From Scalar Rewards to Potential Trends: Shaping Potential Landscapes for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) achieves high sample efficiency by simulating future trajectories with learned dynamics and reward models. However, its effectiveness is severely compromised in sparse reward settings. The core limitation lies in the standard paradigm of regressing ground-truth scalar rewards: in sparse environments, this yields a flat, gradient-free landscape that fails to provide directional guidance for planning. To address this challenge, we propose Shaping Landscapes with Optimistic Potential Estimates (SLOPE), a novel framework that shifts reward modeling from predicting scalars to constructing informative potential landscapes. SLOPE employs optimistic distributional regression to estimate high-confidence upper bounds, which amplifies rare success signals and ensures sufficient exploration gradients. Evaluations on 30+ tasks across 5 benchmarks demonstrate that SLOPE consistently outperforms leading baselines in fully sparse, semi-sparse, and dense rewards.

Do VLMs Perceive or Recall? Probing Visual Perception vs. Memory with Classic Visual Illusions

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often answer classic visual illusions "correctly" on original images, yet persist with the same responses when illusion factors are inverted, even though the visual change is obvious to humans. This raises a fundamental question: do VLMs perceive visual changes or merely recall memorized patterns? While several studies have noted this phenomenon, the underlying causes remain unclear. To move from observations to systematic understanding, this paper introduces VI-Probe, a controllable visual-illusion framework with graded perturbations and matched visual controls (without illusion inducer) that disentangles visually grounded perception from language-driven recall. Unlike prior work that focuses on averaged accuracy, we measure stability and sensitivity using Polarity-Flip Consistency, Template Fixation Index, and an illusion multiplier normalized against matched controls. Experiments across different families reveal that response persistence arises from heterogeneous causes rather than a single mechanism. For instance, GPT-5 exhibits memory override, Claude-Opus-4.1 shows perception-memory competition, while Qwen variants suggest visual-processing limits. Our findings challenge single-cause views and motivate probing-based evaluation that measures both knowledge and sensitivity to controlled visual change. Data and code are available at https://sites.google.com/view/vi-probe/.

OpenVision 3: A Family of Unified Visual Encoder for Both Understanding and Generation

This paper presents a family of advanced vision encoder, named OpenVision 3, that learns a single, unified visual representation that can serve both image understanding and image generation. Our core architecture is simple: we feed VAE-compressed image latents to a ViT encoder and train its output to support two complementary roles. First, the encoder output is passed to the ViT-VAE decoder to reconstruct the original image, encouraging the representation to capture generative structure. Second, the same representation is optimized with contrastive learning and image-captioning objectives, strengthening semantic features. By jointly optimizing reconstruction- and semantics-driven signals in a shared latent space, the encoder learns representations that synergize and generalize well across both regimes. We validate this unified design through extensive downstream evaluations with the encoder frozen. For multimodal understanding, we plug the encoder into the LLaVA-1.5 framework: it performs comparably with a standard CLIP vision encoder (e.g., 62.4 vs 62.2 on SeedBench, and 83.7 vs 82.9 on POPE). For generation, we test it under the RAE framework: ours substantially surpasses the standard CLIP-based encoder (e.g., gFID: 1.89 vs 2.54 on ImageNet). We hope this work can spur future research on unified modeling.

ComfySearch: Autonomous Exploration and Reasoning for ComfyUI Workflows

AI-generated content has progressed from monolithic models to modular workflows, especially on platforms like ComfyUI, allowing users to customize complex creative pipelines. However, the large number of components in ComfyUI and the difficulty of maintaining long-horizon structural consistency under strict graph constraints frequently lead to low pass rates and workflows of limited quality. To tackle these limitations, we present ComfySearch, an agentic framework that can effectively explore the component space and generate functional ComfyUI pipelines via validation-guided workflow construction. Experiments demonstrate that ComfySearch substantially outperforms existing methods on complex and creative tasks, achieving higher executability (pass) rates, higher solution rates, and stronger generalization.

IDT: A Physically Grounded Transformer for Feed-Forward Multi-View Intrinsic Decomposition

Intrinsic image decomposition is fundamental for visual understanding, as RGB images entangle material properties, illumination, and view-dependent effects. Recent diffusion-based methods have achieved strong results for single-view intrinsic decomposition; however, extending these approaches to multi-view settings remains challenging, often leading to severe view inconsistency. We propose \textbf{Intrinsic Decomposition Transformer (IDT)}, a feed-forward framework for multi-view intrinsic image decomposition. By leveraging transformer-based attention to jointly reason over multiple input images, IDT produces view-consistent intrinsic factors in a single forward pass, without iterative generative sampling. IDT adopts a physically grounded image formation model that explicitly decomposes images into diffuse reflectance, diffuse shading, and specular shading. This structured factorization separates Lambertian and non-Lambertian light transport, enabling interpretable and controllable decomposition of material and illumination effects across views. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that IDT achieves cleaner diffuse reflectance, more coherent diffuse shading, and better-isolated specular components, while substantially improving multi-view consistency compared to prior intrinsic decomposition methods.

Breaking the Passive Learning Trap: An Active Perception Strategy for Human Motion Prediction

Forecasting 3D human motion is an important embodiment of fine-grained understanding and cognition of human behavior by artificial agents. Current approaches excessively rely on implicit network modeling of spatiotemporal relationships and motion characteristics, falling into the passive learning trap that results in redundant and monotonous 3D coordinate information acquisition while lacking actively guided explicit learning mechanisms. To overcome these issues, we propose an Active Perceptual Strategy (APS) for human motion prediction, leveraging quotient space representations to explicitly encode motion properties while introducing auxiliary learning objectives to strengthen spatio-temporal modeling. Specifically, we first design a data perception module that projects poses into the quotient space, decoupling motion geometry from coordinate redundancy. By jointly encoding tangent vectors and Grassmann projections, this module simultaneously achieves geometric dimension reduction, semantic decoupling, and dynamic constraint enforcement for effective motion pose characterization. Furthermore, we introduce a network perception module that actively learns spatio-temporal dependencies through restorative learning. This module deliberately masks specific joints or injects noise to construct auxiliary supervision signals. A dedicated auxiliary learning network is designed to actively adapt and learn from perturbed information. Notably, APS is model agnostic and can be integrated with different prediction models to enhance active perceptual. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves the new state-of-the-art, outperforming existing methods by large margins: 16.3% on H3.6M, 13.9% on CMU Mocap, and 10.1% on 3DPW.

Hi-Reco: High-Fidelity Real-Time Conversational Digital Humans

High-fidelity digital humans are increasingly used in interactive applications, yet achieving both visual realism and real-time responsiveness remains a major challenge. We present a high-fidelity, real-time conversational digital human system that seamlessly combines a visually realistic 3D avatar, persona-driven expressive speech synthesis, and knowledge-grounded dialogue generation. To support natural and timely interaction, we introduce an asynchronous execution pipeline that coordinates multi-modal components with minimal latency. The system supports advanced features such as wake word detection, emotionally expressive prosody, and highly accurate, context-aware response generation. It leverages novel retrieval-augmented methods, including history augmentation to maintain conversational flow and intent-based routing for efficient knowledge access. Together, these components form an integrated system that enables responsive and believable digital humans, suitable for immersive applications in communication, education, and entertainment.

EmoVid: A Multimodal Emotion Video Dataset for Emotion-Centric Video Understanding and Generation

Emotion plays a pivotal role in video-based expression, but existing video generation systems predominantly focus on low-level visual metrics while neglecting affective dimensions. Although emotion analysis has made progress in the visual domain, the video community lacks dedicated resources to bridge emotion understanding with generative tasks, particularly for stylized and non-realistic contexts. To address this gap, we introduce EmoVid, the first multimodal, emotion-annotated video dataset specifically designed for creative media, which includes cartoon animations, movie clips, and animated stickers. Each video is annotated with emotion labels, visual attributes (brightness, colorfulness, hue), and text captions. Through systematic analysis, we uncover spatial and temporal patterns linking visual features to emotional perceptions across diverse video forms. Building on these insights, we develop an emotion-conditioned video generation technique by fine-tuning the Wan2.1 model. The results show a significant improvement in both quantitative metrics and the visual quality of generated videos for text-to-video and image-to-video tasks. EmoVid establishes a new benchmark for affective video computing. Our work not only offers valuable insights into visual emotion analysis in artistically styled videos, but also provides practical methods for enhancing emotional expression in video generation.

LightBagel: A Light-weighted, Double Fusion Framework for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation

Unified multimodal models have recently shown remarkable gains in both capability and versatility, yet most leading systems are still trained from scratch and require substantial computational resources. In this paper, we show that competitive performance can be obtained far more efficiently by strategically fusing publicly available models specialized for either generation or understanding. Our key design is to retain the original blocks while additionally interleaving multimodal self-attention blocks throughout the networks. This double fusion mechanism (1) effectively enables rich multi-modal fusion while largely preserving the original strengths of the base models, and (2) catalyzes synergistic fusion of high-level semantic representations from the understanding encoder with low-level spatial signals from the generation encoder. By training with only ~ 35B tokens, this approach achieves strong results across multiple benchmarks: 0.91 on GenEval for compositional text-to-image generation, 82.16 on DPG-Bench for complex text-to-image generation, 6.06 on GEditBench, and 3.77 on ImgEdit-Bench for image editing. By fully releasing the entire suite of code, model weights, and datasets, we hope to support future research on unified multimodal modeling.

Resolving Ambiguity in Gaze-Facilitated Visual Assistant Interaction Paradigm

With the rise in popularity of smart glasses, users' attention has been integrated into Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to streamline multi-modal querying in daily scenarios. However, leveraging gaze data to model users' attention may introduce ambiguity challenges: (1) users' verbal questions become ambiguous by using pronouns or skipping context, (2) humans' gaze patterns can be noisy and exhibit complex spatiotemporal relationships with their spoken questions. Previous works only consider single image as visual modality input, failing to capture the dynamic nature of the user's attention. In this work, we introduce GLARIFY, a novel method to leverage spatiotemporal gaze information to enhance the model's effectiveness in real-world applications. Initially, we analyzed hundreds of querying samples with the gaze modality to demonstrate the noisy nature of users' gaze patterns. We then utilized GPT-4o to design an automatic data synthesis pipeline to generate the GLARIFY-Ambi dataset, which includes a dedicated chain-of-thought (CoT) process to handle noisy gaze patterns. Finally, we designed a heatmap module to incorporate gaze information into cutting-edge VLMs while preserving their pretrained knowledge. We evaluated GLARIFY using a hold-out test set. Experiments demonstrate that GLARIFY significantly outperforms baselines. By robustly aligning VLMs with human attention, GLARIFY paves the way for a usable and intuitive interaction paradigm with a visual assistant.