PUMA: Perception-driven Unified Foothold Prior for Mobility Augmented Quadruped Parkour

Parkour tasks for quadrupeds have emerged as a promising benchmark for agile locomotion. While human athletes can effectively perceive environmental characteristics to select appropriate footholds for obstacle traversal, endowing legged robots with similar perceptual reasoning remains a significant challenge. Existing methods often rely on hierarchical controllers that follow pre-computed footholds, thereby constraining the robot's real-time adaptability and the exploratory potential of reinforcement learning. To overcome these challenges, we present PUMA, an end-to-end learning framework that integrates visual perception and foothold priors into a single-stage training process. This approach leverages terrain features to estimate egocentric polar foothold priors, composed of relative distance and heading, guiding the robot in active posture adaptation for parkour tasks. Extensive experiments conducted in simulation and real-world environments across various discrete complex terrains, demonstrate PUMA's exceptional agility and robustness in challenging scenarios.

Single-Pixel Vision-Language Model for Intrinsic Privacy-Preserving Behavioral Intelligence

Adverse social interactions, such as bullying, harassment, and other illicit activities, pose significant threats to individual well-being and public safety, leaving profound impacts on physical and mental health. However, these critical events frequently occur in privacy-sensitive environments like restrooms, and changing rooms, where conventional surveillance is prohibited or severely restricted by stringent privacy regulations and ethical concerns. Here, we propose the Single-Pixel Vision-Language Model (SP-VLM), a novel framework that reimagines secure environmental monitoring. It achieves intrinsic privacy-by-design by capturing human dynamics through inherently low-dimensional single-pixel modalities and inferring complex behavioral patterns via seamless vision-language integration. Building on this framework, we demonstrate that single-pixel sensing intrinsically suppresses identity recoverability, rendering state-of-the-art face recognition systems ineffective below a critical sampling rate. We further show that SP-VLM can nonetheless extract meaningful behavioral semantics, enabling robust anomaly detection, people counting, and activity understanding from severely degraded single-pixel observations. Combining these findings, we identify a practical sampling-rate regime in which behavioral intelligence emerges while personal identity remains strongly protected. Together, these results point to a human-rights-aligned pathway for safety monitoring that can support timely intervention without normalizing intrusive surveillance in privacy-sensitive spaces.

S$^3$IT: A Benchmark for Spatially Situated Social Intelligence Test

The integration of embodied agents into human environments demands embodied social intelligence: reasoning over both social norms and physical constraints. However, existing evaluations fail to address this integration, as they are limited to either disembodied social reasoning (e.g., in text) or socially-agnostic physical tasks. Both approaches fail to assess an agent's ability to integrate and trade off both physical and social constraints within a realistic, embodied context. To address this challenge, we introduce Spatially Situated Social Intelligence Test (S$^{3}$IT), a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate embodied social intelligence. It is centered on a novel and challenging seat-ordering task, requiring an agent to arrange seating in a 3D environment for a group of large language model-driven (LLM-driven) NPCs with diverse identities, preferences, and intricate interpersonal relationships. Our procedurally extensible framework generates a vast and diverse scenario space with controllable difficulty, compelling the agent to acquire preferences through active dialogue, perceive the environment via autonomous exploration, and perform multi-objective optimization within a complex constraint network. We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs on S$^{3}$IT and found that they still struggle with this problem, showing an obvious gap compared with the human baseline. Results imply that LLMs have deficiencies in spatial intelligence, yet simultaneously demonstrate their ability to achieve near human-level competence in resolving conflicts that possess explicit textual cues.

TongSIM: A General Platform for Simulating Intelligent Machines

As artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly advances, especially in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), research focus is shifting from single-modality text processing to the more complex domains of multimodal and embodied AI. Embodied intelligence focuses on training agents within realistic simulated environments, leveraging physical interaction and action feedback rather than conventionally labeled datasets. Yet, most existing simulation platforms remain narrowly designed, each tailored to specific tasks. A versatile, general-purpose training environment that can support everything from low-level embodied navigation to high-level composite activities, such as multi-agent social simulation and human-AI collaboration, remains largely unavailable. To bridge this gap, we introduce TongSIM, a high-fidelity, general-purpose platform for training and evaluating embodied agents. TongSIM offers practical advantages by providing over 100 diverse, multi-room indoor scenarios as well as an open-ended, interaction-rich outdoor town simulation, ensuring broad applicability across research needs. Its comprehensive evaluation framework and benchmarks enable precise assessment of agent capabilities, such as perception, cognition, decision-making, human-robot cooperation, and spatial and social reasoning. With features like customized scenes, task-adaptive fidelity, diverse agent types, and dynamic environmental simulation, TongSIM delivers flexibility and scalability for researchers, serving as a unified platform that accelerates training, evaluation, and advancement toward general embodied intelligence.

A Generative Data Framework with Authentic Supervision for Underwater Image Restoration and Enhancement

Underwater image restoration and enhancement are crucial for correcting color distortion and restoring image details, thereby establishing a fundamental basis for subsequent underwater visual tasks. However, current deep learning methodologies in this area are frequently constrained by the scarcity of high-quality paired datasets. Since it is difficult to obtain pristine reference labels in underwater scenes, existing benchmarks often rely on manually selected results from enhancement algorithms, providing debatable reference images that lack globally consistent color and authentic supervision. This limits the model's capabilities in color restoration, image enhancement, and generalization. To overcome this limitation, we propose using in-air natural images as unambiguous reference targets and translating them into underwater-degraded versions, thereby constructing synthetic datasets that provide authentic supervision signals for model learning. Specifically, we establish a generative data framework based on unpaired image-to-image translation, producing a large-scale dataset that covers 6 representative underwater degradation types. The framework constructs synthetic datasets with precise ground-truth labels, which facilitate the learning of an accurate mapping from degraded underwater images to their pristine scene appearances. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments across 6 representative network architectures and 3 independent test sets show that models trained on our synthetic data achieve comparable or superior color restoration and generalization performance to those trained on existing benchmarks. This research provides a reliable and scalable data-driven solution for underwater image restoration and enhancement. The generated dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/yftian2025/SynUIEDatasets.git.

Spatial Blind Spot: Auditory Motion Perception Deficits in Audio LLMs

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have recently shown impressive progress in speech recognition, audio captioning, and auditory question answering. Yet, whether these models can perceive spatial dynamics, particularly the motion of sound sources, remains unclear. In this work, we uncover a systematic motion perception deficit in current ALLMs. To investigate this issue, we introduce AMPBench, the first benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate auditory motion understanding. AMPBench introduces a controlled question-answering benchmark designed to evaluate whether Audio-Language Models (LALMs) can infer the direction and trajectory of moving sound sources from binaural audio. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analyses reveal that current models struggle to reliably recognize motion cues or distinguish directional patterns. The average accuracy remains below 50%, underscoring a fundamental limitation in auditory spatial reasoning. Our study highlights a fundamental gap between human and model auditory spatial reasoning, providing both a diagnostic tool and new insight for enhancing spatial cognition in future Audio-Language Models.

Class-Aware Prototype Learning with Negative Contrast for Test-Time Adaptation of Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate impressive zero-shot generalization through large-scale image-text pretraining, yet their performance can drop once the deployment distribution diverges from the training distribution. To address this, Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) methods update models using unlabeled target data. However, existing approaches often ignore two key challenges: prototype degradation in long-tailed distributions and confusion between semantically similar classes. To tackle these issues, we propose \textbf{C}lass-Aware \textbf{P}rototype \textbf{L}earning with \textbf{N}egative \textbf{C}ontrast(\textbf{CPL-NC}), a lightweight TTA framework designed specifically for VLMs to enhance generalization under distribution shifts. CPL-NC introduces a \textit{Class-Aware Prototype Cache} Module that dynamically adjusts per-class capacity based on test-time frequency and activation history, with a rejuvenation mechanism for inactive classes to retain rare-category knowledge. Additionally, a \textit{Negative Contrastive Learning} Mechanism identifies and constrains hard visual-textual negatives to improve class separability. The framework employs asymmetric optimization, refining only textual prototypes while anchoring on stable visual features. Experiments on 15 benchmarks show that CPL-NC consistently outperforms prior TTA methods across both ResNet-50 and ViT-B/16 backbones.

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of 3D DDPM for MRI Image Generation Using Tensor Networks

We address the challenge of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) for three-dimensional (3D) U-Net-based denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) image generation. Despite its practical significance, research on parameter-efficient representations of 3D convolution operations remains limited. To bridge this gap, we propose Tensor Volumetric Operator (TenVOO), a novel PEFT method specifically designed for fine-tuning DDPMs with 3D convolutional backbones. Leveraging tensor network modeling, TenVOO represents 3D convolution kernels with lower-dimensional tensors, effectively capturing complex spatial dependencies during fine-tuning with few parameters. We evaluate TenVOO on three downstream brain MRI datasets-ADNI, PPMI, and BraTS2021-by fine-tuning a DDPM pretrained on 59,830 T1-weighted brain MRI scans from the UK Biobank. Our results demonstrate that TenVOO achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-scale structural similarity index measure (MS-SSIM), outperforming existing approaches in capturing spatial dependencies while requiring only 0.3% of the trainable parameters of the original model. Our code is available at: https://github.com/xiaovhua/tenvoo

Learning Long Short-Term Intention within Human Daily Behaviors

In the domain of autonomous household robots, it is of utmost importance for robots to understand human behaviors and provide appropriate services. This requires the robots to possess the capability to analyze complex human behaviors and predict the true intentions of humans. Traditionally, humans are perceived as flawless, with their decisions acting as the standards that robots should strive to align with. However, this raises a pertinent question: What if humans make mistakes? In this research, we present a unique task, termed "long short-term intention prediction". This task requires robots can predict the long-term intention of humans, which aligns with human values, and the short term intention of humans, which reflects the immediate action intention. Meanwhile, the robots need to detect the potential non-consistency between the short-term and long-term intentions, and provide necessary warnings and suggestions. To facilitate this task, we propose a long short-term intention model to represent the complex intention states, and build a dataset to train this intention model. Then we propose a two-stage method to integrate the intention model for robots: i) predicting human intentions of both value-based long-term intentions and action-based short-term intentions; and 2) analyzing the consistency between the long-term and short-term intentions. Experimental results indicate that the proposed long short-term intention model can assist robots in comprehending human behavioral patterns over both long-term and short-term durations, which helps determine the consistency between long-term and short-term intentions of humans.

Body Discovery of Embodied AI

In the pursuit of realizing artificial general intelligence (AGI), the importance of embodied artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly apparent. Following this trend, research integrating robots with AGI has become prominent. As various kinds of embodiments have been designed, adaptability to diverse embodiments will become important to AGI. We introduce a new challenge, termed "Body Discovery of Embodied AI", focusing on tasks of recognizing embodiments and summarizing neural signal functionality. The challenge encompasses the precise definition of an AI body and the intricate task of identifying embodiments in dynamic environments, where conventional approaches often prove inadequate. To address these challenges, we apply causal inference method and evaluate it by developing a simulator tailored for testing algorithms with virtual environments. Finally, we validate the efficacy of our algorithms through empirical testing, demonstrating their robust performance in various scenarios based on virtual environments.