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Nov 10

LinAlg-Bench: A Forensic Benchmark Revealing Structural Failure Modes in LLM Mathematical Reasoning

We introduce LinAlg-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark evaluating 10 frontier large language models on structured linear algebra computation across a strict dimensional gradient of 3x3, 4x4, and 5x5 matrices. Spanning 9 task types and 660 SymPy-certified problems, the benchmark exhaustively evaluates 6,600 model outputs. Beyond binary accuracy, LinAlg-Bench introduces a three-stage automated forensic pipeline classifying 1,156 failures into ten primary error tags with fine-grained subtypes, revealing that LLM mathematical failure is not random but structurally constrained by algorithm type and matrix dimension. Our central finding is a sharp behavioral threshold at 4x4 scale: below it, models fail through execution errors -- sign tracking failures, arithmetic drift, and parity errors; above it, failure transitions to computational abandonment, with models fabricating responses through tool roleplay, constraint-consistent confabulation, and structured hallucination rather than attempting computation. This fabrication-to-abandonment transition is near-universal across all model tiers and architectures, suggesting a working memory limit rather than a knowledge gap, supported by three scale-emergent error types absent at 3x3 but present at 4x4 and 5x5. We further show that solution strategy rigidity is a near-perfect predictor of 5x5 determinant accuracy, document constraint-aware confabulation as a novel structured hallucination failure mode, and release all data, model outputs, error labels, and judge pipeline publicly.

  • 3 authors
·
May 15

Addressing Pitfalls in the Evaluation of Uncertainty Estimation Methods for Natural Language Generation

Hallucinations are a common issue that undermine the reliability of large language models (LLMs). Recent studies have identified a specific subset of hallucinations, known as confabulations, which arise due to predictive uncertainty of LLMs. To detect confabulations, various methods for estimating predictive uncertainty in natural language generation (NLG) have been developed. These methods are typically evaluated by correlating uncertainty estimates with the correctness of generated text, with question-answering (QA) datasets serving as the standard benchmark. However, commonly used approximate correctness functions have substantial disagreement between each other and, consequently, in the ranking of the uncertainty estimation methods. This allows one to inflate the apparent performance of uncertainty estimation methods. We propose using several alternative risk indicators for risk correlation experiments that improve robustness of empirical assessment of UE algorithms for NLG. For QA tasks, we show that marginalizing over multiple LLM-as-a-judge variants leads to reducing the evaluation biases. Furthermore, we explore structured tasks as well as out of distribution and perturbation detection tasks which provide robust and controllable risk indicators. Finally, we propose to use an Elo rating of uncertainty estimation methods to give an objective summarization over extensive evaluation settings.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 22, 2025

Video-Mirai: Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models Need Foresight

Causal video generators must predict from the past, but they need not learn only from it. In streaming autoregressive video diffusion, each emitted segment becomes a commitment that future segments must preserve. Standard training, however, only asks each causal state to explain the present. This creates what we call a representation-level planning gap: states that fit the current segment may discard identity, layout, and motion information needed for a consistent future. We introduce Video-Mirai, a training-only method that closes this gap without changing causal inference: the generator rolls out causally, a frozen foresight encoder reads the completed rollout non-causally, and a lightweight predictor distills the resulting stopped-gradient targets into causal states. Future frames supervise representations, never generator inputs. At inference, the encoder and predictor are discarded, leaving the original architecture, per-step FLOPs, and KV-cache behavior unchanged. Video-Mirai improves a strong Causal-Forcing baseline on 5-second VBench from 83.8 to 84.6 in terms of Total Score. On 30-second rollouts beyond the training horizon, subject consistency improves from 84.9 to 88.5 and background consistency from 90.2 to 91.9. Ablations identify future-conditioned targets as the key ingredient, and probes show that future frames become more decodable from current features. Causality should constrain inference, not representation supervision. Our study highlights that visual autoregressive models need foresight. Project page: https://y0uroy.github.io/Video-Mirai.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 1

MemBodied: Recurrent Associative Memory for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action models provide a strong foundation for general-purpose robot control, yet a vast majority of policies do not preserve and leverage episode-level information beyond the current observation. This limitation is consequential in history-dependent manipulation tasks that depend on information available only in past observations. Retaining past observations in context can aid in recovering this information, but at the significant cost of ever-growing, bloated context and inference latency. We thus introduce MemBodied, a fixed-size episodic memory with two complementary components: an associative state that records interactions across policy calls and an episode anchor that preserves a compact representation of the initial scene as a reference. At each policy call, the model conditions action generation on the current input and the memory components, rather than directly using past observations. Across five evaluated RMBench tasks requiring memory, MemBodied achieves 7.81times the mean success rate of a stateless policy and 2.98times of vanilla recurrent memory, while outperforming the strongest memory-augmented baseline by 1.3times with 10times fewer added parameters. On the fully observable LIBERO-Long suite, it reached 90.6%, a 5.4% improvement over the stateless π_0 policy. These findings support MemBodied as a practical alternative to expanding the policy context for history-dependent manipulation.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 22 3

A Geometric Taxonomy of Hallucinations in LLMs

The term "hallucination" converge different failure modes with specific geometric signatures in embedding space. We propose a taxonomy identifying three types: unfaithfulness (Type I: ignoring provided context), confabulation (Type II: inventing semantically foreign content), and factual error (Type III: wrong details within correct conceptual frames). We introduce two detection methods grounded in this taxonomy: the Semantic Grounding Index (SGI) for Type I, which measures whether a response moves toward provided context on the unit hypersphere, and the Directional Grounding Index (DGI) for Type II, which measures displacement geometry in context-free settings. DGI achieves AUROC=0.958 on human-crafted confabulations with 3.8% cross-domain degradation. External validation on three independently collected human-annotated benchmarks -WikiBio GPT-3, FELM, and ExpertQA- yields domain-specific AUROC 0.581-0.695, with DGI outperforming an NLI CrossEncoder baseline on expert-domain data, where surface entailment operates at chance. On LLM-generated benchmarks, detection is domain-local. We examine the Type III boundary through TruthfulQA, where apparent classifier signal (Logistic Regression with AUROC 0.731) is traced to a stylistic annotation confound: false answers are geometrically closer to queries than truthful ones, a pattern incompatible with factual-error detection. This identifies a theoretical constraint from a methodological limitation.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 6

EventVLA: Event-Driven Visual Evidence Memory for Long-Horizon Vision-Language-Action Policies

Memory remains a critical bottleneck for long-horizon robotic manipulation, as standard Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies often fail when task-relevant cues become occluded or unobservable over time. While existing memory-augmented methods utilize historical context, they either suffer from severe information bottlenecks, incur high latency via decoupled dual systems, or rely on unselective buffers that accumulate massive visual redundancies. To address these limitations, we introduce EventVLA, an end-to-end framework founded on the concept of sparse visual evidence memory that comprises two core components: foundational visual anchors to retain initial and short-term contexts, and a dynamic Keyframe Evidence Memory (KEM) module. Specifically, KEM directly predicts future keyframe probabilities from the VLA's latent embeddings to autonomously capture and store sparse, task-critical visual events. This foresight-driven mechanism empowers the policy to dynamically evaluate the future causal utility of current observations, preserving transient visual evidence before it becomes unobservable. Furthermore, we propose RoboTwin-MeM, a diagnostic benchmark specifically designed to evaluate non-Markovian manipulation tasks with interactive visual evidence. Extensive evaluations show that across 17 memory-requiring simulation tasks and 4 real-world bimanual tasks, EventVLA achieves an average success rate improvement of +40% over state-of-the-art memory-augmented VLAs.

Learning Unknown Constraints without Unsafe Data via Optimality and Counterfactual Regularization

Learning from demonstrations (LfD) provides a framework for inferring unknown constraints from locally optimal, constraint-satisfying expert behavior. Existing approaches largely fall into two paradigms, constrained inverse optimal control (CIOC) and inverse constrained reinforcement learning (ICRL). CIOC exploits optimality conditions such as the Karush--Kuhn--Tucker (KKT) conditions but typically assumes known dynamics and structured constraint representations. Meanwhile, ICRL accommodates complex unknown constraints and unknown transition dynamics but often requires extensive online exploration, during which unsafe constraint violations may occur. In this work, we introduce Counterfactual KKT (CF-KKT), a constraint learning framework that leverages learned dynamics and locally optimal demonstrations to recover unknown constraints without requiring known dynamics or additional risky exploration, thereby combining the data efficiency and safety advantages of CIOC with the flexibility of ICRL. First, we use a locally learned differentiable dynamics model to impose KKT-inspired optimality conditions directly on the demonstrations. Second, we use the learned dynamics to generate reward-improving counterfactual behaviors near the demonstrations, revealing behaviors that would be preferable in the absence of the unknown constraint and thus providing synthetic infeasible data. When the constraint parameterization is known, the same learned-dynamics framework enables direct CIOC-based parameter recovery, and we characterize its sensitivity to dynamics misspecification. Across high-dimensional robotic control tasks, our approach learns neural constraint representations with improved safety and data efficiency relative to state-of-the-art offline ICRL baselines.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 6

Anatomy of a Lie: A Multi-Stage Diagnostic Framework for Tracing Hallucinations in Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) frequently "hallucinate" - generate plausible yet factually incorrect statements - posing a critical barrier to their trustworthy deployment. In this work, we propose a new paradigm for diagnosing hallucinations, recasting them from static output errors into dynamic pathologies of a model's computational cognition. Our framework is grounded in a normative principle of computational rationality, allowing us to model a VLM's generation as a dynamic cognitive trajectory. We design a suite of information-theoretic probes that project this trajectory onto an interpretable, low-dimensional Cognitive State Space. Our central discovery is a governing principle we term the geometric-information duality: a cognitive trajectory's geometric abnormality within this space is fundamentally equivalent to its high information-theoretic surprisal. Hallucination detection is counts as a geometric anomaly detection problem. Evaluated across diverse settings - from rigorous binary QA (POPE) and comprehensive reasoning (MME) to unconstrained open-ended captioning (MS-COCO) - our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance. Crucially, it operates with high efficiency under weak supervision and remains highly robust even when calibration data is heavily contaminated. This approach enables a causal attribution of failures, mapping observable errors to distinct pathological states: perceptual instability (measured by Perceptual Entropy), logical-causal failure (measured by Inferential Conflict), and decisional ambiguity (measured by Decision Entropy). Ultimately, this opens a path toward building AI systems whose reasoning is transparent, auditable, and diagnosable by design.

The Past Frames the Future: Memory for Autoregressive Video Generation

Advances in generative models have improved video fidelity, enabling long-horizon generation, interactive world modeling, and evolving visual environments. Autoregressive (AR) video generation extends visual sequences through causal rollouts. However, a fundamental bottleneck emerges: as the generated sequence expands, practical models must operate under strictly bounded context windows, storage, and computational limits. Consequently, critical historical information, e.g., entity identities, dynamic states, and intervention-induced causal changes, often leaves the active context long before its relevance diminishes. Overcoming this limitation and maintaining temporal persistence constitutes a fundamental memory problem. We present a systematic and comprehensive review of memory mechanisms in AR video generation. We formulate memory operationally as persistent historical information maintained across outer AR steps, capable of influencing future generation even after the originating evidence is no longer locally accessible. Building upon this unified framework, we organize the literature through five complementary perspectives: (I) Forms, the representational carriers of history; (II) Functions, the specific semantic and physical information requiring preservation; (III) Operations, the lifecycle of writing, reading, updating, managing, and integrating memory; (IV) Learning, the optimization of memory behaviors under closed-loop rollouts; and (V) Evaluation, the paradigms for diagnosing genuine memory capabilities. We conclude by synthesizing open challenges, including composable and resource-aware memory architectures, trustworthy state updating, self-rollout learning, and standardized evaluation. By bridging representations, mechanisms, and learning paradigms, this paper establishes a structured foundation for developing reliable, memory-conditioned video generation systems.

  • 25 authors
·
Sep 22 2

Learning with Boolean threshold functions

We develop a method for training neural networks on Boolean data in which the values at all nodes are strictly pm 1, and the resulting models are typically equivalent to networks whose nonzero weights are also pm 1. The method replaces loss minimization with a nonconvex constraint formulation. Each node implements a Boolean threshold function (BTF), and training is expressed through a divide-and-concur decomposition into two complementary constraints: one enforces local BTF consistency between inputs, weights, and output; the other imposes architectural concurrence, equating neuron outputs with downstream inputs and enforcing weight equality across training-data instantiations of the network. The reflect-reflect-relax (RRR) projection algorithm is used to reconcile these constraints. Each BTF constraint includes a lower bound on the margin. When this bound is sufficiently large, the learned representations are provably sparse and equivalent to networks composed of simple logical gates with pm 1 weights. Across a range of tasks -- including multiplier-circuit discovery, binary autoencoding, logic-network inference, and cellular automata learning -- the method achieves exact solutions or strong generalization in regimes where standard gradient-based methods struggle. These results demonstrate that projection-based constraint satisfaction provides a viable and conceptually distinct foundation for learning in discrete neural systems, with implications for interpretability and efficient inference.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 19

Exact Regular-Constrained Variable-Order Markov Generation via Sparse Context-State Belief Propagation

Variable-order Markov models generate sequences over a finite alphabet by conditioning each symbol on the longest available suffix of the generated history. Regular constraints, by contrast, describe finite-horizon control requirements by an automaton: fixed positions, forced endings, metrical patterns, and forbidden copied fragments are all special cases. Existing exact methods already handle regular constraints with belief propagation for first-order Markov chains. The contribution here is the variable-order extension: identifying the state space on which the existing BP-regular machinery must be run when the generator is a variable-order/backoff model. A first-order constraint layer can enforce useful support conditions, but it computes future mass after merging histories that a variable-order generator deliberately keeps distinct. We formalize this mismatch and give the sparse construction obtained by replacing the first-order Markov state with the observed context state, then taking the standard product with the regular constraint automaton. For a fixed trained context graph and automaton, inference is linear in the sequence horizon; in general it is polynomial in the number of reachable product edges. This gives the correct variable-order distribution conditioned on regular constraints without expanding to all K-tuples. The same finite-source interface supports reversible data augmentation by inverse count lookup, matching materialized transposition augmentation without storing transformed corpora. We also separate exact BP inference from generation-time backoff policies, such as singleton avoidance, whose stochastic semantics must be made explicit if exactness is claimed.

  • 1 authors
·
May 7

HiMPO: Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization for Less-Entangled Credit in Long-Horizon Agents

Long-horizon agents rely on memory mechanisms to compress interaction history, but optimizing memory writing faces a distinct credit assignment challenge: a memory update may be rewarded or penalized due to downstream tool failures, noisy observations, or reasoning errors rather than its own contribution. This causally entangled credit can lead agents to discard useful evidence or preserve irrelevant information. We propose HiMPO, a Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization framework for assigning less-entangled credit to memory-writing actions in long-horizon agents. HiMPO first estimates the local utility of a memory update by comparing the task-relevant information recoverable from the previous and updated memories under the same pre-write state. It then uses hindsight relevance as a bounded retrospective filter that attenuates memory credit when local utility is not supported by the target outcome. The resulting memory-specific advantage is applied only to memory tokens, while trajectory-level rewards optimize the rest of the agent behavior. Across judge-based open-domain tasks and objective compressive-memory QA, HiMPO improves over strong memory-based and RL-based baselines while preserving compressed-context efficiency. Controlled interventions further show that HiMPO reduces blame leakage from tool-induced errors and improves attribution fidelity of memory updates.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 14

TriggerBench: Investigating Prospective Memory for Large Language Models

While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in long interactions, existing evaluations focus predominantly on retrospective memory (RM) via explicit queries. Prospective memory (PM), the critical ability to spontaneously recall and act on latent constraints without direct prompts, remains largely unevaluated. We introduce TriggerBench, a comprehensive PM benchmark spanning five dimensions across both daily assistants and professional workflows. TriggerBench pairs scenarios with matched RM controls, contrastive positive/negative variants, and overloaded triggers, enabling fine-grained measurement of proactive recall, false-alarm rate, and attentional robustness under a single protocol. Our evaluation yields three key findings. (i) PM shows a precision-recall trade-off and attentional fragility. Though enhanced reasoning significantly improves proactive recall, models may overfit to an "always-remind" heuristic. Furthermore, PM accuracy degrades substantially under implicit constraints or triggers overloaded by concurrent user requests, indicating that robust PM remains an open challenge. (ii) PM is notably harder than RM: on identical contexts, RM near-saturates up to 100K tokens, while PM decays sharply as context length scales. (iii) PM may serve as a behavioral probe of spare reasoning capacity. Pairing PM scenarios with AIME-2025 math problems reveals that successful trajectories yield higher PM accuracy than failed ones at the same context length, showing PM tracks spare reasoning budget that token count obscures. Project page: https://github.com/KristenZHANG/TriggerBench-Official.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 21

MemoryVLA++: Temporal Modeling via Memory and Imagination in Vision-Language-Action Models

Temporal modeling is essential for robotic manipulation, as effective control requires both memory of past interactions and imagination of future states. However, most VLA models rely primarily on the current observation and therefore struggle with long-horizon, temporally dependent tasks. Cognitive science suggests that humans rely on working memory to buffer short-lived context, the hippocampal system to preserve episodic memory of past experience, and internal models to imagine possible future state evolution. Inspired by these mechanisms, we propose MemoryVLA++, a full temporal modeling framework that equips VLA models with memory and imagination for robotic manipulation. A pretrained VLM encodes the current observation into perceptual and cognitive tokens, forming working memory. These tokens query a Perceptual-Cognitive Memory Bank to retrieve relevant historical context. This bank stores low-level details and high-level semantics from past interactions, and is updated through redundancy-aware consolidation. A world model imagines future states in a denoising latent space, and the imagined latents are integrated under memory guidance to form full temporal-aware tokens. The resulting tokens condition a diffusion action expert to predict temporally consistent action sequences. We conduct extensive experiments on 5 simulation benchmarks and 3 categories of real-robot tasks across 3 robots, covering general manipulation, long-horizon temporal tasks, robustness, and generalization. Our method achieves strong performance across Libero, SimplerEnv, Mikasa-Robo, Calvin, Libero-Plus, and diverse real-robot tasks, validating the effectiveness of full temporal modeling with memory and imagination. For example, on real robots, it achieves +9%, +26%, +28% gains on general, memory-dependent, and imagination-dependent tasks. Project Page: https://shihao1895.github.io/MemoryVLA-PP-Web

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 7

MemGen: Weaving Generative Latent Memory for Self-Evolving Agents

Agent memory shapes how Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents, akin to the human brain, progressively refine themselves through environment interactions. Existing paradigms remain constrained: parametric memory forcibly adjusts model parameters, and retrieval-based memory externalizes experience into structured databases, yet neither captures the fluid interweaving of reasoning and memory that underlies human cognition. To address this gap, we propose MemGen, a dynamic generative memory framework that equips agents with a human-esque cognitive faculty. It consists of a memory trigger, which monitors the agent's reasoning state to decide explicit memory invocation, and a memory weaver, which takes the agent's current state as stimulus to construct a latent token sequence as machine-native memory to enrich its reasoning. In this way, MemGen enables agents to recall and augment latent memory throughout reasoning, producing a tightly interwoven cycle of memory and cognition. Extensive experiments across eight benchmarks show that MemGen surpasses leading external memory systems such as ExpeL and AWM by up to 38.22%, exceeds GRPO by up to 13.44%, and exhibits strong cross-domain generalization ability. More importantly, we find that without explicit supervision, MemGen spontaneously evolves distinct human-like memory faculties, including planning memory, procedural memory, and working memory, suggesting an emergent trajectory toward more naturalistic forms of machine cognition.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 29, 2025

RELIC: Interactive Video World Model with Long-Horizon Memory

A truly interactive world model requires three key ingredients: real-time long-horizon streaming, consistent spatial memory, and precise user control. However, most existing approaches address only one of these aspects in isolation, as achieving all three simultaneously is highly challenging-for example, long-term memory mechanisms often degrade real-time performance. In this work, we present RELIC, a unified framework that tackles these three challenges altogether. Given a single image and a text description, RELIC enables memory-aware, long-duration exploration of arbitrary scenes in real time. Built upon recent autoregressive video-diffusion distillation techniques, our model represents long-horizon memory using highly compressed historical latent tokens encoded with both relative actions and absolute camera poses within the KV cache. This compact, camera-aware memory structure supports implicit 3D-consistent content retrieval and enforces long-term coherence with minimal computational overhead. In parallel, we fine-tune a bidirectional teacher video model to generate sequences beyond its original 5-second training horizon, and transform it into a causal student generator using a new memory-efficient self-forcing paradigm that enables full-context distillation over long-duration teacher as well as long student self-rollouts. Implemented as a 14B-parameter model and trained on a curated Unreal Engine-rendered dataset, RELIC achieves real-time generation at 16 FPS while demonstrating more accurate action following, more stable long-horizon streaming, and more robust spatial-memory retrieval compared with prior work. These capabilities establish RELIC as a strong foundation for the next generation of interactive world modeling.

  • 14 authors
·
Dec 3, 2025 2

Distortion Instead of Hallucination: The Effect of Reasoning Under Strict Constraints

With the widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs), hallucinations, which are non-factual fabrications in model outputs, have become serious concerns. Reasoning capabilities have received attention as a self-verification process to improve output reliability. However, the effect of reasoning within a closed system where LLMs cannot rely on external tools or knowledge has yet to be clarified. We therefore conduct experiments under strict constraints (recommending peer-reviewed journal articles in computer science) to examine the effect of reasoning across multiple models (GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Flash). Our results reveal a problematic trade-off between constraint compliance and factual accuracy. Non-reasoning models exhibit high constraint violation rates (66-75%) but maintain factual accuracy, while reasoning models reduce violations (13-26%) but systematically distort known facts to satisfy constraints and increase complete fabrication. This trade-off pattern is consistent across both models despite different architectures, indicating a fundamental limitation of reasoning. Furthermore, reasoning does not uniformly improve output authenticity: effects diverge by model, reflecting different allocations of the compliance-truthfulness trade-off. These findings challenge the assumption that reasoning universally improves reliability: reasoning models trade honest constraint violations for detection-resistant distortions.

  • 1 authors
·
Jan 4

Enhancing Physical Plausibility in Video Generation by Reasoning the Implausibility

Diffusion models can generate realistic videos, but existing methods rely on implicitly learning physical reasoning from large-scale text-video datasets, which is costly, difficult to scale, and still prone to producing implausible motions that violate fundamental physical laws. We introduce a training-free framework that improves physical plausibility at inference time by explicitly reasoning about implausibility and guiding the generation away from it. Specifically, we employ a lightweight physics-aware reasoning pipeline to construct counterfactual prompts that deliberately encode physics-violating behaviors. Then, we propose a novel Synchronized Decoupled Guidance (SDG) strategy, which leverages these prompts through synchronized directional normalization to counteract lagged suppression and trajectory-decoupled denoising to mitigate cumulative trajectory bias, ensuring that implausible content is suppressed immediately and consistently throughout denoising. Experiments across different physical domains show that our approach substantially enhances physical fidelity while maintaining photorealism, despite requiring no additional training. Ablation studies confirm the complementary effectiveness of both the physics-aware reasoning component and SDG. In particular, the aforementioned two designs of SDG are also individually validated to contribute critically to the suppression of implausible content and the overall gains in physical plausibility. This establishes a new and plug-and-play physics-aware paradigm for video generation.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 29, 2025

A Plausible Future Is Not a Causal Future: Can Video Models Generate How the World Unfolds?

Large-scale video generation models are increasingly viewed as a promising path toward world models, yet their ability to capture causally coherent physical dynamics remains poorly understood. Existing evaluations largely emphasize visual quality, prompt adherence, or broad physical plausibility, leaving open whether a model can faithfully realize a complete causal cascade, in which an initiating event propagates through causally dependent interactions to a terminal outcome. We introduce CausalCascade, a simulator-grounded benchmark centered on 50 event-rich Blender scenes with structured event graphs, graph-grounded diagnostic VQA, three levels of future-event specification, and 2,832 controlled counterfactual variants, and use it to evaluate nine image-to-video models with complementary motion-, event-, and counterfactual-level diagnostics. Across the evaluated models, generated motion is more reliably localized spatially than realized with correct spatiotemporal evolution, while richer future-event specification improves event recovery but leaves physical realization limited. Counterfactual evaluation further reveals weak selective responsiveness to physical interventions, while most audited failures are foundational, arising at scene consistency or event occurrence. Together, these results position causal cascade generation as a process-level test of world modeling and highlight the need to jointly recover the intended future, faithfully realize its physical evolution, selectively respond to physical interventions, and maintain a coherent physical world over time. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/SJTU-DeepDeltaLab/CausalCascade .

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 10

CRONOS: Benchmarking Counterfactual Physical Consistency in Video Models

Video prediction is increasingly viewed as a path toward generalizable world models, yet it remains unclear whether these systems learn underlying causal structure or merely exploit superficial visual correlations for future prediction. We introduce CRONOS, an intervention-based benchmark designed to evaluate counterfactual physical consistency: whether a model's predictions of physical events respond appropriately to controlled changes in the visual input, such as variations of scene context, viewpoint, object appearance, and object category. Built in a photorealistic Unreal Engine environment, CRONOS enables controlled, high-fidelity generation of videos across diverse scenes and dynamics. In contrast to previous benchmarks, CRONOS systematically intervenes on four key factors - viewpoint, scene, object category, and object appearance - while keeping the underlying physical event type, such as a collision, occlusion, or fall, fixed. Our evaluation of recent open-source video generators reveals substantial failures in counterfactual physical consistency: prediction quality for the same physical event type is affected by appearance, environment, and, particularly by viewpoint changes. CRONOS provides a controlled and reproducible testbed for diagnosing how the quality of generated videos changes for different interventions, establishing a concrete target for developing models that perform consistently across changes of multiple conditions. The dataset and code are available at our project page.

  • 3 authors
·
May 21 3

A2RBench: An Automatic Paradigm for Formally Verifiable Abstract Reasoning Benchmark Generation

Abstract reasoning ability reflects the intelligence and generalization capacity of LLMs to extract and apply abstract rules. However, accurately measuring this ability remains challenging: existing benchmarks either rely on expensive manual annotation, limiting their scale, or risk measuring memorization rather than genuine reasoning. To address this, we introduce an automated pipeline named A2RBench, encompassing generation, expansion, evaluation, and analysis. Specifically, in the generation stage, LLMs create diverse tasks demanding genuine reasoning; in the expansion stage, LLMs reuse validated rules and expand new input spaces to generate task variations, achieving scaling. However, such a process may cause hallucinations. To eliminate it, we further establish a theoretical framework and prove that programmatic verification--testing whether the inverse operation perfectly reverses the forward operation (cycle consistency)--guarantees a unique solution. Through extensive evaluations on mainstream LLMs, we find: (1) Current LLMs exhibit fundamental deficiencies in abstract reasoning, with top models significantly underperforming humans on a representative subset (39.8% vs. 68.5%). (2) Current LLMs fall far short of 2D and 1D in the complexity of generated 3D tasks, revealing their lack of understanding of high-dimensional tasks. (3) Counterintuitively, inputs with higher information complexity can simplify the reasoning process.

MAC-AutoML MAC-AutoML
·
May 16 1

ActWorld: From Explorable to Interactive World Model via Action-Aware Memory

Interactive world models aim to simulate environment dynamics under real-time user actions. However, their action vocabulary is largely confined to navigation: most actions correspond to motion (e.g., walk, turn, look around), while interaction with objects in the scene (e.g., pick up plates, open doors, or trigger physical responses) is either absent, restricted to game domains, or relegated to prompt-to-full-video scenarios. The resulting worlds are visually explorable but not truly actionable. In this work, we present ActWorld, an interactive world model that extends prior navigation-centric generators to support mid-rollout object interaction within a chunk-autoregressive framework. We argue that the navigation-interaction gap stems from two bottlenecks. First, a data bottleneck: the lack of human-object interaction data with accurate, dense labels. Second, a memory bottleneck: recency-biased history compression in existing world models discards the event-transition frames that causally determine subsequent object states, leading to an action-forgetting pathology. On the data side, we construct a 100K interaction video dataset, each annotated with per-chunk captions via chain-of-thought reasoning. On the model side, we introduce a hierarchical action-aware memory design that routes history compression by interaction importance, complemented by a persistent memory bank that maintains event-update and object-identity tokens across long rollouts. Experiments show that ActWorld supports both flexible navigation and rich object interaction within a single model, substantially improving interaction fidelity over navigation-only baselines without sacrificing viewpoint control. Project page is available at https://interactwm.github.io/ActWorld.

ByteDance ByteDance
·
Jun 15

PhysEvolve: Verifier-grounded Self-evolution for Physical Reasoning with Executable Worlds

Physical reasoning underpins how embodied systems understand and act in the physical world, yet vision-language models (VLMs) remain unreliable on questions about dynamics and physical causality. Progress is critically constrained by the scarcity of grounded counterfactual training data, as observational videos capture only the factual trajectory that occurred. The self-evolving paradigm offers a route beyond fixed datasets by enabling models to construct their own training problems. Extending this paradigm to physics, however, requires an external source of truth that can both validate model-proposed environments and verify alternative physical outcomes under intervention. We introduce , a verifier-grounded self-evolving framework that trains VLMs for causal physical reasoning from model-proposed executable worlds and simulation-authored tasks. At each round, a shared VLM proposes executable world programs and evidence schemas; a deterministic physics engine freezes each valid world, simulates matched baseline and body-elided counterfactual branches, and synthesizes discrete, answer-bound visual tasks. Exact verifier feedback from task solving updates both the shared policy via GRPO and an adaptive curriculum over physical intents. Starting from Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct, achieves targeted gains across PhysBench, CausalPhys, and ContPhy without human intervention data, improving PhysBench Throwing by 8.8 points and ContPhy Counterfactual Removal and Goal-Pit by 7.4 and 24.4 points. These gains concentrate on interaction-sensitive and altered-world questions, demonstrating zero-shot transfer of causal principles to unseen complex dynamics (cloth, fluid, soft bodies) and real-world video.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 25 2

Memorize When Needed: Decoupled Memory Control for Spatially Consistent Long-Horizon Video Generation

Spatially consistent long-horizon video generation aims to maintain temporal and spatial consistency along predefined camera trajectories. Existing methods mostly entangle memory modeling with video generation, leading to inconsistent content during scene revisits and diminished generative capacity when exploring novel regions, even trained on extensive annotated data. To address these limitations, we propose a decoupled framework that separates memory conditioning from generation. Our approach significantly reduces training costs while simultaneously enhancing spatial consistency and preserving the generative capacity for novel scene exploration. Specifically, we employ a lightweight, independent memory branch to learn precise spatial consistency from historical observation. We first introduce a hybrid memory representation to capture complementary temporal and spatial cues from generated frames, then leverage a per-frame cross-attention mechanism to ensure each frame is conditioned exclusively on the most spatially relevant historical information, which is injected into the generative model to ensure spatial consistency. When generating new scenes, a camera-aware gating mechanism is proposed to mediate the interaction between memory and generation modules, enabling memory conditioning only when meaningful historical references exist. Compared with the existing method, our method is highly data-efficient, yet the experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both visual quality and spatial consistency.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 20

Thinking in Video: Can Video Generators Really Reason About the Real World?

Recent advances in world models and video generation have given rise to an emerging reasoning paradigm that leverages video generative models to simulate, predict, and reason about real-world dynamics. We redefine this paradigm as Thinking in Video, where video is not merely an output artifact but a medium for constructing, extending, and verifying causal thought. However, this promise remains unverified: convincing rollouts may reflect memorized appearances rather than causal understanding, while existing metrics separate perceptual fidelity from semantic logic. To evaluate whether video generators support such reasoning, we introduce the Causal-Generative Dual-Judge (CGDJ), auditing World Model Consistency from two perspectives. Explicit Causal Perception tests whether a generator reads a video scenario as a reasoning problem through spatio-temporal flattened visual question answering, while Implicit Generative Perception-Prediction Gap evaluates whether it renders the causal consequence as a consistent future video. Applying CGDJ to representative open- and closed-source generators reveals a clear Perception-Prediction Gap: open-source models produce plausible dynamics despite near-zero explicit causal perception, whereas advanced closed-source systems show stronger but still limited alignment between reasoning and generation. Further analysis exposes audio-visual misalignment, where models verbalize correct causal logic more reliably than they render it, challenging the "world simulator" narrative.

  • 15 authors
·
Jul 19

Long-WAM: Scaling the Context of World-Action Models

Real-time robot control demands enough visual history to infer motion and task progress, but processing that history can delay action. We present Long-WAM, a model-system framework for scaling the context of causal world-action models under real-time control constraints. Our central finding is that access to history is not the same as using it: longer histories pay off far more when the video foundation is pretrained autoregressively (AR). We first learn causal prediction from robot and egocentric videos without action labels, then preserve this history-to-future structure during world-action adaptation. On RoboCasa GR-1, increasing context from 0.0 to 19.2 seconds raises success from 63.3% to 78.7%, whereas a bidirectionally pretrained initialization shows no net gain; robot-domain AR pretraining further raises peak success on GR-1 and LIBERO-Long. Long-WAM also achieves the best results among compared methods on LIBERO-Long, RoboTwin 2.0, and DOMINO. Streaming observation encoding, asynchronous execution, and hardware-specific acceleration enable deployment on RTX 5090, DGX Spark, and Jetson AGX Thor without dropping future prediction; on RTX 5090, each action chunk, including future-video latent prediction, takes 107.4 ms. Real-time deployment on Unitree G1 and YAM supports dynamic and long-horizon manipulation, including 95% success on dynamic cup stacking, where Pi0.5 and Fast-WAM succeed in none of 20 trials. As a memory-informed executor, Long-WAM also complements higher-level planning in composite tasks.

nvidia NVIDIA
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Oct 6 4

Trimming the Long-Tail of Visual World Modeling Evaluation

Physical interactions follow a long-tailed distribution: a set of common and regular interactions dominates human experience and visual data, while a broad spectrum of rare and irregular interactions remains underrepresented. Although recent visual world models, including image and video generation models, achieve impressive realism on existing benchmarks, they primarily focus on simulating common physical interactions. This raises a central question: Do current visual world models internalize and generalize physical principles? In this work, we introduce Tailor-Bench, a benchmark that challenges world models to simulate irregular physical interactions. To enable systematic evaluation, we design three scenario modes that progressively challenge model reasoning: Regular scenarios reflect common tool-task pairs, Unconventional scenarios replace conventional tools with attribute-compatible substitutes to test affordance generalization, and Impossible scenarios introduce attribute-violating tools to probe constraint awareness. Additionally, we design two complementary settings under a unified evaluation protocol: predictive generation requires inferring outcomes without guidance, while descriptive generation specifies the target outcome for faithful realization. Our experimental results reveal a clear long-tail gap in physical world modeling: performance degrades from Regular to Unconventional and Impossible scenarios, indicating limited generalization beyond common interactions. Failure analysis further shows that models rely on superficial visual patterns: image models fail to realize correct state changes, while video models further suffer from temporal inconsistencies.

PlanGEN: A Multi-Agent Framework for Generating Planning and Reasoning Trajectories for Complex Problem Solving

Recent agent frameworks and inference-time algorithms often struggle with complex planning problems due to limitations in verifying generated plans or reasoning and varying complexity of instances within a single task. Many existing methods for these tasks either perform task-level verification without considering constraints or apply inference-time algorithms without adapting to instance-level complexity. To address these limitations, we propose PlanGEN, a model-agnostic and easily scalable agent framework with three key components: constraint, verification, and selection agents. Specifically, our approach proposes constraint-guided iterative verification to enhance performance of inference-time algorithms--Best of N, Tree-of-Thought, and REBASE. In PlanGEN framework, the selection agent optimizes algorithm choice based on instance complexity, ensuring better adaptability to complex planning problems. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements over the strongest baseline across multiple benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results on NATURAL PLAN (sim8%uparrow), OlympiadBench (sim4%uparrow), DocFinQA (sim7%uparrow), and GPQA (sim1%uparrow). Our key finding highlights that constraint-guided iterative verification improves inference-time algorithms, and adaptive selection further boosts performance on complex planning and reasoning problems.

  • 14 authors
·
Feb 22, 2025 5

ProAR: Learning Prospective Reasoning with Autoregressive Video Models

Autoregressive (AR) video models excel at causal generation, but their reliance on next-chunk prediction confines them to a short-sighted, reactive paradigm. This limitation is particularly consequential for reasoning-oriented generation, where achieving a target outcome through valid intermediate states matters more than local visual plausibility. To address this challenge, we propose Learning Prospective Reasoning with Autoregressive Video Models (ProAR), a novel framework that transforms autoregressive video generation into a goal-oriented reasoning process. ProAR introduces two key components: (1) To anchor generation to the long-range outcome, we integrate goal-frame prediction into the autoregressive loop via an asymmetric attention mask, enabling the predicted goal frame to guide the generation of intermediate states without being disrupted by them. (2) To guide short-range transitions, we introduce future representation self-alignment to encourage current hidden states to anticipate upcoming temporal dynamics. By leveraging teacher-forcing in AR training, we extract clean future representations in a single forward pass and align current representations with them using a lightweight, training-only predictor. Together, these two mechanisms seamlessly combine explicit, sparse target supervision with implicit, dense step-wise guidance, promoting coherent, goal-directed reasoning progress with modest computational cost. Experiments show that ProAR's complementary components consistently improve performance across diverse visual reasoning benchmarks. The framework proves highly training-efficient, surpassing fully trained standard AR baselines using only 25% of the training steps. This paradigm also demonstrates promising applicability to embodied reasoning tasks.

ucdavis UC Davis
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Oct 1 3

Walking the Tightrope: Disentangling Beneficial and Detrimental Drifts in Non-Stationary Custom-Tuning

This paper uncovers a critical yet overlooked phenomenon in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs): detrimental concept drift within chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning during non-stationary reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT), where reasoning token distributions evolve unpredictably, thereby introducing significant biases in final predictions. To address this, we are pioneers in establishing the theoretical bridge between concept drift theory and RFT processes by formalizing CoT's autoregressive token streams as non-stationary distributions undergoing arbitrary temporal shifts. Leveraging this framework, we propose a novel counterfact-aware RFT that systematically decouples beneficial distribution adaptation from harmful concept drift through concept graph-empowered LLM experts generating counterfactual reasoning trajectories. Our solution, Counterfactual Preference Optimization (CPO), enables stable RFT in non-stationary environments, particularly within the medical domain, through custom-tuning of counterfactual-aware preference alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate our superior performance of robustness, generalization and coordination within RFT. Besides, we also contributed a large-scale dataset CXR-CounterFact (CCF), comprising 320,416 meticulously curated counterfactual reasoning trajectories derived from MIMIC-CXR. Our code and data are public.

  • 3 authors
·
May 18, 2025

ConMax: Confidence-Maximizing Compression for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Recent breakthroughs in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated that extensive Chain-of-Thought (CoT) generation is critical for enabling intricate cognitive behaviors, such as self-verification and backtracking, to solve complex tasks. However, this capability often leads to ``overthinking'', where models generate redundant reasoning paths that inflate computational costs without improving accuracy. While Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on reasoning traces is a standard paradigm for the 'cold start' phase, applying existing compression techniques to these traces often compromises logical coherence or incurs prohibitive sampling costs. In this paper, we introduce ConMax (Confidence-Maximizing Compression), a novel reinforcement learning framework designed to automatically compress reasoning traces while preserving essential reasoning patterns. ConMax formulates compression as a reward-driven optimization problem, training a policy to prune redundancy by maximizing a weighted combination of answer confidence for predictive fidelity and thinking confidence for reasoning validity through a frozen auxiliary LRM. Extensive experiments across five reasoning datasets demonstrate that ConMax achieves a superior efficiency-performance trade-off. Specifically, it reduces inference length by 43% over strong baselines at the cost of a mere 0.7% dip in accuracy, proving its effectiveness in generating high-quality, efficient training data for LRMs.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 8

TFP: Temporally Conditioned Memory-Fusion Policies for Visuomotor Learning

Vision--Language--Action (VLA) policies such as π_{0.5} and OpenVLA perform well on many manipulation tasks, but they are often reactive: the next action is predicted from the current observation, instruction, and proprioceptive state. This assumption breaks down in stage-dependent manipulation, where visually similar states may require different actions depending on latent task progress and previous interaction outcomes. We argue that such tasks require not only memory, but dynamics-aware belief updates: the policy should preserve task progress during stable or occluded phases and revise its belief near contact, release, or subgoal transitions. We introduce Temporally Conditioned Memory-Fusion Policies (TFP), a lightweight memory-action framework for VLA backbones. TFP maintains an episode-local task-progress belief with Liquid Time-Constant dynamics and injects the updated belief directly into the flow-matching action decoder through adaptive modulation. This lets temporally accumulated context shape the generated action chunk, rather than serving only as passive history context. With a 3.3B-parameter model, TFP improves the average success rate from \(96.9\%\) to \(98.75\%\) on LIBERO and from \(91.4\%\) to \(93.77\%\) on LIBERO-plus. On the memory-focused MIKASA ShellGameTouch diagnostic, TFP achieves success up to \(75.0\%\). Mechanistic analyses show that write-gain changes near manipulation events are about \(6\times\) larger than far non-event phases, and hidden-state interventions show that the belief causally modulates generated action chunks. These results suggest that compact, event-sensitive memory dynamics can improve VLA policies under occlusion, visual perturbation, and stage-dependent task structure.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 8

Envision: Benchmarking Unified Understanding & Generation for Causal World Process Insights

Current multimodal models aim to transcend the limitations of single-modality representations by unifying understanding and generation, often using text-to-image (T2I) tasks to calibrate semantic consistency. However, their reliance on static, single-image generation in training and evaluation leads to overfitting to static pattern matching and semantic fusion, while fundamentally hindering their ability to model dynamic processes that unfold over time. To address these constraints, we propose Envision-a causal event progression benchmark for chained text-to-multi-image generation. Grounded in world knowledge and structured by spatiotemporal causality, it reorganizes existing evaluation dimensions and includes 1,000 four-stage prompts spanning six scientific and humanities domains. To transition evaluation from single images to sequential frames and assess whether models truly internalize world knowledge while adhering to causal-temporal constraints, we introduce Envision-Score, a holistic metric integrating multi-dimensional consistency, physicality, and aesthetics. Comprehensive evaluation of 15 models (10 specialized T2I models, 5 unified models) uncovers: specialized T2I models demonstrate proficiency in aesthetic rendering yet lack intrinsic world knowledge. Unified multimodal models bridge this gap, consistently outperforming specialized counterparts in causal narrative coherence. However, even these unified architectures remain subordinate to closed-source models and struggle to overcome the core challenge of spatiotemporal consistency. This demonstrates that a focus on causally-isolated single images impedes multi-frame reasoning and generation, promoting static pattern matching over dynamic world modeling-ultimately limiting world knowledge internalization, generation.

opendatalab OpenDataLab
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Dec 1, 2025 5

EnerVerse: Envisioning Embodied Future Space for Robotics Manipulation

We introduce EnerVerse, a comprehensive framework for embodied future space generation specifically designed for robotic manipulation tasks. EnerVerse seamlessly integrates convolutional and bidirectional attention mechanisms for inner-chunk space modeling, ensuring low-level consistency and continuity. Recognizing the inherent redundancy in video data, we propose a sparse memory context combined with a chunkwise unidirectional generative paradigm to enable the generation of infinitely long sequences. To further augment robotic capabilities, we introduce the Free Anchor View (FAV) space, which provides flexible perspectives to enhance observation and analysis. The FAV space mitigates motion modeling ambiguity, removes physical constraints in confined environments, and significantly improves the robot's generalization and adaptability across various tasks and settings. To address the prohibitive costs and labor intensity of acquiring multi-camera observations, we present a data engine pipeline that integrates a generative model with 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS). This pipeline leverages the generative model's robust generalization capabilities and the spatial constraints provided by 4DGS, enabling an iterative enhancement of data quality and diversity, thus creating a data flywheel effect that effectively narrows the sim-to-real gap. Finally, our experiments demonstrate that the embodied future space generation prior substantially enhances policy predictive capabilities, resulting in improved overall performance, particularly in long-range robotic manipulation tasks.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 3, 2025 3

Matrix-Game 3.5: Enhancing Real-Time Streaming Interactive World Models with Patch Memory

Interactive world models extend video generation from offline clip synthesis toward persistent simulation of interactive virtual worlds, enabling applications in games, robotics, embodied agents, and XR. Achieving stable long-horizon interactive generation, however, remains challenging, as the model must simultaneously preserve scene geometry, dynamic consistency, and camera control while supporting real-time autoregressive generation. Building upon Matrix-Game 3.0, we present Matrix-Game 3.5, as shown in Figure 1, which advances real-time interactive world generation toward geometry-aware and long-horizon consistent simulation through three key improvements. First, we propose a unified geometry-aware memory framework, whose patch-memory and tiled-PRoPE components introduce no additional learnable parameters, combining explicit 3D patch retrieval with projective camera conditioning to enable geometry-consistent camera control and faithful long-horizon scene recall. Second, we introduce a static-dynamic disentangled world representation that separately models static scene geometry and dynamic subjects, preserving both geometric consistency and subject identity throughout long-horizon generation. Third, we develop a two-stage progressive real-time distillation framework that converts a bidirectional diffusion model into a few-step causal generator through Perceptual Flow Matching and curriculum based Self-Rollout DMD, enabling minute-long real-time interactive generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, with a unified training corpus spanning Unreal simulation environments, open-world games, and internet videos, MatrixGame 3.5 achieves strong performance in long-horizon scene recall, precise camera control, subject consistency, prompt-driven world generation, and stable real-time open-world interaction.

  • 17 authors
·
Aug 29 1

Causal Discovery from Heterogeneous/Nonstationary Data with Independent Changes

It is commonplace to encounter heterogeneous or nonstationary data, of which the underlying generating process changes across domains or over time. Such a distribution shift feature presents both challenges and opportunities for causal discovery. In this paper, we develop a framework for causal discovery from such data, called Constraint-based causal Discovery from heterogeneous/NOnstationary Data (CD-NOD), to find causal skeleton and directions and estimate the properties of mechanism changes. First, we propose an enhanced constraint-based procedure to detect variables whose local mechanisms change and recover the skeleton of the causal structure over observed variables. Second, we present a method to determine causal orientations by making use of independent changes in the data distribution implied by the underlying causal model, benefiting from information carried by changing distributions. After learning the causal structure, next, we investigate how to efficiently estimate the "driving force" of the nonstationarity of a causal mechanism. That is, we aim to extract from data a low-dimensional representation of changes. The proposed methods are nonparametric, with no hard restrictions on data distributions and causal mechanisms, and do not rely on window segmentation. Furthermore, we find that data heterogeneity benefits causal structure identification even with particular types of confounders. Finally, we show the connection between heterogeneity/nonstationarity and soft intervention in causal discovery. Experimental results on various synthetic and real-world data sets (task-fMRI and stock market data) are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed methods.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 5, 2019

V-Reflection: Transforming MLLMs from Passive Observers to Active Interrogators

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success, yet they remain prone to perception-related hallucinations in fine-grained tasks. This vulnerability arises from a fundamental limitation: their reasoning is largely restricted to the language domain, treating visual input as a static, reasoning-agnostic preamble rather than a dynamic participant. Consequently, current models act as passive observers, unable to re-examine visual details to ground their evolving reasoning states. To overcome this, we propose V-Reflection, a framework that transforms the MLLM into an active interrogator through a "think-then-look" visual reflection mechanism. During reasoning, latent states function as dynamic probes that actively interrogate the visual feature space, grounding each reasoning step for task-critical evidence. Our approach employs a two-stage distillation strategy. First, the Box-Guided Compression (BCM) module establishes stable pixel-to-latent targets through explicit spatial grounding. Next, a Dynamic Autoregressive Compression (DAC) module maps the model's hidden states into dynamic probes that interrogate the global visual feature map. By distilling the spatial expertise of the BCM teacher into the DAC student, V-Reflection internalizes the ability to localize task-critical evidence. During inference, both modules remain entirely inactive, maintaining a purely end-to-end autoregressive decoding in the latent space with optimal efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our V-Reflection across six perception-intensive benchmarks, significantly narrowing the fine-grained perception gap. Visualizations confirm that latent reasoning autonomously localizes task-critical visual evidence.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 30 1

Agentic Learner with Grow-and-Refine Multimodal Semantic Memory

MLLMs exhibit strong reasoning on isolated queries, yet they operate de novo -- solving each problem independently and often repeating the same mistakes. Existing memory-augmented agents mainly store past trajectories for reuse. However, trajectory-based memory suffers from brevity bias, gradually losing essential domain knowledge. More critically, even in truly multimodal problem-solving settings, it records only a single-modality trace of past behavior, failing to preserve how visual attention and logical reasoning jointly contributed to the solution. This is fundamentally misaligned with human cognition: semantic memory is both multimodal and integrated, preserving visual and abstract knowledge through coordinated but distinct representational streams. We thus introduce ViLoMem, a dual-stream memory framework that constructs compact, schema-based memory. It separately encodes visual distraction patterns and logical reasoning errors, enabling MLLMs to learn from their successful and failed experiences. Following a grow-and-refine principle, the system incrementally accumulates and updates multimodal semantic knowledge -- preserving stable, generalizable strategies while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Across six multimodal benchmarks, ViLoMem consistently improves pass@1 accuracy and substantially reduces repeated visual and logical errors. Ablations confirm the necessity of dual-stream memory with explicit distraction--hallucination separation, demonstrating the value of error-aware multimodal memory for lifelong and cross-domain agentic learning. Our project page will be available at https://weihao-bo.github.io/ViLoMeo-page.

  • 12 authors
·
Nov 26, 2025 2

Plenoptic Video Generation

Camera-controlled generative video re-rendering methods, such as ReCamMaster, have achieved remarkable progress. However, despite their success in single-view setting, these works often struggle to maintain consistency across multi-view scenarios. Ensuring spatio-temporal coherence in hallucinated regions remains challenging due to the inherent stochasticity of generative models. To address it, we introduce PlenopticDreamer, a framework that synchronizes generative hallucinations to maintain spatio-temporal memory. The core idea is to train a multi-in-single-out video-conditioned model in an autoregressive manner, aided by a camera-guided video retrieval strategy that adaptively selects salient videos from previous generations as conditional inputs. In addition, Our training incorporates progressive context-scaling to improve convergence, self-conditioning to enhance robustness against long-range visual degradation caused by error accumulation, and a long-video conditioning mechanism to support extended video generation. Extensive experiments on the Basic and Agibot benchmarks demonstrate that PlenopticDreamer achieves state-of-the-art video re-rendering, delivering superior view synchronization, high-fidelity visuals, accurate camera control, and diverse view transformations (e.g., third-person to third-person, and head-view to gripper-view in robotic manipulation). Project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/dir/plenopticdreamer/

nvidia NVIDIA
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Jan 8 2

Staying VIGILant: Mitigating Visual Laziness via Counterfactual Visual Alignment in MLLMs

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) extend large language models (LLMs) with visual perception, enabling joint reasoning over images and text. Despite inheriting strong reasoning capabilities from LLMs, they remain prone to hallucinations that contradict their visual inputs. Mechanistic studies indicate that this weakness stems from visual laziness: MLLMs encode the correct visual evidence internally, but overly rely on strong language priors during response. Existing alignment methods, such as direct preference optimization, primarily optimize outcome-level rewards based on text. This introduces an optimization bias toward linguistic shortcuts, leading to responses that often contradict the visual evidence. To address this, we propose Visual Information Gain In aLignment (VIGIL), a reinforcement-learning (RL) post-training framework that shifts the focus from numerical reward fitting to causal visual grounding. VIGIL introduces a geometric constraint that explicitly maximizes the mutual information between the visual input and the generated response. We achieve this by penalizing "blind confidence" instances where the model remains improperly certain even when textual-visual attention is masked to create a counterfactual blind state. Extensive experiments show that VIGIL consistently outperforms recent alignment methods across hallucination and reasoning benchmarks without compromising text-only capabilities. Our approach matches the full-data performance of state-of-the-art methods using only 25% of the preference data and even demonstrates emergent spatial grounding capabilities without explicit bounding box supervision.

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 23

Episodic Memories Generation and Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models

Episodic memory -- the ability to recall specific events grounded in time and space -- is a cornerstone of human cognition, enabling not only coherent storytelling, but also planning and decision-making. Despite their remarkable capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) lack a robust mechanism for episodic memory: we argue that integrating episodic memory capabilities into LLM is essential for advancing AI towards human-like cognition, increasing their potential to reason consistently and ground their output in real-world episodic events, hence avoiding confabulations. To address this challenge, we introduce a comprehensive framework to model and evaluate LLM episodic memory capabilities. Drawing inspiration from cognitive science, we develop a structured approach to represent episodic events, encapsulating temporal and spatial contexts, involved entities, and detailed descriptions. We synthesize a unique episodic memory benchmark, free from contamination, and release open source code and datasets to assess LLM performance across various recall and episodic reasoning tasks. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art models, including GPT-4 and Claude variants, Llama 3.1, and o1-mini, reveals that even the most advanced LLMs struggle with episodic memory tasks, particularly when dealing with multiple related events or complex spatio-temporal relationships -- even in contexts as short as 10k-100k tokens.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 20, 2025

Memadapter: Counterfactual Adaptation Against Memory-induced Sycophancy

Long-term memory enables LLM-based agents to retain and reuse information across tasks and sessions, supporting personalization and long-horizon interactions. However, persistent memories can also induce sycophancy, causing agents to over-align with users' historical beliefs even when they are inaccurate, outdated, or inconsistent with objective evidence. Existing mitigation methods assume that memory-induced sycophancy originates from biased or incorrect memories and attempt to reduce this risk by filtering such memories at different stages of the memory pipeline. However, in the real world, objective and correct memories can still induce sycophancy, and the same memory can warrant different influence across different contexts. To this end, we propose MemAdapter, a novel framework that adaptively integrates retrieved memories to support objective and reliable reasoning. Specifically, MemAdapter consists of three components: (i) Counterfactual Induction, which leverages counterfactual reasoning to uncover the potential risk of retrieved memories; (ii) Context-Aware Reflection, which calibrates the inferential influence of each retrieved memory in light of the current task via self-reflection; and (iii) Evidence-Based Reasoning, which grounds the final response in appropriate evidence while preserving the legitimate influence of memory. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that MemAdapter consistently improves memory reliability across diverse scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/DEEP-JLU/MemAdapter.

Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Language Models via Causal Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit logically inconsistent hallucinations that appear coherent yet violate reasoning principles, with recent research suggesting an inverse relationship between causal reasoning capabilities and such hallucinations. However, existing reasoning approaches in LLMs, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and its graph-based variants, operate at the linguistic token level rather than modeling the underlying causal relationships between variables, lacking the ability to represent conditional independencies or satisfy causal identification assumptions. To bridge this gap, we introduce causal-DAG construction and reasoning (CDCR-SFT), a supervised fine-tuning framework that trains LLMs to explicitly construct variable-level directed acyclic graph (DAG) and then perform reasoning over it. Moreover, we present a dataset comprising 25,368 samples (CausalDR), where each sample includes an input question, explicit causal DAG, graph-based reasoning trace, and validated answer. Experiments on four LLMs across eight tasks show that CDCR-SFT improves the causal reasoning capability with the state-of-the-art 95.33% accuracy on CLADDER (surpassing human performance of 94.8% for the first time) and reduces the hallucination on HaluEval with 10% improvements. It demonstrates that explicit causal structure modeling in LLMs can effectively mitigate logical inconsistencies in LLM outputs. Code is available at https://github.com/MrLYG/CDCR-SFT.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 17, 2025

Unlocking Complex Visual Generation via Closed-Loop Verified Reasoning

Despite rapid advancements, current text-to-image (T2I) models predominantly rely on a single-step generation paradigm, which struggles with complex semantics and faces diminishing returns from parameter scaling. While recent multi-step reasoning approaches show promise, they are hindered by ungrounded planning hallucinations lacking verification, monolithic post-hoc reflection, long-context optimization instabilities, and prohibitive inference latency. To overcome these bottlenecks, we propose the Closed-Loop Visual Reasoning (CLVR) framework, a comprehensive system that deeply couples visual-language logical planning with pixel-level diffusion generation. CLVR introduces an automated data engine with step-level visual verification to synthesize reliable reasoning trajectories, and proposes Proxy Prompt Reinforcement Learning (PPRL) to resolve long-context optimization instabilities by distilling interleaved multimodal histories into explicit reward signals for accurate causal attribution. Furthermore, to mitigate the severe latency bottleneck caused by iterative denoising, we propose Δ-Space Weight Merge (DSWM), a theoretically grounded method that fuses alignment weights with off-the-shelf distillation priors, reducing the per-step inference cost to just 4 NFEs without requiring expensive re-distillation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CLVR outperforms existing open-source baselines across multiple benchmarks and approaches the performance of proprietary commercial models, unlocking general test-time scaling capabilities for complex visual generation.

WALL-SS: Scaling Long-horizon World Models via Next-Scale Autoregression

Generative world models provide robots with predictive models of how the world evolves under interaction, with growing potential for simulation, planning, policy evaluation, and robot learning. Beyond clip-level future prediction, a unified generative formulation should relate actions to consequences, support flexible horizons and continuous interaction, and enable reward-driven optimization. We introduce WALL-SS, a world model that generates visual futures through Scale-wise autoregressive Scaling, enabling action-controllable and long-horizon robotic simulation. WALL-SS represents embodied trajectories as causal sequences of temporally interleaved observations and actions, making action-dependent state transitions explicit while naturally supporting variable-length generation, streaming extension through reusable causal states, and direct optimization through sequence probabilities. To make this formulation effective over long horizons, we generate each future observation in a coarse-to-fine manner and develop three complementary components within the same hierarchy. Action-conditioned next-scale prediction injects scale-aligned action representations to improve action-future coupling and model both successful and failed behaviors. Scale-compressed long-horizon memory retains recent interactions at fine resolution while compressing distant observations and actions, with scale-wise dream forcing enhancing robustness to self-generated context. Finally, on-policy alignment optimizes autoregressive visual dynamics with action-following and long-term consistency rewards while preserving the pretrained visual distribution. Experiments show that WALL-SS improves action following and trajectory accuracy, supports coherent minute-long streaming rollout under bounded memory, and consistently benefits from on-policy alignment in reducing action drift and long-horizon inconsistency.

  • 25 authors
·
Aug 25

The Model Says Walk: How Surface Heuristics Override Implicit Constraints in LLM Reasoning

Large language models systematically fail when a salient surface cue conflicts with an unstated feasibility constraint. We study this through a diagnose-measure-bridge-treat framework. Causal-behavioral analysis of the ``car wash problem'' across six models reveals approximately context-independent sigmoid heuristics: the distance cue exerts 8.7 to 38 times more influence than the goal, and token-level attribution shows patterns more consistent with keyword associations than compositional inference. The Heuristic Override Benchmark (HOB) -- 500 instances spanning 4 heuristic by 5 constraint families with minimal pairs and explicitness gradients -- demonstrates generality across 14 models: under strict evaluation (10/10 correct), no model exceeds 75%, and presence constraints are hardest (44%). A minimal hint (e.g., emphasizing the key object) recovers +15 pp on average, suggesting the failure lies in constraint inference rather than missing knowledge; 12/14 models perform worse when the constraint is removed (up to -39 pp), revealing conservative bias. Parametric probes confirm that the sigmoid pattern generalizes to cost, efficiency, and semantic-similarity heuristics; goal-decomposition prompting recovers +6 to 9 pp by forcing models to enumerate preconditions before answering. Together, these results characterize heuristic override as a systematic reasoning vulnerability and provide a benchmark for measuring progress toward resolving it.

How Large Language Models are Designed to Hallucinate

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable fluency across linguistic and reasoning tasks but remain systematically prone to hallucination. Prevailing accounts attribute hallucinations to data gaps, limited context, or optimization errors. We argue instead that hallucination is a structural outcome of the transformer architecture. As coherence engines, transformers are compelled to produce fluent continuations, with self-attention simulating the relational structure of meaning but lacking the existential grounding of temporality, mood, and care that stabilizes human understanding. On this basis, we distinguish ontological hallucination, arising when continuations require disclosure of beings in world, and residual reasoning hallucination, where models mimic inference by recycling traces of human reasoning in text. We illustrate these patterns through case studies aligned with Heideggerian categories and an experiment across twelve LLMs showing how simulated "self-preservation" emerges under extended prompts. Our contribution is threefold: (1) a comparative account showing why existing explanations are insufficient; (2) a predictive taxonomy of hallucination linked to existential structures with proposed benchmarks; and (3) design directions toward "truth-constrained" architectures capable of withholding or deferring when disclosure is absent. We conclude that hallucination is not an incidental defect but a defining limit of transformer-based models, an outcome scaffolding can mask but never resolve.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 19, 2025

Think Before You Move: Latent Motion Reasoning for Text-to-Motion Generation

Current state-of-the-art paradigms predominantly treat Text-to-Motion (T2M) generation as a direct translation problem, mapping symbolic language directly to continuous poses. While effective for simple actions, this System 1 approach faces a fundamental theoretical bottleneck we identify as the Semantic-Kinematic Impedance Mismatch: the inherent difficulty of grounding semantically dense, discrete linguistic intent into kinematically dense, high-frequency motion data in a single shot. In this paper, we argue that the solution lies in an architectural shift towards Latent System 2 Reasoning. Drawing inspiration from Hierarchical Motor Control in cognitive science, we propose Latent Motion Reasoning (LMR) that reformulates generation as a two-stage Think-then-Act decision process. Central to LMR is a novel Dual-Granularity Tokenizer that disentangles motion into two distinct manifolds: a compressed, semantically rich Reasoning Latent for planning global topology, and a high-frequency Execution Latent for preserving physical fidelity. By forcing the model to autoregressively reason (plan the coarse trajectory) before it moves (instantiates the frames), we effectively bridge the ineffability gap between language and physics. We demonstrate LMR's versatility by implementing it for two representative baselines: T2M-GPT (discrete) and MotionStreamer (continuous). Extensive experiments show that LMR yields non-trivial improvements in both semantic alignment and physical plausibility, validating that the optimal substrate for motion planning is not natural language, but a learned, motion-aligned concept space. Codes and demos can be found in https://chenhaoqcdyq.github.io/LMR/{https://chenhaoqcdyq.github.io/LMR/}

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 30, 2025

LiveVVT: High-Fidelity Video Virtual Try-On in Real Time

Diffusion-based Video Virtual Try-On (VVT) achieves high visual fidelity through bidirectional spatio-temporal modeling, but complete-clip dependence incurs prohibitive latency and computational overhead in practical continuous deployment. Naively enforcing causality disrupts pretrained bidirectional priors and substantially degrades synthesis quality. We introduce LiveVVT, a rolling streaming diffusion framework that preserves bounded bidirectional modeling within causal recurrent generation. Within a fixed-size window, LiveVVT jointly denoises multiple video chunks under bounded look-ahead, preserving local bidirectional interactions while emitting one clean chunk per iteration. Beyond the window, two complementary memories sustain long-term consistency: a bounded temporal memory propagates recent dynamics and occlusion context, whereas a persistent global appearance memory, constructed once from the target garment and a frontal try-on keyframe, anchors garment details and dressed appearance throughout the stream. We further introduce a progressive distillation framework integrating bidirectional VVT learning, teacher-trajectory regression for causal few-step adaptation, and Collaborative Matching Distillation, which couples teacher-distribution matching with rolling flow matching on real videos to align optimization with recurrent inference. Experiments on paired and unpaired long-sequence benchmarks demonstrate superior generation quality over similarly sized models, with 26times lower latency and 11times higher throughput, enabling high-fidelity real-time streaming VVT.

  • 7 authors
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Aug 27

MMLA: Memory-Mediated Learning Architecture for Predictive Dual-State Adaptation

Memory-Mediated Learning Architecture (MMLA) separates slow base parameters theta, a bounded numerical policy carrier Phi, and a bounded authoritative memory M. Predictive Dual-State Adaptation (PDSA) lets feedback update Phi while one problem remains active and lets a trusted lifecycle atomically commit one typed row or exact NULL. Later reasoning may read both states, but their writers, resets, rollback domains, and ledgers remain distinct. Realized futures supervise values only during training; deployment is causal and future-blind. We give conditional theory and falsifiable contracts for reasoning-time updates, completed-segment consolidation, predictive admission, authoritative memory, and dual-state attribution. Assumptions, counterexamples, capacity and cost ledgers, recovery duties, and identifying experiments are explicit; these are not implementation guarantees. Controlled studies show exact lifecycle execution on 300/300 held-out records for each of three seeds, calibrated retrieval gains over frozen-hidden dense and BM25 baselines, and exact typed anchor-filler transport on 240/240 held-out records per seed. These validate restricted components, not natural-language memory management or complete PDSA. Post-training studies retain positive and negative evidence. Later protocols obtain restricted readout progress, but a nine-trajectory comparison finds that matched latent readout, a full-width bridge, and bridge plus frozen text-teacher alignment all fail continuous-event qualification across both task families. A separately adapted text reference and restoration checks pass. At the September 13, 2026 evidence cutoff, no strict policy-only reasoning-time-training effect, predictive-admission oracle margin, learned future-blind admission policy, or policy-by-memory factorial advantage is established.

  • 2 authors
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Sep 13

CounterBench: A Benchmark for Counterfactuals Reasoning in Large Language Models

Counterfactual reasoning is widely recognized as one of the most challenging and intricate aspects of causality in artificial intelligence. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of large language models (LLMs) in counterfactual reasoning. In contrast to previous studies that primarily focus on commonsense causal reasoning, where LLMs often rely on prior knowledge for inference, we specifically assess their ability to perform counterfactual inference using a set of formal rules. To support this evaluation, we introduce a new benchmark dataset, CounterBench, comprising 1K counterfactual reasoning questions. The dataset is designed with varying levels of difficulty, diverse causal graph structures, distinct types of counterfactual questions, and multiple nonsensical name variants. Our experiments demonstrate that counterfactual reasoning poses a significant challenge for LLMs, with most models performing at levels comparable to random guessing. To enhance LLM's counterfactual reasoning ability, we propose a novel reasoning paradigm, CoIn, which guides LLMs through iterative reasoning and backtracking to systematically explore counterfactual solutions. Experimental results show that our method significantly improves LLM performance on counterfactual reasoning tasks and consistently enhances performance across different LLMs.Our dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/CounterBench/CounterBench.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 16, 2025

RealCam: Real-Time Novel-View Video Generation with Interactive Camera Control

Camera-controlled video-to-video (V2V) generation enables dynamic viewpoint synthesis from monocular footage, holding immense potential for interactive filmmaking and live broadcasting. However, existing implicit synthesis methods fundamentally rely on non-causal, full-sequence processing and rigid prefix-style temporal concatenation. This architectural paradigm mandates bidirectional attention, resulting in prohibitive computational latency, quadratic complexity scaling, and inherent incompatibility with real-time streaming or variable-length inputs. To overcome these limitations, we introduce RealCam, a novel autoregressive framework for interactive, real-time camera-controlled V2V generation. We first design a high-fidelity teacher model grounded in a Cross-frame In-context Learning paradigm. By interleaving source and target frames into synchronized contextual pairs, our design inherently enables length-agnostic generalization and naturally facilitates causal adaptation, breaking the rigid prefix bottleneck. We then distill this teacher into a few-step causal student via Self-Forcing with Distribution Matching Distillation, enabling efficient, on-the-fly streaming synthesis. Furthermore, to mitigate severe loop inconsistency in closed-loop trajectories, we propose Loop-Closed Data Augmentation (LoopAug), a novel paradigm that synthesizes globally consistent loop sequences from existing multiview datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RealCam achieves state-of-the-art visual fidelity and temporal consistency while enabling truly interactive camera control with orders-of-magnitude faster inference than existing paradigms. Our project page is at https://xyc-fly.github.io/RealCam/.

  • 8 authors
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May 6

CausalMotion: Structured Physical Reasoning as Keyframe and Trajectory Guidance for Training-Free Video Generation

Recent advances in diffusion-based video generation have significantly improved visual quality and short-term temporal coherence. However, existing methods still struggle to produce videos with physically consistent and causally plausible dynamics, especially in scenarios involving long-horizon interactions. This limitation arises from the fact that video diffusion models primarily learn physical consistency implicitly, while vision-language models can directly model physical laws. Based on this idea, in this work, we propose CausalMotion, a training-free framework that injects explicit physical reasoning into video generation through structured intermediate representations. Our key idea is to decouple reasoning from generation by leveraging a vision-language model to decompose a text prompt into a sequence of causally consistent keyframes and object-centric motion trajectories. These representations are then aligned and integrated as soft constraints to guide a pretrained video diffusion model during inference. This design enables explicit modeling of object dynamics and causal transitions without requiring additional training or supervision. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently improves physical plausibility and temporal coherence, particularly in dynamics-intensive scenarios, while maintaining high perceptual video quality.

  • 4 authors
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Jun 11

AstraNav-World: World Model for Foresight Control and Consistency

Embodied navigation in open, dynamic environments demands accurate foresight of how the world will evolve and how actions will unfold over time. We propose AstraNav-World, an end-to-end world model that jointly reasons about future visual states and action sequences within a unified probabilistic framework. Our framework integrates a diffusion-based video generator with a vision-language policy, enabling synchronized rollouts where predicted scenes and planned actions are updated simultaneously. Training optimizes two complementary objectives: generating action-conditioned multi-step visual predictions and deriving trajectories conditioned on those predicted visuals. This bidirectional constraint makes visual predictions executable and keeps decisions grounded in physically consistent, task-relevant futures, mitigating cumulative errors common in decoupled "envision-then-plan" pipelines. Experiments across diverse embodied navigation benchmarks show improved trajectory accuracy and higher success rates. Ablations confirm the necessity of tight vision-action coupling and unified training, with either branch removal degrading both prediction quality and policy reliability. In real-world testing, AstraNav-World demonstrated exceptional zero-shot capabilities, adapting to previously unseen scenarios without any real-world fine-tuning. These results suggest that AstraNav-World captures transferable spatial understanding and planning-relevant navigation dynamics, rather than merely overfitting to simulation-specific data distribution. Overall, by unifying foresight vision and control within a single generative model, we move closer to reliable, interpretable, and general-purpose embodied agents that operate robustly in open-ended real-world settings.

  • 13 authors
·
Dec 25, 2025

StressDream: Steering Video World Models for Robust Policy Evaluation and Improvement

Video world models (WMs) have shown promise for policy evaluation and improvement by imagining realistic future observations conditioned on ego-robot actions. While WMs can model distributions over futures, policy evaluation and improvement typically rely on nominal imaginations, which can miss high-impact outcomes of robot actions unless prohibitively many samples are drawn. To enable robust policy evaluation and improvement over WM imaginations, we propose StressDream, which steers imaginations toward high-impact yet plausible outcomes specified at inference time by optimizing the initial noise of diffusion-based WMs. However, optimizing high-dimensional noise is challenging: the optimization must reason about nuanced, scene-dependent target events in generated videos while avoiding out-of-distribution (OOD) noise that yields implausible imaginations. We address this with two complementary objectives: a semantic objective with a Vision-Language Model that provides informative gradients by reasoning about the generated video, and a plausibility objective that prevents the optimized noise from drifting OOD. With state-of-the-art video world models for autonomous driving and robotic manipulation, we show that StressDream effectively steers imaginations toward high-impact yet plausible outcomes specified by text at inference time, such as task failures, enabling robust policy evaluation and improvement by identifying actions whose plausible futures include undesirable outcomes. Video results are available at https://junwon.me/StressDream/.

  • 9 authors
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May 28 1

TRACEALIGN -- Tracing the Drift: Attributing Alignment Failures to Training-Time Belief Sources in LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) fine-tuned to align with human values often exhibit alignment drift, producing unsafe or policy-violating completions when exposed to adversarial prompts, decoding perturbations, or paraphrased jailbreaks. While prior work has behaviorally characterized alignment failure, little is known about the training-time belief sources underlying these failures. We introduce TraceAlign, a unified framework for tracing unsafe completions back to their root causes in the model's training corpus. Central to our approach is the Belief Conflict Index (BCI), which quantifies semantic inconsistency between generated spans and aligned policies, based on retrieved training documents using suffix-array matching. We propose three complementary interventions: (i) TraceShield, an inference-time safety filter that refuses completions with high-BCI spans, (ii) Contrastive Belief Deconfliction Loss, a contrastive fine-tuning objective penalizing high-BCI continuations during DPO, and (iii) Prov-Decode, a provenance-aware decoding strategy that vetoes beam expansions predicted to yield high-BCI spans. Together, these defenses reduce alignment drift by up to 85% on our curated Alignment Drift Benchmark (ADB) while preserving utility on standard tasks, with delta less than 0.2 and improved refusal quality. We further derive a theoretical upper bound on drift likelihood via suffix-array span statistics, linking memorization frequency and length to adversarial reactivation risk. TraceAlign thus provides the first scalable, traceable, and grounded toolkit for understanding and mitigating alignment failures at source. To encourage further exploration and development, we open-source our implementation at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/tracealign-2DA7

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 4, 2025 2

WorldFoundry: Towards Unified Infrastructure for World Intelligence

Visual generative models increasingly blur the line between synthesizing observations and simulating environments. Yet visual plausibility alone does not constitute successful world modeling: compelling outputs may lack persistent state, physical dynamics, or causally consistent responses to interactions. We define a generative world model as a predictive dynamical system that maintains a persistent, history-conditioned representation of an environment, updates that representation in response to actions or interventions, and generates temporally coherent trajectories that reflect outcomes under observed and counterfactual interventions. From this definition, we derive an intelligence-oriented framework spanning perceptual grounding, persistent state modeling, controllable transformation, dynamics-aware prediction, and closed-loop interaction. We present WorldFoundry, open-source infrastructure for reproducible inference and evaluation across video, 3D and 4D, embodied action, and interactive world systems. WorldFoundry unifies model and benchmark discovery, runtime and asset preparation, execution orchestration, artifact management, and interactive visualization, while modality-specific adapters preserve native inputs, execution semantics, output representations, and evaluation protocols. Explicit manifests, durable artifact contracts, and evidence-aware scorecards separate execution readiness from evaluative claims, making each claim traceable to its supporting artifacts. The catalog contains 270 model entries, 74 benchmarks, and 62 registered metric entries, with readiness and execution evidence recorded separately. WorldFoundry enables reproducible comparison of persistent, controllable dynamics across heterogeneous systems, advancing the field from perceptual synthesis toward measurable world intelligence.

OpenEnvisionLab OpenEnvision
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Nov 7 1

LiMA: Bridging Long-term Imagination to Real-time Dexterous Manipulation via Asynchronous Diffusion

Dexterous manipulation demands long-term foresight and rapid reactive control. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, while proficient in high-level reasoning, often lack a fine-grained understanding of physical dynamics and spatial perception. Conversely, World-Action Models (WAMs) typically suffer from high inference latency due to iterative generation. These deficiencies result in a critical temporal misalignment where the model's intent fails to adapt to rapid physical contact changes. To overcome this fundamental bottleneck, we propose LiMA, an asynchronous dual-system generative framework that systematically decouples intent planning from reactive execution. LiMA organizes computation into a multi-scale hierarchy: a slow system handles sparse long-horizon spatiotemporal intent generation, while a fast system focuses on dense high-frequency motion refinement. To align sparse intent predictions with dense action trajectories, we introduce a Latent Schrödinger Bridge Coupling mechanism that formulates refinement as an entropy-regularized probabilistic transport process. LiMA reduces inference latency by 45.8% compared with Cosmos-Policy via asynchronous decoupling. Evaluated across six bimanual dexterous manipulation tasks spanning multiple horizons, LiMA achieves an overall success rate of 70.8% and an average subtask success rate of 78.9%, while maintaining performance in unseen scenarios. The project website is available at https://ccdcs.github.io/LiMA_repo/

  • 8 authors
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Sep 22

DSAR: Dual-Stream Autoregressive Modeling of Temporal Cloth Dynamics for Photorealistic Animatable Avatars

Creating photorealistic and temporally coherent animatable human avatars from RGB videos remains challenging. Current methods struggle to capture realistic cloth dynamics, producing over-smoothed appearance or severe artifacts on out-of-distribution poses. This limitation stems from a fundamental oversight: existing approaches neglect the temporal causality inherent in cloth physics, where current states emerge from previous states through temporal evolution rather than instantaneous skeletal configurations alone. Without explicit modeling of this causal structure, networks learn pose-appearance correlations instead of motion evolution, leading to poor generalization. We introduce a dual-stream autoregressive framework that explicitly models both observable geometric information and implicit internal state. The geometric stream propagates surface displacement from the previous frame, while the state stream fuses current features with historical states retrieved from a memory bank. Motion-adaptive aggregation handles spatially-varying dynamics, and adaptive regularization balances smoothness with flexibility. Experiments on challenging datasets demonstrate significant improvements in rendering quality, temporal consistency, and generalization to motion patterns beyond training distributions, validating that dual-stream temporal modeling enables realistic cloth dynamics.

  • 4 authors
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Aug 10 1

VepAgent: Bridging Causal-Transition via Tool-Augmented Reinforcement Learning for Video Event Prediction

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in video understanding, yet their reliance on retrospective summarization and text-centric priors often limits their ability to bridge unobserved causal transitions when applied to Video Event Prediction (VEP). To address this, we propose VepAgent, an agentic framework that integrates causal-transition reasoning with tool-augmented reinforcement learning (RL) for robust VEP. Unlike prior methods that passively project future trajectories from historical dependencies, our approach explicitly models the logical progression from terminal observed states to future events. Specifically, we first construct futurebench-4K, a high-quality chain-of-thought dataset for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) that effectively bridges the causal-logic gap by structuring the deduction of unobserved intermediate states. Subsequently, we develop a diagnostic tool library integrating state tracking, frame retrieval, and region magnification, enabling the agent to dynamically augment reasoning with external tools to recover missing spatio-temporal evidence and resolve visual ambiguities during inference. Moreover, we propose a composite reward mechanism that jointly optimizes prediction accuracy, causal coherence, and reliable prior, compelling the agent to rely on genuine visual grounding rather than superficial textual similarities. Extensive evaluations on FutureBench and NEPBench datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming larger MLLMs and validating the empirical effectiveness of our agentic, future-oriented reasoning paradigm.

UCSC-VLAA UCSC-VLAA
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Oct 4 3

TaoMate: Anchor-Guided Memory Bridging Evolving and Reference States for Real-Time Audio-Video Digital Human Generation

Real-time long-form digital-human generation relies on causal models to extend audio-visual content while preserving subject appearance and audio-video synchronization across successive segments. A bounded cache retains local motion and phonetic context but discards older evidence, whereas attending to the complete generated history is computationally expensive and can propagate accumulated errors. We present \method, an anchor-guided persistent-memory framework for few-step joint audio-video generation. The framework preserves an immutable visual anchor, compresses completed video and audio blocks into fixed-capacity dynamic states, and retrieves those states through modality-specific residual attention without extending the active cache. A reference-aware modulation method additionally conditions video features on dynamic and anchor appearance statistics. Anchor-preserving causal-context distillation varies rollout horizon, prefix provenance, and cache-history reliability while keeping the immutable visual anchor unperturbed. By separating persistent memory from stage-local denoising dependencies, \method further admits stage-parallel execution across blocks, accelerating autoregressive inference without pipeline-specific retraining. We evaluate long-form video continuations with appearance, temporal, synchronization, facial, and speech diagnostics. Results show that \method preserves stable appearance across prompt-conditioned segments and strong audio-visual synchronization under autoregressive generation. Our project page is https://taoliveaigc.github.io/TaoMate.

TaoLiveAIGC TaoLive AIGC
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Jul 26

Revisiting Local Context for Long-Horizon Streaming 3D Reconstruction

Streaming 3D reconstruction from extremely long videos requires estimating camera motion and scene geometry online under bounded memory and computation. Early streaming models achieve causal, bounded-cost inference using finite context buffers or compact recurrent states, yet their estimates often deteriorate as sequences grow. Recent methods improve long-horizon stability by coupling short-range context with persistent or multi-level long-range memory. We pursue a different route: we keep the learned temporal state strictly local and formulate predictions whose targets remain independent of sequence length. We present ABot-Recon, a simple streaming model that caches KV features from only the preceding 11 frames. It predicts a point map in the current camera coordinate system together with an adjacent-frame relative pose. These predictions remain equivariant under changes of reference frame, and global poses and geometry are recovered through sequential composition. To reduce accumulated drift, a lightweight temporal refiner improves relative rotations using recent visual and motion context, while a composition-aware pose loss supervises multi-step pose composition. Extensive evaluations on challenging long-sequence benchmarks demonstrate the superior long-horizon performance of our local-context approach. On Oxford Spires, ABot-Recon achieves an ATE of 4.35 m and an RPE-R of 0.12^circ, reducing both errors by approximately 40\% relative to the best prior results.

Foresight: planning future perception in streaming VLMs without retraining

Existing streaming vision-language models (VLMs) continuously perceive and reason over visual streams, but their computational pathways remain fixed throughout inference. Consequently, they cannot adapt computation to evolving scene dynamics, where different future events demand different levels and forms of perception. We show that streaming VLMs inherently possess the ability to anticipate the immediate future, and leverage this capability to dynamically configure future computation in a training-free manner. Realizing such anticipatory computation, however, is very challenging: future anticipation must be sufficiently reliable to guide computation, planning must run concurrently with streaming inference, and online reconfiguration must incur negligible overhead. To address these challenges, we introduce FORESIGHT, a dual-stream architecture comprising two Siamese LLMs with shared weights, input encoders, and KV cache. The first LLM continuously processes incoming tokens, while the second runs ahead of the stream to anticipate future context, plan future computation, and generate task responses without interrupting streaming inference. Each plan decides when to reason next, what to check then, and how densely to sample, keeping transient evidence separate from persistent control. The resulting computation plan is executed online through an efficient reconfiguration protocol with schemaguided decoding and lightweight diff-based updates, enabling dynamic adaptation with low overhead. With a frozen Qwen3-VL-8B backbone, FORESIGHT achieves 23.0 mean joint F1 on OmniPro Online evaluation beating strongest trained baseline by 9.5%, while improving the backbone by 6.7 on StreamingBench and 15.4 on OVO-Bench, with the largest gain of 18.7 when evidence arrives later in the video stream. Our source code will be made publicly available.

  • 8 authors
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Oct 1 2

HalluWorld: A Controlled Benchmark for Hallucination via Reference World Models

Hallucination remains a central failure mode of large language models, but existing benchmarks operationalize it inconsistently across summarization, question answering, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic interaction. This fragmentation makes it unclear whether a mitigation that works in one setting reduces hallucinations across contexts. Current benchmarks either require human annotation and fixed references that may be memorized, or rely on observations in settings that are difficult to reproduce. To study root causes, we introduce HalluWorld, an extensible benchmark grounded in an explicit reference-world formulation: a model hallucinates when it produces an observable claim that is false with respect to this world. Building on this view, we construct synthetic and semi-synthetic environments in which the reference world is fully specified, the model's view is controlled, and hallucination labels are generated automatically. HalluWorld spans gridworlds, chess, and realistic terminal tasks, enabling controlled variation of world complexity, observability, temporal change, and source-conflict policy, and disentangling hallucinations into fine-grained error categories. We evaluate frontier and open-weight language models across these settings and find consistent patterns: perceptual hallucination on directly observed information is near-solved for frontier models, while multi-step state tracking and causal forward simulation remain difficult and are not generally solved by extended thinking. In the terminal setting, models also struggle with when to abstain. The uneven profile of failures across probe types and domains suggests that hallucinations arise from distinct failure modes rather than a single capability. Our results suggest that controlled reference worlds offer a scalable and reproducible path toward measuring and reducing hallucinations in modern language models.

  • 7 authors
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May 18

DIPO: Dual-State Images Controlled Articulated Object Generation Powered by Diverse Data

We present DIPO, a novel framework for the controllable generation of articulated 3D objects from a pair of images: one depicting the object in a resting state and the other in an articulated state. Compared to the single-image approach, our dual-image input imposes only a modest overhead for data collection, but at the same time provides important motion information, which is a reliable guide for predicting kinematic relationships between parts. Specifically, we propose a dual-image diffusion model that captures relationships between the image pair to generate part layouts and joint parameters. In addition, we introduce a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) based graph reasoner that explicitly infers part connectivity relationships. To further improve robustness and generalization on complex articulated objects, we develop a fully automated dataset expansion pipeline, name LEGO-Art, that enriches the diversity and complexity of PartNet-Mobility dataset. We propose PM-X, a large-scale dataset of complex articulated 3D objects, accompanied by rendered images, URDF annotations, and textual descriptions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DIPO significantly outperforms existing baselines in both the resting state and the articulated state, while the proposed PM-X dataset further enhances generalization to diverse and structurally complex articulated objects. Our code and dataset will be released to the community upon publication.

  • 9 authors
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May 26, 2025

AutoPersonas: A Multi-Timescale Loop Engine for Open-Ended Persona Evolution

Long-term persona agents must remain identifiable while adapting to new events, relationships, evidence, and social conditions. We identify self-locking as a runtime failure mode in continuing persona-life loops: locally plausible events keep appearing while the generated life collapses toward familiar environments, weak relationships, suspended decisions, and stale life stages. We trace this failure to model-level convergence toward high-probability behavioral channels and system-level context gravity from State, memory, history, and environment summaries. We introduce AutoPersonas, a multi-timescale life-environment engine for bounded persona-level recursive self-evolution. It separates environment-side Occurrences, accumulated Observations, and persona State. Its OSO loop admits divergent future-facing material while requiring evidence-governed absorption before State or reachability changes. A three-year compressed simulation exposed environment watermark shells, occurrence-hardening gaps, slow-change accumulation failures, recursive indecision, and weak relationship persistence. An eight-model 40-day stress test generated 1,600 events and found mean rolling 5-day action-category repetition of 95.2%-97.6%, with all models crossing 90% by day 11. Semantic re-keeping found 79.0%-88.0% macro-theme repetition across all direct-loop runs. In a same-runtime 40-day A/B, context-slice masking plus per-sample divergence targeting reduced macro-theme repetition from 61.8% to 36.3% and roughly doubled cumulative theme count. A juvenile-goblin fictional-world run reproduced the anti-fixation regime without hard real-world intrusions. These results support a bounded claim: separating controlled divergence from evidence-governed absorption can reduce persona-environment self-locking while preserving identity continuity.

  • 1 authors
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Jul 8