to discover the crucial neuron path from input to output within the target model. Our experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method finding the most influential neuron path along which the information flows, over the existing baseline solutions. Additionally, the neuron paths have illustrated that vision Transformers exhibit some specific inner working mechanism for processing the visual information within the same image category. We further analyze the key effects of these neurons on the image classification task, showcasing that the found neuron paths have already preserved the model capability on downstream tasks, which may also shed some lights on real-world applications like model pruning. The project website including implementation code is available at https://foundation-model-research.github.io/NeuronPath/.