Evolution of Optimization Methods: Algorithms, Scenarios, and Evaluations

Balancing convergence speed, generalization capability, and computational efficiency remains a core challenge in deep learning optimization. First-order gradient descent methods, epitomized by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and Adam, serve as the cornerstone of modern training pipelines. However, large-scale model training, stringent differential privacy requirements, and distributed learning paradigms expose critical limitations in these conventional approaches regarding privacy protection and memory efficiency. To mitigate these bottlenecks, researchers explore second-order optimization techniques to surpass first-order performance ceilings, while zeroth-order methods reemerge to alleviate memory constraints inherent to large-scale training. Despite this proliferation of methodologies, the field lacks a cohesive framework that unifies underlying principles and delineates application scenarios for these disparate approaches. In this work, we retrospectively analyze the evolutionary trajectory of deep learning optimization algorithms and present a comprehensive empirical evaluation of mainstream optimizers across diverse model architectures and training scenarios. We distill key emerging trends and fundamental design trade-offs, pinpointing promising directions for future research. By synthesizing theoretical insights with extensive empirical evidence, we provide actionable guidance for designing next-generation highly efficient, robust, and trustworthy optimization methods. The code is available at https://github.com/APRIL-AIGC/Awesome-Optimizer.

Evolution of Video Generative Foundations

The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) has revolutionized video generation, enabling systems ranging from proprietary pioneers like OpenAI's Sora, Google's Veo3, and Bytedance's Seedance to powerful open-source contenders like Wan and HunyuanVideo to synthesize temporally coherent and semantically rich videos. These advancements pave the way for building "world models" that simulate real-world dynamics, with applications spanning entertainment, education, and virtual reality. However, existing reviews on video generation often focus on narrow technical fields, e.g., Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and diffusion models, or specific tasks (e. g., video editing), lacking a comprehensive perspective on the field's evolution, especially regarding Auto-Regressive (AR) models and integration of multimodal information. To address these gaps, this survey firstly provides a systematic review of the development of video generation technology, tracing its evolution from early GANs to dominant diffusion models, and further to emerging AR-based and multimodal techniques. We conduct an in-depth analysis of the foundational principles, key advancements, and comparative strengths/limitations. Then, we explore emerging trends in multimodal video generation, emphasizing the integration of diverse data types to enhance contextual awareness. Finally, by bridging historical developments and contemporary innovations, this survey offers insights to guide future research in video generation and its applications, including virtual/augmented reality, personalized education, autonomous driving simulations, digital entertainment, and advanced world models, in this rapidly evolving field. For more details, please refer to the project at https://github.com/sjtuplayer/Awesome-Video-Foundations.

UniICL: Systematizing Unified Multimodal In-context Learning through a Capability-Oriented Taxonomy

In-context Learning enables training-free adaptation via demonstrations but remains highly sensitive to example selection and formatting. In unified multimodal models spanning understanding and generation, this sensitivity is exacerbated by cross-modal interference and varying cognitive demands. Consequently, In-context Learning efficacy is often non-monotonic and highly task-dependent. To diagnose these behaviors, we introduce a six-level capability-oriented taxonomy that categorizes the functional role of demonstrations from basic perception to high-order discernment. Guided by this cognitive framework, we construct UniICL-760K, a large-scale corpus featuring curated 8-shot In-context Learning episodes across 15 subtasks, alongside UniICL-Bench for rigorous, controlled evaluation. As an architectural intervention to stabilize few-shot adaptation, we propose the Context-Adaptive Prototype Modulator, a lightweight, plug-and-play module. Evaluations on UniICL-Bench show that our approach yields highly competitive unified results, outperforming larger-parameter multimodal large language model baselines on most understanding In-context Learning tasks. Data and code will be available soon at https://github.com/xuyicheng-zju/UniICL.

Large-Scale Multidimensional Knowledge Profiling of Scientific Literature

The rapid expansion of research across machine learning, vision, and language has produced a volume of publications that is increasingly difficult to synthesize. Traditional bibliometric tools rely mainly on metadata and offer limited visibility into the semantic content of papers, making it hard to track how research themes evolve over time or how different areas influence one another. To obtain a clearer picture of recent developments, we compile a unified corpus of more than 100,000 papers from 22 major conferences between 2020 and 2025 and construct a multidimensional profiling pipeline to organize and analyze their textual content. By combining topic clustering, LLM-assisted parsing, and structured retrieval, we derive a comprehensive representation of research activity that supports the study of topic lifecycles, methodological transitions, dataset and model usage patterns, and institutional research directions. Our analysis highlights several notable shifts, including the growth of safety, multimodal reasoning, and agent-oriented studies, as well as the gradual stabilization of areas such as neural machine translation and graph-based methods. These findings provide an evidence-based view of how AI research is evolving and offer a resource for understanding broader trends and identifying emerging directions. Code and dataset: https://github.com/xzc-zju/Profiling_Scientific_Literature

M3CoTBench: Benchmark Chain-of-Thought of MLLMs in Medical Image Understanding

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has proven effective in enhancing large language models by encouraging step-by-step intermediate reasoning, and recent advances have extended this paradigm to Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). In the medical domain, where diagnostic decisions depend on nuanced visual cues and sequential reasoning, CoT aligns naturally with clinical thinking processes. However, Current benchmarks for medical image understanding generally focus on the final answer while ignoring the reasoning path. An opaque process lacks reliable bases for judgment, making it difficult to assist doctors in diagnosis. To address this gap, we introduce a new M3CoTBench benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the correctness, efficiency, impact, and consistency of CoT reasoning in medical image understanding. M3CoTBench features 1) a diverse, multi-level difficulty dataset covering 24 examination types, 2) 13 varying-difficulty tasks, 3) a suite of CoT-specific evaluation metrics (correctness, efficiency, impact, and consistency) tailored to clinical reasoning, and 4) a performance analysis of multiple MLLMs. M3CoTBench systematically evaluates CoT reasoning across diverse medical imaging tasks, revealing current limitations of MLLMs in generating reliable and clinically interpretable reasoning, and aims to foster the development of transparent, trustworthy, and diagnostically accurate AI systems for healthcare. Project page at https://juntaojianggavin.github.io/projects/M3CoTBench/.

Disco-RAG: Discourse-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as an important means of enhancing the performance of large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive tasks. However, most existing RAG strategies treat retrieved passages in a flat and unstructured way, which prevents the model from capturing structural cues and constrains its ability to synthesize knowledge from dispersed evidence across documents. To overcome these limitations, we propose Disco-RAG, a discourse-aware framework that explicitly injects discourse signals into the generation process. Our method constructs intra-chunk discourse trees to capture local hierarchies and builds inter-chunk rhetorical graphs to model cross-passage coherence. These structures are jointly integrated into a planning blueprint that conditions the generation. Experiments on question answering and long-document summarization benchmarks show the efficacy of our approach. Disco-RAG achieves state-of-the-art results on the benchmarks without fine-tuning. These findings underscore the important role of discourse structure in advancing RAG systems.

UltraLBM-UNet: Ultralight Bidirectional Mamba-based Model for Skin Lesion Segmentation

Skin lesion segmentation is a crucial step in dermatology for guiding clinical decision-making. However, existing methods for accurate, robust, and resource-efficient lesion analysis have limitations, including low performance and high computational complexity. To address these limitations, we propose UltraLBM-UNet, a lightweight U-Net variant that integrates a bidirectional Mamba-based global modeling mechanism with multi-branch local feature perception. The proposed architecture integrates efficient local feature injection with bidirectional state-space modeling, enabling richer contextual interaction across spatial dimensions while maintaining computational compactness suitable for point-of-care deployment. Extensive experiments on the ISIC 2017, ISIC 2018, and PH2 datasets demonstrate that our model consistently achieves state-of-the-art segmentation accuracy, outperforming existing lightweight and Mamba counterparts with only 0.034M parameters and 0.060 GFLOPs. In addition, we introduce a hybrid knowledge distillation strategy to train an ultra-compact student model, where the distilled variant UltraLBM-UNet-T, with only 0.011M parameters and 0.019 GFLOPs, achieves competitive segmentation performance. These results highlight the suitability of UltraLBM-UNet for point-of-care deployment, where accurate and robust lesion analyses are essential. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/LinLinLin-X/UltraLBM-UNet.

OpenVE-3M: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Instruction-Guided Video Editing

The quality and diversity of instruction-based image editing datasets are continuously increasing, yet large-scale, high-quality datasets for instruction-based video editing remain scarce. To address this gap, we introduce OpenVE-3M, an open-source, large-scale, and high-quality dataset for instruction-based video editing. It comprises two primary categories: spatially-aligned edits (Global Style, Background Change, Local Change, Local Remove, Local Add, and Subtitles Edit) and non-spatially-aligned edits (Camera Multi-Shot Edit and Creative Edit). All edit types are generated via a meticulously designed data pipeline with rigorous quality filtering. OpenVE-3M surpasses existing open-source datasets in terms of scale, diversity of edit types, instruction length, and overall quality. Furthermore, to address the lack of a unified benchmark in the field, we construct OpenVE-Bench, containing 431 video-edit pairs that cover a diverse range of editing tasks with three key metrics highly aligned with human judgment. We present OpenVE-Edit, a 5B model trained on our dataset that demonstrates remarkable efficiency and effectiveness by setting a new state-of-the-art on OpenVE-Bench, outperforming all prior open-source models including a 14B baseline. Project page is at https://lewandofskee.github.io/projects/OpenVE.

Transform Trained Transformer: Accelerating Naive 4K Video Generation Over 10$\times$

Native 4K (2160$\times$3840) video generation remains a critical challenge due to the quadratic computational explosion of full-attention as spatiotemporal resolution increases, making it difficult for models to strike a balance between efficiency and quality. This paper proposes a novel Transformer retrofit strategy termed $\textbf{T3}$ ($\textbf{T}$ransform $\textbf{T}$rained $\textbf{T}$ransformer) that, without altering the core architecture of full-attention pretrained models, significantly reduces compute requirements by optimizing their forward logic. Specifically, $\textbf{T3-Video}$ introduces a multi-scale weight-sharing window attention mechanism and, via hierarchical blocking together with an axis-preserving full-attention design, can effect an "attention pattern" transformation of a pretrained model using only modest compute and data. Results on 4K-VBench show that $\textbf{T3-Video}$ substantially outperforms existing approaches: while delivering performance improvements (+4.29$\uparrow$ VQA and +0.08$\uparrow$ VTC), it accelerates native 4K video generation by more than 10$\times$. Project page at https://zhangzjn.github.io/projects/T3-Video

UltraVideo: High-Quality UHD Video Dataset with Comprehensive Captions

The quality of the video dataset (image quality, resolution, and fine-grained caption) greatly influences the performance of the video generation model. The growing demand for video applications sets higher requirements for high-quality video generation models. For example, the generation of movie-level Ultra-High Definition (UHD) videos and the creation of 4K short video content. However, the existing public datasets cannot support related research and applications. In this paper, we first propose a high-quality open-sourced UHD-4K (22.4\% of which are 8K) text-to-video dataset named UltraVideo, which contains a wide range of topics (more than 100 kinds), and each video has 9 structured captions with one summarized caption (average of 824 words). Specifically, we carefully design a highly automated curation process with four stages to obtain the final high-quality dataset: \textit{i)} collection of diverse and high-quality video clips. \textit{ii)} statistical data filtering. \textit{iii)} model-based data purification. \textit{iv)} generation of comprehensive, structured captions. In addition, we expand Wan to UltraWan-1K/-4K, which can natively generate high-quality 1K/4K videos with more consistent text controllability, demonstrating the effectiveness of our data curation.We believe that this work can make a significant contribution to future research on UHD video generation. UltraVideo dataset and UltraWan models are available at https://xzc-zju.github.io/projects/UltraVideo.