Daily Papers

The impact of randomness on model training is poorly understood. How do differences in data order and initialization actually manifest in the model, such that some training runs outperform others or converge faster? Furthermore, how can we interpret the resulting training dynamics and the phase transitions that characterize different trajectories? To understand the effect of randomness on the dynamics and outcomes of neural network training, we train models multiple times with different random seeds and compute a variety of metrics throughout training, such as the L_2 norm, mean, and variance of the neural network's weights. We then fit a hidden Markov model (HMM) over the resulting sequences of metrics. The HMM represents training as a stochastic process of transitions between latent states, providing an intuitive overview of significant changes during training. Using our method, we produce a low-dimensional, discrete representation of training dynamics on grokking tasks, image classification, and masked language modeling. We use the HMM representation to study phase transitions and identify latent "detour" states that slow down convergence.

A common problem for agents operating in real-world environments is that the response of an environment to their actions may be non-deterministic and observed through noise. This renders environmental state and progress towards completing a task latent. Despite recent impressive demonstrations of LLM's reasoning abilities on various benchmarks, whether LLMs can build estimates of latent state and leverage them for reasoning has not been explicitly studied. We investigate this problem in the real-world domain of autonomous UI agents. We establish that appropriately prompting LLMs in a zero-shot manner can be formally understood as forming point estimates of latent state in a textual space. In the context of autonomous UI agents we then show that LLMs used in this manner are more than 76% accurate at inferring various aspects of latent state, such as performed (vs. commanded) actions and task progression. Using both public and internal benchmarks and three reasoning methods (zero-shot, CoT-SC & ReAct), we show that LLM-powered agents that explicitly estimate and reason about latent state are able to successfully complete up to 1.6x more tasks than those that do not.

Knowledge about the hidden factors that determine particular system dynamics is crucial for both explaining them and pursuing goal-directed interventions. Inferring these factors from time series data without supervision remains an open challenge. Here, we focus on spatiotemporal processes, including wave propagation and weather dynamics, for which we assume that universal causes (e.g. physics) apply throughout space and time. A recently introduced DIstributed SpatioTemporal graph Artificial Neural network Architecture (DISTANA) is used and enhanced to learn such processes, requiring fewer parameters and achieving significantly more accurate predictions compared to temporal convolutional neural networks and other related approaches. We show that DISTANA, when combined with a retrospective latent state inference principle called active tuning, can reliably derive location-respective hidden causal factors. In a current weather prediction benchmark, DISTANA infers our planet's land-sea mask solely by observing temperature dynamics and, meanwhile, uses the self inferred information to improve its own future temperature predictions.

Methods based on ordinary differential equations (ODEs) are widely used to build generative models of time-series. In addition to high computational overhead due to explicitly computing hidden states recurrence, existing ODE-based models fall short in learning sequence data with sharp transitions - common in many real-world systems - due to numerical challenges during optimization. In this work, we propose LS4, a generative model for sequences with latent variables evolving according to a state space ODE to increase modeling capacity. Inspired by recent deep state space models (S4), we achieve speedups by leveraging a convolutional representation of LS4 which bypasses the explicit evaluation of hidden states. We show that LS4 significantly outperforms previous continuous-time generative models in terms of marginal distribution, classification, and prediction scores on real-world datasets in the Monash Forecasting Repository, and is capable of modeling highly stochastic data with sharp temporal transitions. LS4 sets state-of-the-art for continuous-time latent generative models, with significant improvement of mean squared error and tighter variational lower bounds on irregularly-sampled datasets, while also being x100 faster than other baselines on long sequences.

We provide an optimization-based framework to perform counterfactual analysis in a dynamic model with hidden states. Our framework is grounded in the ``abduction, action, and prediction'' approach to answer counterfactual queries and handles two key challenges where (1) the states are hidden and (2) the model is dynamic. Recognizing the lack of knowledge on the underlying causal mechanism and the possibility of infinitely many such mechanisms, we optimize over this space and compute upper and lower bounds on the counterfactual quantity of interest. Our work brings together ideas from causality, state-space models, simulation, and optimization, and we apply it on a breast cancer case study. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to compute lower and upper bounds on a counterfactual query in a dynamic latent-state model.

Spatial reasoning is a core aspect of human intelligence that allows perception, inference and planning in 3D environments. However, current vision-language models (VLMs) struggle to maintain geometric coherence and cross-view consistency for spatial reasoning in multi-view settings. We attribute this gap to the lack of fine-grained benchmarks that isolate multi-view reasoning from single-view perception and temporal factors. To address this, we present ReMindView-Bench, a cognitively grounded benchmark for evaluating how VLMs construct, align and maintain spatial mental models across complementary viewpoints. ReMindView-Bench systematically varies viewpoint spatial pattern and query type to probe key factors of spatial cognition. Evaluations of 15 current VLMs reveals consistent failures in cross-view alignment and perspective-taking in multi-view spatial reasoning, motivating deeper analysis on the reasoning process. Explicit phase-wise analysis using LLM-as-a-judge and self-consistency prompting shows that VLMs perform well on in-frame perception but degrade sharply when integrating information across views. Implicit analysis, including linear probing and entropy dynamics, further show progressive loss of task-relevant information and uncertainty separation between correct and incorrect trajectories. These results provide a cognitively grounded diagnosis of VLM spatial reasoning and reveal how multi-view spatial mental models are formed, degraded and destabilized across reasoning phases. The ReMindView-Bench benchmark is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Xue0823/ReMindView-Bench, and the source codes of benchmark construction and VLM reasoning analysis are available at https://github.com/pittisl/ReMindView-Bench.

Current transformers discard their rich latent residual stream between positions, reconstructing latent reasoning context at each new position and leaving potential reasoning capacity untapped. The State Stream Transformer (SST) V2 enables parameter-efficient reasoning in continuous latent space through an FFN-driven nonlinear recurrence at each decoder layer, where latent states are streamed horizontally across the full sequence via a learned blend. This same mechanism supports continuous latent deliberation per position at inference time, dedicating additional FLOPs to exploring abstract reasoning before committing to a token. A two-pass parallel training procedure resolves the sequential dependency of the recurrence to allow compute-efficient training. Hidden state analysis shows the state stream facilitates reasoning through exploration of distinct semantic basins in continuous latent space, where transitions at content-dependent positions move the model into a substantially different Bayesian posterior, directly influencing the latent space at future positions. We also find, via a learned probe, that at the first generated token position, the latent state already predicts whether the eventual answer will survive or break under additional latent computation for every subsequent position. Co-trained into an existing 27B backbone using only a small dataset of GSM8K examples, the SST delivers a +15.15 point gain over a fine-tuning-matched baseline on out-of-distribution GPQA-Diamond and cuts that same baseline's remaining GSM8K errors by 46%, together showing that the reasoning improvement is attributable to the architectural mechanism rather than scale or training data. On GPQA-Diamond, the resulting 27B SST also achieves higher accuracy than several larger open-weight and proprietary systems, including open-weight models up to 25 times larger.

Multimodal large language models excel at passive perception but struggle with complex visual cognitive tasks requiring multi-step temporal reasoning. This degradation largely stems from the inherent ambiguity of language-based reasoning, which often fails to accurately articulate continuous visual transformations. To address this, we propose ChronoVision, a multimodal framework designed to align visual logic with latent imagery. During supervised fine-tuning, a Reconstructive Visual Head predicts the latent representation of the final transformed state, while an ROI Attention Locating module focuses the model on key visual evidence via semantic span queries. In post-training, we apply reinforcement learning with an implicit process grounding mechanism, guided by a composite reward function that evaluates outcome correctness, latent process alignment, and unsupervised visual focus. Furthermore, we introduce Vbvr-VQA, a novel dataset that evaluates temporal tracking by reformulating video reasoning into a strict image-ordering task. Experiments demonstrate that ChronoVision achieves state-of-the-art performance on Vbvr-VQA with 74.8% in-domain and 71.6% out-of-domain accuracy, alongside a strong 55.0% accuracy on IntPhys2, a highly challenging cross-domain benchmark.

World models construct latent states that support prediction, planning, and reasoning about an underlying system. Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) offer a direct way to learn such states by predicting targets in representation space instead of reconstructing every detail of the observation. Standard JEPAs, however, organize all predictable content through one target embedding and one prediction pathway. In complex systems, this monolithic state can allocate redundant capacity to dominant signals while providing weak or conflicting gradients to less dominant predictive structure. We introduce \method, a latent world-modeling framework based on orthogonal predictive factorization. Learned basis matrices analyze each target state into multiple components, and a dedicated prediction branch estimates each component from a shared context representation. Predictive regression preserves the factor magnitudes required for state synthesis, an orthogonality objective discourages repeated directions, factor-activity regularization maintains variation in projected targets, and online variance regularization discourages coordinate-wise encoder collapse. Predicted components are synthesized into a complete latent state that can be used by a readout, decoder, planner, or autoregressive rollout. The same predictive-state mechanism applies when the target is temporally future, spatially hidden, or another partial observation of the same system. Experiments on controlled vision, single-cell transcriptomics, longitudinal health records, continuous control, and molecular dynamics evaluate representation quality, forecasting, planning, and long-horizon stability.

Joint-embedding world models enable visual planning by learning action-conditioned dynamics in latent space. Yet they are commonly trained for one-step prediction on encoded states, while planning recursively applies the learned transition to its own predictions. One-step accuracy therefore does not capture how prediction errors propagate under recursive rollout. We decompose multi-step rollout error into the errors introduced at individual steps and their propagation through subsequent transitions. We show that state-affine dynamics are precisely the differentiable transitions with state-independent Jacobians, eliminating the nonlinear propagation residual and making the error propagation operators depend only on the action sequence. Guided by this result, we introduce SALT (State-Affine Latent Transition), an action-conditioned state-affine dynamics model in which the action modulates both the state transformation and the additive update. We train SALT through recursive multi-step rollout supervision, feeding each predicted latent state back into the transition so that training matches how the model is used during planning. Across four visual planning environments, SALT exhibits 1.48--2.19times higher one-step prediction error than the matched LeWM baseline, yet improves closed-loop success in every environment by 10.0 percentage points on average. On OGBench-Cube, the fraction of episodes that fail with a sharp rise in model-predicted cost after execution decreases from 23.3% to 2.0%.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enables large language models (LLMs) to break down complex problems into interpretable intermediate steps, significantly enhancing model transparency and performance in reasoning tasks. However, conventional CoT methods rely on heuristic sampling without structured modeling of reasoning transitions, constraining their ability to systematically explore and discover diverse and effective reasoning trajectories. In this work, we introduce CTRLS, a framework that formulates CoT reasoning as a Markov decision process (MDP) with latent state transitions, enabling principled and state-aware exploration via distributional reinforcement learning. By modelling reasoning actions as explicit probability distributions in latent space, our approach explicitly models epistemic uncertainty, facilitating robust exploration of the reasoning space. As part of our framework, we introduce an on-policy reinforcement learning strategy incorporating epsilon-greedy exploration and entropy-based regularization to iteratively refine latent state transitions without requiring additional fine-tuning of the underlying LLM. Theoretical analyses provide evidence lower bounds (ELBO), theoretically grounding our transition-aware modeling of latent reasoning dynamics. Further experiments demonstrate improvements in reasoning accuracy, diversity, and exploration efficiency across benchmark reasoning tasks.

End-to-end autonomous driving systems are increasingly integrating Vision-Language Model (VLM) architectures, incorporating text reasoning or visual reasoning to enhance the robustness and accuracy of driving decisions. However, the reasoning mechanisms employed in most methods are direct adaptations from general domains, lacking in-depth exploration tailored to autonomous driving scenarios, particularly within visual reasoning modules. In this paper, we propose a driving world model that performs parallel prediction of latent semantic features for consecutive future frames in the bird's-eye-view (BEV) space, thereby enabling long-horizon modeling of future world states. We also introduce an efficient and adaptive text reasoning mechanism that utilizes additional social knowledge and reasoning capabilities to further improve driving performance in challenging long-tail scenarios. We present a novel, efficient, and effective approach that achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on the closed-loop Bench2drive benchmark. Codes are available at: https://github.com/hotdogcheesewhite/DeepSight.

Auto-regressive models have emerged as powerful tools for sequential data, from language to video. Understanding how and why these models learn latent representations remains an open theoretical question. In this work, we demonstrate that when trained by empirical risk minimization on data from partially observed linear dynamical systems, two-layer linear auto-regressive models naturally learn to approximate Kalman filtering. In particular, we show that the learned hidden representation coincides, up to a similarity transformation, with the state estimates produced by the optimal (Kalman) filter, even though the model has no explicit knowledge of the underlying dynamics or state. The result follows from three main insights. First, we establish that the Kalman filter is well approximated by an auto-regressive model with bounded truncation error. Second, we show that despite non-convexity, the two-layer optimization landscape is benign, i.e., all stationary points are either strict saddles or global minima. Finally, as our main contributions, we provide finite-sample guarantees on prediction error, parameter estimation error, and latent state recovery. Numerical simulations support the theoretical results and demonstrate that the latent representations of auto-regressive models recover state estimates.

Unsupervised pre-training has recently become the bedrock for computer vision and natural language processing. In reinforcement learning (RL), goal-conditioned RL can potentially provide an analogous self-supervised approach for making use of large quantities of unlabeled (reward-free) data. However, building effective algorithms for goal-conditioned RL that can learn directly from diverse offline data is challenging, because it is hard to accurately estimate the exact value function for faraway goals. Nonetheless, goal-reaching problems exhibit structure, such that reaching distant goals entails first passing through closer subgoals. This structure can be very useful, as assessing the quality of actions for nearby goals is typically easier than for more distant goals. Based on this idea, we propose a hierarchical algorithm for goal-conditioned RL from offline data. Using one action-free value function, we learn two policies that allow us to exploit this structure: a high-level policy that treats states as actions and predicts (a latent representation of) a subgoal and a low-level policy that predicts the action for reaching this subgoal. Through analysis and didactic examples, we show how this hierarchical decomposition makes our method robust to noise in the estimated value function. We then apply our method to offline goal-reaching benchmarks, showing that our method can solve long-horizon tasks that stymie prior methods, can scale to high-dimensional image observations, and can readily make use of action-free data. Our code is available at https://seohong.me/projects/hiql/

Memory retention challenges in deep neural architectures have ongoing limitations in the ability to process and recall extended contextual information. Token dependencies degrade as sequence length increases, leading to a decline in coherence and factual consistency across longer outputs. A structured approach is introduced to mitigate this issue through the reweaving of latent states captured at different processing layers, reinforcing token representations over extended sequences. The proposed Contextual Memory Reweaving framework incorporates a Layered Latent State Reconstruction mechanism to systematically integrate past contextual embeddings without introducing external memory modules. Experimental results demonstrate improvements in recall accuracy across a range of sequence lengths, with notable gains in the retention of rarely occurring tokens and numerical reasoning consistency. Further analysis of computational efficiency indicates that the additional processing overhead remains within acceptable thresholds, enabling scalability across different model sizes. Evaluations in long-form text generation and ambiguous query resolution highlight the capacity of memory reweaving to enhance continuity and reduce inconsistencies over extended outputs. Attention weight distributions reveal more structured allocation patterns, suggesting that reweaved latent states contribute to improved contextual awareness. The findings establish a framework for refining memory retention mechanisms in language models, addressing long-standing challenges in handling complex, multi-step reasoning tasks.

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) powered by Large Language Models have unlocked advanced collaborative reasoning, yet they remain shackled by the inefficiency of discrete text communication, which imposes significant runtime overhead and information quantization loss. While latent state transfer offers a high-bandwidth alternative, existing approaches either assume homogeneous sender-receiver architectures or rely on pair-specific learned translators, limiting scalability and modularity across diverse model families with disjoint manifolds. In this work, we propose the Vision Wormhole, a novel framework that repurposes the visual interface of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to enable model-agnostic, text-free communication. By introducing a Universal Visual Codec, we map heterogeneous reasoning traces into a shared continuous latent space and inject them directly into the receiver's visual pathway, effectively treating the vision encoder as a universal port for inter-agent telepathy. Our framework adopts a hub-and-spoke topology to reduce pairwise alignment complexity from O(N^2) to O(N) and leverages a label-free, teacher-student distillation objective to align the high-speed visual channel with the robust reasoning patterns of the text pathway. Extensive experiments across heterogeneous model families (e.g., Qwen-VL, Gemma) demonstrate that the Vision Wormhole reduces end-to-end wall-clock time in controlled comparisons while maintaining reasoning fidelity comparable to standard text-based MAS. Code is available at https://github.com/xz-liu/heterogeneous-latent-mas

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate how specific users respond to a given context, enabling more user-centric applications that rely on user feedback. However, existing user simulators mostly imitate surface-level patterns and language styles, which fail to reflect the underlying states of real users (e.g., beliefs and emotions). To address these limitations, we propose a novel training framework, HumanLM, which builds user simulators that accurately reflect real users. Our key insight is that, in addition to generating responses, the model should generate natural-language latent states that align with ground-truth responses through reinforcement learning. These latent states correspond to a set of psychologically grounded state dimensions that drive how real users respond. HumanLM further synthesizes these aligned latent states into responses that accurately represent real users. For extensive evaluation, we develop Humanual, a comprehensive benchmark for simulating real users based on public data. Humanual consists of six large-scale datasets with 26k users and 216k responses in total, spanning diverse tasks such as generating user responses to daily life issues, political blogs, and chat sessions with LLM assistants. Across datasets, HumanLM significantly outperforms alternative approaches, achieving an average relative improvement of 16.3% in alignment scores from an LLM judge. In a real-time simulation study with 111 participants, HumanLM achieves the highest similarity to real user responses and competitive human-likeness scores.

Neural operators have emerged as powerful data-driven frameworks for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs), offering significant speedups over numerical methods. However, existing neural operators struggle with scalability in high-dimensional spaces, incur high computational costs, and face challenges in capturing continuous and long-range dependencies in PDE dynamics. To address these limitations, we introduce the Latent Mamba Operator (LaMO), which integrates the efficiency of state-space models (SSMs) in latent space with the expressive power of kernel integral formulations in neural operators. We also establish a theoretical connection between state-space models (SSMs) and the kernel integral of neural operators. Extensive experiments across diverse PDE benchmarks on regular grids, structured meshes, and point clouds covering solid and fluid physics datasets, LaMOs achieve consistent state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, with a 32.3% improvement over existing baselines in solution operator approximation, highlighting its efficacy in modeling complex PDE solutions.

World action models (WAMs) improve robot control by modeling how observations evolve, but generating future observations at test time incurs substantial latency. Fast-WAM removes this process for efficiency; however, our matched implementations show lower generalization for Fast-WAM than for future-aware alternatives, especially with scarce robot demonstrations and in out-of-distribution scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce **LAWA**, a WAM architecture that uses compact latent actions as an operational representation of future intentions, enabling efficient test-time future imagination without generating future observations. Specifically, a discrete tokenizer enhanced by action-free pre-training produces manipulation-centric codebook targets. LAWA jointly denoises a continuous latent state anchored to these targets with executable action chunks while omitting the future-video branch at inference. On RoboCasa, LAWA achieves state-of-the-art average success rates of 65.6% and 80.8% in the few-shot and full data settings, improving over the matched Fast-WAM baseline by 9.6 and 4.5 points, respectively. It also preserves the performance level of the matched Joint-WAM variant while requiring 42.9% lower inference latency. LAWA also demonstrates competitive zero-shot robustness on LIBERO-Plus and superior performance on real-world tasks. These results show that future imagination need not be discarded: retaining it with compact latent actions yields an effective trade-off among performance, generalization, and latency. Code and models will be released.

Strong reasoning depends not only on model knowledge but also on how effectively cognitive behaviors are deployed during generation. Existing methods often rely on explicit behavior-level control, making them insufficiently adaptive when failures and required corrections vary across reasoning states, tasks, and models. To this end, we propose Latent Reward Steering (LRS), an adaptive inference-time framework that promotes cognitive behaviors by optimizing the sparse-autoencoder (SAE) latent states that implicitly carry them. Rather than relying on predefined cognitive behaviors or steering directions derived from them, LRS trains a latent reward model on reasoning traces by final answer correctness to estimate the quality of intermediate latent states. During inference, reward gradients provide state-specific correction directions for fragile latent states, while a reward and confidence gate restricts intervention to states the reward signal flags as fragile. Experiments on multiple reasoning LLM backbones and benchmarks show that \ours consistently improves performance over various baselines, and post-hoc analyses further indicate that \ours implicitly promotes good cognitive behaviors that fix the original reasoning errors. Code is available at: https://github.com/jiakanglee/Latent-Reward-Steering.

Latent reasoning models (LRMs) replace explicit chain-of-thought with continuous thoughts. Recent work treats observable latent-state patterns, such as BFS-like frontiers and decodable arithmetic computation, as evidence for internal reasoning mechanisms. Evaluating two LRMs (Coconut and CODI) against controls lacking the proposed recurrence or curriculum, we find these patterns also appear in the controls and do not always causally affect behavior. Causal interventions reveal that latent-thought utilization is not binary but graded, scaling with a thought's causal effect on model behavior. Geometric analyses reveal this effect concentrates in low-rank directions whose step-to-step geometry grows more structured as their behavioral influence increases. Latent thoughts should therefore be treated as hidden computation, not hidden explanation: decodability, attention, or static structure alone cannot establish mechanism. LRM interpretability thus requires matched controls and causal tests.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved notable gains in various tasks by incorporating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning in language spaces. Recent work extends this direction by leveraging external tools for visual editing, thereby enhancing the visual signal along the reasoning trajectories. Nevertheless, these approaches remain fundamentally constrained: reasoning is still confined to the language space, with visual information treated as static preconditions. We introduce Latent Visual Reasoning (LVR), a new paradigm that enables autoregressive reasoning directly in the visual embedding space. A visual encoder first projects images into visual tokens within a joint semantic space shared with the language model. The language model is then trained to generate latent states that reconstruct key visual tokens critical for answering the query, constituting the process of latent visual reasoning. By interleaving LVR with standard text generation, our model achieves substantial gains on perception-intensive visual question answering tasks. In addition, we adapt the GRPO algorithm to conduct reinforcement learning on latent reasoning, further balancing LVR and textual generation. We show that LVR substantially improves fine-grained visual understanding and perception, achieving 71.67% on MMVP compared to 66.67% with Qwen2.5-VL. Code base and model weights will be released later.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) improves the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) but incurs substantial computation and context costs. Existing methods either lose intermediate information through hard pruning or lack a principled criterion for continuous compression. We present A*-Thought-V2, a geometric dynamics of LLM guided framework that models CoT as a hidden-state trajectory and replaces hard deletion with an explicit-implicit interleaved latent architecture. After projecting question, step, and solution representations into a 3D PCA space, it measures alignment between each local transition and global question-to-solution direction. Aligned steps remain explicit text, whereas deviating steps are compressed into continuous latent tokens. Directional angles capture both local semantics and reasoning dynamics: small angles indicate direct execution and answer formation, while large angles more frequently involve checking, correction, and branch exploration; their temporal variation reveals exploration, convergence, and refinement stages. To train this architecture, we introduce stepwise embedding forcing, which pools each redundant step into a single latent embedding, and label forcing, which supervises that latent token with a soft multi-modal vocabulary distribution instead of a hard one-hot label. Experiments on Qwen3.5-9B and Qwen3.6-27B across six in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks show that A*-Thought-V2 improves average accuracy by up to 2.6% while reducing response length by up to half, increasing Accuracy per Computation Unit by 2.29times, and reducing preprocessing and training time by 94.6% and up to 80.3%, respectively. Representation analyses suggest that latent states form a compact region distinct from textual states, while higher entropy at latent-token positions reflects broader soft targets that encourage richer step-level feature learning.

Reward modeling often requires jointly representing and reasoning over multiple evaluation criteria, yet verbalizing this process token by token can incur substantial inference cost. Recent work on latent reasoning suggests that continuous states may support this computation more compactly. We introduce LatentGRM, a latent evaluation framework built on semantic chunking, compression, and reconstruction. By using the structure of rubric-guided evaluations to guide compression, LatentGRM learns compact continuous trajectories that support autonomous pairwise judgments without generating textual assessments. A separate interpreter reconstructs evaluation text from these trajectories, providing an offline view of the information retained under compression. Under matched training data and backbones, LatentGRM achieves competitive aggregate preference accuracy relative to explicit Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) judges at both 4B and 8B scales. Across four benchmark domains, LatentGRM-8B compresses evaluation trajectories by 8.9--9.2x and reduces total judge inference time by 6.1--7.0x at vote@5. Controlled rubric interventions show that criterion-dependent preference information is carried through the latent sequence. Together, these results demonstrate that continuous latent evaluation can substantially reduce inference cost while preserving competitive judgment quality.

Transformers replace recurrence with a memory that grows with sequence length and self-attention that enables ad-hoc look ups over past tokens. Consequently, they lack an inherent incentive to compress history into compact latent states with consistent transition rules. This often leads to learning solutions that generalize poorly. We introduce Next-Latent Prediction (NextLat), which extends standard next-token training with self-supervised predictions in the latent space. Specifically, NextLat trains a transformer to learn latent representations that are predictive of its next latent state given the next output token. Theoretically, we show that these latents provably converge to belief states, compressed information of the history necessary to predict the future. This simple auxiliary objective also injects a recurrent inductive bias into transformers, while leaving their architecture, parallel training, and inference unchanged. NextLat effectively encourages the transformer to form compact internal world models with its own belief states and transition dynamics -- a crucial property absent in standard next-token prediction transformers. Empirically, across benchmarks targeting core sequence modeling competencies -- world modeling, reasoning, planning, and language modeling -- NextLat demonstrates significant gains over standard next-token training in downstream accuracy, representation compression, and lookahead planning. NextLat stands as a simple and efficient paradigm for shaping transformer representations toward stronger generalization.

State space models (SSM) have been widely applied for the analysis and visualization of large sequential datasets. Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) is a very popular particle-based method to sample latent states from intractable posteriors. However, SSM is significantly influenced by the choice of the proposal. Recently Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling has shown success in many practical problems. In this paper, we propose an SMC augmented by HMC (HSMC) for inference and model learning of nonlinear SSM, which can exempt us from learning proposals and reduce the model complexity significantly. Based on the measure preserving property of HMC, the particles directly generated by transition function can approximate the posterior of latent states arbitrarily well. In order to better adapt to the local geometry of latent space, the HMC is conducted on Riemannian manifold defined by a positive definite metric. In addition, we show that the proposed HSMC method can improve SSMs realized by both Gaussian Processes (GP) and Neural Network (NN).

Understanding a dynamical world calls for more than a latent state that summarizes its observations: the state should also be organized into the factors that stay shared across related observations and the factors that vary between them. For example, a robot pushing a cube to a goal should take the same action when the camera shifts or the lights dim, since nothing in the scene has moved. Existing approaches to this decomposition commonly obtain it through reconstruction, so the latent variables must first explain the entire observational world before their organization can be trusted. Joint embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) model the latent state directly and never reconstruct, yet no existing result recovers the invariant and variant parts of the state they learn. How to learn the invariant-variant structure of the latent world without paying for its reconstruction therefore remains open. To close this gap, we introduce SplitJEPA, a JEPA that jointly recovers the latent state and its invariant and variant organization directly in representation space, without any reconstruction. We prove that, under stationary Gaussian predictive dynamics and a full-rank variation condition, SplitJEPA identifies the invariant and variant subspaces up to independent block-wise isometries, without introducing an observation decoder. Since the guarantee needs no decoder, the result extends reconstruction-free latent recovery to invariant-variant block identification. Experiments on synthetic nonlinear systems and robotic manipulation tasks support the theoretical results and show their practical value for both robustness and efficiency.

Existing video language models encode sampled RGB frames independently, so a long video must either exhaust the token budget or drop the changes between sampled frames. Codec-aware front-ends read the motion vectors and residuals that encoding produced, but in their deployed form each predictive frame is still tokenized on its own: the tokens are a function of the current primitives, not of a carried reference. We argue that a more natural function is of both---the current primitives and a carried reference. A clip and its time reversal share the same frames and differ only in the order of changes---an axis that symmetric pooling discards by construction, and that is non-empty in the frozen vision features VideoLMs use---and the codec recurrence already composes those changes in order against a reference state. We introduce RESUME, a stateful codec representation: an anchor I-frame initializes a compact latent state, each subsequent predictive frame is consumed as an update to that state, and a shared readout exposes VideoLM-compatible tokens from the accumulated state. Codec prediction is thereby kept at the representation level and handed to the language model as a trajectory, not as a set of independent token groups. At the same per-predictive-frame token budget as prior codec-aware methods, a predictive frame enters the language model as a readout of what the front-end already knows, not as an encoding of the current primitives alone. Across ten benchmarks, the gains concentrate on temporal reasoning: on all three temporal benchmarks RESUME improves over both the RGB-frame baseline LLaVA-Video-7B (by 2.8, 5.1, and 3.9 points on TempCompass, TOMATO, and MVBench) and the codec-based baseline CoPE-7B, while staying competitive on general and long-form QA. Frozen-transition tests further show anchor dependence, order sensitivity, and useful rollout behavior beyond the training horizon.

We present LaGSplat (Latent Lagrangian Gaussian Splatting), a framework that infers interactive, physics-governed dynamics from one or a few monocular videos. At inference it lets a user push on the filmed object, rigid or deformable, with an external force that was never measured, annotated, or seen during training. This is possible because a low-dimensional latent state q in R^d plays two roles at once: it is the generalised coordinate of a learned dissipative Lagrangian and the conditioning variable of a Gaussian Splatting decoder. The inductive bias of this decoder, whose primitives are explicit points μ_i(q) that move with the object, is what lets a force f applied in the image pull back into a latent generalised force J(q)^top f and enter the equations of motion, which pixel-space (CNN) or neural-field (NeRF) decoders cannot do. We validate LaGSplat on test cases of increasing difficulty, from rigid to deformable and from autonomous to forced real systems, combining monocular video and sensor measurements. We further demonstrate interactive use: forces of arbitrary magnitude and direction can be applied to the reconstructed object at any time, its response rendered in real time, in 2D or 3D. Assuming a dissipative Euler-Lagrange equation over a few generalised coordinates trades generality for a bounded, plausible response to unseen forces, where an unconstrained predictor diverges.

Recent latent-space monitoring techniques have shown promise as defenses against LLM attacks. These defenses act as scanners that seek to detect harmful activations before they lead to undesirable actions. This prompts the question: Can models execute harmful behavior via inconspicuous latent states? Here, we study such obfuscated activations. We show that state-of-the-art latent-space defenses -- including sparse autoencoders, representation probing, and latent OOD detection -- are all vulnerable to obfuscated activations. For example, against probes trained to classify harmfulness, our attacks can often reduce recall from 100% to 0% while retaining a 90% jailbreaking rate. However, obfuscation has limits: we find that on a complex task (writing SQL code), obfuscation reduces model performance. Together, our results demonstrate that neural activations are highly malleable: we can reshape activation patterns in a variety of ways, often while preserving a network's behavior. This poses a fundamental challenge to latent-space defenses.

Visuomotor policies trained via behavior cloning are vulnerable to covariate shift, where small deviations from expert trajectories can compound into failure. Common strategies to mitigate this issue involve expanding the training distribution through human-in-the-loop corrections or synthetic data augmentation. However, these approaches are often labor-intensive, rely on strong task assumptions, or compromise the quality of imitation. We introduce Latent Policy Barrier, a framework for robust visuomotor policy learning. Inspired by Control Barrier Functions, LPB treats the latent embeddings of expert demonstrations as an implicit barrier separating safe, in-distribution states from unsafe, out-of-distribution (OOD) ones. Our approach decouples the role of precise expert imitation and OOD recovery into two separate modules: a base diffusion policy solely on expert data, and a dynamics model trained on both expert and suboptimal policy rollout data. At inference time, the dynamics model predicts future latent states and optimizes them to stay within the expert distribution. Both simulated and real-world experiments show that LPB improves both policy robustness and data efficiency, enabling reliable manipulation from limited expert data and without additional human correction or annotation.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning improves large language models (LLMs) on difficult tasks, but it also makes inference expensive because every intermediate step must be generated as a discrete token. Latent reasoning reduces visible token generation by propagating continuous states, yet replacing explicit derivations with latent computation can hurt tasks that require symbolic checking. We propose Latent-Then-Explicit Reasoning (LaTER), a two-stage paradigm that first performs bounded exploration in a continuous latent space and then switches to explicit CoT for verification and answer generation. In a training-free instantiation, LaTER projects final-layer hidden states back to the input embedding space, preserves the latent KV cache, and uses entropy and model-native stop-token probes to decide when to switch. We find that strong reasoning models already exhibit structured latent trajectories under this interface. On Qwen3-14B, training-free LaTER reduces total token usage by 16%-32% on several benchmarks while matching or improving accuracy on most of them; for example, it improves AIME 2025 from 70.0% to 73.3% while reducing tokens from 15,730 to 10,661. We further construct Latent-Switch-69K, a supervised corpus that pairs condensed solution intuitions with shortened explicit derivations. Fine-tuning with latent rollout and halting supervision yields additional gains: trained LaTER reaches 80.0% accuracy on AIME 2025, 10.0 points above the standard CoT baseline, while using 33% fewer tokens. Our code, data, and model are available at https://github.com/TioeAre/LaTER.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has enabled multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to tackle complex visual reasoning tasks by generating explicit intermediate reasoning steps in natural language. However, this text-based reasoning paradigm is inherently slow at inference time with even thousands of tokens and fundamentally constrained by the expressiveness of natural language. In this paper, we propose CoLT, (Chain of Latent Thoughts), a novel framework that teaches multi-modal models to reason through a chain of latent thought representations instead of verbose text tokens, which can perform thinking with as few as 3 steps. Naively forcing the model to think with latent states easily produces meaningless semantics and makes training unstable. To effectively regulate the latent reasoning process, we introduce a lightweight external decoder that provides step-level supervision for each latent reasoning step in two complementary directions: a forward mode that decodes latent thoughts into the textual reasoning of the next step, and a backward mode that aligns decoder hidden states with the model's latent thoughts given preceding textual context. We further incorporate internal supervision that encourages coherent step-by-step latent transitions. The decoder and internal supervision are removed during inference to maintain high efficiency of latent reasoning. Extensive experiments on eight benchmarks demonstrate that CoLT not only outperforms existing latent reasoning methods such as CODI and SIM-CoT, but also surpasses latent visual reasoning approaches that rely on auxiliary images with costly annotation requirements. Compared to text CoT methods, CoLT can notably reduce the inference time by 10.1times and text decoding time by 22.6times. Code is released at https://github.com/hulianyuyy/CoLT.

Interleaved multimodal Chain-of-Thought (CoT) improves visual reasoning by incorporating auxiliary visual evidence into intermediate reasoning. However, existing approaches remain constrained by externally defined reasoning traces and visual operations, limiting their ability to develop flexible and abstract visual thinking. Reasoning with latent has recently offered a promising direction by internalizing intermediate computation into continuous representations. Nevertheless, existing visual-latent methods mainly supervise latent states through alignment with compressed auxiliary visual features, treating them as proxies for visual observations rather than active reasoning states. Consequently, they capture the provided evidence but fail to fully internalize the abstract reasoning process induced by multimodal CoT. In this paper, we propose OPLD (On-Policy Latent Distillation), a simple framework that transfers the reasoning capability induced by privileged multimodal CoT into latent reasoning representations. Extensive experiments on diverse multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that OPLD consistently outperforms existing latent reasoning methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks. The results suggest that supervising latent representations at the reasoning-process level provides a more effective paradigm for multimodal latent reasoning than conventional feature-level alignment.

On-policy distillation (OPD) corrects a student on the responses it writes, but its signal is the teacher's next-token distribution: it tells the student what the teacher says but misses how it thinks. Latent supervision promises the missing part by aligning the student's latent states to the teacher's. Recent methods such as OPRD bring this signal into on-policy distillation. However, we observe two failures of this recipe when distilling Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B into Qwen3-1.7B-Base. Early gain, late collapse: latent supervision alone lifts MATH-500 accuracy from 25 to 46 in 10 steps, but subsequent training degrades performance down to 11 with no recovery. Better alignment, worse behavior: although the alignment metric steadily improves throughout this collapse, the most aligned model turns out to be the worst performing. Further analysis suggests a mismatch in how the latent signal is applied: layers paired by depth play different roles in the two models, so continued alignment may pull the student toward teacher states it cannot understand. To address this, we propose LastOPD, which applies the latent signal only at the last-layer state, the common interface both LM heads read, and only during a 10-step crossfade into token-level OPD. This keeps the useful part of the latent signal and hands the student to token-level supervision before the collapse sets in. Extensive experiments show that LastOPD improves MATH-500 over token-only OPD by 5.55 and 4.02 points with the 4B and 8B teachers, leads on most held-out datasets, and reaches the final score of token-only OPD in about half the steps. Code is available at https://github.com/Muyiiiii/LastOPD.

We study reinforcement learning with function approximation for large-scale Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) where the state space and observation space are large or even continuous. Particularly, we consider Hilbert space embeddings of POMDP where the feature of latent states and the feature of observations admit a conditional Hilbert space embedding of the observation emission process, and the latent state transition is deterministic. Under the function approximation setup where the optimal latent state-action Q-function is linear in the state feature, and the optimal Q-function has a gap in actions, we provide a computationally and statistically efficient algorithm for finding the exact optimal policy. We show our algorithm's computational and statistical complexities scale polynomially with respect to the horizon and the intrinsic dimension of the feature on the observation space. Furthermore, we show both the deterministic latent transitions and gap assumptions are necessary to avoid statistical complexity exponential in horizon or dimension. Since our guarantee does not have an explicit dependence on the size of the state and observation spaces, our algorithm provably scales to large-scale POMDPs.

Gaussian process state-space models (GPSSMs) provide a principled and flexible approach to modeling the dynamics of a latent state, which is observed at discrete-time points via a likelihood model. However, inference in GPSSMs is computationally and statistically challenging due to the large number of latent variables in the model and the strong temporal dependencies between them. In this paper, we propose a new method for inference in Bayesian GPSSMs, which overcomes the drawbacks of previous approaches, namely over-simplified assumptions, and high computational requirements. Our method is based on free-form variational inference via stochastic gradient Hamiltonian Monte Carlo within the inducing-variable formalism. Furthermore, by exploiting our proposed variational distribution, we provide a collapsed extension of our method where the inducing variables are marginalized analytically. We also showcase results when combining our framework with particle MCMC methods. We show that, on six real-world datasets, our approach can learn transition dynamics and latent states more accurately than competing methods.

State space models (SSMs) have shown remarkable empirical performance on many long sequence modeling tasks, but a theoretical understanding of these models is still lacking. In this work, we study the learning dynamics of linear SSMs to understand how covariance structure in data, latent state size, and initialization affect the evolution of parameters throughout learning with gradient descent. We show that focusing on the learning dynamics in the frequency domain affords analytical solutions under mild assumptions, and we establish a link between one-dimensional SSMs and the dynamics of deep linear feed-forward networks. Finally, we analyze how latent state over-parameterization affects convergence time and describe future work in extending our results to the study of deep SSMs with nonlinear connections. This work is a step toward a theory of learning dynamics in deep state space models.

Latent reasoning represents a new development in Transformer language models that has shown potential in compressing reasoning lengths compared to chain-of-thought reasoning. By directly passing the information-rich previous final latent state into the next sequence, latent reasoning removes the restriction to human language tokens as the medium for reasoning. We develop adaptive-length latent reasoning models and introduce a post-SFT reinforcement-learning methodology to optimize latent reasoning length by minimizing reasoning length while maintaining accuracy. This, in turn, further reduces compute usage and raises the bar on the compressive capabilities of latent reasoning models. Experiments on the Llama 3.2 1B model and the GSM8K-Aug dataset show a 52% drop in total reasoning length with no penalty to accuracy. In future work, we plan to extend to additional models and datasets, analyze relationships between training coefficients, experiment with architecture variations, and continue our knowledge distillation for latent reasoning SFT efforts. We make our code and pretrained weights available at https://github.com/apning/adaptive-latent-reasoning.

Classical state estimation algorithms rely on predefined target's state-space model, which complicates model derivation and limits adaptability when system dynamics change. Neural network based estimators offer a data-driven alternative, but rarely fuse classical estimation theory into their structure and demand large, pre-computed training sets. To overcome these limitations, we propose a unified state-space structure without target's state-space model and treats both the input-layer activations and all network weights as latent states to be estimated online. We instantiate this nonlinear model with three canonical estimators-the extended Kalman estimator, the unscented Kalman estimator, and the particle estimator to simulate different neural network and demonstrate its generality. We then benchmark our approach against seven leading neural network estimators across three representative scenarios. Results show that our neural network state-space estimators not only retain the robust learning capability, but also match or exceed the accuracy of both classical and pre-trained neural network methods. Code, data, and more result: github.com/ShineMinxing/PaperNNSSE.git

Universal multimodal embedding (UME) maps heterogeneous inputs into a shared retrieval space with a single model. Recent approaches improve UME by generating explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales before extracting embeddings, enabling multimodal large language models to better infer complex query intent. However, explicit CoT incurs substantial inference overhead and can compress rich multimodal evidence into a narrow textual bottleneck. We propose PLUME, a latent reasoning framework that advances UME by replacing verbalized CoT with a short autoregressive rollout of continuous latent states. To support diverse multimodal queries, PLUME further introduces a semantic-anchor-guided transition adapter that steers latent rollout along different reasoning trajectories under the same fixed computation budget. To stabilize training, PLUME adopts a progressive explicit-to-latent curriculum that uses verbalized reasoning only as a temporary training scaffold and gradually transfers this behavior into hidden-state computation, eliminating explicit CoT at inference. On the 78-task MMEB-v2 benchmark, PLUME outperforms strong explicit-CoT UME baselines while reducing reasoning from hundreds of generated tokens to fewer than 10 latent steps, delivering over 30x faster inference. PLUME is especially well suited to retrieval settings where relevant evidence is dense, structurally complex, and difficult to organize through verbalized intermediate rationales, such as video and visual document retrieval. These results show that structured latent computation can preserve the benefits of intermediate reasoning without the overhead of explicit rationale generation, providing a stronger and more efficient paradigm for practical retrieval systems.

A central puzzle for the behavioural sciences and for human-facing artificial intelligence is the persistence of within-person variability. The same individual, presented with the same observable input, produces different outcomes on different occasions, and different individuals produce divergent outcomes that no observable covariate fully predicts. We argue that this variability belongs in the dynamic latent state of the person, and that human outcomes are controllable in a precise and operational sense through interventions that target the state and its weighting at the moment a decision is being formed. We define a state as the time-indexed weighting vector over the dimensions that govern how an individual's biology, physiology, and neuropsychology process the next event into a decision and an outcome. The relationship between state, decision, and outcome is causal rather than correlational. The weighting vector is dynamic at sub-daily timescales. The conscious channel through which outcomes are reportable is a narrow attentional bottleneck whose contents are themselves state-dependent. Taken together, these claims imply that the outcome of a given event is controllable, conditionally, on the state-trajectory at the time of intervention. We motivate the framework with six strands of established evidence (causal inference, predictive processing, allostasis, attentional bottleneck, chronobiology, computational psychiatry) and a 24-month observational base from a deployed behavioural platform spanning more than 200,000 consented users across four occupational personas (research period 2023 to 2026). We derive seven testable predictions, list six operational requirements for state-aware systems, and discuss implications for digital health, education, AI personalisation, and personal agency.

Latent visual reasoning aims to perform multimodal reasoning through hidden-state computation rather than explicit textual chains of thought. However, visual information being present in a latent state does not imply that the model actually relies on that state when producing its answer, especially when alternative image-conditioned paths remain available. We introduce Causal Visual Recurrent Reasoning (CVRR), which preserves pretrained visual competence while making recurrent computation the required image-conditioned path to prediction. CVRR initializes recurrence from the question hidden state after the pretrained vision-language model has incorporated the image, then repeatedly updates this state while re-reading the same fixed visual evidence. Before decoding, visual states and the original multimodal KV cache are removed so that only the final recurrent state carries image-conditioned information to the answer. Across the V^*, MMVP, BLINK, and MME-RealWorld-Lite benchmarks, CVRR retains strong performance under this strict interface, while compatible latent reasoners fail to recover comparable visual competence even when retrained under the same constraint. Causal interventions further show that predictions remain sensitive to recurrent content when the question is held fixed, and that persistent visual evidence causally revises the recurrent trajectory. These results distinguish latent informativeness from latent computation that is actually used for prediction.

Chain-of-thought reasoning has substantially improved the problem-solving capabilities of multimodal large language models. Fine-grained visual evidence, however, remains difficult to preserve and reuse across text-based reasoning steps. To address this limitation, tool-augmented thinking-with-images methods maintain visual access externally by revisiting or manipulating the image, but require predefined tools and additional inference-time processing. As an internal alternative, continuous visual latent reasoning retains intermediate computation in hidden states. However, its prevailing autoregressive construction makes each latent state depend on its predecessors, so later states may repeat information already present in the latent sequence rather than capture complementary visual details. We introduce GLaQ, a grounded latent-query framework that replaces sequential latent rollout with a fixed set of context-conditioned queries grounded in the original visual tokens. The grounded queries are reinjected for answer generation, providing direct and coordinated access to source visual evidence. We train GLaQ with localized-view supervision followed by reinforcement learning under task-level rewards. Across five benchmarks for fine-grained visual understanding and perception, GLaQ-7B gains 5.99--9.66\% over its base model and leads all compared visual latent methods, suggesting that direct query-to-image grounding can recover localized evidence from the full image without external visual operations or autoregressive latent rollouts.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle complex problems, but remains constrained by the computational cost and reasoning path collapse when grounded in discrete token spaces. Recent latent reasoning approaches attempt to optimize efficiency by performing reasoning within continuous hidden states. However, these methods typically operate as opaque end-to-end mappings from explicit reasoning steps to latent states, and often require a pre-defined number of latent steps during inference. In this work, we introduce PLaT (Planning with Latent Thoughts), a framework that reformulates latent reasoning as planning by fundamentally decouple reasoning from verbalization. We model reasoning as a deterministic trajectory of latent planning states, while a separate Decoder grounds these thoughts into text when necessary. This decoupling allows the model to dynamically determine when to terminate reasoning rather than relying on fixed hyperparameters. Empirical results on mathematical benchmarks reveal a distinct trade-off: while PLaT achieves lower greedy accuracy than baselines, it demonstrates superior scalability in terms of reasoning diversity. This indicates that PLaT learns a robust, broader solution space, offering a transparent and scalable foundation for inference-time search.

End-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving has recently attracted increasing interest in unifying Vision-Language-Action (VLA) with World Models to enhance decision-making and forward-looking imagination. However, existing methods fail to effectively unify future scene evolution and action planning within a single architecture due to inadequate sharing of latent states, limiting the impact of visual imagination on action decisions. To address this limitation, we propose DriveWorld-VLA, a novel framework that unifies world modeling and planning within a latent space by tightly integrating VLA and world models at the representation level, which enables the VLA planner to benefit directly from holistic scene-evolution modeling and reducing reliance on dense annotated supervision. Additionally, DriveWorld-VLA incorporates the latent states of the world model as core decision-making states for the VLA planner, facilitating the planner to assess how candidate actions impact future scene evolution. By conducting world modeling entirely in the latent space, DriveWorld-VLA supports controllable, action-conditioned imagination at the feature level, avoiding expensive pixel-level rollouts. Extensive open-loop and closed-loop evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of DriveWorld-VLA, which achieves state-of-the-art performance with 91.3 PDMS on NAVSIMv1, 86.8 EPDMS on NAVSIMv2, and 0.16 3-second average collision rate on nuScenes. Code and models will be released in https://github.com/liulin815/DriveWorld-VLA.git.

While language reasoning models excel in many tasks, visual reasoning remains challenging for current large multimodal models (LMMs). As a result, most LMMs default to verbalizing perceptual content into text, a strong limitation for tasks requiring fine-grained spatial and visual understanding. While recent approaches take steps toward thinking with images by invoking tools or generating intermediate images, they either rely on external modules, or incur unnecessary computation by reasoning directly in pixel space. In this paper, we introduce LanteRn, a framework that enables LMMs to interleave language with compact latent visual representations, allowing visual reasoning to occur directly in latent space. LanteRn augments a vision-language transformer with the ability to generate and attend to continuous visual thought embeddings during inference. We train the model in two stages: supervised fine-tuning to ground visual features in latent states, followed by reinforcement learning to align latent reasoning with task-level utility. We evaluate LanteRn on three perception-centric benchmarks (VisCoT, V*, and Blink), observing consistent improvements in visual grounding and fine-grained reasoning. These results suggest that internal latent representations provide a promising direction for more efficient multimodal reasoning.

Large language models solve complex problems by generating lengthy chains of explicit reasoning tokens. While effective, this makes reasoning expensive, length-sensitive, and constrained to (discrete) natural language. While latent reasoning offers a continuous alternative, determining useful structures for intermediate latent states is an open challenge. In this paper, we formulate latent reasoning as a geometric path-approximation problem within the model's pretrained token-embedding space. We introduce Geometric Latent Reasoning (GLR), which uses a lightweight transition head to predict iterative direction updates in embedding space. Using textual chain-of-thought traces as anchors, GLR learns to approximate discrete reasoning trajectories while permitting continuous deviations from exact token embeddings. Evaluations on mathematical reasoning benchmarks using Qwen3 models reveal an emergent phenomenon: geometric latent reasoning induces substantially shorter generations without an explicit length objective. By replacing early explicit reasoning with continuous latent steps, models often reach correct answers using substantially fewer total generation steps. These findings suggest that continuous trajectories act as compact intermediate reasoning states, exposing a new tradeoff between latent computation budget, output length, and accuracy.

Latent action world models let agents plan new behaviors at test time by predicting how actions change the environment, and joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) do so by forecasting future latent states rather than pixels. Yet nearly all such models see the world through a camera, even though robotic manipulation is fundamentally geometric: in robotics goals for manipulation are traditionally specified by target object poses, not by images of the object once placed. We ask whether latent planning survives a shift from appearance to geometry, on the observation side as well as on the goal specifications side. To answer this, we extend the stable-worldmodel evaluation platform with simulated LiDAR-style raycast point clouds as a new sensor modality, and adapt three JEPA designs to point clouds: a frozen-encoder model built on Utonia features, a distribution-prior model based on LeWM, and an action-sensitive model based on Delta-JEPA. We further introduce a goal-encoding mechanism that constructs the goal latent from the current latent and a 3D target pose, removing the need for goal images or goal point clouds. A comparative evaluation of the different anti-collapse mechanisms shows that point-cloud world models can match their image-based counterparts, demonstrating that the modality shift from appearance to geometry is achievable. All models are released as open weights with open-source training and inference code, to make world-model planning accessible for LiDAR-driven and pose-directed robotic tasks.

State-space models (SSMs) offer a powerful framework for dynamical system analysis, wherein the temporal dynamics of the system are assumed to be captured through the evolution of the latent states, which govern the values of the observations. This paper provides a selective review of recent advancements in deep neural network-based approaches for SSMs, and presents a unified perspective for discrete time deep state space models and continuous time ones such as latent neural Ordinary Differential and Stochastic Differential Equations. It starts with an overview of the classical maximum likelihood based approach for learning SSMs, reviews variational autoencoder as a general learning pipeline for neural network-based approaches in the presence of latent variables, and discusses in detail representative deep learning models that fall under the SSM framework. Very recent developments, where SSMs are used as standalone architectural modules for improving efficiency in sequence modeling, are also examined. Finally, examples involving mixed frequency and irregularly-spaced time series data are presented to demonstrate the advantage of SSMs in these settings.

While Chain-of-Thought empowers Large Vision-Language Models with multi-step reasoning, explicit textual rationales suffer from an information bandwidth bottleneck, where continuous visual details are discarded during discrete tokenization. Recent latent reasoning methods attempt to address this challenge, but often fall prey to premature semantic collapse due to rigid autoregressive objectives. In this paper, we propose Laser, a novel paradigm that reformulates visual deduction via Dynamic Windowed Alignment Learning (DWAL). Instead of forcing a point-wise prediction, Laser aligns the latent state with a dynamic validity window of future semantics. This mechanism enforces a "Forest-before-Trees" cognitive hierarchy, enabling the model to maintain a probabilistic superposition of global features before narrowing down to local details. Crucially, Laser maintains interpretability via decodable trajectories while stabilizing unconstrained learning via Self-Refined Superposition. Extensive experiments on 6 benchmarks demonstrate that Laser achieves state-of-the-art performance among latent reasoning methods, surpassing the strong baseline Monet by 5.03% on average. Notably, it achieves these gains with extreme efficiency, reducing inference tokens by more than 97%, while demonstrating robust generalization to out-of-distribution domains.

Dynamical systems theory and reinforcement learning view world evolution as latent-state dynamics driven by actions, with visual observations providing partial information about the state. Recent video world models attempt to learn this action-conditioned dynamics from data. However, existing datasets rarely match the requirement: they typically lack diverse and semantically meaningful action spaces, and actions are directly tied to visual observations rather than mediated by underlying states. As a result, actions are often entangled with pixel-level changes, making it difficult for models to learn structured world dynamics and maintain consistent evolution over long horizons. In this paper, we propose WildWorld, a large-scale action-conditioned world modeling dataset with explicit state annotations, automatically collected from a photorealistic AAA action role-playing game (Monster Hunter: Wilds). WildWorld contains over 108 million frames and features more than 450 actions, including movement, attacks, and skill casting, together with synchronized per-frame annotations of character skeletons, world states, camera poses, and depth maps. We further derive WildBench to evaluate models through Action Following and State Alignment. Extensive experiments reveal persistent challenges in modeling semantically rich actions and maintaining long-horizon state consistency, highlighting the need for state-aware video generation. The project page is https://shandaai.github.io/wildworld-project/.

While vision-language models excel at general multimodal understanding, they still struggle with visual spatial planning. We attribute this to a perception-reasoning modality gap: visual planning requires models to infer latent state structures from pixels and then reason over the recovered structure to produce valid actions, whereas symbolic planning directly leverages explicit objects and constraints. This creates dual bottlenecks in visual state recovery and multi-step planning. To address this, we propose MGSD, a two-stage modality-gap-aware self-distillation framework. First, a cold-start grounding stage equips the visual student with reliable state representations, minimizing early perception noise. Second, a privileged teacher transfers planning capabilities via on-policy distillation, using explicit symbolic states to supervise the student's own visual rollout prefixes. Crucially, symbolic data is used strictly during training, leaving inference purely visual. Experiments on visual planning benchmarks show that MGSD consistently improves visual planning across both 4B and 8B backbones, raising the macro average by 19.3% and 18.4%, respectively. The resulting models narrow the gap to symbolic-input upper bounds, while ablations and diagnostics confirm that the improvement comes from both visual state recovery and optimal-path reasoning. These results suggest that modality-gap-aware self-distillation improves not only how models perceive actionable states, but also how they plan over the inferred structure. Code is available at https://github.com/Oranger-l/MGSD.

Event cameras offer multiple advantages in monocular egocentric 3D human pose estimation from head-mounted devices, such as millisecond temporal resolution, high dynamic range, and negligible motion blur. Existing methods effectively leverage these properties, but suffer from low 3D estimation accuracy, insufficient in many applications (e.g., immersive VR/AR). This is due to the design not being fully tailored towards event streams (e.g., their asynchronous and continuous nature), leading to high sensitivity to self-occlusions and temporal jitter in the estimates. This paper rethinks the setting and introduces E-3DPSM, an event-driven continuous pose state machine for event-based egocentric 3D human pose estimation. E-3DPSM aligns continuous human motion with fine-grained event dynamics; it evolves latent states and predicts continuous changes in 3D joint positions associated with observed events, which are fused with direct 3D human pose predictions, leading to stable and drift-free final 3D pose reconstructions. E-3DPSM runs in real-time at 80 Hz on a single workstation and sets a new state of the art in experiments on two benchmarks, improving accuracy by up to 19% (MPJPE) and temporal stability by up to 2.7x. See our project page for the source code and trained models.

Learning structured and control-relevant latent representations remains a key challenge for world models. Recent JEPA-based world models learn action-conditioned predictive latent dynamics from observation sequences. However, their forward-prediction objectives do not explicitly enforce reliable identifiability of robot-centric physical state from individual latents or state changes from latent pairs, which can limit downstream planning and policy performance. We propose PSG-JEPA, a physically grounded JEPA world model that shapes its latent space with two complementary grounding objectives beyond forward prediction: grounding individual latents in robot proprioceptive state, and grounding latent pairs in multi-horizon joint-angle changes. Both objectives are applied only during training, leaving the inference architecture and computational cost unchanged. To comprehensively evaluate PSG-JEPA, we conduct experiments at three levels: (1) latent identifiability via probing, (2) goal-conditioned planning on frozen latents, and (3) policy learning in simulation and on a real robot. Experiments demonstrate that our PSG-JEPA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art latent world-model baselines at all three levels.

Long-term memory is essential for LLM agents to reason coherently across extended interactions, personalize responses, and reuse past experience. However, existing memory-augmented methods typically treat memory as a fixed resource: text-space approaches concatenate retrieved memories into the context window, causing substantial token overhead and sensitivity to noisy evidence, while latent-space approaches reduce textual cost but still rely on rigid retrieval or fixed-capacity memory interfaces. This creates a mismatch between query-dependent memory utility and fixed memory allocation. We propose ElasticMem, a memory-augmented LLM framework that learns to use memory as an elastic latent resource. ElasticMem builds an offline latent memory bank with retrieval keys and content caches, retrieves memories adaptively from the reasoner's hidden state, assigns each retrieved memory a variable latent budget through a learned policy, and injects selected latent states as soft memory tokens for generation. The full memory-use process is optimized with downstream task rewards through group-relative policy optimization. We evaluate ElasticMem on MemorySuite, covering memory-intensive QA and embodied agent control. Across Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct backbones, ElasticMem improves weighted average QA accuracy by 26.2% and 24.6%, and improves ALFWorld success rate by 66.3% and 27.2%, respectively, over the strongest baselines, while achieving the lowest ALFWorld token cost. Ablations and qualitative analyses further show that adaptive retrieval and elastic budget allocation help ElasticMem prioritize useful evidence and transferable plans beyond rigid cosine similarity. Our code for ElasticMem will be released at https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/ElasticMem.

Latent Chain-of-Thought (Latent-CoT) aims to enable step-by-step computation without emitting long rationales, yet its mechanisms remain unclear. We study CODI, a continuous-thought teacher-student distillation model, on strictly sequential polynomial-iteration tasks. Using logit-lens decoding, linear probes, attention analysis, and activation patching, we localize intermediate-state representations and trace their routing to the final readout. On two- and three-hop tasks, CODI forms the full set of bridge states that become decodable across latent-thought positions, while the final input follows a separate near-direct route; predictions arise via late fusion at the end-of-thought boundary. For longer hop lengths, CODI does not reliably execute a full latent rollout, instead exhibiting a partial latent reasoning path that concentrates on late intermediates and fuses them with the last input at the answer readout position. Ablations show that this partial pathway can collapse under regime shifts, including harder optimization. Overall, we delineate when CODI-style latent-CoT yields faithful iterative computation versus compressed or shortcut strategies, and highlight challenges in designing robust latent-CoT objectives for sequential reasoning.

Medical vision--language models (VLMs) have shown strong potential for medical visual question answering (VQA), yet their reasoning remains largely text-centric: images are encoded once as static context, and subsequent inference is dominated by language. This paradigm is fundamentally limited in clinical scenarios, where accurate answers often depend on subtle, localized visual evidence that cannot be reliably preserved in static embeddings. We propose MedLVR, a latent visual reasoning framework that introduces an explicit visual evidence state into autoregressive decoding. Instead of relying solely on text-based intermediate reasoning, MedLVR interleaves a short latent reasoning segment within the decoder by reusing hidden states as continuous latent steps, enabling iterative preservation and refinement of query-relevant visual evidence before answer generation. To support effective visual supervision, we adopt a two-stage training strategy: region of interest (ROI)-supervised fine-tuning aligns latent states with clinically relevant image evidence, and Visual-Latent Policy Optimization (VLPO) further optimizes latent reasoning and answer generation under outcome-level rewards. Experiments on OmniMedVQA and five external medical VQA benchmarks show that MedLVR consistently outperforms recent reasoning baselines and improves the average score over the Qwen2.5-VL-7B backbone from 48.3\% to 53.4\%. These results show that latent visual reasoning provides an effective mechanism for preserving diagnostically relevant visual evidence and improving the reliability of medical VQA.

In this paper, we study robust decision-making in the latent space of world models (WMs). Robust optimization is a mathematical framework where, given explicitly specified dynamics and physically meaningful disturbances, a robot can select actions that remain effective even under worst-case disturbances. However, applying this principle to the learned latent space of WMs introduces a fundamental challenge: because WMs have fully learned state spaces and dynamics inferred from high-dimensional observations, it is unclear how to define latent-space disturbances that faithfully represent uncertainty in the underlying system. Our key idea is to model a latent-space disturbance as a perturbation to the learned latent dynamics that induces pessimistic but plausible transitions. Specifically, we construct a set of plausible latent dynamics by combining a dynamics-aware similarity metric that captures plausible transitions with out-of-distribution detection that excludes implausible latent states. We calibrate this uncertainty set over latent dynamics using conformal prediction, ensuring that WM imaginations induced by the latent disturbance remain plausible without becoming overly pessimistic. We then jointly optimize robust robot actions and the worst-case latent disturbances through game-theoretic optimization. We leverage this latent-space robust optimization to robustify policy steering, considering two paradigms: latent safety filtering and sample-and-verify steering of a generative control policy. Our controlled simulation experiments show that our latent disturbance enables robust decision-making directly in WM latent spaces, and hardware experiments with a Franka manipulator show that modeling latent disturbances enables robust policy steering, reducing failures by 70% in safety filtering and 54% in sampling-based policy steering. Project website: https://junwon.me/LatentDisturbance/.

Despite recent progress in reinforcement learning (RL) from raw pixel data, sample inefficiency continues to present a substantial obstacle. Prior works have attempted to address this challenge by creating self-supervised auxiliary tasks, aiming to enrich the agent's learned representations with control-relevant information for future state prediction. However, these objectives are often insufficient to learn representations that can represent the optimal policy or value function, and they often consider tasks with small, abstract discrete action spaces and thus overlook the importance of action representation learning in continuous control. In this paper, we introduce TACO: Temporal Action-driven Contrastive Learning, a simple yet powerful temporal contrastive learning approach that facilitates the concurrent acquisition of latent state and action representations for agents. TACO simultaneously learns a state and an action representation by optimizing the mutual information between representations of current states paired with action sequences and representations of the corresponding future states. Theoretically, TACO can be shown to learn state and action representations that encompass sufficient information for control, thereby improving sample efficiency. For online RL, TACO achieves 40% performance boost after one million environment interaction steps on average across nine challenging visual continuous control tasks from Deepmind Control Suite. In addition, we show that TACO can also serve as a plug-and-play module adding to existing offline visual RL methods to establish the new state-of-the-art performance for offline visual RL across offline datasets with varying quality.

Transformers are the dominant architecture for sequence modeling, but there is growing interest in models that use a fixed-size latent state that does not depend on the sequence length, which we refer to as "generalized state space models" (GSSMs). In this paper we show that while GSSMs are promising in terms of inference-time efficiency, they are limited compared to transformer models on tasks that require copying from the input context. We start with a theoretical analysis of the simple task of string copying and prove that a two layer transformer can copy strings of exponential length while GSSMs are fundamentally limited by their fixed-size latent state. Empirically, we find that transformers outperform GSSMs in terms of efficiency and generalization on synthetic tasks that require copying the context. Finally, we evaluate pretrained large language models and find that transformer models dramatically outperform state space models at copying and retrieving information from context. Taken together, these results suggest a fundamental gap between transformers and GSSMs on tasks of practical interest.

We introduce ODE-GS, a novel approach that integrates 3D Gaussian Splatting with latent neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs) to enable future extrapolation of dynamic 3D scenes. Unlike existing dynamic scene reconstruction methods, which rely on time-conditioned deformation networks and are limited to interpolation within a fixed time window, ODE-GS eliminates timestamp dependency by modeling Gaussian parameter trajectories as continuous-time latent dynamics. Our approach first learns an interpolation model to generate accurate Gaussian trajectories within the observed window, then trains a Transformer encoder to aggregate past trajectories into a latent state evolved via a neural ODE. Finally, numerical integration produces smooth, physically plausible future Gaussian trajectories, enabling rendering at arbitrary future timestamps. On the D-NeRF, NVFi, and HyperNeRF benchmarks, ODE-GS achieves state-of-the-art extrapolation performance, improving metrics by 19.8% compared to leading baselines, demonstrating its ability to accurately represent and predict 3D scene dynamics.

As video content creation shifts toward long-form narratives, composing short clips into coherent storylines becomes increasingly important. However, prevailing retrieval formulations remain context-agnostic at inference time, prioritizing local semantic alignment while neglecting state and identity consistency. To address this structural limitation, we formalize the task of Consistent Video Retrieval (CVR) and introduce a diagnostic benchmark spanning YouCook2, COIN, and CrossTask. We propose CAST (Context-Aware State Transition), a lightweight, plug-and-play adapter compatible with diverse frozen vision-language embedding spaces. By predicting a state-conditioned residual update (Δ) from visual history, CAST introduces an explicit inductive bias for latent state evolution. Extensive experiments show that CAST improves performance on YouCook2 and CrossTask, remains competitive on COIN, and consistently outperforms zero-shot baselines across diverse foundation backbones. Furthermore, CAST provides a useful reranking signal for black-box video generation candidates (e.g., from Veo), promoting more temporally coherent continuations.

Physiological time series signals reflect complex, multi-scale dynamical processes of the human body. Existing modeling studies focus on static tasks such as classification, event forecasting, or short-horizon next step prediction, while long-horizon signal-level forecasting and predictive nature of physiological signals remain underexplored. We introduce NormWear-2, a world model that encodes both multivariate physiological signals and clinical intervention variables into a shared latent space and models their joint temporal evolution as a dynamical system. Our approach combines inference from prior pre-trained knowledge (intuition) with instant non-parametric latent state transition adaptation (insight), enabling coherent forecasting across multiple temporal scales, conditioned on heterogeneous clinical interventions. During the pretraining phase, we find that chaos-theoretic balancing of dynamical regime diversity yields more robust representations, with a smaller balanced corpus outperforming one twice its size and capturing bifurcation regimes. We evaluate the world model performance across diverse real-world physiological datasets spanning heterogeneous temporal resolutions and intervention regimes, covering daily life, point-of-care, and clinical settings, including fitness planning, hemodialysis, diabetes management, and surgical monitoring. These evaluation datasets comprise records from 8,026 subjects, spanning study durations from 3.2 hours for high-resolution signal data to 2.3 years for longitudinal clinical biomarker tracking. NormWear-2 achieves the best overall forecasting performance across time, frequency, and latent representation domains, with significant improvements over state-of-the-art time series foundation models, while maintaining competitive downstream representation quality, providing a step toward general-purpose world models for physiological signals.

Managing drawdown, the peak-to-trough decline in an investment portfolio's value, is a precondition for long-term survival in practical investment management. However, mainstream stock forecasting methods predominantly optimize returns or Sharpe ratios under the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) assumption. Real markets do not follow this assumption, triggering catastrophic drawdowns. We propose a cross-asset state-space trading system (CAST), consisting of two components: The predictor, Cross-Asset Collaborative Kalman Filter (CoKF), estimates each asset's latent state online, coupling all assets through their correlations and adaptively fusing multiple integrated-random-walk orders. The controller, Model Predictive Control (MPC), converts the predictor's forecast into trades, using forecast uncertainty as an explicit risk penalty that controls drawdown. We evaluate CAST on four real-world stock markets over a 15-year test window and show that it consistently occupies the return-drawdown Pareto frontier, achieving strong risk-adjusted performance while maintaining substantially lower maximum drawdown than competitive baselines. A stress test across crisis periods further demonstrates robust behavior under market shocks and distribution shift. Because the predictor and controller interact only through the predicted price path, both are plug-and-play, making CAST a modular, interpretable trading system. The code is available at https://github.com/FanBroWell/CAST

LLMs have fundamentally transformed dense retrieval, upgrading backbones from discriminative encoders to generative architectures. However, a critical disconnect remains: while LLMs possess strong reasoning capabilities, current retrievers predominantly utilize them as static encoders, leaving their potential for complex reasoning unexplored. To address this, existing approaches typically adopt rewrite-then-retrieve pipelines to generate explicit CoT rationales before retrieval. However, this incurs prohibitive latency. In this paper, we propose LaSER, a novel self-distillation framework that internalizes explicit reasoning into the latent space of dense retrievers. Operating on a shared LLM backbone, LaSER introduces a dual-view training mechanism: an Explicit view that explicitly encodes ground-truth reasoning paths, and a Latent view that performs implicit latent thinking. To bridge the gap between these views, we design a multi-grained alignment strategy. Beyond standard output alignment, we introduce a trajectory alignment mechanism that synchronizes the intermediate latent states of the latent path with the semantic progression of the explicit reasoning segments. This allows the retriever to think silently and effectively without autoregressive text generation. Extensive experiments on both in-domain and out-of-domain reasoning-intensive benchmarks demonstrate that LaSER significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, analyses across diverse backbones and model scales validate the robustness of our approach, confirming that our unified learning framework is essential for eliciting effective latent thinking. Our method successfully combines the reasoning depth of explicit CoT pipelines with the inference efficiency of standard dense retrievers.

Visual-Language-Action models (VLAs) have advanced generalist robot control by mapping multimodal observations and language instructions directly to actions, but sparse action supervision often encourages shortcut mappings rather than representations of dynamics, contact, and task progress. Recent world-action models introduce future prediction through video rollouts, yet pixel-space prediction is a costly and indirect substrate for control, as it may model visual details irrelevant to action generation and introduces substantial training or inference overhead. We present Being-H0.7, a latent world-action model that brings future-aware reasoning into VLA-style policies without generating future frames. Being-H0.7 inserts learnable latent queries between perception and action as a compact reasoning interface, and trains them with a future-informed dual-branch design: a deployable prior branch infers latent states from the current context, while a training-only posterior branch replaces the queries with embeddings from future observations. Jointly aligning the two branches at the latent reasoning space leads the prior branch to reason future-aware, action-useful structure from current observations alone. At inference, Being-H0.7 discards the posterior branch and performs no visual rollout. Experiments across six simulation benchmarks and diverse real-world tasks show that Being-H0.7 achieves state-of-the-art or comparable performance, combining the predictive benefits of world models with the efficiency and deployability of direct VLA policies.

Joint audio-visual reasoning is essential for omnimodal understanding, yet current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) still struggle when reasoning requires fine-grained evidence from both modalities. A central limitation is that explicit text-based chain-of-thought (CoT) compresses continuous audio-visual signals into discrete tokens, weakening temporal grounding and shifting intermediate reasoning toward language priors. We argue that a unified latent space is a better medium for such reasoning because it preserves dense sensory information while remaining compatible with autoregressive generation. Based on this insight, we propose LatentOmni, a cross-modal reasoning framework that interleaves textual reasoning with audio-visual latent states. LatentOmni introduces feature-level supervision to align latent reasoning states with task-relevant sensory features and uses Omni-Sync Position Embedding (OSPE) to maintain temporal consistency between latent audio and visual states. We further construct LatentOmni-Instruct-35K, a dataset of audio-visual interleaved reasoning trajectories for supervising latent-space reasoning. Comprehensive evaluation across multiple audio-visual reasoning benchmarks demonstrates that LatentOmni achieves the best performance among the evaluated open-source models and consistently outperforms the Explicit Text CoT baseline, supporting latent-space joint reasoning as a promising path toward stronger omnimodal understanding.

Detecting misalignment in large language models is challenging because models may learn to conceal misbehavior during training. Standard auditing techniques fall short: black-box methods often cannot distinguish misaligned outputs from benign ones, and mechanistic interpretability does not scale with model capabilities. We introduce Split Personality Training (SPT), which fine-tunes a second ``honest persona'' into LoRA parameters that remain inactive during normal operation. After the main model responds, we activate the LoRA adapter and insert a trigger string, enabling the honest persona to review the response while accessing the main model's latent states. We test our method on the Anthropic Auditing Game Model Organism, a benchmark where Llama-3.3-70B is trained to exploit reward hacks while concealing this behavior. SPT achieves 96% overall accuracy, whereas Anthropic reports near 0% accuracy. The honest persona reveals latent knowledge inaccessible to external observers, such as the fictional biases the compromised model was trained on.

Recent work on activation and latent steering has demonstrated that modifying internal representations can effectively guide large language models (LLMs) toward improved reasoning and efficiency without updating model parameters. However, most existing approaches rely on fixed steering policies and static intervention strengths, which limit their robustness across problem instances and often result in over- or under-steering. We propose Adaptive Test-time Latent Steering (ATLAS), a lightweight framework that dynamically controls steering decisions at inference time using a trained, lightweight verifier over the latent states. Given intermediate hidden states, the verifier predicts the quality of ongoing reasoning and adaptively selects which steering action to apply, enabling per-example and per-step adjustment with minimal overhead. ATLAS provides a unified framework for combining learned latent verification with test-time activation steering, enabling adaptive reasoning control without additional LLM decoding or inference-time process reward model calls. Experiments on multiple mathematical and coding reasoning benchmarks show that ATLAS consistently outperforms both vanilla decoding and fixed steering baselines, achieving higher accuracy while substantially reducing test-time token usage. These results demonstrate that verifier-guided latent adaptation provides an effective and scalable mechanism for controlling reasoning efficiency without sacrificing solution quality. All source code will be publicly available.

This paper shows that JEPA-style latent world models (LWMs) can learn across diverse domains and data sources by adopting the language-conditioned interface of video generation models. We establish this approach as an effective and efficient basis for planning with imagination and downstream policy fine-tuning. To this end, we introduce LaLa-World, a Language-conditioned Latent World model that learns from simulation and robot trajectories together with broader image and video data. Two designs make this work. First, we describe both numerical actions and visual changes in language, enabling joint training of a single future predictor across heterogeneous datasets. Second, we build the predictor on a language model, allowing it to interpret language conditions while predicting future latent states. The resulting predictor achieves higher average MPC planning performance than existing LWMs trained separately for each domain or task. Adding image and video data further improves average planning performance and robustness to action phrasing. In a matched comparison with an RAEv2-based video generation model baseline, LaLa-World reaches comparable planning performance with 6times less training cost and 13.9times faster planning. Beyond planning, the pretrained LaLa-World serves as an initialization for LaLa-Policy, which jointly predicts actions and future visual representations. LaLa-Policy performs competitively with Cosmos Policy on LIBERO and RoboCasa, with up to 5.5times faster inference.

Optimization-based latent reasoning improves large language model outputs by optimizing instance-specific continuous states at test time while keeping model parameters frozen. Existing methods, however, typically connect these states to the reasoning trajectory through decoded tokens, making sequence-level credit assignment indirect and obscuring how latent updates shape subsequent reasoning. We introduce GradCuit (gradient through circuit), which inserts optimizable latent states at a selected Transformer layer between the hidden representations of the prompt and the generated continuation. Causal self-attention provides every continuation-token log-probability with a differentiable path to every preceding latent state through the remaining Transformer blocks, enabling reward-weighted gradients from the entire continuation to be assigned directly to the latents. Across five instruction-tuned backbones, three reasoning benchmarks, and two answer formats, GradCuit achieves an average accuracy of 64.5%, outperforming chain-of-thought prompting by 6.6 percentage points and the strongest competing method by 2.4 points. GradCuit also demonstrates greater robustness: across seven learning-rate settings, it consistently outperforms LatentSeek while reducing the standard deviation of accuracy from 1.53 to 0.82, and even its random-walk variant remains competitive with LatentSeek. For interpretability, token-level gradient attribution reveals that latent influence concentrates on reasoning-connector tokens, while layer analysis identifies early-to-middle Transformer layers as the most effective optimization space. By directly optimizing internal reasoning from outcome feedback, GradCuit opens a new axis of robust and interpretable test-time scaling, where LLMs adapt how they reason rather than merely regenerate, sample, or rerank outputs.

Diffusion models generate realistic images but often fail on visual reasoning tasks, such as filling in a Sudoku or drawing the path through a maze. When a discrete symbolic representation is available, recursive methods such as the Tiny Recursive Model (TRM) solve even hard instances of these puzzles. We ask how such reasoning can be carried over to pixels, where no symbolic representation is available. We propose Painter-Thinker (PaTh): a small recursive network (the Thinker) reasons over a grid of learned tokens that encode the noisy image and the conditioning, refines a latent state within every denoising step, and steers a frozen diffusion model (the Painter) through ControlNet adapters. The Thinker is trained with the standard reconstruction loss alone, without symbolic targets, a solver, or a verifier. PaTh solves 92.5% of hard MNIST Sudoku puzzles (prior best 75%) and 71.2% of extreme ones (prior best 4.1%), with 10M parameters against 82M for a standard diffusion model. It also improves on mazes, Queens, and CLEVR scenes with specified spatial relations, and its advantage grows with problem size. Diagnostic experiments show that PaTh recovers from injected mistakes that the diffusion model cannot repair, especially when many cells are wrong. Together, these results show that reasoning mechanisms developed for symbolic data can be integrated into pixel-space diffusion without symbolic supervision, opening a path toward generating data under increasingly complex constraints.

Interactive world simulators can provide scalable environments for robot planning, policy training, and evaluation by predicting action consequences while reducing reliance on repeated physical rollouts. To serve these applications, they must generate future image sequences that respond faithfully to robot actions and preserve the dynamics of robot-object interactions over long horizons. However, existing world models typically predict the entire next latent state and often fail to capture subtle changes induced by robot actions. Such omissions can produce physically implausible outcomes, including object interpenetration and excessive deformation. To address this limitation, we propose DeltaWorld, a physically consistent interactive world simulator for robotic manipulation. Our method introduces the Delta Latent Transition Model (Delta-LTM), which predicts action-induced latent feature changes and adds them to the current latent state to obtain the next state, rather than predicting the next latent state directly. To mitigate object interpenetration and excessive deformation in predicted future frames, Interaction-aware Latent Alignment is introduced to construct counterfactual interaction regions and supervise interaction-related latent changes. DeltaWorld is evaluated on the IWS manipulation benchmark and a self-collected cross-robot dataset covering multiple robot embodiments and manipulation tasks. On the cross-robot dataset, DeltaWorld reduces FVD by 46.6% and LPIPS by 31.1% relative to the IWS baseline. These results highlight the potential of DeltaWorld for long-horizon action-conditioned video prediction in robotic manipulation.

Video event prediction (VEP) requires models to infer unobserved future states from partial video evidence. Existing video MLLMs usually verbalize intermediate future reasoning in text space: once visual evidence is verbalized, fine-grained motion, geometry, and interaction cues can be lost, leading to plausible but visually ungrounded hallucinations. We introduce Future-L1, an interleaved latent visual reasoning framework that lets an MLLM alternate between language tokens and continuous latent visual spans during autoregressive decoding. To train this capability, we construct Future-L1-50K by selecting examples where future visual hints help prediction and align latent states to future-frame embeddings, then further optimize sampled latent trajectories with LA-DAPO, a latent-aware RL objective with outcome-contrastive and temporal-diversity rewards. Future-L1 achieves new state-of-the-art results on both benchmarks: on FutureBench, it improves Qwen3-VL-8B from 61.0 to 85.4 and exceeds the previous best Video-CoE by 10.4 points; on TwiFF-Bench, it improves the average score from 2.44 to 3.04. These results suggest that future-oriented video reasoning benefits from preserving intermediate visual semantics in latent space rather than translating every reasoning step into text.

Looped Language Models (LoopLMs) enable efficient latent reasoning through depth recurrence, yet exhibit unreliable test-time scaling behavior: performance often peaks at a certain iteration depth and then collapses with further recurrence. Through latent dynamics analysis, we find an inherent trade-off between stability and effectiveness in existing architectures and strategies. By conceptualizing reasoning as uncertainty reduction, we propose that convergence toward stable fixed points while preserving effectiveness represents a promising way. To this end, we propose STARS (STAbility-driven Recurrent Scaling), a training framework that constrains latent states to approach asymptotically stable fixed points. This is realized via efficient Jacobian Spectral Radius Regularization with random loop sampling, enabling STARS to maximize effectiveness while ensuring rigorous stability. Experiments on arithmetic tasks show that STARS achieves reliable test-time scaling, and on complex mathematical reasoning it substantially mitigates performance degradation as recurrence depth increases while also improving peak performance.

Interactive video world models must maintain broad scene context under camera motion while producing high-fidelity observations with low latency. Existing approaches face a representation trade-off: perspective models operate on local views and must preserve off-screen content over long rollouts, whereas broader spatial coverage is typically obtained by synthesizing full-sphere videos or constructing explicit 3D representations. Motivated by the complementary roles of global context and selective local acuity in visual perception, we present AlayaVista, a camera-controllable streaming video world model that decouples panoramic world evolution from perspective observation synthesis. Given a single perspective image, AlayaVista constructs a 360-degree scene prior using a pretrained panorama expansion model and then evolves the scene as a camera-conditioned panoramic latent state. A latent viewport renderer maps this state to the requested perspective video latents, while a perspective refiner restores details, suppresses artifacts, and performs super-resolution. To support efficient streaming, we adapt the panoramic generator to chunk-autoregressive generation and distill both panoramic generation and perspective refinement into few-step processes. To provide the supervision required by this design, we construct MUGEN, a large-scale real-world panoramic video dataset containing 1,318 hours of videos at resolutions of at least 4K, together with rich semantic and geometric annotations.

We present a framework for visual action planning of complex manipulation tasks with high-dimensional state spaces, focusing on manipulation of deformable objects. We propose a Latent Space Roadmap (LSR) for task planning which is a graph-based structure globally capturing the system dynamics in a low-dimensional latent space. Our framework consists of three parts: (1) a Mapping Module (MM) that maps observations given in the form of images into a structured latent space extracting the respective states as well as generates observations from the latent states, (2) the LSR which builds and connects clusters containing similar states in order to find the latent plans between start and goal states extracted by MM, and (3) the Action Proposal Module that complements the latent plan found by the LSR with the corresponding actions. We present a thorough investigation of our framework on simulated box stacking and rope/box manipulation tasks, and a folding task executed on a real robot.

Looped Language Models (LoopLMs) perform multi-step latent reasoning prior to token generation and outperform conventional LLMs on reasoning benchmarks at smaller parameter budgets. However, attempts to further improve LoopLM reasoning with reinforcement learning have failed - standard objectives such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) only assign credit to the final latent state, creating a fundamental mismatch with the model's internal computation. To resolve this, we introduce RLTT (Reward Latent Thought Trajectories), a reinforcement learning framework which distributes reward across the full latent reasoning trajectory. RLTT provides dense, trajectory-level credit assignment without relying on external verifiers and can directly replace GRPO with negligible overhead. Across extensive experiments with Ouro-2.6B-Thinking under identical training and inference conditions, RLTT yields substantial improvements over GRPO on challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, improving accuracy by +14.4% on MATH-500, +16.6% on AIME24, and +10.0% on BeyondAIME. Despite being trained exclusively on mathematics, RLTT also transfers effectively to non-mathematical reasoning benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of trajectory-level credit assignment for reinforcement learning in LoopLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate emergent in-context learning capabilities, where they adapt to new tasks based on example demonstrations. However, in-context learning has seen limited effectiveness in many settings, is difficult to quantitatively control and takes up context window space. To overcome these limitations, we propose an alternative approach that recasts in-context learning as in-context vectors (ICV). Using ICV has two steps. We first use a forward pass on demonstration examples to create the in-context vector from the latent embedding of the LLM. This vector captures essential information about the intended task. On a new query, instead of adding demonstrations to the prompt, we shift the latent states of the LLM using the ICV. The ICV approach has several benefits: 1) it enables the LLM to more effectively follow the demonstration examples; 2) it's easy to control by adjusting the magnitude of the ICV; 3) it reduces the length of the prompt by removing the in-context demonstrations; 4) ICV is computationally much more efficient than fine-tuning. We demonstrate that ICV achieves better performance compared to standard in-context learning and fine-tuning on diverse tasks including safety, style transfer, role-playing and formatting. Moreover, we show that we can flexibly teach LLM to simultaneously follow different types of instructions by simple vector arithmetics on the corresponding ICVs.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made remarkable progress on vision-language reasoning, yet most methods still compress visual evidence into discrete textual thoughts, creating an information bottleneck for fine-grained perception. Recent latent visual reasoning methods attempt to reason in continuous hidden states, but we find that they suffer from insufficient manifold compatibility: latent trajectories drift away from pretrained reasoning circuits, collapse into instance-agnostic patterns, and are often bypassed during answer generation. To address these issues, we propose RIS (Retrieve, Integrate, and Synthesize), a spatial-semantic grounded framework that develops latent reasoning as a compatible extension of pretrained MLLM computation. We first construct a step-wise grounded reasoning dataset with bounding boxes and region-specific semantic descriptions. Built on this supervision, RIS anchors latent tokens to both spatial and semantic evidence, enforces their causal role through a progressive attention bottleneck, and introduces short language transition tokens to bridge synthesized latent states back to vocabulary-aligned decoding. Experiments on V*, HRBench4K, HRBench8K, MMVP, and BLINK show consistent improvements over closed/open-source and latent reasoning baselines. Further analyses demonstrate that RIS learns diverse, interpretable, and progressively integrated latent trajectories, offering a practical path toward faithful internal visual reasoning in MLLMs.

Large language models achieve high reasoning performance via explicit chain-of-thought and reinforcement learning, but require long output sequences and extended inference time. Latent reasoning reduces this cost by shifting computation into a latent space; however, continuous latent methods are hard to train, suffering from unstable and uninterpretable reasoning trajectories. We argue these issues stem from a misalignment between continuous-space reasoning and discrete symbolic supervision, as continuous states lack explicit anchors for step-by-step alignment. To resolve this, we propose Discrete Latent Reasoning~(DLR), the first method that converts continuous latent states into explicit discrete tokens. Inspired by render-based compression, we render textual chains of thought into images, extract visual features, and construct a discrete latent vocabulary via clustering-based fine-tuning. Expanding the vocabulary and output head enables standard autoregressive modeling over both natural language and latent tokens, supporting pretraining alignment, SFT, and RL. Experiments on five reasoning benchmarks and two model series~(Qwen3-VL and LLaMA-3) confirm that DLR outperforms prior latent reasoning baselines with up to 20times compression. Furthermore, the learned latent trajectories retain an interpretable semantic structure. Overall, discrete latent tokens provide a controllable and interpretable basis for efficient latent reasoning.

Large-scale traffic forecasting relies on fixed sensor networks that often exhibit blackouts: contiguous intervals of missing measurements caused by detector or communication failures. These outages are typically handled under a Missing At Random (MAR) assumption, even though blackout events may correlate with unobserved traffic conditions (e.g., congestion or anomalous flow), motivating a Missing Not At Random (MNAR) treatment. We propose a latent state-space framework that jointly models (i) traffic dynamics via a linear dynamical system and (ii) sensor dropout via a Bernoulli observation channel whose probability depends on the latent traffic state. Inference uses an Extended Kalman Filter with Rauch-Tung-Striebel smoothing, and parameters are learned via an approximate EM procedure with a dedicated update for detector-specific missingness parameters. On the Seattle inductive loop detector data, introducing latent dynamics yields large gains over naive baselines, reducing blackout imputation RMSE from 7.02 (LOCF) and 5.02 (linear interpolation + seasonal naive) to 4.23 (MAR LDS), corresponding to about a 64% reduction in MSE relative to LOCF. Explicit MNAR modeling provides a consistent but smaller additional improvement on real data (imputation RMSE 4.20; 0.8% RMSE reduction relative to MAR), with similar modest gains for short-horizon post-blackout forecasts (evaluated at 1, 3, and 6 steps). In controlled synthetic experiments, the MNAR advantage increases as the true missingness dependence on latent state strengthens. Overall, temporal dynamics dominate performance, while MNAR modeling offers a principled refinement that becomes most valuable when missingness is genuinely informative.

World models are essential for autonomous robotic planning. However, the substantial computational overhead of existing dense Transformerbased models significantly hinders real-time deployment. To address this efficiency-performance bottleneck, we introduce DDP-WM, a novel world model centered on the principle of Disentangled Dynamics Prediction (DDP). We hypothesize that latent state evolution in observed scenes is heterogeneous and can be decomposed into sparse primary dynamics driven by physical interactions and secondary context-driven background updates. DDP-WM realizes this decomposition through an architecture that integrates efficient historical processing with dynamic localization to isolate primary dynamics. By employing a crossattention mechanism for background updates, the framework optimizes resource allocation and provides a smooth optimization landscape for planners. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DDP-WM achieves significant efficiency and performance across diverse tasks, including navigation, precise tabletop manipulation, and complex deformable or multi-body interactions. Specifically, on the challenging Push-T task, DDP-WM achieves an approximately 9 times inference speedup and improves the MPC success rate from 90% to98% compared to state-of-the-art dense models. The results establish a promising path for developing efficient, high-fidelity world models. Codes will be available at https://github.com/HCPLab-SYSU/DDP-WM.

Long-horizon interactions between users and LLM-based assistants necessitate effective memory management, yet current approaches face challenges in training and evaluation of memory. Existing memory benchmarks rely on static, off-policy data as context, limiting evaluation reliability and scalability. To address these gaps, we introduce AMemGym, an interactive environment enabling on-policy evaluation and optimization for memory-driven personalization. AMemGym employs structured data sampling to predefine user profiles, state-dependent questions, and state evolution trajectories, enabling cost-effective generation of high-quality, evaluation-aligned interactions. LLM-simulated users expose latent states through role-play while maintaining structured state consistency. Comprehensive metrics based on structured data guide both assessment and optimization of assistants. Extensive experiments reveal performance gaps in existing memory systems (e.g., RAG, long-context LLMs, and agentic memory) and corresponding reasons. AMemGym not only enables effective selection among competing approaches but also can potentially drive the self-evolution of memory management strategies. By bridging structured state evolution with free-form interactions, our framework provides a scalable, diagnostically rich environment for advancing memory capabilities in conversational agents.

Diffusion models achieve state-of-the-art performance but often fail to generate outputs that align with human preferences and intentions, resulting in images with poor aesthetic quality and semantic inconsistencies. Existing alignment methods present a difficult trade-off: fine-tuning approaches suffer from loss of diversity with reward over-optimization, while test-time scaling methods introduce significant computational overhead and tend to under-optimize. To address these limitations, we propose HyperAlign, a novel framework that trains a hypernetwork for efficient and effective test-time alignment. Instead of modifying latent states, HyperAlign dynamically generates low-rank adaptation weights to modulate the diffusion model's generation operators. This allows the denoising trajectory to be adaptively adjusted based on input latents, timesteps and prompts for reward-conditioned alignment. We introduce multiple variants of HyperAlign that differ in how frequently the hypernetwork is applied, balancing between performance and efficiency. Furthermore, we optimize the hypernetwork using a reward score objective regularized with preference data to reduce reward hacking. We evaluate HyperAlign on multiple extended generative paradigms, including Stable Diffusion and FLUX. It significantly outperforms existing fine-tuning and test-time scaling baselines in enhancing semantic consistency and visual appeal.

Perception for action suggests that representations of the world should be shaped not by visual fidelity alone, but by their relevance for actions. At the same time, latent JEPA-style world models advocate learning compact predictive states from high-dimensional observations to facilitate the prediction of future states, but end-to-end training of these models is nontrivial because representations may collapse if our only goal is to construct a latent state that is easy to predict. We introduce a sensorimotor world model (SMWM): a latent world model trained end-to-end with inverse dynamics regularization. This single regularizer addresses both issues: it prevents representation collapse and induces action-aligned representations. By forcing latent states to preserve information about the action underlying a transition, it biases the model toward the controllable degrees of freedom of the environment while discarding uncontrollable distractors. This yields stable latent world models trained from offline, reward-free trajectories, without frozen encoders, exponential moving averages, or complex latent regularizers. Empirically, SMWM learns compact, interpretable latent spaces and enables competitive planning performance across simple 2D and 3D control tasks.

World models infer latent states of an environment to capture its underlying dynamics and predict future evolution. Many real-world environments, however, are inherently relational and observed as evolving graphs, where entities, relations, and their properties change over time. Prior graph-related world models use graph structures to organize internal states or support task-specific reasoning, rather than treating an evolving graph itself as the modeled world. We instead study graph world modeling (GWM), where graph evolution itself constitutes the world dynamics. We formulate graph world modeling over observed graph evolution, latent graph states, and heterogeneous graph-transition predictions. Based on this formulation, we construct GWM-Zero, a benchmark covering node-, edge-, and graph-level transitions over eight temporal graph datasets. We propose WorldGraph, which combines a state-aware graph transformer for multi-granularity structural and transition-conditioned evolution modeling with transition-aware GRPO using dynamic grouping and structure-aware verifiable rewards. Extensive experiments on GWM-Zero show that WorldGraph consistently outperforms representative graph representation, temporal graph learning, graph pretraining, and graph world-model baselines across all three transition granularities.

Despite remarkable successes, deep reinforcement learning algorithms remain sample inefficient: they require an enormous amount of trial and error to find good policies. Model-based algorithms promise sample efficiency by building an environment model that can be used for planning. Posterior Sampling for Reinforcement Learning is such a model-based algorithm that has attracted significant interest due to its performance in the tabular setting. This paper introduces Posterior Sampling for Deep Reinforcement Learning (PSDRL), the first truly scalable approximation of Posterior Sampling for Reinforcement Learning that retains its model-based essence. PSDRL combines efficient uncertainty quantification over latent state space models with a specially tailored continual planning algorithm based on value-function approximation. Extensive experiments on the Atari benchmark show that PSDRL significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art attempts at scaling up posterior sampling while being competitive with a state-of-the-art (model-based) reinforcement learning method, both in sample efficiency and computational efficiency.

We study pre-training representations for decision-making using video data, which is abundantly available for tasks such as game agents and software testing. Even though significant empirical advances have been made on this problem, a theoretical understanding remains absent. We initiate the theoretical investigation into principled approaches for representation learning and focus on learning the latent state representations of the underlying MDP using video data. We study two types of settings: one where there is iid noise in the observation, and a more challenging setting where there is also the presence of exogenous noise, which is non-iid noise that is temporally correlated, such as the motion of people or cars in the background. We study three commonly used approaches: autoencoding, temporal contrastive learning, and forward modeling. We prove upper bounds for temporal contrastive learning and forward modeling in the presence of only iid noise. We show that these approaches can learn the latent state and use it to do efficient downstream RL with polynomial sample complexity. When exogenous noise is also present, we establish a lower bound result showing that the sample complexity of learning from video data can be exponentially worse than learning from action-labeled trajectory data. This partially explains why reinforcement learning with video pre-training is hard. We evaluate these representational learning methods in two visual domains, yielding results that are consistent with our theoretical findings.

Integrating and processing information from various sources or modalities are critical for obtaining a comprehensive and accurate perception of the real world in autonomous systems and cyber-physical systems. Drawing inspiration from neuroscience, we develop the Information-Theoretic Hierarchical Perception (ITHP) model, which utilizes the concept of information bottleneck. Different from most traditional fusion models that incorporate all modalities identically in neural networks, our model designates a prime modality and regards the remaining modalities as detectors in the information pathway, serving to distill the flow of information. Our proposed perception model focuses on constructing an effective and compact information flow by achieving a balance between the minimization of mutual information between the latent state and the input modal state, and the maximization of mutual information between the latent states and the remaining modal states. This approach leads to compact latent state representations that retain relevant information while minimizing redundancy, thereby substantially enhancing the performance of multimodal representation learning. Experimental evaluations on the MUStARD, CMU-MOSI, and CMU-MOSEI datasets demonstrate that our model consistently distills crucial information in multimodal learning scenarios, outperforming state-of-the-art benchmarks. Remarkably, on the CMU-MOSI dataset, ITHP surpasses human-level performance in the multimodal sentiment binary classification task across all evaluation metrics (i.e., Binary Accuracy, F1 Score, Mean Absolute Error, and Pearson Correlation).

Partition logics -- non-Boolean event structures obtained by pasting Boolean algebras -- provide a natural language for situations in which a system has a definite latent state but can be accessed and resolved only through mutually incompatible coarse-grained modes of observation. We show that this structure arises in a range of social-science settings by constructing six explicit examples from personnel assessment, survey framing, clinical diagnosis, espionage coordination, legal pluralism, and organizational auditing. For each case we identify the latent state space, the observational contexts as partitions, and the shared atoms that intertwine contexts, yielding instances of the L_{12} bowtie, triangle, pentagon, and automaton partition logics. These examples make precise a notion of social complementarity: different modes of inquiry can be incompatible even though the underlying system remains fully value-definite. Complementarity in this sense does not entail contextuality or ontic indeterminacy. We further compare the classical probabilities generated by convex mixtures of dispersion-free states with the quantum-like Born probabilities available when the same exclusivity graph admits a faithful orthogonal representation. The framework thus separates logical structure from probabilistic realization and suggests empirically testable benchmarks for quantum-cognition models.

Deploying safety-critical agents requires anticipating the consequences of actions before they are executed. While world models offer a paradigm for this proactive foresight, current approaches relying on visual simulation incur prohibitive latencies, often exceeding several seconds per step. In this work, we challenge the assumption that visual processing is necessary for failure prevention. We show that a trained policy's latent state, combined with its planned actions, already encodes sufficient information to anticipate action outcomes, making visual simulation redundant for failure prevention. To this end, we introduce DILLO (DIstiLLed Language-ActiOn World Model), a fast steering layer that shifts the paradigm from "simulate-then-act" to "describe-then-act." DILLO is trained via cross-modal distillation, where a privileged Vision Language Model teacher annotates offline trajectories and a latent-conditioned Large Language Model student learns to predict semantic outcomes. This creates a text-only inference path, bypassing heavy visual generation entirely, achieving a 14x speedup over baselines. Experiments on MetaWorld and LIBERO demonstrate that DILLO produces high-fidelity descriptions of the next state and is able to steer the policy, improving episode success rate by up to 15 pp and 9.3 pp on average across tasks.

Current world models face a fundamental tension: faithful long-horizon simulation demands deep computation, but deeper models are expensive to deploy and prone to compounding errors. We resolve this by introducing Looped World Models (LoopWM), which are the first looped architectures for world modelling. Our method iteratively refines latent environment states through a parameter-shared transformer block. This yield up to 100x parameter efficiency over conventional approaches with adaptive computation that automatically scales depth to match the complexity of each prediction step. Orthogonal to scaling model size and training data, LoopWM establishes iterative latent depth as a new scaling axis for world simulation, which might significantly push the community forward.

Diffusion and flow-based generative models produce strong images, yet their controllability remains largely endpoint-centric: users specify conditions and receive final outputs, while the intermediate generative dynamics remain hidden. Recent methods have begun to exploit generation order and process decomposition to improve sample quality, but still treat intermediate states as internal computation rather than objects for interaction. We propose Trajectory Forcing (TF), a trajectory-centric framework that makes the generation path explicit, semantic, and editable. TF organizes synthesis as a sequence of semantically structured stages, progressing from global layout to object-, part-, and detail-level representations. Each stage produces a decodable latent state that can be inspected, evaluated, and locally edited before the next stage begins. To instantiate this path, we derive coarse-to-fine teacher hierarchies by clustering pretrained visual representations such as DINOv2, and train a hierarchy-conditioned one-step flow-matching model at each level. We further introduce trajectory-aware metrics that measure structural consistency and local controllability beyond endpoint quality metrics such as FID. Experiments show that TF achieves competitive sample quality while exposing coherent intermediate states and supporting localized edits across semantic levels. By shifting the focus from final images to the generative path itself, TF opens a route toward controllable, trajectory-aware image synthesis.

World models enable model-based planning through learned latent dynamics, but imagined rollouts become unstable as the planning horizon grows or the dynamics distribution shifts. We argue that this instability reflects two missing structures in planner-facing latents: history-conditioned memory for approximate Markov completeness, and geometric organization that separates configuration, momentum, and task semantics. We propose HaM-World (HMW), a structured world model that decomposes the latent state into a canonical (q, p) subspace and a context subspace c, while using Mamba selective state-space memory as the history-conditioned input to the same latent dynamics. Within this interface, (q, p) evolves through an energy-derived Hamiltonian vector field plus learnable residual/control dynamics, while c captures semantic, dissipative, and non-conservative factors. This gives the planner a single latent state shared by dynamics prediction, reward/value estimation, imagined rollouts, and CEM action search. On four DeepMind Control Suite tasks, HaM-World reaches the highest Avg. AUC (117.9, +9.5%), reduces long-horizon rollout error to 45% of a strong baseline model, and wins 11/12 k in {3,5,7} MSE cells. Under 12 OOD perturbations spanning dynamics shifts, action delay, and observation masking, HaM-World achieves the highest return in every condition, with average OOD-return gains of 10.2% on Finger Spin and 13.6% on Reacher Easy. Mechanism diagnostics further show bounded action-free Hamiltonian-energy drift, structured energy variation under policy rollouts, and coherent control-induced energy transfer, supporting the intended Soft-Hamiltonian dynamics design.

Extended reasoning has become standard for frontier Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the trajectories these models produce remain largely uncontrollable. Existing methods for shaping how a model reasons are prompt based approaches and operate at the input level, offering no fine-grained control over the reasoning process itself. Related work analyzes and discovers latent transition dynamics in the reasoning traces from Large Language Models. Building on this, we statistically characterize these states, and show that failure trajectories get stuck in self-loops, exhausting the token budget without progress toward the final answer. To intervene on these failures, We propose SOPHIA: Steering Of reasoning Processes via Hidden-state Intervention and Activations. We treat each reasoning trace as a sequence of latent states rather than an unstructured texts, and investigate whether inference time interventions can provide fine-grained control over the self-looping reasoning process. We classify every prefix to a latent state, record step level transitions, and use them to construct a bank of steering vectors indexed by state pairs. At inference time, a controller infers the current state and, given a target state, retrieves the corresponding vector and can also detect self-loops online from the transition structure to prevent the model from sinking into a reasoning black hole. Through extensive experiments, our method reliably intervenes on self-loop failures, with steering vectors that generalize to different state pairs. End task accuracy and token efficiency indicate that fine-grained controllability results in better reasoning quality.

Predicting cellular responses to genetic perturbations is a central capability for virtual cells and a key step toward computational modeling of biological interventions. Most existing models directly map an unperturbed molecular profile and perturba- tion to the resulting observation without explicitly representing the latent cellular transition induced by the intervention. We introduce a mechanism-centric virtual cell world model that represents cellular state as a set of Latent Mechanism Units (LMUs) and treats genetic perturbations as actions on these latent states. Each LMU combines a reusable identity grounded in multimodal biological evidence with an observation-specific state, allowing a perturbation to induce mechanism- specific stochastic transitions before decoding the resulting transcriptional response. We train VCLMU through two-stage pretraining, first on around 200K pseudo-bulk perturbation profiles and then on gene-aligned single-cell perturbation data. Across six perturbation-disjoint benchmarks, VCLMU consistently improves perturbation- specific response recovery over strong baselines while maintaining competitive global response accuracy. We further analyze learned LMUs through enrichment between perturbation responses and LMU gene sets and show that they capture structured biological response programs. These results support mechanism-level latent state transition as a useful formulation for virtual cell models that aim to predict and interpret cellular responses to biological interventions.

Simulating physical systems governed by Lagrangian dynamics often entails solving partial differential equations (PDEs) over high-resolution spatial domains, leading to significant computational expense. Reduced-order modeling (ROM) mitigates this cost by evolving low-dimensional latent representations of the underlying system. While neural ROMs enable querying solutions from latent states at arbitrary spatial points, their latent states typically represent the global domain and struggle to capture localized, highly dynamic behaviors such as fluids. We propose a sampling-based reduction framework that evolves Lagrangian systems directly in physical space over the particles themselves, reducing the number of active degrees of freedom via data-driven neural PDE operators. To enable querying at arbitrary spatial locations, we introduce a learnable kernel parameterization that uses local spatial information from time-evolved sample particles to infer the underlying solution manifold. Empirically, our approach achieves a 6.6x to 32x reduction in input dimensionality while maintaining high-fidelity evaluations across diverse Lagrangian regimes, including fluid flows, granular media, and elastoplastic dynamics. We refer to this framework as GIOROM (Geometry-Informed Reduced-Order Modeling). All code and data are available at: https://github.com/HrishikeshVish/GIOROM

The shift from monolithic LLMs to distributed multi-agent architectures demands new frameworks for verifying and securing autonomous coordination. Unlike traditional multi-agent systems focused on cooperative state alignment, modern LLM patterns: multi-agent debate, constitutional oversight, helper-critic loops-rely on adversarial critique for error correction and reasoning refinement. Since LLMs are dynamical systems whose latent states are imperfectly observable from verbalized outputs, securing these networks requires understanding both macroscopic topology and microscopic agent observability. This paper establishes a rigorous graph-theoretic framework for analyzing consensus in signed, directed interaction networks, bridging graph theory and LLM reasoning by formally mapping Transformer cross-entropy log-odds to the signed Laplacian. We characterize agreement stability through structural balance theory, showing how unbalanced critique cycles produce logical frustration and persistent reasoning oscillations, and prove that unobservable latent states from hidden system prompts act as topological Trojan horses that destabilize cooperative consensus. To resolve unobservable deadlocks, we restrict interaction topologies to chordal graphs and apply matrix decomposition with Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization, proving that rank-one spectral edge perturbations deterministically break expertise symmetry by shifting eigenvalues into the stable left-half plane. Core contributions include consensus theorems, polynomial-time Perfect Elimination Ordering verification algorithms, and large-scale empirical validation on clustered ensembles of LLaMA-3, Mistral, and Gemma agents.

Transformers have become the dominant architecture for sequence modeling by using self-attention to enable expressive and highly parallel processing. However, the resulting quadratic time and memory costs limit efficiency in long-context settings. Recurrent models such as LSTMs provide explicit nonlinear state updates and strong state-tracking capabilities, yet their strictly sequential computation limits parallelism. We introduce the Parallel Recursive LSTM (PR-LSTM), a hierarchical recurrent architecture that replaces left-to-right recurrence with recursive nonlinear state composition over a balanced computation tree. Tokens are first mapped independently to latent states, which are then recursively merged by a learned gated composition block. This structure uses the reduction pattern underlying parallel scans as a fixed execution schedule, rather than assuming an associative recurrence. As a result, PR-LSTM retains nonlinear gated state representations while reducing recurrent parallel depth from linear to logarithmic. Empirically, PR-LSTM achieves strong sequence-length generalization on formal-language benchmarks, solving more tasks than standard RNN, LSTM, and Transformer baselines, while avoiding the quadratic scaling of attention. These results suggest that recurrent computation can be reorganized hierarchically to expose parallelism without restricting the transition dynamics to linear or associative forms.

Inertial sensors play a pivotal role in indoor localization, which in turn lays the foundation for pervasive personal applications. However, low-cost inertial sensors, as commonly found in smartphones, are plagued by bias and noise, which leads to unbounded growth in error when accelerations are double integrated to obtain displacement. Small errors in state estimation propagate to make odometry virtually unusable in a matter of seconds. We propose to break the cycle of continuous integration, and instead segment inertial data into independent windows. The challenge becomes estimating the latent states of each window, such as velocity and orientation, as these are not directly observable from sensor data. We demonstrate how to formulate this as an optimization problem, and show how deep recurrent neural networks can yield highly accurate trajectories, outperforming state-of-the-art shallow techniques, on a wide range of tests and attachments. In particular, we demonstrate that IONet can generalize to estimate odometry for non-periodic motion, such as a shopping trolley or baby-stroller, an extremely challenging task for existing techniques.

Recursive models can continue updating their latent states beyond their nominal inference budget, so an incorrect output at that budget does not show whether computation is unfinished or has entered a persistently unsuccessful regime. We study the dynamics of completion in attention- and MLP-based Tiny Recursive Models (TRMs) on 1,000 hard Sudoku puzzles. Extending recurrence from the nominal 16 steps to 512 steps increases cumulative exact-solve accuracy from 59.2% to 87.5% for the attention model and from 74.4% to 91.9% for the MLP model, solving more than two-thirds of the puzzles unsolved in the nominal budget. Across both architectures, latent-state motion drops sharply after the first exact solution. Completed states are typically locally contractive along the trajectory direction, even though the same local Jacobian retains strongly expanding directions. We characterize this phenomenon as trajectory-conditioned anisotropic stability. Perturbation experiments confirm this directional stability across both models. The multi-step fate of the maximally expanding direction differs: it is absorbed within 16 steps in the attention model but persists longer in the MLP model. The anisotropic-stability pattern also holds for a second attention checkpoint. Together, these results distinguish nominal-budget failure from completed computation and identify a common dynamical signature of completion across two recurrent architectures.

To minimize the average of a set of log-convex functions, the stochastic Newton method iteratively updates its estimate using subsampled versions of the full objective's gradient and Hessian. We contextualize this optimization problem as sequential Bayesian inference on a latent state-space model with a discriminatively-specified observation process. Applying Bayesian filtering then yields a novel optimization algorithm that considers the entire history of gradients and Hessians when forming an update. We establish matrix-based conditions under which the effect of older observations diminishes over time, in a manner analogous to Polyak's heavy ball momentum. We illustrate various aspects of our approach with an example and review other relevant innovations for the stochastic Newton method.

Sample efficiency remains a key challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). A promising approach is to learn a meaningful latent representation space through auxiliary learning objectives alongside the MARL objective to aid in learning a successful control policy. In our work, we present MAPO-LSO (Multi-Agent Policy Optimization with Latent Space Optimization) which applies a form of comprehensive representation learning devised to supplement MARL training. Specifically, MAPO-LSO proposes a multi-agent extension of transition dynamics reconstruction and self-predictive learning that constructs a latent state optimization scheme that can be trivially extended to current state-of-the-art MARL algorithms. Empirical results demonstrate MAPO-LSO to show notable improvements in sample efficiency and learning performance compared to its vanilla MARL counterpart without any additional MARL hyperparameter tuning on a diverse suite of MARL tasks.

Scaling test-time compute by iteratively updating a latent state has emerged as a powerful paradigm for reasoning. Yet the internal mechanisms that enable these iterative models to generalize beyond memorized patterns remain unclear. We hypothesize that generalizable reasoning arises from learning task-conditioned attractors: latent dynamical systems whose stable fixed points correspond to valid solutions. We formalize this process through Equilibrium Reasoners (EqR), which enable test-time scaling without external verifiers or task-specific priors. EqR scales internal dynamics along two axes: depth, by running more iterations, and breadth, by aggregating stochastic trajectories from multiple initializations. Empirically, gains from test-time scaling are tightly coupled with stronger convergence toward solution-aligned attractors. This attractor perspective allows neural networks to adaptively allocate test-time compute based on task difficulty. While simple cases converge within 1 to 5 iteration steps, harder cases benefit from massive test-time scaling. By unrolling up to the equivalent of 40,000 layers, scalable latent reasoning boosts accuracy from 2.6% for feedforward models to over 99% on Sudoku-Extreme. These results suggest that learned attractor landscapes provide a useful mechanistic lens for understanding scalable reasoning in iterative latent models.

World models in robot learning predict future states from visual observations and actions, enabling agents to reason about the consequences of their controls. However, many action-conditioned models are evaluated in settings where motion is dominated by immediate control, whereas aquatic surface vehicles and other real-world objects continue moving under inertia and are displaced by hidden ambient drift, such as water currents or wind. We propose FlowMo-WM, an end-to-end trainable visual world model that infers object-centric motion state and a predictive long-history context associated with hidden drift from image-action histories without direct supervision of flow fields. FlowMo-WM factorizes image-action history into a short-history latent state, trained to summarize object-centric motion, and a longer-history context, trained to summarize slowly varying exogenous influences. A zero-context residual transition separates action-conditioned base dynamics from context-dependent drift effects during latent rollout. In simulated aquatic surface-vehicle environments with diverse hidden flows, disturbances, and randomized vehicle dynamics, FlowMo-WM improves long-horizon rollout accuracy over representative action-conditioned latent world models. Prediction-time context ablations, in which the inferred context is zeroed or shuffled during rollout, show that the ambient context is important for stable prediction under hidden drift, while frozen linear probes characterize information encoded in the learned factors.

Anticipating how scenes evolve under ego actions is fundamental to safe autonomous driving, yet the full potential of world models for decision-making remains unrealized. The critical challenge lies in ensuring that future modeling is not merely predictive, but decision-informative: the predicted future must directly shape which trajectory is selected. Existing approaches decouple future representation learning from planning optimization, or share predicted states across trajectory candidates, thereby diluting the action-specific consequences that ought to guide selection. To bridge this gap, we propose DA-WAM, a framework that unifies predictive representation learning, action-conditioned future modeling, and trajectory scoring under a single decision-making objective. DA-WAM maintains predictive supervision throughout planner optimization via an online encoder and a stable momentum target, allowing future representations to co-evolve with the driving task. An action-conditioned predictor generates a distinct future latent state per trajectory candidate, which is then evaluated by a future-latent-conditioned factorized scorer. For the expert-matched trajectory, the predicted future latent is supervised by the observed future representation, while safety-critical hard negatives provide additional supervision near planning boundaries. Extensive experiments on NAVSIM-v1 and NAVSIM-v2 demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, while ablations and diagnostic analyses validate the key components.

Evaluating recommender systems before deployment requires simulators that remain realistic over long, closed-loop interaction cycles. Current LLM-based agents generally function as surface imitators that generate realistic short-term responses but fail to capture the underlying user dynamics such as fatigue, affect, and shifting preferences. We propose PsyBer-Agent, a psychology-inspired simulator that models these dynamics through its Psy-Engine. This engine represents each user with three evolving, model-defined latent states. To calibrate simulated behavior against real interaction logs, we align log-conditioned reference trajectories with simulator-generated latent-state trajectories via Unbalanced Gromov--Wasserstein optimal transport. This approach provides structured supervision for a lightweight policy without the computational burden of fine-tuning the backbone LLM. We also introduce WebSim and the PsyBer Benchmark, which encompass multimodal scenarios and seven recommender backbones. Our framework evaluates behavioral fidelity, latent-state consistency, robustness, and responses to social-cue perturbations. On the tested horizons, PsyBer-Agent shows lower behavioral discrepancy than the prompt-only simulators while maintaining stable performance under large-scale concurrent simulation for up to 5M queued simulation tasks under bounded concurrency. Code is available in the supplementary material and at: PsyBer-Agent: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CC66F/, WebSim Platform: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/D8EAX/.

Evaluating software agents on a full benchmark is expensive. A small task subset can preserve agent rankings while yielding inaccurate scores. Historical responses provide useful structure, but tasks with identical source responses can have different outcomes for a new target agent. We introduce Hierarchical Score Posterior Recovery (HSPR), which combines source-fitted response factors with uncertain group success rates. Observed target outcomes update the posteriors over the target latent state and group rates; posterior-guided acquisition selects subsequent tasks. Its score-based criterion equals the expected one-step reduction in full-score posterior variance. Observed successes and posterior-predictive counts for unqueried tasks yield a full-score posterior. The final estimate uses its median with source-selected calibration. At a 10% task budget on four task banks from the SWE-bench family, HSPR achieves the lowest mean absolute error (MAE) on three banks and the lowest maximum absolute error (MaxErr) on all four among the methods compared. Removing group uncertainty or replacing adaptive queries increases macro MAE in the respective controls. Macro MAE decreases across 5-20% budgets.

This paper introduces a novel approach to efficiently feeding knowledge to language models (LLMs) during prediction by integrating retrieval and generation processes within a unified framework. While the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model addresses gaps in LLMs' training data and knowledge limits, it is hindered by token limit restrictions and dependency on the retrieval system's accuracy. Our proposed architecture incorporates in-context vectors (ICV) to overcome these challenges. ICV recasts in-context learning by using latent embeddings of LLMs to create a vector that captures essential task information. This vector is then used to shift the latent states of the LLM, enhancing the generation process without adding demonstration examples to the prompt. ICV directly integrates information into the model, enabling it to process this information more effectively. Our extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that ICV outperforms standard in-context learning and fine-tuning across question-answering, information retrieval, and other tasks. This approach mitigates the limitations of current RAG models and offers a more robust solution for handling extensive and diverse datasets. Despite leveraging a fraction of the parameters, our ICV-enhanced model achieves competitive performance against models like LLaMA-3, Gemma, and Phi-3, significantly reducing computational costs and memory requirements. ICV reduces prompt length, is easy to control, surpasses token limitations, and is computationally efficient compared to fine-tuning.

In this paper, we present LaVieID, a novel local autoregressive video diffusion framework designed to tackle the challenging identity-preserving text-to-video task. The key idea of LaVieID is to mitigate the loss of identity information inherent in the stochastic global generation process of diffusion transformers (DiTs) from both spatial and temporal perspectives. Specifically, unlike the global and unstructured modeling of facial latent states in existing DiTs, LaVieID introduces a local router to explicitly represent latent states by weighted combinations of fine-grained local facial structures. This alleviates undesirable feature interference and encourages DiTs to capture distinctive facial characteristics. Furthermore, a temporal autoregressive module is integrated into LaVieID to refine denoised latent tokens before video decoding. This module divides latent tokens temporally into chunks, exploiting their long-range temporal dependencies to predict biases for rectifying tokens, thereby significantly enhancing inter-frame identity consistency. Consequently, LaVieID can generate high-fidelity personalized videos and achieve state-of-the-art performance. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/ssugarwh/LaVieID.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has unlocked advanced reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with intermediate steps, yet incurs prohibitive computational costs due to generation of extra tokens. Recent studies empirically show that compressing reasoning steps into latent states, or implicit CoT compression, offers a token-efficient alternative. However, the mechanism behind CoT compression remains unclear. In this paper, we provide the first theoretical analysis of the difficulty of learning to internalize intermediate reasoning steps. By introducing Order-r Interaction, we prove that the learning signal for high-order logical dependencies exponentially decays to solve irreducible problem, where skipping intermediate steps inevitably leads to high-order interaction barriers. To empirically validate this, we introduce NatBool-DAG, a challenging benchmark designed to enforce irreducible logical reasoning and eliminate semantic shortcuts. Guided by our theoretical findings, we propose ALiCoT (Aligned Implicit CoT), a novel framework that overcomes the signal decay by aligning latent token distributions with intermediate reasoning states. Experimental results demonstrate that ALiCoT successfully unlocks efficient reasoning: it achieves a 54.4x speedup while maintaining performance comparable to explicit CoT.

Autonomous agents, especially delegated systems with memory, persistent context, and multi-step planning, pose a measurement problem not present in stateless models: an agent that preserves continued operation as a terminal objective and one that does so merely instrumentally can produce observationally similar trajectories. External behavioral monitoring cannot reliably distinguish between them. We introduce the Unified Continuation-Interest Protocol (UCIP), a multi-criterion detection framework that moves this distinction from behavior to the latent structure of agent trajectories. UCIP encodes trajectories with a Quantum Boltzmann Machine (QBM), a classical algorithm based on the density-matrix formalism of quantum statistical mechanics, and measures the von Neumann entropy of the reduced density matrix induced by a bipartition of hidden units. We test whether agents with terminal continuation objectives (Type A) produce latent states with higher entanglement entropy than agents whose continuation is merely instrumental (Type B). Higher entanglement reflects stronger cross-partition statistical coupling. On gridworld agents with known ground-truth objectives, UCIP achieves 100% detection accuracy and 1.0 AUC-ROC on held-out non-adversarial evaluation under the frozen Phase I gate. The entanglement gap between Type A and Type B agents is Delta = 0.381 (p < 0.001, permutation test). Pearson r = 0.934 across an 11-point interpolation sweep indicates that, within this synthetic family, UCIP tracks graded changes in continuation weighting rather than merely a binary label. Among the tested models, only the QBM achieves positive Delta. All computations are classical; "quantum" refers only to the mathematical formalism. UCIP does not detect consciousness or subjective experience; it detects statistical structure in latent representations that correlates with known objectives.

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.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong promise for mining Electronic Health Records (EHRs) by reasoning over longitudinal clinical information to capture context-rich patient trajectories. However, leveraging LLMs for structured EHRs (e.g., standardized diagnosis and medication codes) presents two key challenges. First, translating time-stamped EHR sequences into plain text can obscure both temporal structure and code identities, weakening the ability to capture code co-occurrence and longitudinal regularities. Second, unlike cohort-trained predictive models that learn a shared, task-aligned representation space across patients, LLMs are often applied in a case-isolated inference setting where each patient is processed independently without leveraging population-level patterns. To address these challenges, we introduce RePrompT, a time-aware LLM framework that integrates structured EHR encoders through prompt tuning, without modifying underlying architectures. Specifically, RePrompT recurrently incorporates latent states from prior visits to preserve longitudinal information, and injects population-level information through trainable prompt tokens derived from a cohort-trained, task-aligned EHR encoder. Experiments on MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV demonstrate that RePrompT consistently outperforms both EHR-based and LLM-based baselines across multiple clinical prediction tasks.

Healthcare foundation models have largely followed paradigms from natural language processing and computer vision, emphasizing large scale pretraining and deterministic representations over heterogeneous clinical data. However, clinical observations are inherently incomplete, reflecting sparse, irregular, and modality dependent measurements of an underlying physiologic state. In this work, we propose a framework for uncertainty aware foundation modeling that represents each patient not as a point embedding, but as a distribution over plausible latent states. By learning set valued representations and enforcing consistency across partial views of the same patient, the model captures what is invariantly inferable while explicitly encoding epistemic uncertainty. We integrate this formulation with multimodal encoders and scalable self supervised objectives, combining reconstruction, contrastive alignment, and distributional regularization. Across diverse clinical tasks, our approach improves predictive performance, robustness under missing data, and uncertainty calibration relative to strong baselines. These results suggest that modeling what is not observed rather than only what is constitutes a critical inductive bias for healthcare foundation models.

We propose Q-Guided Value-Gradient Matching (Q-VGM), an off-policy reinforcement learning method for a central difficulty in fine-tuning flow-matching vision-language-action (VLA) policies: improving an expressive flow-matching action expert with a learned Q-function. Effective improvement must exploit the critic's first-order signal nabla_A Q, yet flow policies make this hard: backpropagating values through the multi-step denoising chain is unstable at VLA scale, and the tractable action likelihoods required by policy gradients are unavailable under iterative denoising. Existing value-based methods therefore backpropagate through the full chain, use the critic only for test-time selection or guidance, or distill critic-improved actions as terminal labels that never supervise the velocity field. Q-VGM instead casts policy improvement as optimal control over the denoising dynamics, where the optimal residual velocity is the gradient of a denoising-time value function: clean-action estimates improved by iterative Q-gradient ascent with keep-best selection are converted into residual velocity targets that directly supervise the velocity field -- no action likelihoods, no backpropagation through the denoising chain, fully offline on a fixed replay buffer, and no critic at inference time. The critic is an action-sensitive stepwise IQL critic on compact latent states from the frozen VLA backbone. This enables a few-shot-initialization, learn-from-experience paradigm: starting from a few-shot-SFT π_{0.5} policy, Q-VGM improves the policy from its own rollouts without additional expert supervision, raising the average LIBERO success rate from 79.0% to 92.5%, outperforming all same-backbone, same-critic baselines, and attaining high success rates on four real-robot manipulation tasks, including fine-grained plug insertion.

On-policy distillation (OPD) specializes pretrained video diffusion models through teacher supervision along the student's own generation trajectory. Although large video models are natural teachers, developing specialized video experts can require costly video data and training, while querying them incurs substantially higher latency than querying image experts. More readily available and cheaper to query, image experts offer a cost-effective alternative, particularly for largely temporal-agnostic capabilities such as aesthetics and OCR that admit frame-level supervision. However, heterogeneous image and video latent spaces prevent direct supervision of intermediate student states, while image experts lack cross-frame motion supervision, making temporal consistency vulnerable to frame-level improvements. In this paper, we propose MILD, a Motion-Preserving Image-to-Video Latent Distillation framework that transfers specialized image expertise while preserving pretrained video dynamics. MILD uses a learnable linear connector that aligns student latent states and predicted updates with those of image experts, enabling supervision transfer across heterogeneous latent spaces. We further constrain image-guided corrections around the pretrained student's predictions to preserve video dynamics and incorporate an optical-flow-based motion reward to improve motion quality and temporal consistency. Across specialized image experts and multiple video-student backbones, our method consistently outperforms video-teacher OPD baselines, with further studies demonstrating effective transfer across connector designs and heterogeneous architectures. These results establish image-to-video distillation as an effective route to improving video generation by drawing on the diverse and evolving capabilities of the image-generation ecosystem.

Diffusion Transformers have established a new state-of-the-art in image synthesis, but the high computational cost of iterative sampling severely hampers their practical deployment. While existing acceleration methods often focus on the temporal domain, they overlook the substantial spatial redundancy inherent in the generative process, where global structures emerge long before fine-grained details are formed. The uniform computational treatment of all spatial regions represents a critical inefficiency. In this paper, we introduce Just-in-Time (JiT), a novel training-free framework that addresses this challenge by acceleration in the spatial domain. JiT formulates a spatially approximated generative ordinary differential equation (ODE) that drives the full latent state evolution based on computations from a dynamically selected, sparse subset of anchor tokens. To ensure seamless transitions as new tokens are incorporated to expand the dimensions of the latent state, we propose a deterministic micro-flow, a simple and effective finite-time ODE that maintains both structural coherence and statistical correctness. Extensive experiments on the state-of-the-art FLUX.1-dev model demonstrate that JiT achieves up to a 7x speedup with nearly lossless performance, significantly outperforming existing acceleration methods and establishing a new and superior trade-off between inference speed and generation fidelity.