Daily Papers

A common approach to world-model simulation for vision-language-action (VLA) systems is to predict future RGB observations and then re-encode them into policy inputs, introducing an indirect interface between simulation and downstream policy execution. We instead investigate whether world dynamics can be modeled in a compact, policy-oriented state derived from VLM visual tokens. A key challenge is that raw VLM visual tokens are high-dimensional, making efficient and accurate autoregressive dynamics modeling challenging. To address this, we introduce Token-World, an action-conditioned world model that compresses VLM features into a compact token state, learns future dynamics in this reduced space, and maps predicted states back to the original policy-facing representation for downstream use. Across manipulation benchmarks, Token-World improves open-loop feature fidelity and policy-action consistency over recent world-model simulators, with slower degradation over long rollout horizons. In closed-loop evaluation, its simulated policy performance correlates more strongly with reference policy performance than Ctrl-World (r=0.794 vs.\ 0.583), while requiring lower simulation latency. Ablations further show that compact-representation design and dimensionality substantially affect future-state prediction. Code will be available at https://chuyaofu.github.io/Token-World/.

Motivated by the success of Transformers when applied to sequences of discrete symbols, token-based world models (TBWMs) were recently proposed as sample-efficient methods. In TBWMs, the world model consumes agent experience as a language-like sequence of tokens, where each observation constitutes a sub-sequence. However, during imagination, the sequential token-by-token generation of next observations results in a severe bottleneck, leading to long training times, poor GPU utilization, and limited representations. To resolve this bottleneck, we devise a novel Parallel Observation Prediction (POP) mechanism. POP augments a Retentive Network (RetNet) with a novel forward mode tailored to our reinforcement learning setting. We incorporate POP in a novel TBWM agent named REM (Retentive Environment Model), showcasing a 15.4x faster imagination compared to prior TBWMs. REM attains superhuman performance on 12 out of 26 games of the Atari 100K benchmark, while training in less than 12 hours. Our code is available at https://github.com/leor-c/REM.

Large Language Models (LLMs) based autonomous agents demonstrate multifaceted capabilities to contribute substantially to economic production. However, existing benchmarks remain focused on single agentic capability, failing to capture long-horizon real-world scenarios. Moreover, the reliance on human-in-the-loop feedback for realistic tasks creates a scalability bottleneck, hindering automated rollout collection and evaluation. To bridge this gap, we introduce AgencyBench, a comprehensive benchmark derived from daily AI usage, evaluating 6 core agentic capabilities across 32 real-world scenarios, comprising 138 tasks with specific queries, deliverables, and rubrics. These scenarios require an average of 90 tool calls, 1 million tokens, and hours of execution time to resolve. To enable automated evaluation, we employ a user simulation agent to provide iterative feedback, and a Docker sandbox to conduct visual and functional rubric-based assessment. Experiments reveal that closed-source models significantly outperform open-source models (48.4% vs 32.1%). Further analysis reveals significant disparities across models in resource efficiency, feedback-driven self-correction, and specific tool-use preferences. Finally, we investigate the impact of agentic scaffolds, observing that proprietary models demonstrate superior performance within their native ecosystems (e.g., Claude-4.5-Opus via Claude-Agent-SDK), while open-source models exhibit distinct performance peaks, suggesting potential optimization for specific execution frameworks. AgencyBench serves as a critical testbed for next-generation agents, highlighting the necessity of co-optimizing model architecture with agentic frameworks. We believe this work sheds light on the future direction of autonomous agents, and we release the full benchmark and evaluation toolkit at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/AgencyBench.

Token-based world models emerged as a promising modular framework, modeling dynamics over token streams while optimizing tokenization separately. While successful in visual environments with discrete actions (e.g., Atari games), their broader applicability remains uncertain. In this paper, we introduce M^{3}, a modular world model that extends this framework, enabling flexible combinations of observation and action modalities through independent modality-specific components. M^{3} integrates several improvements from existing literature to enhance agent performance. Through extensive empirical evaluation across diverse benchmarks, M^{3} achieves state-of-the-art sample efficiency for planning-free world models. Notably, among these methods, it is the first to reach a human-level median score on Atari 100K, with superhuman performance on 13 games. We https://github.com/leor-c/M3{open-source our code and weights}.

Robot policies receive heterogeneous observations at each decision step, yet sequence models differ in how they organize these inputs over time. We introduce WorldToken, a time-first policy instantiation that fuses multiview images, proprioception, and task conditioning within each policy timestep into one world token. A causal temporal Transformer models the resulting world-token sequence, and a diffusion action head generates action chunks. On 23 RoboCasa tasks, an 85.3M-parameter policy trained from scratch apart from a frozen pretrained CLIP text encoder achieves 59.45% mean closed-loop success using 2,900 generated demonstrations per task. A complete factorial sweep over five dataset sizes, five model sizes, and two training seeds shows consistent gains from additional target-domain data and diminishing returns beyond moderate model size. Under same-checkpoint history truncation, reducing visible history to one or two policy timesteps lowers closed-loop success for all 50 RoboCasa policies. On RMBench Blocks Ranking, reducing visible history from 146 to 8 seconds lowers evaluator success from 95% to 28%, while an exploratory extended rollout sustains the reference swap sequence for over 850 seconds. These results establish the empirical feasibility of the complete WorldToken instantiation and characterize its data-scaling and temporal-context behavior under the tested recipes. They do not establish superiority over alternative sequence organizations or isolate which components of the complete implementation drive the observed performance.

Anticipating diverse future states is a central challenge in video world modeling. Discriminative world models produce a deterministic prediction that implicitly averages over possible futures, while existing generative world models remain computationally expensive. Recent work demonstrates that predicting the future in the feature space of a vision foundation model (VFM), rather than a latent space optimized for pixel reconstruction, requires significantly fewer world model parameters. However, most such approaches remain discriminative. In this work, we introduce DeltaTok, a tokenizer that encodes the VFM feature difference between consecutive frames into a single continuous "delta" token, and DeltaWorld, a generative world model operating on these tokens to efficiently generate diverse plausible futures. Delta tokens reduce video from a three-dimensional spatio-temporal representation to a one-dimensional temporal sequence, for example yielding a 1,024x token reduction with 512x512 frames. This compact representation enables tractable multi-hypothesis training, where many futures are generated in parallel and only the best is supervised. At inference, this leads to diverse predictions in a single forward pass. Experiments on dense forecasting tasks demonstrate that DeltaWorld forecasts futures that more closely align with real-world outcomes, while having over 35x fewer parameters and using 2,000x fewer FLOPs than existing generative world models. Code and weights: https://deltatok.github.io.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their reasoning capabilities. However, they continue to struggle with basic character-level tasks, such as counting letters in words, a problem rooted in their tokenization process. While existing benchmarks have highlighted this weakness through basic character operations, such failures are often dismissed due to lacking practical relevance. Yet, many real-world applications, such as navigating text-based maps or interpreting structured tables, rely heavily on precise sub-token understanding. In this regard, we introduce SubTokenTest, a comprehensive benchmark that assesses sub-token understanding through practical, utility-driven tasks. Our benchmark includes ten tasks across four domains and isolates tokenization-related failures by decoupling performance from complex reasoning. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of nine advanced LLMs. Additionally, we investigate the impact of test-time scaling on sub-token reasoning and explore how character-level information is encoded within the hidden states.

Autonomous driving requires reasoning about how ego actions shape the evolution of the surrounding world. However, most end-to-end methods rely on direct state-to-action mappings, capturing correlations without explicitly modeling action-conditioned dynamics. Conversely, continuous-latent world models often lack compositional structure for causal reasoning across counterfactual futures. We introduce Discrete-WAM, a unified latent vision-action world policy that represents future visual states and ego actions as aligned discrete tokens, enabling compositional causal reasoning across alternative futures. Built upon this unified discrete alignment, Discrete-WAM establishes a shared discrete diffusion framework with unified generative tasks, jointly formulating world modeling, world-action policy, and hierarchical decision-enabled policy, supporting compositional generalization across diverse driving scenarios. Experiments on large-scale autonomous-driving benchmarks show that Discrete-WAM achieves competitive performance while supporting controllable generation and counterfactual reasoning, offering a principled path toward more reliable decision-making.

Real-world image super-resolution (RWSR) is a long-standing problem as low-quality (LQ) images often have complex and unidentified degradations. Existing methods such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) or continuous diffusion models present their own issues including GANs being difficult to train while continuous diffusion models requiring numerous inference steps. In this paper, we propose an Iterative Token Evaluation and Refinement (ITER) framework for RWSR, which utilizes a discrete diffusion model operating in the discrete token representation space, i.e., indexes of features extracted from a VQGAN codebook pre-trained with high-quality (HQ) images. We show that ITER is easier to train than GANs and more efficient than continuous diffusion models. Specifically, we divide RWSR into two sub-tasks, i.e., distortion removal and texture generation. Distortion removal involves simple HQ token prediction with LQ images, while texture generation uses a discrete diffusion model to iteratively refine the distortion removal output with a token refinement network. In particular, we propose to include a token evaluation network in the discrete diffusion process. It learns to evaluate which tokens are good restorations and helps to improve the iterative refinement results. Moreover, the evaluation network can first check status of the distortion removal output and then adaptively select total refinement steps needed, thereby maintaining a good balance between distortion removal and texture generation. Extensive experimental results show that ITER is easy to train and performs well within just 8 iterative steps. Our codes will be available publicly.

Diffusion-based world models have shown strong potential for unified world simulation, but the iterative denoising remains too costly for interactive use and long-horizon rollouts. While feature caching can accelerate inference without training, we find that policies designed for single-modal diffusion transfer poorly to world models due to two world-model-specific obstacles: token heterogeneity from multi-modal coupling and spatial variation, and non-uniform temporal dynamics where a small set of hard tokens drives error growth, making uniform skipping either unstable or overly conservative. We propose WorldCache, a caching framework tailored to diffusion world models. We introduce Curvature-guided Heterogeneous Token Prediction, which uses a physics-grounded curvature score to estimate token predictability and applies a Hermite-guided damped predictor for chaotic tokens with abrupt direction changes. We also design Chaotic-prioritized Adaptive Skipping, which accumulates a curvature-normalized, dimensionless drift signal and recomputes only when bottleneck tokens begin to drift. Experiments on diffusion world models show that WorldCache delivers up to 3.7times end-to-end speedups while maintaining 98\% rollout quality, demonstrating the vast advantages and practicality of WorldCache in resource-constrained scenarios. Our code is released in https://github.com/FofGofx/WorldCache.

On-chain transfer volume is often used to describe activity in tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), although recorded transfers may reflect very different economic functions, including token creation, destruction, issuer-related operations, and movements between other addresses. Ownership measures face a similar problem because a large address balance may belong to a pool or intermediary that represents multiple investors. We address these two measurement problems by decomposing transfer activity and making ownership coverage explicit. Transfer turnover is calculated before and after observable event categories are separated, using the same asset, observation window, and supply denominator. For ownership, we compare concentration measured against total supply with concentration among the addresses that remain after identified intermediaries are excluded. Using Ethereum-based tokenized funds from December 2025 to August 2026, we find that transfer classification can materially change measured turnover. We also show that removing an intermediary can lower concentration when measured against total supply while concentration among the remaining addresses increases. Transfer activity and address concentration need to be interpreted with their underlying transaction functions and ownership coverage in mind. These measures provide evidence about liquidity-related activity, but they do not directly measure market liquidity. The code and data used in the analysis are available at https://github.com/atytmr07/rwa-liquidity.

Research in Document Intelligence and especially in Document Key Information Extraction (DocKIE) has been mainly solved as Token Classification problem. Recent breakthroughs in both natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision helped building document-focused pre-training methods, leveraging a multimodal understanding of the document text, layout and image modalities. However, these breakthroughs also led to the emergence of a new DocKIE subtask of extractive document Question Answering (DocQA), as part of the Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) research field. In this work, we compare the Question Answering approach with the classical token classification approach for document key information extraction. We designed experiments to benchmark five different experimental setups : raw performances, robustness to noisy environment, capacity to extract long entities, fine-tuning speed on Few-Shot Learning and finally Zero-Shot Learning. Our research showed that when dealing with clean and relatively short entities, it is still best to use token classification-based approach, while the QA approach could be a good alternative for noisy environment or long entities use-cases.

In real-world applications, users often require both translations and transcriptions of speech to enhance their comprehension, particularly in streaming scenarios where incremental generation is necessary. This paper introduces a streaming Transformer-Transducer that jointly generates automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech translation (ST) outputs using a single decoder. To produce ASR and ST content effectively with minimal latency, we propose a joint token-level serialized output training method that interleaves source and target words by leveraging an off-the-shelf textual aligner. Experiments in monolingual (it-en) and multilingual (\{de,es,it\}-en) settings demonstrate that our approach achieves the best quality-latency balance. With an average ASR latency of 1s and ST latency of 1.3s, our model shows no degradation or even improves output quality compared to separate ASR and ST models, yielding an average improvement of 1.1 WER and 0.4 BLEU in the multilingual case.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance in language-centric tasks. However, in agentic settings, LLMs often struggle to anticipate action consequences and adapt to environment dynamics, highlighting the need for world-modeling capabilities in LLM-based agents. We propose Reinforcement World Model Learning (RWML), a self-supervised method that learns action-conditioned world models for LLM-based agents on textual states using sim-to-real gap rewards. Our method aligns simulated next states produced by the model with realized next states observed from the environment, encouraging consistency between internal world simulations and actual environment dynamics in a pre-trained embedding space. Unlike next-state token prediction, which prioritizes token-level fidelity (i.e., reproducing exact wording) over semantic equivalence and can lead to model collapse, our method provides a more robust training signal and is empirically less susceptible to reward hacking than LLM-as-a-judge. We evaluate our method on ALFWorld and τ^2 Bench and observe significant gains over the base model, despite being entirely self-supervised. When combined with task-success rewards, our method outperforms direct task-success reward RL by 6.9 and 5.7 points on ALFWorld and τ^2 Bench respectively, while matching the performance of expert-data training.

Understanding open-world semantics is critical for robotic planning and control, particularly in unstructured outdoor environments. Existing vision-language mapping approaches typically rely on object-centric segmentation priors, which often fail outdoors due to semantic ambiguities and indistinct class boundaries. We propose OTAS - an Open-vocabulary Token Alignment method for outdoor Segmentation. OTAS addresses the limitations of open-vocabulary segmentation models by extracting semantic structure directly from the output tokens of pre-trained vision models. By clustering semantically similar structures across single and multiple views and grounding them in language, OTAS reconstructs a geometrically consistent feature field that supports open-vocabulary segmentation queries. Our method operates in a zero-shot manner, without scene-specific fine-tuning, and achieves real-time performance of up to ~17 fps. On the Off-Road Freespace Detection dataset, OTAS yields a modest IoU improvement over fine-tuned and open-vocabulary 2D segmentation baselines. In 3D segmentation on TartanAir, it achieves up to a 151% relative IoU improvement compared to existing open-vocabulary mapping methods. Real-world reconstructions further demonstrate OTAS' applicability to robotic deployment. Code and a ROS 2 node are available at https://otas-segmentation.github.io/.

A unified simulator that can model diverse physical phenomena without solver-specific redesign is a long-standing goal across simulation science. We present a learning-based particle simulator built on a single transformer architecture to model cloth, elastic solds, Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids, granular materials, and molecular dynamics. Our model follows a prediction-correction design on a shared Lagrangian particle representation. An explicit predictor first advances particles under the known external forces, producing an intermediate state that captures externally driven motion but not inter-particle interactions. A learned corrector then predicts the residual position and velocity updates through three stages: a particle tokenizer that encodes local particle-particle, particle-boundary, and topology-guided interactions; a super-token encoder that hierarchically merges particle tokens into a compact set of super tokens via alternating self-attention and token merging; and a super-token decoder that lifts these super tokens back to particle resolution through cross-attention to predict per-particle position and velocity corrections. Progressive token merging reduces the attention cost at successive encoder layers by halving the token count at each level, and the decoder communicates through the compact super-token set rather than full particle-to-particle attention. Across the six dynamics categories, the same architecture generalizes to unseen materials, boundary configurations, initial conditions, and external forces. We further demonstrate downstream interactive control, inverse design, and learning from real-world manipulation data, reducing the need for per-phenomenon solver engineering.

In the classical Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) framework, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is employed to learn from sparse, sentence-level rewards -- a challenging scenario in traditional deep reinforcement learning. Despite the great successes of PPO in the alignment of state-of-the-art closed-source large language models (LLMs), its open-source implementation is still largely sub-optimal, as widely reported by numerous research studies. To address these issues, we introduce a framework that models RLHF problems as a Markov decision process (MDP), enabling the capture of fine-grained token-wise information. Furthermore, we provide theoretical insights that demonstrate the superiority of our MDP framework over the previous sentence-level bandit formulation. Under this framework, we introduce an algorithm, dubbed as Reinforced Token Optimization (RTO), which learns the token-wise reward function from preference data and performs policy optimization based on this learned token-wise reward signal. Theoretically, RTO is proven to have the capability of finding the near-optimal policy sample-efficiently. For its practical implementation, RTO innovatively integrates Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and PPO. DPO, originally derived from sparse sentence rewards, surprisingly provides us with a token-wise characterization of response quality, which is seamlessly incorporated into our subsequent PPO training stage. Extensive real-world alignment experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

We introduce VideoLISA, a video-based multimodal large language model designed to tackle the problem of language-instructed reasoning segmentation in videos. Leveraging the reasoning capabilities and world knowledge of large language models, and augmented by the Segment Anything Model, VideoLISA generates temporally consistent segmentation masks in videos based on language instructions. Existing image-based methods, such as LISA, struggle with video tasks due to the additional temporal dimension, which requires temporal dynamic understanding and consistent segmentation across frames. VideoLISA addresses these challenges by integrating a Sparse Dense Sampling strategy into the video-LLM, which balances temporal context and spatial detail within computational constraints. Additionally, we propose a One-Token-Seg-All approach using a specially designed <TRK> token, enabling the model to segment and track objects across multiple frames. Extensive evaluations on diverse benchmarks, including our newly introduced ReasonVOS benchmark, demonstrate VideoLISA's superior performance in video object segmentation tasks involving complex reasoning, temporal understanding, and object tracking. While optimized for videos, VideoLISA also shows promising generalization to image segmentation, revealing its potential as a unified foundation model for language-instructed object segmentation. Code and model will be available at: https://github.com/showlab/VideoLISA.

Generative AI is transforming how people access information, challenging traditional advertising mechanisms built around predefined slots. Towards generation-native advertising, we propose the Latent Advertiser Mixture Auction (LAMA), a token-level advertising mechanism that embeds advertiser influence directly into the generation process. Advertisers report local continuation values that induce advertiser-specific next-token policies, from which the platform decodes through a latent mixture while updating an allocation posterior. We show that LAMA satisfies Markov DSIC and IR, and achieves near-optimal KL-regularized welfare. We further develop a learning-based implementation that reconstructs the required reports online from learned local advantages and root values. Proof-of-concept experiments on real-world commercial-search query splits show that LAMA improves platform welfare and revenue while maintaining user-facing response quality, providing initial evidence for the feasibility of generation-native advertising.

Autoregressive video world models enable interactive, long-horizon exploration, but flexible control remains challenging. Exploring a source video from new viewpoints requires the generated rollout to remain synchronised with the recorded event, place observed content in the requested view, plausibly complete newly exposed regions, and recover previously generated appearance on revisits. Existing methods typically address these requirements through task-specific modules or additional training. We present World in World, a training-free inference-time interface that converts heterogeneous control evidence into camera- and time-labelled clean visual states, which are read through the native self attention of a frozen causal video model. The evidence comprises source-video observations, target-view scene projections, geometry renderings that guide completion of newly exposed subject regions, and retrieved generated states beyond the rolling cache. Each evidence source carries token-level support and its own availability schedule. A correspondence router combines persistent point identities with geometry to establish token correspondences, guiding supported queries towards matching source-video tokens. Evidence-wise attention CFG (EWA) then independently regulates each auxiliary channel's additional contribution using attention responses from the same denoising forward pass. The shared interface supports camera-controlled rerendering, long-horizon revisiting, and human-motion transfer with the same frozen backbone. We evaluate World in World on camera-controlled video rerendering under diverse viewpoint changes, assessing perceptual quality, temporal consistency, and camera-following accuracy.

Equipping artificial agents with spatial intelligence requires a comprehensive generative prior over the dynamic 3D world. We propose World Motion Models (WMMs) that capture "what was, is, and will be where across time" via sparse SE(3) pose trajectories. WMMs are built on the observation that elements of dynamic scenes can be well approximated by a set of rigid SE(3) trajectories, a minimal yet expressive primitive for 4D modeling. This representation unifies articulated objects, human bodies, hand-object interactions, piecewise-rigid scene dynamics, camera motion, and even robot states and actions into a single shared space. Given this representation, we cast the joint distribution of these entities as a flexible sequence modeling problem, utilizing flow-matching with per-token noise levels. Coupled with a context token mechanism for non-sequential conditioning, this formulation supports any-to-any marginal conditioning across an arbitrary number of entities and time steps. Tasks such as future prediction, motion infilling, model-predictive control, inverse kinematics, cross-embodiment retargeting, and policy learning all reduce to the application of different masks over the same network. Experiments on 6 diverse applications of 3D vision and robotics demonstrate the versatility and flexibility of WMMs with strong performance.

Multi-player interactive world models aim to simulate shared environments from multiple players' perspectives, but achieving robust generation while scaling to more players remains challenging. Existing approaches that rely on fully-connected communication (e.g., Solaris) incur quadratic attention costs as the number of players grows, while centralized approaches (e.g., γ-World) suffer from interference between unrelated events in a shared global representation. To address these challenges, we present Multics, a multi-player video generation framework with hierarchical communication that structures information exchange across player, group, and global levels. This hierarchy introduces group tokens into self-attention as intermediate group-level representations that aggregate locally relevant player information. These tokens connect to global tokens for cross-group communication, while the hierarchical topology limits direct mixing between unrelated local events. Group-token parameters are shared across group slots, allowing the same communication module to accommodate varying numbers of players without introducing new group-specific parameters. We further propose budget-constrained dynamic grouping based on recent camera trajectories, which adaptively groups relevant players while limiting unnecessary communication. Experiments demonstrate that Multics achieves state-of-the-art performance in 4- and 6-player settings, with improved cross-player consistency, player-specific action and camera controllability, and interference robustness. Moreover, Multics generalizes from 4-player training to 6-, 8-, and 10-player inference without retraining, while reducing self-attention computation compared with fully-connected communication.

Rotary Positional Embedding (RoPE) is widely used to encode relative positions in Transformers. In multi-view settings, however, patch coordinates are defined independently in each image: the same 3D point can therefore have different coordinates across views, making them insufficient for establishing cross-view correspondences. We introduce WorldRoPE, a probabilistic world-centric RoPE for multi-view attention. At each layer, WorldRoPE back-projects each patch token into a set of volumetric Gaussian primitives in a shared world frame. These primitives represent multiple plausible 3D supports for a token, jointly capturing alternative depth hypotheses, depth uncertainty, and the finite spatial extent of its patch frustum. When a key token's support is projected into a query view, it induces a distribution over where that key may appear in the query image. WorldRoPE integrates the rotary operator over this distribution in closed form, combining rotations at the projected primitive centers according to their mixture weights with covariance-dependent attenuation. This makes attention less sensitive to uncertain key locations in the query view, without rasterizing or warping token features. The formulation reduces to deterministic RoPE when the support collapses to a point. Across layers, the predicted geometry guides cross-view attention, while the updated features refine the geometry used at the next layer. Experiments on novel view synthesis, depth estimation, and 3D geometry reconstruction demonstrate the effectiveness of WorldRoPE for multi-view Transformers.

We cast real-world humanoid control as a next token prediction problem, akin to predicting the next word in language. Our model is a causal transformer trained via autoregressive prediction of sensorimotor trajectories. To account for the multi-modal nature of the data, we perform prediction in a modality-aligned way, and for each input token predict the next token from the same modality. This general formulation enables us to leverage data with missing modalities, like video trajectories without actions. We train our model on a collection of simulated trajectories coming from prior neural network policies, model-based controllers, motion capture data, and YouTube videos of humans. We show that our model enables a full-sized humanoid to walk in San Francisco zero-shot. Our model can transfer to the real world even when trained on only 27 hours of walking data, and can generalize to commands not seen during training like walking backward. These findings suggest a promising path toward learning challenging real-world control tasks by generative modeling of sensorimotor trajectories.

Image restoration (IR) in real-world scenarios presents significant challenges due to the lack of high-capacity models and comprehensive datasets. To tackle these issues, we present a dual strategy: GenIR, an innovative data curation pipeline, and DreamClear, a cutting-edge Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based image restoration model. GenIR, our pioneering contribution, is a dual-prompt learning pipeline that overcomes the limitations of existing datasets, which typically comprise only a few thousand images and thus offer limited generalizability for larger models. GenIR streamlines the process into three stages: image-text pair construction, dual-prompt based fine-tuning, and data generation & filtering. This approach circumvents the laborious data crawling process, ensuring copyright compliance and providing a cost-effective, privacy-safe solution for IR dataset construction. The result is a large-scale dataset of one million high-quality images. Our second contribution, DreamClear, is a DiT-based image restoration model. It utilizes the generative priors of text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models and the robust perceptual capabilities of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to achieve photorealistic restoration. To boost the model's adaptability to diverse real-world degradations, we introduce the Mixture of Adaptive Modulator (MoAM). It employs token-wise degradation priors to dynamically integrate various restoration experts, thereby expanding the range of degradations the model can address. Our exhaustive experiments confirm DreamClear's superior performance, underlining the efficacy of our dual strategy for real-world image restoration. Code and pre-trained models will be available at: https://github.com/shallowdream204/DreamClear.

Recent progress in vision-language models (VLMs) has led to impressive results in document understanding tasks, but their high computational demands remain a challenge. To mitigate the compute burdens, we propose a lightweight token pruning framework that filters out non-informative background regions from document images prior to VLM processing. A binary patch-level classifier removes non-text areas, and a max-pooling refinement step recovers fragmented text regions to enhance spatial coherence. Experiments on real-world document datasets demonstrate that our approach substantially lowers computational costs, while maintaining comparable accuracy.

While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have seen rapid progress in pretraining, their advancement in Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains hampered by low sample efficiency and sparse rewards in real-world settings. Developing generalizable process reward models is essential for providing the fine-grained feedback necessary to bridge this gap, yet existing temporal value functions often fail to generalize beyond their training domains. We introduce TOPReward, a novel, probabilistically grounded temporal value function that leverages the latent world knowledge of pretrained video Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to estimate robotic task progress. Unlike prior methods that prompt VLMs to directly output progress values, which are prone to numerical misrepresentation, TOPReward extracts task progress directly from the VLM's internal token logits. In zero-shot evaluations across 130+ distinct real-world tasks and multiple robot platforms (e.g., Franka, YAM, SO-100/101), TOPReward achieves 0.947 mean Value-Order Correlation (VOC) on Qwen3-VL, dramatically outperforming the state-of-the-art GVL baseline which achieves near-zero correlation on the same open-source model. We further demonstrate that TOPReward serves as a versatile tool for downstream applications, including success detection and reward-aligned behavior cloning.

Agent skills, structured procedural knowledge packages injected at inference time, are increasingly used to augment LLM agents on software engineering tasks. However, their real utility in end-to-end development settings remains unclear. We present SWE-Skills-Bench, the first requirement-driven benchmark that isolates the marginal utility of agent skills in real-world software engineering (SWE). It pairs 49 public SWE skills with authentic GitHub repositories pinned at fixed commits and requirement documents with explicit acceptance criteria, yielding approximately 565 task instances across six SWE subdomains. We introduce a deterministic verification framework that maps each task's acceptance criteria to execution-based tests, enabling controlled paired evaluation with and without the skill. Our results show that skill injection benefits are far more limited than rapid adoption suggests: 39 of 49 skills yield zero pass-rate improvement, and the average gain is only +1.2%. Token overhead varies from modest savings to a 451% increase while pass rates remain unchanged. Only seven specialized skills produce meaningful gains (up to +30%), while three degrade performance (up to -10%) due to version-mismatched guidance conflicting with project context. These findings suggest that agent skills are a narrow intervention whose utility depends strongly on domain fit, abstraction level, and contextual compatibility. SWE-Skills-Bench provides a testbed for evaluating the design, selection, and deployment of skills in software engineering agents. SWE-Skills-Bench is available at https://github.com/GeniusHTX/SWE-Skills-Bench.

Large language models encode extensive world knowledge valuable for zero-shot named entity recognition. However, their causal attention mechanism, where tokens attend only to preceding context, prevents effective token classification when disambiguation requires future context. Existing approaches use LLMs generatively, prompting them to list entities or produce structured outputs, but suffer from slow autoregressive decoding, hallucinated entities, and formatting errors. We propose Just Pass Twice (JPT), a simple yet effective method that enables causal LLMs to perform discriminative token classification with full bidirectional context. Our key insight is that concatenating the input to itself lets each token in the second pass attend to the complete sentence, requiring no architectural modifications. We combine these representations with definition-guided entity embeddings for flexible zero-shot generalization. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on zero-shot NER benchmarks, surpassing the previous best method by +7.9 F1 on average across CrossNER and MIT benchmarks, being over 20x faster than comparable generative methods.

KV-cache memory is a major bottleneck in real-world LLM serving, where systems must simultaneously support latency-sensitive small-batch requests and high-throughput concurrent workloads. Although many KV-cache compression methods improve offline accuracy or compression ratio, they often violate practical serving constraints such as paged memory layouts, regular memory access, and fused attention execution, limiting their effectiveness in deployment. In this work, we identify the minimal set of 4-bit KV-cache quantization methods that remain viable under these constraints. Our central finding is that a simple design--token-wise INT4 quantization with block-diagonal Hadamard rotation--consistently achieves the best accuracy-efficiency trade-off. Across multiple models and benchmarks, this approach recovers nearly all of the accuracy lost by naive INT4, while more complex methods such as vector quantization and Hessian-aware quantization provide only marginal additional gains once serving compatibility is taken into account. To make this practical, we implement a fused rotation-quantization kernel that integrates directly into paged KV-cache layouts and introduces zero measurable end-to-end overhead, matching plain INT4 throughput across concurrency levels. Our results show that effective KV-cache compression is fundamentally a systems co-design problem: under real serving constraints, lightweight block-diagonal Hadamard rotation is a viable method that delivers near-lossless accuracy without sacrificing serving efficiency.

Autoregressive video generation has emerged as a powerful paradigm for World Action Models (WAMs). However, existing approaches suffer from slow training convergence and limited converged accuracy, particularly at high frame rates, as the training supervision is confined to the current chunk without explicit signals about future dynamics; they also suffer from slow inference due to iterative video denoising. In this paper, we present Next Forcing, a multi-chunk prediction (MCP) framework for causal world modeling that enables faster training, higher accuracy, and accelerated inference. Inspired by multi-token prediction in large language models, Next Forcing introduces an MCP training objective that augments the main model with lightweight auxiliary MCP modules to simultaneously denoise video chunks at multiple future temporal horizons (next^1, next^2, next^3 chunks). These MCP modules form a causal chain across prediction depths, where intermediate features fused from multiple layers of the main model are leveraged to predict future dynamics, allowing near-future predictions to inform farther-future ones and providing dense multi-scale temporal supervision back to the main model. During training, the MCP modules significantly accelerate convergence and improve converged accuracy, especially at high frame rates: at 50 fps, Next Forcing achieves a 93.1% relative improvement over LingBot-VA at 5k training steps and 2.3x faster convergence, and establishes new state-of-the-art results on the RoboTwin benchmark (94.1/93.5% on Clean/Random). At inference, the MCP modules can be retained to predict the next video chunk in parallel with the current one, achieving 2x inference acceleration. Next Forcing also demonstrates significant improvements on PhyWorld, a benchmark evaluating adherence to physical laws in video generation, and over 50% FVD reduction on general video pretraining.

We introduce Orca, an initial instantiation of a general world foundation model. Orca learns a unified world latent space from multimodal world signals and exposes it through multimodal readout interfaces. Rather than optimizing isolated next-token, next-frame, or next-action prediction, we are centered on Next-State-Prediction modeling, offering a unified state-transition modeling route toward understanding, predicting, and acting upon the world. Orca learns through two complementary paradigms: unconscious learning captures dense natural state transitions from continuous videos, and conscious learning models sparse meaningful state transitions by language-described events and VQA supervision. For pre-training, we construct a large-scale world-learning inventory data, including 125K hours of video data and 160M event annotations. After pre-training, Orca learns a unified world latent space. To examine whether the learned latent supports downstream, we evaluate it by three representative downstream readouts: text generation, image prediction, and embodied action generation. Orca's backbone is frozen, and only the lightweight modality-specific decoders are trainable. Experiments show the scalability of the proposed paradigm and verify that stronger world latent enables stronger downstream readouts. Orca outperforms similar-sized specialized baselines. These results show that Orca, as a general world foundation model, presents a promising approach to understanding, predicting, and acting upon the world. Finally, we discuss the current limitations, aiming to provide useful insights and inspiration for the community.

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference without changing the target distribution, but no single drafting structure performs best across real-world workloads. Autoregressive multi-token prediction (MTP) is a lightweight, stable proposal mechanism, whereas block-parallel diffusion amortizes drafting latency over much longer candidate sequences; the better choice depends strongly on the output distribution. We present AngelSpec, a unified training framework for MTP and block-parallel speculative decoding that addresses this heterogeneity at three levels. At the training level, rather than fitting one universal drafter to a uniform data mixture, we co-specialize structure and data: the MTP drafter is trained on diverse conversational data for high-entropy open-ended chat, and the block-diffusion drafter on code and mathematics data for longer predictable continuations. At the architecture level, we propose DFly, a block-diffusion framework combining a hybrid target-conditioning backbone with a predecessor-conditioned autoregressive head, improving target-feature utilization and intra-block dependency modeling while keeping generation parallel. At the inference level, both acceptance length and verification cost vary with domain, request, online load, and hardware, so DFly treats verification as a shared batch-level resource: it reallocates compute toward high-confidence prefixes across requests and combines expected utility with a profiled cost model to adapt verification depth online. Across the Hy3 series, DFly raises the average accepted length on Hy3-A21B by roughly 30% and attains the highest average throughput at every tested concurrency from 4 to 64, a 1.98-2.40x speedup over autoregressive decoding and 10.5-11.8% higher throughput than DFlash. We release AngelSpec to support training and extending these methods.

Real-world image super-resolution aims to recover high-quality images from complex and unknown real-world degradations. However, existing generative Real-ISR methods largely inherit the dense latent representations and quadratic-cost global modeling paradigm developed for high-resolution image synthesis, causing computation, memory usage, and inference latency to scale unfavorably with resolution and thus limiting practical deployment. We argue that the key bottleneck lies not in insufficient restoration priors, but in excessive token redundancy and costly token interactions during high-resolution restoration. Motivated by this observation, we revisit Real-ISR from the perspectives of compact latent representation and linear-complexity modeling, and propose SANA-SR, an efficient one-step restoration framework. Specifically, SANA-SR employs a deep compression autoencoder with a 32x compression ratio to drastically reduce latent tokens while preserving restoration-relevant structures and textures. On top of this compact latent space, we introduce a linear-attention DiT with LoRA fine-tuning, enabling efficient high-resolution restoration with linear-complexity token mixing. Extensive experiments on all benchmark datasets demonstrate that SANA-SR achieves highly competitive and often superior quantitative performance against existing methods, while restoring clearer and more realistic textures. Moreover, after pruning, the deployed model runs in 0.019s with 407.95G MACs and 344M parameters, highlighting its strong potential for practical mobile deployment.

Driving in the real world is open-world: a car may encounter a fallen mattress, a deer, or other objects outside its training data. Naming them is not enough. The system must know how to treat each region: can it drive over it, and how severe would a collision be? We therefore shift scene perception from category labels to dense action-relevant attributes, where each pixel is labeled by how it should affect motion rather than by object name. We instantiate this general formulation with two ordered attributes: 7-rank drivability and 5-rank vulnerability. We read Qwen3.5 image-token hidden states directly as a spatial semantic representation. A lightweight boundary-aware decoder then turns this coarse token grid into sharp full-resolution attribute maps. The whole process requires neither autoregressive text generation nor an external mask model such as SAM. We train on dense attribute labels built in CARLA and test transfer to real scenes and to novel obstacles never seen in training. We compare with vision-only segmenters trained on the same attributes and prompted VLM segmenters. Our model matches strong vision-only segmenters on familiar categories and improves transfer to real open-world anomalies, reaching 69.4% mean vulnerability-rank recall versus 57.1% for the best vision-only baseline and 53.9% for the best prompted VLM baseline. These results show that VLM image tokens provide useful semantic cues for transferring driving attributes to objects outside the training vocabulary.

Video world models turn actions and camera motion into long visual rollouts, making video a natural interface for interactive simulation. Such interaction requires responsive generation, yet coherent rollouts must retain visual memory of what has already been generated. Chunked video diffusion models usually keep this context in growing KV caches, so later chunks become progressively slower. To address this bottleneck, we introduce Velox, a training-free attention router for region-level context selection using frustum slab correspondences from streaming geometry. Velox represents historical blocks as camera frustum slabs with depth intervals and obtains current-block depth through recency-priority multiwarp. For well-covered regions, frustum slab overlap softly modulates each layer's model-derived block importance. Uncovered regions retain the model-derived route without geometric bias. The fixed token-block granularity matches FlashAttention-style tiled execution and reduces the attention term that grows with rollout length. Frustum slab construction runs asynchronously with denoising on the same H200. At chunk 48, Velox accelerates attention by 4.36times and denoising by 2.43times. On the full 158-case WBench navigation split, it remains within 0.15 API-free average points of dense LingBot-Fast-Cam. Please see our project page at https://velox-world.com/velox/ for more details.

Transformer models underpin many recent advances in practical machine learning applications, yet understanding their internal behavior continues to elude researchers. Given the size and complexity of these models, forming a comprehensive picture of their inner workings remains a significant challenge. To this end, we set out to understand small transformer models in a more tractable setting: that of solving mazes. In this work, we focus on the abstractions formed by these models and find evidence for the consistent emergence of structured internal representations of maze topology and valid paths. We demonstrate this by showing that the residual stream of only a single token can be linearly decoded to faithfully reconstruct the entire maze. We also find that the learned embeddings of individual tokens have spatial structure. Furthermore, we take steps towards deciphering the circuity of path-following by identifying attention heads (dubbed adjacency heads), which are implicated in finding valid subsequent tokens.

We present OmniJARVIS, a novel Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model for open-world instruction-following agents in open-world Minecraft. Compared to prior works that either emit textual goals to separate controllers or produce the control command directly, OmniJARVIS seeks a different path to ensure both strong reasoning and efficient decision-making capabilities via unified tokenization of multimodal interaction data. First, we introduce a self-supervised approach to learn a behavior encoder that produces discretized tokens for behavior trajectories tau = {o_0, a_0, dots} and an imitation learning (IL) policy decoder conditioned on these tokens. These additional behavior tokens will be augmented to the vocabulary of pretrained Multimodal Language Models (MLMs). With this encoder, we then pack long-term multimodal interactions involving task instructions, memories, thoughts, observations, textual responses, behavior trajectories, etc. into unified token sequences and model them with autoregressive transformers. Thanks to the semantically meaningful behavior tokens, the resulting VLA model, OmniJARVIS, can reason (by producing chain-of-thoughts), plan, answer questions, and act (by producing behavior tokens for the IL policy decoder). OmniJARVIS demonstrates excellent performances on a comprehensive collection of atomic, programmatic, and open-ended tasks in open-world Minecraft. Our analysis further unveils the crucial design principles in interaction data formation, unified tokenization, and its scaling potentials.

Hallucinations pose a significant challenge to the reliability of large vision-language models, making their detection essential for ensuring accuracy in critical applications. Current detection methods often rely on computationally intensive models, leading to high latency and resource demands. Their definitive outcomes also fail to account for real-world scenarios where the line between hallucinated and truthful information is unclear. To address these issues, we propose HalLoc, a dataset designed for efficient, probabilistic hallucination detection. It features 150K token-level annotated samples, including hallucination types, across Visual Question Answering (VQA), instruction-following, and image captioning tasks. This dataset facilitates the development of models that detect hallucinations with graded confidence, enabling more informed user interactions. Additionally, we introduce a baseline model trained on HalLoc, offering low-overhead, concurrent hallucination detection during generation. The model can be seamlessly integrated into existing VLMs, improving reliability while preserving efficiency. The prospect of a robust plug-and-play hallucination detection module opens new avenues for enhancing the trustworthiness of vision-language models in real-world applications. The HalLoc dataset and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/dbsltm/cvpr25_halloc.

Biomolecular interactions underpin almost all biological processes, and their rational design is central to programming new biological functions. Generative AI models have emerged as powerful tools for molecular design, yet most remain specialized for individual molecular types and lack fine-grained control over interaction details. Here we present ODesign, an all-atom generative world model for all-to-all biomolecular interaction design. ODesign allows scientists to specify epitopes on arbitrary targets and generate diverse classes of binding partners with fine-grained control. Across entity-, token-, and atom-level benchmarks in the protein modality, ODesign demonstrates superior controllability and performance to modality-specific baselines. Extending beyond proteins, it generalizes to nucleic acid and small-molecule design, enabling interaction types such as protein-binding RNA/DNA and RNA/DNA-binding ligands that were previously inaccessible. By unifying multimodal biomolecular interactions within a single generative framework, ODesign moves toward a general-purpose molecular world model capable of programmable design. ODesign is available at https://odesign.lglab.ac.cn ,

Reasoning over long sequences of observations and actions is essential for many robotic tasks. Yet, learning effective long-context policies from demonstrations remains challenging. As context length increases, training becomes increasingly expensive due to rising memory demands, and policy performance often degrades as a result of spurious correlations. Recent methods typically sidestep these issues by truncating context length, discarding historical information that may be critical for subsequent decisions. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach that explicitly regularizes the retention of past information. We first revisit the copycat problem in imitation learning and identify an opposite challenge in recent diffusion policies: rather than over-relying on prior actions, they often fail to capture essential dependencies between past and future actions. To address this, we introduce Past-Token Prediction (PTP), an auxiliary task in which the policy learns to predict past action tokens alongside future ones. This regularization significantly improves temporal modeling in the policy head, with minimal reliance on visual representations. Building on this observation, we further introduce a multistage training strategy: pre-train the visual encoder with short contexts, and fine-tune the policy head using cached long-context embeddings. This strategy preserves the benefits of PTP while greatly reducing memory and computational overhead. Finally, we extend PTP into a self-verification mechanism at test time, enabling the policy to score and select candidates consistent with past actions during inference. Experiments across four real-world and six simulated tasks demonstrate that our proposed method improves the performance of long-context diffusion policies by 3x and accelerates policy training by more than 10x.

Large language models (LLMs) trained with next-word-prediction have achieved success as clinical foundation models. Representations from these language backbones yield strong linear probe performance across biomedical tasks, suggesting that patient semantics emerge from next-token prediction at scale. However, this paradigm treats patients as a document to be summarized rather than a dynamical system to be simulated; a patient's trajectory emerges from their state evolving under interventions and time, requiring models that simulate dynamics rather than predict tokens. To address this, we introduce SMB-Structure, a world model for structured EHR that grounds a joint-embedding prediction architecture (JEPA) with next-token prediction (SFT). SFT grounds our model to reconstruct future patient states in token space, while JEPA predicts those futures in latent space from the initial patient representation alone, forcing trajectory dynamics to be encoded before the next state is observed. We validate across two large-scale cohorts: Memorial Sloan Kettering (23,319 oncology patients; 323,000+ patient-years) and INSPECT (19,402 pulmonary embolism patients). Using a linear probe evaluated at multiple points along the disease trajectory, we demonstrate that our training paradigm learns embeddings that capture disease dynamics not recoverable by autoregressive baselines, enabling SMB-Structure to achieve competitive performance on complex tasks characterized by high patient heterogeneity. Model weights are available at https://huggingface.co/standardmodelbio/SMB-v1-1.7B-Structure.

Modeling cellular states and predicting their responses to perturbations are central challenges in computational biology and the development of virtual cells. Existing foundation models for single-cell transcriptomics provide powerful static representations, but they do not explicitly model the distribution of cellular states for generative simulation. Here, we introduce Lingshu-Cell, a masked discrete diffusion model that learns transcriptomic state distributions and supports conditional simulation under perturbation. By operating directly in a discrete token space that is compatible with the sparse, non-sequential nature of single-cell transcriptomic data, Lingshu-Cell captures complex transcriptome-wide expression dependencies across approximately 18,000 genes without relying on prior gene selection, such as filtering by high variability or ranking by expression level. Across diverse tissues and species, Lingshu-Cell accurately reproduces transcriptomic distributions, marker-gene expression patterns and cell-subtype proportions, demonstrating its ability to capture complex cellular heterogeneity. Moreover, by jointly embedding cell type or donor identity with perturbation, Lingshu-Cell can predict whole-transcriptome expression changes for novel combinations of identity and perturbation. It achieves leading performance on the Virtual Cell Challenge H1 genetic perturbation benchmark and in predicting cytokine-induced responses in human PBMCs. Together, these results establish Lingshu-Cell as a flexible cellular world model for in silico simulation of cell states and perturbation responses, laying the foundation for a new paradigm in biological discovery and perturbation screening.

Next-token prediction is the self-supervised signal that trains language models, and every observed prompt token provides the same signal at test time. We study whether this signal can define the inner-loop objective for test-time training (TTT) in pretrained long-context language models. Many TTT architectures require models to be trained with test-time adaptation in mind, limiting their direct applicability to released LLM checkpoints. While recent in-place TTT methods make fast-weight adaptation possible for pretrained LLMs without redesigning the backbone, they leave a central question unresolved: what should each test-time write store? Existing recipes train the fast weight to match a learned local value proxy but they are not directly tied to the self-supervised next-token prediction signal. We introduce Test-Time Training with Next-Token Prediction (TTT-NTP), a drop-in fast-weight adaptation method for pretrained LLMs that instead supervises updates using the model's own next contextual hidden state. This makes each local write follow the same causal computation that supports next-token prediction: the value target is a pointwise linear projection of a single next-position contextual state. On RULER Full-13 (averaged over 4k, 8k, 16k, and 32k context lengths), TTT-NTP is the only method that consistently improves the released backbone across four models spanning three families and a 0.6--8B size range: Llama-3.1-8B (+3.9), Mistral-7B-v0.3 (+3.0), and the Qwen3 series (Qwen3-4B +4.1, Qwen3-0.6B +2.9). On the real-world LongBench-v2 long-document QA benchmark, TTT-NTP improves over the base model on both Llama-3.1-8B (+5.6) and Mistral-7B-v0.3 (+3.7), while preserving commonsense and knowledge performance.

World Action Models (WAMs) couple action generation with prediction of future states. Their effectiveness depends on whether future dynamics are modeled in a space that is both aligned with action generation and sufficiently geometry-aware to capture where and how actions change the scene. Existing WAMs typically satisfy only part of this requirement, relying on either perceptually heavy observation-space targets or auxiliary latent spaces that are not jointly structured for action relevance and geometry. We propose SG-WAM, a self-guided framework that learns geometry-aware action-conditioned dynamics directly in the policy-derived representation space. SG-WAM introduces learnable dynamics tokens and a Self-Guided World Predictor that forecasts their future latent states conditioned on intervening robot actions. Prediction targets are generated by an exponential moving average copy of the same policy backbone, providing stable supervision within the representation family used by the action expert. Geometric supervision further structures the policy image-token representations, providing spatially grounded context for the dynamics tokens and yielding a future-alignment space that is both action-relevant and geometry-aware. Latent future prediction, geometric grounding, and flow-matching action generation are jointly optimized end-to-end in a unified framework. Built on a 0.9B model without large-scale embodied pretraining, SG-WAM achieves 98.5% average success on LIBERO and 73% on LIBERO-Plus, while outperforming strong baselines in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution real-world evaluations.

We introduce the REAL-TSE Challenge, an IEEE SLT 2026 satellite challenge on target speaker extraction~(TSE) from real conversational recordings. Given a multi-speaker mixture and one or more enrollment utterances from a target speaker, participating systems must recover only the target speech. Unlike simulated read-speech benchmarks, REAL-TSE evaluates Mandarin and English recordings that contain natural overlap, reverberation, noise, channel mismatch, and conversational dynamics. The challenge defines two complementary tracks: an Online track for low-latency streaming extraction and an Offline track for full-context processing. Systems are evaluated with Token Error Rate (TER), Speaker Similarity (SpkSim), DNSMOS, and target-speaker activity F1. This overview paper describes the task definition, datasets, baselines, evaluation protocol, submitted systems, condition-wise findings, and lessons for future real-world TSE benchmarks.

World-action models (WAMs) leverage pretrained video models to improve generalization in robot control by jointly predicting future visual states and actions. This capability comes at a substantial inference cost, as dense future-frame tokens are repeatedly processed during denoising. Prior methods address this by token pruning that prioritizes visual fidelity to reduce denoising costs in video diffusion models. However, these methods do not use action relevance to determine which future-frame tokens to retain during joint denoising in WAMs. In this paper, we propose Sparse-WAM, a training-free framework for action-guided sparse imagination that selectively processes future-frame tokens to accelerate WAM inference. We observe substantial overlap in the spatial distribution of attention from action tokens to future-frame tokens (action-to-future attention) between consecutive denoising steps, despite continued updates to the future representations. Motivated by this, we develop Action-Guided Token Selection to retain frame-specific action-relevant regions together with cross-frame context. However, a naive implementation can incur attention-scoring and token-packing overhead that offsets the computational savings from pruning. We therefore introduce Pilot, an efficient engine that reduces sparse inference overhead through lightweight scoring and cross-step reuse of token selections. On LIBERO with FastWAM-Joint and RoboLab-120 with Cosmos 3 Edge, Sparse-WAM achieves inference speedups of approximately 2.0times and 1.8times, respectively, over dense eager inference on an NVIDIA RTX 4090, while largely preserving task performance.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong robotic manipulation performance but incur high computational costs from processing long token sequences at every control step, limiting real-time deployment. Visual token pruning offers a direct solution, as visual patches dominate the input sequence and contain considerable redundancy. Existing approaches, however, either rely on indirect training-free heuristics, such as attention scores and motion thresholds, or require costly fine-tuning of the base VLA model. We introduce VLA-ACL (Action Consistency Learning), which learns a lightweight visual token pruning policy through action-level supervision while keeping the base VLA model entirely frozen. The training objective encourages actions produced from pruned visual contexts to remain consistent with the full-context teacher, with ground-truth actions as auxiliary supervision. This directly ties token selection to its effect on the downstream control output. Experiments on LIBERO and real-world manipulation tasks show that VLA-ACL prunes up to 87.5% of visual tokens while retaining competitive performance, reduces computation by up to 75%, and achieves a 1.5x inference speedup. These results establish a stronger performance-efficiency trade-off than existing frozen-VLA pruning methods and demonstrate the value of action-level supervision for visual token selection. Code is available at https://github.com/du-owen/VLA-ACL.

Foundation models must handle multiple generative processes, yet mechanistic interpretability largely studies capabilities in isolation; it remains unclear how a single transformer organizes multiple, potentially conflicting "world models". Previous experiments on Othello playing neural-networks test world-model learning but focus on a single game with a single set of rules. We introduce MetaOthello, a controlled suite of Othello variants with shared syntax but different rules or tokenizations, and train small GPTs on mixed-variant data to study how multiple world models are organized in a shared representation space. We find that transformers trained on mixed-game data do not partition their capacity into isolated sub-models; instead, they converge on a mostly shared board-state representation that transfers causally across variants. Linear probes trained on one variant can intervene on another's internal state with effectiveness approaching that of matched probes. For isomorphic games with token remapping, representations are equivalent up to a single orthogonal rotation that generalizes across layers. When rules partially overlap, early layers maintain game-agnostic representations while a middle layer identifies game identity, and later layers specialize. MetaOthello offers a path toward understanding not just whether transformers learn world models, but how they organize many at once.

Egocentric world models predict first-person observations conditioned on an agent's actions, but most focus on a single agent. Real embodied settings often involve multiple agents that act and interact within a shared environment. Existing multi-agent world models rely on coarse actions like locomotion, camera control, or discrete commands, leaving fine-grained embodied interactions underexplored. We formulate multi-agent egocentric world modeling as synchronized ego-stream generation for multiple agents interacting through fine-grained actions in a shared world. This requires cross-view action consistency, shared-environment consistency, and consistent propagation of interaction-induced state updates. We propose Multi-agent Egocentric World Model (ME-World), which jointly denoises multiple ego streams in a shared token sequence, conditions each stream on all agents' target-view poses, and grounds generation with shared environment memory. We train and evaluate on real and synthetic multi-agent data and introduce shared-world consistency metrics for environment, update, and identity consistency. Experiments show ME-World improves shared-world consistency, action control, identity preservation, and video quality over existing methods.

Learning with large-scale unlabeled data has become a powerful tool for pre-training Visual Transformers (VTs). However, prior works tend to overlook that, in real-world scenarios, the input data may be corrupted and unreliable. Pre-training VTs on such corrupted data can be challenging, especially when we pre-train via the masked autoencoding approach, where both the inputs and masked ``ground truth" targets can potentially be unreliable in this case. To address this limitation, we introduce the Token Boosting Module (TBM) as a plug-and-play component for VTs that effectively allows the VT to learn to extract clean and robust features during masked autoencoding pre-training. We provide theoretical analysis to show how TBM improves model pre-training with more robust and generalizable representations, thus benefiting downstream tasks. We conduct extensive experiments to analyze TBM's effectiveness, and results on four corrupted datasets demonstrate that TBM consistently improves performance on downstream tasks.

Traditional deep learning often overlooks bytes, the basic units of the digital world, where all forms of information and operations are encoded and manipulated in binary format. Inspired by the success of next token prediction in natural language processing, we introduce bGPT, a model with next byte prediction to simulate the digital world. bGPT matches specialized models in performance across various modalities, including text, audio, and images, and offers new possibilities for predicting, simulating, and diagnosing algorithm or hardware behaviour. It has almost flawlessly replicated the process of converting symbolic music data, achieving a low error rate of 0.0011 bits per byte in converting ABC notation to MIDI format. In addition, bGPT demonstrates exceptional capabilities in simulating CPU behaviour, with an accuracy exceeding 99.99% in executing various operations. Leveraging next byte prediction, models like bGPT can directly learn from vast binary data, effectively simulating the intricate patterns of the digital world.

World modeling is a crucial task for enabling intelligent agents to effectively interact with humans and operate in dynamic environments. In this work, we propose MineWorld, a real-time interactive world model on Minecraft, an open-ended sandbox game which has been utilized as a common testbed for world modeling. MineWorld is driven by a visual-action autoregressive Transformer, which takes paired game scenes and corresponding actions as input, and generates consequent new scenes following the actions. Specifically, by transforming visual game scenes and actions into discrete token ids with an image tokenizer and an action tokenizer correspondingly, we consist the model input with the concatenation of the two kinds of ids interleaved. The model is then trained with next token prediction to learn rich representations of game states as well as the conditions between states and actions simultaneously. In inference, we develop a novel parallel decoding algorithm that predicts the spatial redundant tokens in each frame at the same time, letting models in different scales generate 4 to 7 frames per second and enabling real-time interactions with game players. In evaluation, we propose new metrics to assess not only visual quality but also the action following capacity when generating new scenes, which is crucial for a world model. Our comprehensive evaluation shows the efficacy of MineWorld, outperforming SoTA open-sourced diffusion based world models significantly. The code and model have been released.

Deriving compact and temporally aware visual representations from dynamic scenes is essential for successful execution of sequential scene understanding tasks such as visual tracking and robotic manipulation. In this paper, we introduce Token Bottleneck (ToBo), a simple yet intuitive self-supervised learning pipeline that squeezes a scene into a bottleneck token and predicts the subsequent scene using minimal patches as hints. The ToBo pipeline facilitates the learning of sequential scene representations by conservatively encoding the reference scene into a compact bottleneck token during the squeeze step. In the expansion step, we guide the model to capture temporal dynamics by predicting the target scene using the bottleneck token along with few target patches as hints. This design encourages the vision backbone to embed temporal dependencies, thereby enabling understanding of dynamic transitions across scenes. Extensive experiments in diverse sequential tasks, including video label propagation and robot manipulation in simulated environments demonstrate the superiority of ToBo over baselines. Moreover, deploying our pre-trained model on physical robots confirms its robustness and effectiveness in real-world environments. We further validate the scalability of ToBo across different model scales.

Existing world models for autonomous driving struggle with long-horizon generation and generalization to challenging scenarios. In this work, we develop a model using simple design choices, and without additional supervision or sensors, such as maps, depth, or multiple cameras. We show that our model yields state-of-the-art performance, despite having only 469M parameters and being trained on 280h of video data. It particularly stands out in difficult scenarios like turning maneuvers and urban traffic. We test whether discrete token models possibly have advantages over continuous models based on flow matching. To this end, we set up a hybrid tokenizer that is compatible with both approaches and allows for a side-by-side comparison. Our study concludes in favor of the continuous autoregressive model, which is less brittle on individual design choices and more powerful than the model built on discrete tokens. Code, models and qualitative results are publicly available at https://lmb-freiburg.github.io/orbis.github.io/.

Scaling the context length of large language models (LLMs) offers significant benefits but is computationally expensive. This expense stems primarily from the self-attention mechanism, whose O(N^2) complexity with respect to sequence length presents a major bottleneck for both memory and latency. Fortunately, the attention matrix is often sparse, particularly for long sequences, suggesting an opportunity for optimization. Block-sparse attention has emerged as a promising solution that partitions sequences into blocks and skips computation for a subset of these blocks. However, the effectiveness of this method is highly dependent on the underlying attention patterns, which can lead to sub-optimal block-level sparsity. For instance, important key tokens for queries within a single block may be scattered across numerous other blocks, leading to computational redundancy. In this work, we propose Permuted Block-Sparse Attention (PBS-Attn), a plug-and-play method that leverages the permutation properties of attention to increase block-level sparsity and enhance the computational efficiency of LLM prefilling. We conduct comprehensive experiments on challenging real-world long-context datasets, demonstrating that PBS-Attn consistently outperforms existing block-sparse attention methods in model accuracy and closely matches the full attention baseline. Powered by our custom permuted-FlashAttention kernels, PBS-Attn achieves an end-to-end speedup of up to 2.75times in long-context prefilling, confirming its practical viability. Code available at https://github.com/xinghaow99/pbs-attn

We introduce Emu3.5, a large-scale multimodal world model that natively predicts the next state across vision and language. Emu3.5 is pre-trained end-to-end with a unified next-token prediction objective on a corpus of vision-language interleaved data containing over 10 trillion tokens, primarily derived from sequential frames and transcripts of internet videos. The model naturally accepts interleaved vision-language inputs and generates interleaved vision-language outputs. Emu3.5 is further post-trained with large-scale reinforcement learning to enhance multimodal reasoning and generation. To improve inference efficiency, we propose Discrete Diffusion Adaptation (DiDA), which converts token-by-token decoding into bidirectional parallel prediction, accelerating per-image inference by about 20x without sacrificing performance. Emu3.5 exhibits strong native multimodal capabilities, including long-horizon vision-language generation, any-to-image (X2I) generation, and complex text-rich image generation. It also exhibits generalizable world-modeling abilities, enabling spatiotemporally consistent world exploration and open-world embodied manipulation across diverse scenarios and tasks. For comparison, Emu3.5 achieves performance comparable to Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (Nano Banana) on image generation and editing tasks and demonstrates superior results on a suite of interleaved generation tasks. We open-source Emu3.5 at https://github.com/baaivision/Emu3.5 to support community research.

Evaluating robotics policies across thousands of environments and thousands of tasks is infeasible with existing approaches. This motivates the need for a new methodology for scalable robotics policy evaluation. In this paper, we propose dWorldEval, which uses a discrete diffusion world model as a scalable evaluation proxy for robotics policies. Specifically, dWorldEval maps all modalities - including vision, language, and robotic actions - into a unified token space, modeling them via a single transformer-based denoising network. In this paper, we propose dWorldEval, using a discrete diffusion world model as a scalable evaluation proxy for robotics policy. Specifically, it maps all modalities, including vision, language, and robotics action into a unified token space, then denoises them with a single transformer network. Building on this architecture, we employ a sparse keyframe memory to maintain spatiotemporal consistency. We also introduce a progress token that indicates the degree of task completion. At inference, the model jointly predicts future observations and progress token, allowing automatically determine success when the progress reaches 1. Extensive experiments demonstrate that dWorldEval significantly outperforms previous approaches, i.e., WorldEval, Ctrl-World, and WorldGym, on LIBERO, RoboTwin, and multiple real-robot tasks. It paves the way for a new architectural paradigm in building world simulators for robotics evaluation at scale.

Video large language models (Video-LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in video understanding tasks. However, their practical deployment is still hindered by the inefficiency introduced by processing massive amounts of visual tokens. Although recent approaches achieve extremely low token retention ratios while maintaining accuracy comparable to full-token baselines, most of them perform compression only at the late stage of prefilling, leaving the efficiency of the vision encoder unoptimized. In this paper, we first show that vision encoding contributes a large portion to the time-to-first-token (TTFT). Therefore, instead of compressing visual tokens only after the vision encoder, performing compression inside the encoder still leaves substantial room for exploration. Based on this insight, we propose EarlyTom, a training-free token compression framework that performs early-stage visual token compression inside the vision encoder, enabling significantly better TTFT reduction and higher throughput. In addition, we introduce a decoupled spatial token selection strategy that improves the overall compression effectiveness. EarlyTom reduces TTFT by up to 2.65x and FLOPs by up to 61% on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU for the LLaVA-OneVision-7B model, while maintaining accuracy comparable to the full-token baseline. These improvements substantially enhance the practicality of deploying Video-LLMs in real-world production scenarios.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely applied in real world scenarios, yet fine-tuning them comes with significant computational and storage costs. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods such as LoRA mitigate these costs; however, the adapted parameters are dependent on the base model and cannot be transferred across different backbones. One way to address this issue is through knowledge distillation, but its effectiveness inherently depends on training data. Recent work such as TransLoRA avoids this by generating synthetic data; nevertheless, this adds complexity since it requires training an additional discriminator model. In this paper, we propose TiTok, a new framework that enables effective LoRA Transplantation through Token-level knowledge transfer. Specifically, TiTok captures task-relevant information through a token-wise contrastive excess between a source model with and without LoRA. This excess highlights informative tokens and enables selective filtering of synthetic data, all without additional models or overhead. Through experiments on three benchmarks across multiple transfer settings, we demonstrate that TiTok is consistently effective, achieving average performance gains of +4~10% compared to baselines overall.

Video generators and video-based world models can synthesize plausible visual trajectories, but long-horizon procedural tasks require generation to adapt to what has actually been produced. A model must determine the next action from its generated state, execute that action, and recognize when the task is complete. Open-loop generation cannot adapt to execution outcomes, while existing closed-loop systems often rely on pretrained executors or indirect verification. This leaves a gap between deciding an action and successfully realizing it. We formulate procedural video generation as closed-loop task execution in visual world space and introduce WorldGuide. Given only an initial image and a task goal, WorldGuide predicts an atomic action, generates its corresponding video clip, and uses the generated result to select the next action or terminate. The Planner and Executor are trained on the same step-level procedural demonstrations: the Planner learns to predict the next atomic action or task completion from visual progress, while the Executor is directly trained to realize the predicted actions. Hierarchical visual memory maintains state across long-horizon execution with bounded history token cost. Due to the lack of step-level action-video supervision for joint planner-executor training, we introduce WorldGuide Bench: approximately 59K step-annotated videos across 245 tasks and 27 procedural categories. WorldGuide achieves a 33.33\% Task Success on WorldGuide-Bench, compared with 29.90\% for the strong recent video model MiniMax-H3, even though MiniMax-H3 receives reference action plans, and achieves 47.69\% on VideoCraft-Bench compared with 32.73\% for MiniMax-H3 under goal-only conditioning. These results demonstrate the importance of coupling planning with learned execution for goal-directed procedural video generation.

We propose Token Turing Machines (TTM), a sequential, autoregressive Transformer model with memory for real-world sequential visual understanding. Our model is inspired by the seminal Neural Turing Machine, and has an external memory consisting of a set of tokens which summarise the previous history (i.e., frames). This memory is efficiently addressed, read and written using a Transformer as the processing unit/controller at each step. The model's memory module ensures that a new observation will only be processed with the contents of the memory (and not the entire history), meaning that it can efficiently process long sequences with a bounded computational cost at each step. We show that TTM outperforms other alternatives, such as other Transformer models designed for long sequences and recurrent neural networks, on two real-world sequential visual understanding tasks: online temporal activity detection from videos and vision-based robot action policy learning. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/google-research/scenic/tree/main/scenic/projects/token_turing

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities across various visual understanding and reasoning tasks. However, their real-world deployment is often constrained by high latency during inference due to substantial compute required to process the large number of input tokens (predominantly from the image) by the LLM. To reduce inference costs, one can either downsize the LLM or reduce the number of input image-tokens, the latter of which has been the focus of many recent works around token compression. However, it is unclear what the optimal trade-off is, as both the factors directly affect the VLM performance. We first characterize this optimal trade-off between the number of visual tokens and LLM parameters by establishing scaling laws that capture variations in performance with these two factors. Our results reveal a surprising trend: for visual reasoning tasks, the inference-optimal behavior in VLMs, i.e., minimum downstream error at any given fixed inference compute, is achieved when using the largest LLM that fits within the inference budget while minimizing visual token count - often to a single token. While the token reduction literature has mainly focused on maintaining base model performance by modestly reducing the token count (e.g., 5-10times), our results indicate that the compute-optimal inference regime requires operating under even higher token compression ratios. Based on these insights, we take some initial steps towards building approaches tailored for high token compression settings. Code is available at https://github.com/locuslab/llava-token-compression.

Large Language Models are known to capture real-world knowledge, allowing them to excel in many downstream tasks. Despite recent advances, these models are still prone to what are commonly known as hallucinations, causing them to emit unwanted and factually incorrect text. In this work, we propose a novel calibration method that can be used to combat hallucinations. We add a special [IDK] ("I don't know") token to the model's vocabulary and introduce an objective function that shifts probability mass to the [IDK] token for incorrect predictions. This approach allows the model to express uncertainty in its output explicitly. We evaluate our proposed method across multiple model architectures and factual downstream tasks. We find that models trained with our method are able to express uncertainty in places where they would previously make mistakes while suffering only a small loss of encoded knowledge. We further perform extensive ablation studies of multiple variations of our approach and provide a detailed analysis of the precision-recall tradeoff of our method.

Recent successes in autoregressive (AR) generation models, such as the GPT series in natural language processing, have motivated efforts to replicate this success in visual tasks. Some works attempt to extend this approach to autonomous driving by building video-based world models capable of generating realistic future video sequences and predicting ego states. However, prior works tend to produce unsatisfactory results, as the classic GPT framework is designed to handle 1D contextual information, such as text, and lacks the inherent ability to model the spatial and temporal dynamics essential for video generation. In this paper, we present DrivingWorld, a GPT-style world model for autonomous driving, featuring several spatial-temporal fusion mechanisms. This design enables effective modeling of both spatial and temporal dynamics, facilitating high-fidelity, long-duration video generation. Specifically, we propose a next-state prediction strategy to model temporal coherence between consecutive frames and apply a next-token prediction strategy to capture spatial information within each frame. To further enhance generalization ability, we propose a novel masking strategy and reweighting strategy for token prediction to mitigate long-term drifting issues and enable precise control. Our work demonstrates the ability to produce high-fidelity and consistent video clips of over 40 seconds in duration, which is over 2 times longer than state-of-the-art driving world models. Experiments show that, in contrast to prior works, our method achieves superior visual quality and significantly more accurate controllable future video generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/YvanYin/DrivingWorld.

We design a suite of minimal algorithmic tasks that are a loose abstraction of open-ended real-world tasks. This allows us to cleanly and controllably quantify the creative limits of the present-day language model. Much like real-world tasks that require a creative, far-sighted leap of thought, our tasks require an implicit, open-ended stochastic planning step that either (a) discovers new connections in an abstract knowledge graph (like in wordplay, drawing analogies, or research) or (b) constructs new patterns (like in designing math problems or new proteins). In these tasks, we empirically and conceptually argue how next-token learning is myopic and memorizes excessively; comparatively, multi-token approaches, namely teacherless training and diffusion models, excel in producing diverse and original output. Secondly, in our tasks, we find that to elicit randomness from the Transformer without hurting coherence, it is better to inject noise right at the input layer (via a method we dub hash-conditioning) rather than defer to temperature sampling from the output layer. Thus, our work offers a principled, minimal test-bed for analyzing open-ended creative skills, and offers new arguments for going beyond next-token learning and softmax-based sampling. We make part of the code available under https://github.com/chenwu98/algorithmic-creativity

Large language models (LLMs) use data to learn about the world in order to produce meaningful correlations and predictions. As such, the nature, scale, quality, and diversity of the datasets used to train these models, or to support their work at inference time, have a direct impact on their quality. The rapid development and adoption of LLMs of varying quality has brought into focus the scarcity of publicly available, high-quality training data and revealed an urgent need to ground the stewardship of these datasets in sustainable practices with clear provenance chains. To that end, this technical report introduces Institutional Books 1.0, a large collection of public domain books originally digitized through Harvard Library's participation in the Google Books project, beginning in 2006. Working with Harvard Library, we extracted, analyzed, and processed these volumes into an extensively-documented dataset of historic texts. This analysis covers the entirety of Harvard Library's collection scanned as part of that project, originally spanning 1,075,899 volumes written in over 250 different languages for a total of approximately 250 billion tokens. As part of this initial release, the OCR-extracted text (original and post-processed) as well as the metadata (bibliographic, source, and generated) of the 983,004 volumes, or 242B tokens, identified as being in the public domain have been made available. This report describes this project's goals and methods as well as the results of the analyses we performed, all in service of making this historical collection more accessible and easier for humans and machines alike to filter, read and use.

Large language models (LLMs) acquire substantial world knowledge during pre-training, which is further shaped by post-training techniques such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, the impact of SFT on a model's knowledge remains underexplored, limiting our ability to control knowledge change behavior in fine-tuned models. To address this gap, we evaluate closed-book question answering (CBQA) performance across five LLMs from the LLaMA-2 and LLaMA-3 families. Surprisingly, models fine-tuned on 1,920 samples perform up to 14% worse than those fine-tuned on only 240 samples. Furthermore, varying the level of knowledge mastery in the fine-tuning data leads to performance fluctuations of over 12%. To investigate these effects, we analyze model behavior at both the token and parameter levels. Our analysis reveals that up to 90% of parameter updates during SFT do not contribute to knowledge enhancement. Restoring these updates can improve performance on the CBQA task, depending on the characteristics of the fine-tuning data. These insights offer practical guidance for developing fine-tuning strategies that more effectively strengthen model knowledge.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have emerged as powerful models in the field of computer vision, delivering superior performance across various vision tasks. However, the high computational complexity poses a significant barrier to their practical applications in real-world scenarios. Motivated by the fact that not all tokens contribute equally to the final predictions and fewer tokens bring less computational cost, reducing redundant tokens has become a prevailing paradigm for accelerating vision transformers. However, we argue that it is not optimal to either only reduce inattentive redundancy by token pruning, or only reduce duplicative redundancy by token merging. To this end, in this paper we propose a novel acceleration framework, namely token Pruning & Pooling Transformers (PPT), to adaptively tackle these two types of redundancy in different layers. By heuristically integrating both token pruning and token pooling techniques in ViTs without additional trainable parameters, PPT effectively reduces the model complexity while maintaining its predictive accuracy. For example, PPT reduces over 37% FLOPs and improves the throughput by over 45% for DeiT-S without any accuracy drop on the ImageNet dataset. The code is available at https://github.com/xjwu1024/PPT and https://github.com/mindspore-lab/models/

Generative sequence models are typically trained on sample sequences from natural or formal languages. It is a crucial question whether -- or to what extent -- sample-based training is able to capture the true structure of these languages, often referred to as the ``world model''. Theoretical results indicate that we can hope for soundness at best, that is, generating valid sequences, but not necessarily all of them. However, it is still important to have practical tools that are able to verify whether a given sequence model is sound. In this study, we focus on chess, as it is a domain that provides enough complexity while having a simple rule-based world model. We propose adversarial sequence generation for verifying the soundness of the sequence model. Our adversaries generate valid sequences so as to force the sequence model to generate an invalid next move prediction. Apart from the falsification of soundness, this method is also suitable for a more fine-grained analysis of the failure modes and the effects of different choices during training. To demonstrate this, we propose a number of methods for adversarial sequence generation and evaluate the approach on a large set of chess models. We train models on random as well as high-quality chess games, using several training recipes. We find that none of the models are sound, but some training techniques and dataset choices are able to improve soundness remarkably. We also investigate the potential application of board state probes in both our training and attack methods. Our findings indicate that the extracted board states have no causal role in next token prediction in most of the models.

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) in real-world applications is increasingly limited by their high inference cost. While recent advances in dynamic token-level computation allocation attempt to improve efficiency by selectively activating model components per token, existing methods rely on greedy routing--a myopic execute-or-skip mechanism that often leads to irreversible information loss and suboptimal token selection. This paper introduces informed routing, a new paradigm that proactively addresses these issues. The key insight is to assess not only a token's immediate importance but also its recoverability, i.e., how well its transformation can be approximated. To this end, we propose the Lightweight Feature Forecaster (LFF), a small predictive module that estimates a unit's output before routing decisions are made. This enables a flexible execute-or-approximate policy that preserves model fidelity while drastically reducing computation. Extensive experiments on both language modeling and reasoning tasks show that informed routing achieves state-of-the-art efficiency-performance trade-offs across multiple sparsity levels. Notably, even without final LoRA fine-tuning, our method matches or surpasses strong baselines that require full fine-tuning, all while reducing training time by over 50%. The code is available at: https://github.com/EIT-NLP/informed-routing

World models for interactive video generation have largely focused on single-agent settings, where future observations are generated from a single control signal. However, many generated environments require multi-agent interaction: multiple players, robots, or embodied agents act simultaneously within a shared space. Scaling world models to such settings requires a principled multi-agent design: agents should remain independently controllable, permutation-symmetric, and support efficient inference while maintaining consistency across time and perspectives. In this paper, we present our generative multi-agent world model for interactive simulation. It introduces Simplex Rotary Agent Encoding, a parameter-free extension of 3D RoPE that represents agents as vertices of a regular simplex in rotary angle space. This gives each agent a distinct phase while making all agents permutation-equivalent, enabling scalable agent identity without learned per-slot identities or a fixed agent ordering. To avoid dense all-to-all attention across agents, we further propose Sparse Hub Attention, where learnable hub tokens mediate token interaction across agents, reducing cross-agent attention cost from quadratic to linear in the number of agents. For real-time rollout, we distill a full-context diffusion teacher into a causal student that generates temporal blocks sequentially with KV caching, enabling action-responsive generation at 24 FPS. Experiments in multiplayer virtual environments show that our model improves video fidelity, action controllability, and inter-agent consistency over slot-based and dense-attention baselines, while generalizing from two to four players without additional training.

Pretrained foundation models have become an important basis for end-to-end autonomous driving. In contrast to vision-language models pretrained primarily on static image-text pairs, video generative models capture temporal dynamics and motion priors that are naturally suited for driving. We present DriveWAM, a driving world-action model that adapts a pretrained video diffusion transformer into an autoregressive video-action policy. DriveWAM organizes video and action streams into a unified temporal token sequence and trains them under a joint flow-matching objective, preserving the pretrained video-generation architecture while adapting its large-scale video priors to action generation. To incorporate high-level scene understanding, we introduce scene-evolving driving guidance, where a frozen VLM produces chunk-specific semantic intent to guide video-action generation. To keep long-horizon rollout bounded, we further introduce selective KV memory, which maintains bounded modality-aware video and action memory pools through relevance-redundancy cache selection at inference time. Experiments on NAVSIM and the PhysicalAI-Autonomous-Vehicles benchmark show that DriveWAM achieves strong planning performance, and a data-scaling study from 4k to 100k driving clips further confirms the scaling potential of world-action modeling for end-to-end autonomous driving.

In-context learning (ICL) is the standard method for low-resource classification, yet its efficacy in specialized domains remains largely unexplored. We address the challenge of classifying semantically complex, multi-party B2B conversations, where traditional ICL encounters significant limitations, especially as context length increases due to the concatenation of multiple few-shot examples. We introduce the Call Playbook dataset, featuring five classification tasks derived from real-world B2B conversations targeting core sales concepts. To bridge the gap between performance and practical utility, we propose novel knowledge extraction methods that distill verbose examples into compact, interpretable representations of structured classification criteria and precise task descriptions. Our approach achieves a 99\% reduction in token usage and improves macro-averaged AUC by up to 7\% over traditional ICL. Notably, it remains robust as context grows, unlike advanced token compression baselines which degrade by over 9 F1 points. Importantly, our framework enables direct refinement of classification logic, addressing critical needs for transparency, efficiency, and user interaction in real-world NLP applications.

First-person dynamic spatial reasoning requires models to track continuous motion and precise geometric structure, but the quadratic attention cost of Transformer-based Video-LLMs makes dense visual tokens computationally expensive. Existing token pruning paradigms predominantly rely on discrete static snapshots, failing to preserve the motion and geometric cues essential for reasoning. We propose Event Cascade Pruning (ECP), to our knowledge the first training-free framework that leverages the high-frequency motion cues from event cameras as a continuous event-guided motion prior to guide token selection. ECP combines three stages: Event-Triggered Causal Sampling to anchor motion-informative keyframes, Event-guided Motion Saliency Filtering to suppress event-inactive visual tokens, and Event-Attention Ranking Fusion to calibrate spatial attention with motion-salient dynamics. With 80% visual token reduction, ECP outperforms the full-token baseline (37.62% vs. 36.31%) while achieving 1.89x inference speedup and 52% GFLOPs reduction. We further introduce ESR-Real, the first real-world RGB-event benchmark for first-person spatial reasoning, where ECP improves accuracy by 2.68 percentage points over full-token baselines.

Manipulating fast and dynamically moving targets in unstructured 3D environments remains challenging for embodied AI. Existing visual-language-action models and world models struggle with accurate 3D geometry and physically meaningful forecasting. We propose PhysMani, a framework that couples a physics-principled 3D Gaussian world model with a future-aware action policy model. The world model learns a divergence-free Gaussian velocity field via online optimization for fast and physically grounded future dynamics prediction. The policy model integrates the predicted 3D scene future dynamics through a learnable token based cross-attention module. We introduce PhysMani-Bench, a dynamic manipulation benchmark with 16 tasks, and demonstrate a superior success rate over strong baselines in both simulation and real-world robot experiments.

Video world models that generate and explore environments at scale need a persistent 3D memory of what they have produced. Plane primitives offer a natural candidate: a compact set of oriented planes captures the dominant structural elements (e.g., walls, floors, facades) of indoor and outdoor scenes, while requiring only 7 parameters per primitive. We present PPMem, a video world model that adopts plane primitives as its persistent 3D memory. PPMem augments a video diffusion transformer with a planar prediction head and a Depth Token Fusion (DTF) module: each autoregressive chunk jointly produces RGB video and planar geometry, which merges into a persistent plane memory that conditions subsequent chunks via rendered depth. The resulting memory is three orders of magnitude more compact than per-pixel point clouds (~100K primitives, 5MB for a full scene), geometrically explicit (metric depth, normals, exportable surfaces), cross-view consistent (jointly predicted by the shared backbone), and adaptive (refined by the merging procedure as generation proceeds). On DL3DV and RealEstate10K, PPMem outperforms prior 3D-grounded world models in video quality while jointly producing metric-scale depth, surface normals, and exportable planar geometry, sustaining coherence across hundreds of frames under large viewpoint changes. Project page: https://hyzcluster.github.io/ppmem.

Reliable multi-view forecasting requires videos from different cameras to describe the same evolving 3D scene. To this end, we introduce Video-Point Model (VPM), a world model that conditions on multi-view video histories and a language instruction to jointly forecast future videos from arbitrary viewpoints and the 3D trajectories of persistent scene points. We extend a pretrained world model with camera-conditioned multi-view processing that integrates complementary observations across cameras, and add a trajectory head that predicts how physical points move through time. Each trajectory tracks a single point across all views, and supervising these trajectories alongside video generation therefore anchors appearance changes in every camera to a shared description of 3D motion. To support training and evaluation, we build VPM-Data, a simulation corpus pairing synchronized multi-view videos with persistent point trajectories, and VP-WorldBench, a forecasting benchmark spanning simulated and real environments. We further extend VPM to robot control by adding robot actions as a token modality in the generator. Action tokens share the point-supervised backbone and are denoised jointly with future videos, thereby grounding the policy in the same 3D-aware representation. On VP-WorldBench and existing 4D generation benchmarks, point supervision improves both video fidelity and 3D motion accuracy over a video-only counterpart, and in simulated and real-robot experiments, it also raises the manipulation success of the action-enabled model.

Transformer architecture has shown impressive performance in multiple research domains and has become the backbone of many neural network models. However, there is limited understanding on how it works. In particular, with a simple predictive loss, how the representation emerges from the gradient training dynamics remains a mystery. In this paper, for 1-layer transformer with one self-attention layer plus one decoder layer, we analyze its SGD training dynamics for the task of next token prediction in a mathematically rigorous manner. We open the black box of the dynamic process of how the self-attention layer combines input tokens, and reveal the nature of underlying inductive bias. More specifically, with the assumption (a) no positional encoding, (b) long input sequence, and (c) the decoder layer learns faster than the self-attention layer, we prove that self-attention acts as a discriminative scanning algorithm: starting from uniform attention, it gradually attends more to distinct key tokens for a specific next token to be predicted, and pays less attention to common key tokens that occur across different next tokens. Among distinct tokens, it progressively drops attention weights, following the order of low to high co-occurrence between the key and the query token in the training set. Interestingly, this procedure does not lead to winner-takes-all, but decelerates due to a phase transition that is controllable by the learning rates of the two layers, leaving (almost) fixed token combination. We verify this \emph{scan and snap} dynamics on synthetic and real-world data (WikiText).

Selective state space models (SSM), such as Mamba, have gained prominence for their effectiveness in modeling sequential data. Despite their outstanding empirical performance, a comprehensive theoretical understanding of deep selective SSM remains elusive, hindering their further development and adoption for applications that need high fidelity. In this paper, we investigate the dynamical properties of tokens in a pre-trained Mamba model. In particular, we derive the dynamical system governing the continuous-time limit of the Mamba model and characterize the asymptotic behavior of its solutions. In the one-dimensional case, we prove that only one of the following two scenarios happens: either all tokens converge to zero, or all tokens diverge to infinity. We provide criteria based on model parameters to determine when each scenario occurs. For the convergent scenario, we empirically verify that this scenario negatively impacts the model's performance. For the divergent scenario, we prove that different tokens will diverge to infinity at different rates, thereby contributing unequally to the updates during model training. Based on these investigations, we propose two refinements for the model: excluding the convergent scenario and reordering tokens based on their importance scores, both aimed at improving practical performance. Our experimental results validate these refinements, offering insights into enhancing Mamba's effectiveness in real-world applications.

"Sure, I am happy to generate a story for you: Captain Lyra stood at the helm of her trusty ship, the Maelstrom's Fury, gazing out at the endless sea. [...] Lyra's eyes welled up with tears as she realized the bitter truth - she had sacrificed everything for fleeting riches, and lost the love of her crew, her family, and herself." Although this story, generated by a large language model, is captivating, one may wonder -- how would the story have unfolded if the model had chosen "Captain Maeve" as the protagonist instead? We cannot know. State-of-the-art large language models are stateless -- they maintain no internal memory or state. Given a prompt, they generate a sequence of tokens as an output using an autoregressive process. As a consequence, they cannot reason about counterfactual alternatives to tokens they have generated in the past. In this work, our goal is to enhance them with this functionality. To this end, we develop a causal model of token generation that builds upon the Gumbel-Max structural causal model. Our model allows any large language model to perform counterfactual token generation at almost no cost in comparison with vanilla token generation, it is embarrassingly simple to implement, and it does not require any fine-tuning nor prompt engineering. We implement our model on Llama 3 8B-Instruct and Ministral-8B-Instruct and conduct a qualitative and a quantitative analysis of counterfactually generated text. We conclude with a demonstrative application of counterfactual token generation for bias detection, unveiling interesting insights about the model of the world constructed by large language models.

Recent advances in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown significant progress in open-world Visual Question Answering (VQA). However, integrating visual information increases the number of processed tokens, leading to higher GPU memory usage and computational overhead. Images often contain more redundant information than text, and not all visual details are pertinent to specific questions. To address these challenges, we propose QG-VTC, a novel question-guided visual token compression method for MLLM-based VQA tasks. QG-VTC employs a pretrained text encoder and a learnable feed-forward layer to embed user questions into the vision encoder's feature space then computes correlation scores between the question embeddings and visual tokens. By selecting the most relevant tokens and softly compressing others, QG-VTC ensures fine-tuned relevance to user needs. Additionally, a progressive strategy applies this compression across different vision encoder layers, gradually reducing token numbers. This approach maximizes retention of question-relevant information while discarding irrelevant details. Experimental results show that our method achieves performance on par with uncompressed models using just 1/8 of the visual tokens. The code and model will be publicly available on GitHub.

Visual instruction tuning aims to enable large language models to comprehend the visual world, with a pivotal challenge lying in establishing an effective vision-to-language projection. However, existing methods often grapple with the intractable trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. In this paper, we present LLaVA-Meteor, a novel approach designed to break this deadlock, equipped with a novel Top-Down Compression paradigm that strategically compresses visual tokens without compromising core information. Specifically, we construct a trainable Flash Global Fusion module based on efficient selective state space operators, which aligns the feature space while enabling each token to perceive holistic visual context and instruction preference at low cost. Furthermore, a local-to-single scanning manner is employed to effectively capture local dependencies, thereby enhancing the model's capability in vision modeling. To alleviate computational overhead, we explore a Visual-Native Selection mechanism that independently assesses token significance by both the visual and native experts, followed by aggregation to retain the most critical subset. Extensive experiments show that our approach reduces visual tokens by 75--95% while achieving comparable or superior performance across 12 benchmarks, significantly improving efficiency.

We present Probabilistic Structure Integration (PSI), a system for learning richly controllable and flexibly promptable world models from data. PSI consists of a three-step cycle. The first step, Probabilistic prediction, involves building a probabilistic graphical model Psi of the data, in the form of a random-access autoregressive sequence model. Psi supports a complete set of learned conditional distributions describing the dependence of any variables in the data on any other set of variables. In step 2, Structure extraction, we show how to extract underlying low-dimensional properties in the data, corresponding to a diverse set of meaningful "intermediate structures", in a zero-shot fashion via causal inference on Psi. Step 3, Integration, completes the cycle by converting these structures into new token types that are then continually mixed back into the training diet as conditioning signals and prediction targets. Each such cycle augments the capabilities of Psi, both allowing it to model the underlying data better, and creating new control handles -- akin to an LLM-like universal prompting language. We train an instance of Psi on 1.4 trillion tokens of internet video data; we use it to perform a variety of useful video prediction and understanding inferences; we extract state-of-the-art optical flow, self-supervised depth and object segmentation; and we use these structures to support a full cycle of predictive improvements.

Despite remarkable progress in driving world models, their potential for autonomous systems remains largely untapped: the world models are mostly learned for world simulation and decoupled from trajectory planning. While recent efforts aim to unify world modeling and planning in a single framework, the synergistic facilitation mechanism of world modeling for planning still requires further exploration. In this work, we introduce a new driving paradigm named Policy World Model (PWM), which not only integrates world modeling and trajectory planning within a unified architecture, but is also able to benefit planning using the learned world knowledge through the proposed action-free future state forecasting scheme. Through collaborative state-action prediction, PWM can mimic the human-like anticipatory perception, yielding more reliable planning performance. To facilitate the efficiency of video forecasting, we further introduce a dynamically enhanced parallel token generation mechanism, equipped with a context-guided tokenizer and an adaptive dynamic focal loss. Despite utilizing only front camera input, our method matches or exceeds state-of-the-art approaches that rely on multi-view and multi-modal inputs. Code and model weights will be released at https://github.com/6550Zhao/Policy-World-Model.

Unified models aim to support both understanding and generation by encoding images into discrete tokens and processing them alongside text within a single autoregressive framework. This unified design offers architectural simplicity and cross-modal synergy, which facilitates shared parameterization, consistent training objectives, and seamless transfer between modalities. However, the large number of visual tokens required by such models introduces substantial computation and memory overhead, and this inefficiency directly hinders deployment in resource constrained scenarios such as embodied AI systems. In this work, we propose a unified token compression algorithm UniCompress that significantly reduces visual token count while preserving performance on both image understanding and generation tasks. Our method introduces a plug-in compression and decompression mechanism guided with learnable global meta tokens. The framework is lightweight and modular, enabling efficient integration into existing models without full retraining. Experimental results show that our approach reduces image tokens by up to 4 times, achieves substantial gains in inference latency and training cost, and incurs only minimal performance degradation, which demonstrates the promise of token-efficient unified modeling for real world multimodal applications.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models aim to provide a single generalist controller for robots, but today's systems fall short on the criteria that matter for real-world deployment. Frontier models are closed, open-weight alternatives are tied to expensive hardware, reasoning-augmented policies pay prohibitive latency for their grounding, and fine-tuned success rates remain below the threshold for dependable use. We present MolmoAct2, a fully open action reasoning model built for practical deployment, advancing its predecessor along five axes. We introduce MolmoER, a VLM backbone specialized for spatial and embodied reasoning, trained on a 3.3M-sample corpus with a specialize-then-rehearse recipe. We release three new datasets spanning low-to-medium cost platforms, including MolmoAct2-BimanualYAM, 720 hours of teleoperated bimanual trajectories that constitute the largest open bimanual dataset to date, together with quality-filtered Franka (DROID) and SO100/101 subsets. We provide OpenFAST, an open-weight, open-data action tokenizer trained on millions of trajectories across five embodiments. We redesign the architecture to graft a flow-matching continuous-action expert onto a discrete-token VLM via per-layer KV-cache conditioning. Finally, we propose MolmoThink, an adaptive-depth reasoning variant that re-predicts depth tokens only for scene regions that change between timesteps, retaining geometric grounding at a fraction of prior latency. In the most extensive empirical study of any open VLA to date, spanning 7 simulation and real-world benchmarks, MolmoAct2 outperforms strong baselines including Pi-05, while MolmoER surpasses GPT-5 and Gemini Robotics ER-1.5 across 13 embodied-reasoning benchmarks. We release model weights, training code, and complete training data. Project page: https://allenai.org/blog/molmoact2

Document parsing has recently advanced with multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that directly map document images to structured outputs. Traditional cascaded pipelines depend on precise layout analysis and often fail under casually captured or non-standard conditions. Although end-to-end approaches mitigate this dependency, they still exhibit repetitive, hallucinated, and structurally inconsistent predictions - primarily due to the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality full-page (document-level) end-to-end parsing data and the lack of structure-aware training strategies. To address these challenges, we propose a data-training co-design framework for robust end-to-end document parsing. A Realistic Scene Synthesis strategy constructs large-scale, structurally diverse full-page end-to-end supervision by composing layout templates with rich document elements, while a Document-Aware Training Recipe introduces progressive learning and structure-token optimization to enhance structural fidelity and decoding stability. We further build Wild-OmniDocBench, a benchmark derived from real-world captured documents for robustness evaluation. Integrated into a 1B-parameter MLLM, our method achieves superior accuracy and robustness across both scanned/digital and real-world captured scenarios. All models, data synthesis pipelines, and benchmarks will be publicly released to advance future research in document understanding.

World-Action Models (WAMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for embodied control by coupling future visual prediction with action generation. However, most existing WAMs rely on photorealistic future prediction, which incurs high inference latency and makes real-time robot deployment difficult. This motivates a more efficient WAM design that preserves the control benefits of future visual prediction while reducing its inference cost. We introduce Efficient-WAM, a World-Action Model that reduces the cost of future imagination while preserving its control benefit. Efficient-WAM improves inference efficiency via a compact video expert transferred from WAN-2.2-5B, token-sparse video latents, and asymmetric video-action denoising that allocates fewer sampling steps to video than to actions. Instead of optimizing the future branch for visual fidelity, Efficient-WAM treats future video prediction as a compact guidance signal for action generation. Comprehensive experiments on RoboTwin 2.0 and real-world manipulation tasks show that Efficient-WAM maintains strong action performance despite visibly coarse future predictions. While maintaining competitive control capabilities, our 1B-parameter model can reduce per-chunk latency to around 100 ms during physical deployment, achieving a 30x speedup over existing WAMs.

World-action modeling has emerged as a promising paradigm for robotic control, as it empowers models to go beyond reacting to observations and anticipate how a scene will evolve. However, existing WAMs often incur substantial computational overhead. Pixel-space methods often allocate substantial capacity to visual details that may not be directly relevant to control, while some latent-space methods require multi-stage training to construct the reasoning space. The resulting training cost can make such methods difficult to train under modest computational budgets. In this work, we propose LiLa-WAM, a lightweight world-action model that reasons about the future in a compact latent space and can be trained end-to-end on a single 24GB GPU. Its core design is a compact latent reasoning space jointly shaped by future-state prediction and action generation, which keeps the model lightweight while remaining well aligned with control. For task specification, we further propose the Visual Transition Token(VTT), a language-free task representation that encodes each task as a direction in visual feature space. Experiments on RoboTwin~2.0, LIBERO, and real-robot tasks demonstrate LiLa-WAM's effectiveness, achieving 90.48\% success across 50 RoboTwin tasks with single-GPU training.

Video world models enable interactive exploration of dynamic environments, yet struggle to respect prior observations over long horizons and across viewpoints. We present WorldCrafter, a video world model that learns a camera-queryable implicit 3D-aware memory for this purpose. The key insight is to let the requested viewpoint shape how multi-view evidence is compressed into the video generator's limited token budget. Trained jointly with the video generator, a memory encoder and pose-conditioned readout module integrate historical observations into a fixed set of target view-specific tokens before denoising, without explicit depth-based correspondences. By combining this memory with recent temporal context and few-step distillation, WorldCrafter enables streaming scene exploration from a single input image or text prompt. Experiments across static and dynamic scenes show substantial gains in long-horizon consistency and camera-control accuracy while preserving visual quality during minute-scale exploration.

Video world models achieve long-range temporal consistency by storing KV cache during generation, but the growing cache makes KV cache memory a major deployment bottleneck, which motivates low-bit quantization study for efficiency. Existing 2-bit KV cache quantization methods can achieve nearly lossless performance on VBench, however, when applied to video world models, we find they still cause severe temporal flickering and visual degradation. Meanwhile, deeper investigates show that Key quantization produces smaller reconstruction errors than Value, but surprisingly leads to larger output degradation. We trace this discrepancy to attention in video world models: Key perturbations can change the attention logits, and shift the temporal-spatial tokens selected by Queries. These observations motivate us to preserve attention logits and temporal-spatial token selection during KV cache quantization. To address this issue, we present QuantWM, a training-free 2-bit KV cache quantization framework for video world models. QuantWM introduces two complementary techniques to mitigate the attention shifts. Firstly, quantization-sensitivity-aware clustering (QSAC) jointly considers historical Query sensitivity and residual ranges to select INT2-friendly Key centroids, which reduces quantization errors in channels that are more critical to attention. In addition, principal-subspace attention compensation (PSAC) restores the remaining Key errors along the dominant Query subspace using low-rank projections, which provides a direct and efficient correction to stabilize attention logits. Experiments on LingBot-World-v2, HY-World 1.5, Matrix-Game-2, Longcat-Video and Causal-Forcing demonstrate that QuantWM significantly improves visual quality and temporal consistency, while outperforming existing methods across benchmarks with up to 6.20 KV cache memory compression and limited additional overhead.

World action models (WAMs) aim to answer a coupled physical question: given a task instruction, what motion should the robot execute, and how will that motion change the surrounding world? Most existing WAMs build on pretrained video generators and represent world evolution through images or visual latents. Robotic interaction, however, takes place in metric three-dimensional space, while images are view-dependent projections whose pixel distances do not directly encode physical distances. We introduce UNITAS, to our knowledge the first 3D-native world action model that unifies observations, actions, and scene dynamics in a shared metric 3D frame within each interaction, using a common representation across robot embodiments and human hands. Action flow represents human hands and robot grippers as 3D point trajectories, while scene flow describes scene-point displacements conditioned on these trajectories. World-aligned 3D positional embeddings ground visual tokens with or without depth input, and a physical-time trajectory tokenizer encodes each point trajectory as one token anchored at its current 3D position. This interface supports both direct action execution and action-conditioned scene prediction. With 1.7B parameters, UNITAS achieves the best action-conditioned scene prediction on RoboTwin among the compared methods, with up to 49% lower displacement errors than PointWorld, and state-of-the-art manipulation success, including 99.8% on LIBERO and an average of 85% across real-world tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/DexForce/UNITAS.

Rapid advances in large language models have made software engineering agents capable of tackling complex coding tasks. Within a containerized environment, a coding agent receives tool responses or execution results, and determines its later actions by those earlier results. However, most existing coding agents never look ahead: their policies do not anticipate the consequences of actions, and the terminal reward barely attributes a failure to certain earlier steps, so an ill-judged edit can corrupt the repository state irreversibly before any signal arrives. Recent code world models aim to address these challenges, but they are either trained and then frozen before reinforcement learning (RL), or reduced to an auxiliary next-token loss on the environment's outputs. We present ANTE (Anticipate, Then Execute), an agentic RL framework that verifies the policy's pre-action predictions by real execution and turns them into per-step credit for its actions and trust-or-abstain decisions. With an internal belief stated before each action, Belief-Anchored Policy Optimization (BAPO) turns the settled predictions into per-step advantages by anchoring credit on the policy's own forecasts. To turn the trained forecasts into better actions at inference, thereby facilitating effective test-time scaling, ANTE-TTO (test-time optimization) selects among candidate actions without an external scorer. ANTE raises Qwen3-32B from 25.0% to 57.2% pass@1 on SWE-bench Verified, 6.2% above a matched GRPO baseline trained without the belief state; its world model's accuracy climbs from 44% to 69% during RL, and the learned foresight capability transfers across harnesses and out-of-distribution domains. In summary, we aim to build a code world model that knows what has happened, what holds now, and what the next action will achieve.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress on visual reasoning, yet many tasks require evidence that is difficult to obtain through internal reasoning alone: our controlled study on 22 benchmarks shows that simply increasing the inference budget of the base model yields only modest gains. Such tasks demand grounded perception, external knowledge, and numerical measurements obtained through heterogeneous tools, whose outputs must be made interpretable to the model and retained across reasoning steps. We introduce OpenVLHarness, a multimodal reasoning harness organized around a capability layer and persistent multimodal memory. The capability layer combines task-level tool interfaces with evidence rendering, providing consistent access to heterogeneous backends and converting their outputs into model-readable observations. Persistent multimodal memory retains the corresponding images, structured data, and web references as addressable artifacts throughout each query. A coding interface executes generated programs over stored data, enabling computations that combine results from multiple tools. Together, these mechanisms support an iterative process of acquiring, inspecting, and composing multimodal evidence. Evaluated on 22 benchmarks with eight open and proprietary backbones, OpenVLHarness improves average scores by 9.7-12.6 points over matched no-tool baselines, including +11.2 with Qwen3-VL-8B, +9.7 with Kimi K3, and +9.9 with GPT-6 Astra. With GPT-6 Luna at medium reasoning effort, OpenVLHarness outperforms the base model, Codex, and Visual Sketchpad at maximum effort by 7.7-8.5 points while incurring at most 37% of their model-token cost.

Complex software systems develop over timescales that exceed the lifespan of any individual coding agent. Most agentic software systems preserve continuity through persistent sessions, memories, managers or shared context. We introduce EvoX Genesis (hereafter, Genesis), which instead makes the software project persistent while allowing local agents to remain finite-lived. Genesis represents software as a persistent recursive world: each local world is situated by an accepted version and a repository path, finite-lived agents propose local changes, recursive delegation moves work across paths, and only accepted consequences advance the persistent version history. We evaluate this organization across formation, continuation and redevelopment. Starting from a repository with no compiler implementation, Genesis used DeepSeek V4 Flash to build a Rust-based C compiler with about 250k tracked lines; the run lasted over 120 hours, archived over 1,000 agent episodes and incurred only US$44 in model-token charges. The compiler passed the complete c-testsuite and most LLVM and Csmith tests. In a separate compiler world generated with GLM 5.2, development continued after repeated agent replacement while retaining full test performance. Genesis also reimplemented 13 MESA modules with over 100k Fortran lines as a Rust workspace with nearly 90k Rust lines; across six numerical workloads, it achieved median speedups of 1.55--6.87x. These results show that long-horizon software development can be organized around a persistent project rather than a persistent agent.

Autonomous driving promises transformative improvements to transportation, but building systems capable of safely navigating the unstructured complexity of real-world scenarios remains challenging. A critical problem lies in effectively predicting the various potential outcomes that may emerge in response to the vehicle's actions as the world evolves. To address this challenge, we introduce GAIA-1 ('Generative AI for Autonomy'), a generative world model that leverages video, text, and action inputs to generate realistic driving scenarios while offering fine-grained control over ego-vehicle behavior and scene features. Our approach casts world modeling as an unsupervised sequence modeling problem by mapping the inputs to discrete tokens, and predicting the next token in the sequence. Emerging properties from our model include learning high-level structures and scene dynamics, contextual awareness, generalization, and understanding of geometry. The power of GAIA-1's learned representation that captures expectations of future events, combined with its ability to generate realistic samples, provides new possibilities for innovation in the field of autonomy, enabling enhanced and accelerated training of autonomous driving technology.

Both text and video data are abundant on the internet and support large-scale self-supervised learning through next token or frame prediction. However, they have not been equally leveraged: language models have had significant real-world impact, whereas video generation has remained largely limited to media entertainment. Yet video data captures important information about the physical world that is difficult to express in language. To address this gap, we discuss an under-appreciated opportunity to extend video generation to solve tasks in the real world. We observe how, akin to language, video can serve as a unified interface that can absorb internet knowledge and represent diverse tasks. Moreover, we demonstrate how, like language models, video generation can serve as planners, agents, compute engines, and environment simulators through techniques such as in-context learning, planning and reinforcement learning. We identify major impact opportunities in domains such as robotics, self-driving, and science, supported by recent work that demonstrates how such advanced capabilities in video generation are plausibly within reach. Lastly, we identify key challenges in video generation that mitigate progress. Addressing these challenges will enable video generation models to demonstrate unique value alongside language models in a wider array of AI applications.

World models empower model-based agents to interactively explore, reason, and plan within imagined environments for real-world decision-making. However, the high demand for interactivity poses challenges in harnessing recent advancements in video generative models for developing world models at scale. This work introduces Interactive VideoGPT (iVideoGPT), a scalable autoregressive transformer framework that integrates multimodal signals--visual observations, actions, and rewards--into a sequence of tokens, facilitating an interactive experience of agents via next-token prediction. iVideoGPT features a novel compressive tokenization technique that efficiently discretizes high-dimensional visual observations. Leveraging its scalable architecture, we are able to pre-train iVideoGPT on millions of human and robotic manipulation trajectories, establishing a versatile foundation that is adaptable to serve as interactive world models for a wide range of downstream tasks. These include action-conditioned video prediction, visual planning, and model-based reinforcement learning, where iVideoGPT achieves competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. Our work advances the development of interactive general world models, bridging the gap between generative video models and practical model-based reinforcement learning applications.

One of the predominant methods for training world models is autoregressive prediction in the output space of the next element of a sequence. In Natural Language Processing (NLP), this takes the form of Large Language Models (LLMs) predicting the next token; in Computer Vision (CV), this takes the form of autoregressive models predicting the next frame/token/pixel. However, this approach differs from human cognition in several respects. First, human predictions about the future actively influence internal cognitive processes. Second, humans naturally evaluate the plausibility of predictions regarding future states. Based on this capability, and third, by assessing when predictions are sufficient, humans allocate a dynamic amount of time to make a prediction. This adaptive process is analogous to System 2 thinking in psychology. All these capabilities are fundamental to the success of humans at high-level reasoning and planning. Therefore, to address the limitations of traditional autoregressive models lacking these human-like capabilities, we introduce Energy-Based World Models (EBWM). EBWM involves training an Energy-Based Model (EBM) to predict the compatibility of a given context and a predicted future state. In doing so, EBWM enables models to achieve all three facets of human cognition described. Moreover, we developed a variant of the traditional autoregressive transformer tailored for Energy-Based models, termed the Energy-Based Transformer (EBT). Our results demonstrate that EBWM scales better with data and GPU Hours than traditional autoregressive transformers in CV, and that EBWM offers promising early scaling in NLP. Consequently, this approach offers an exciting path toward training future models capable of System 2 thinking and intelligently searching across state spaces.

By leveraging the generative priors from pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models, significant progress has been made in real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR). However, these methods tend to generate inaccurate and unnatural reconstructions in complex and/or heavily degraded scenes, primarily due to their limited perception and understanding capability of the input low-quality image. To address these limitations, we propose, for the first time to our knowledge, to adapt the pre-trained autoregressive multimodal model such as Lumina-mGPT into a robust Real-ISR model, namely PURE, which Perceives and Understands the input low-quality image, then REstores its high-quality counterpart. Specifically, we implement instruction tuning on Lumina-mGPT to perceive the image degradation level and the relationships between previously generated image tokens and the next token, understand the image content by generating image semantic descriptions, and consequently restore the image by generating high-quality image tokens autoregressively with the collected information. In addition, we reveal that the image token entropy reflects the image structure and present a entropy-based Top-k sampling strategy to optimize the local structure of the image during inference. Experimental results demonstrate that PURE preserves image content while generating realistic details, especially in complex scenes with multiple objects, showcasing the potential of autoregressive multimodal generative models for robust Real-ISR. The model and code will be available at https://github.com/nonwhy/PURE.

Diffusion models (DMs) have significantly advanced the development of real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR), but the computational cost of multi-step diffusion models limits their application. One-step diffusion models generate high-quality images in a one sampling step, greatly reducing computational overhead and inference latency. However, most existing one-step diffusion methods are constrained by the performance of the teacher model, where poor teacher performance results in image artifacts. To address this limitation, we propose FluxSR, a novel one-step diffusion Real-ISR technique based on flow matching models. We use the state-of-the-art diffusion model FLUX.1-dev as both the teacher model and the base model. First, we introduce Flow Trajectory Distillation (FTD) to distill a multi-step flow matching model into a one-step Real-ISR. Second, to improve image realism and address high-frequency artifact issues in generated images, we propose TV-LPIPS as a perceptual loss and introduce Attention Diversification Loss (ADL) as a regularization term to reduce token similarity in transformer, thereby eliminating high-frequency artifacts. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing one-step diffusion-based Real-ISR methods. The code and model will be released at https://github.com/JianzeLi-114/FluxSR.

Creating machines capable of understanding the world in 3D is essential in assisting designers that build and edit 3D environments and robots navigating and interacting within a three-dimensional space. Inspired by advances in language and image modeling, we investigate the potential of autoregressive models for a new modality: structured 3D scenes. To this end, we propose a unified LLM framework that aligns language, images, and 3D scenes and provide a detailed ''cookbook'' outlining critical design choices for achieving optimal training and performance addressing key questions related to data representation, modality-specific objectives, and more. We evaluate performance across four core 3D tasks -- rendering, recognition, instruction-following, and question-answering -- and four 3D datasets, synthetic and real-world. We extend our approach to reconstruct complex 3D object shapes by enriching our 3D modality with quantized shape encodings, and show our model's effectiveness on real-world 3D object recognition tasks. Project webpage: https://glab-caltech.github.io/kyvo/

State-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) suffer from a critical failure in understanding negation, often referred to as affirmative bias. This limitation is particularly severe in described object detection (DOD) tasks. To address this, we propose two primary contributions: (1) a new dataset pipeline and (2) a novel, lightweight adaptation recipe. First, we introduce CoVAND, a dataset constructed with a systematic chain-of-thought (CoT) and VQA-based pipeline to generate high-quality, instance-grounded negation data. Second, we propose NegToMe, a novel text token merging module that directly tackles the architectural cause of affirmative bias. NegToMe fundamentally addresses the structural loss of negation cues in tokenization, grouping them with attributes into coherent semantic phrases. It maintains correct polarity at the input level, enabling robust negation understanding even with limited data. For instance, to prevent a model from treating the fragmented tokens "not" and "girl" as simply "girl", NegToMe binds them into a single token whose meaning is correctly distinguished from that of "girl" alone. This module is integrated with a parameter-efficient and strategic LoRA fine-tuning approach. Our method significantly improves performance on challenging negation benchmarks with a lowered false positive rate, boosting NMS-AP by up to +10.8 points on OVDEval and demonstrating generalization to SoTA VLMs. This work marks a crucial step forward in addressing negation understanding for real-world detection applications.

Vision Transformers can achieve high accuracy and strong generalization across various contexts, but their practical applicability on real-world robotic systems is limited due to their quadratic attention complexity. Recent works have focused on dynamically merging tokens according to the image complexity. Token merging works well for classification but is less suited to dense prediction. We propose ClustViT, where we expand upon the Vision Transformer (ViT) backbone and address semantic segmentation. Within our architecture, a trainable Cluster module merges similar tokens along the network guided by pseudo-clusters from segmentation masks. Subsequently, a Regenerator module restores fine details for downstream heads. Our approach achieves up to 2.18x fewer GFLOPs and 1.64x faster inference on three different datasets, with comparable segmentation accuracy. Our code and models will be made publicly available.

Embodied AI requires agents that perceive, act, and anticipate how actions reshape future world states. World models serve as internal simulators that capture environment dynamics, enabling forward and counterfactual rollouts to support perception, prediction, and decision making. This survey presents a unified framework for world models in embodied AI. Specifically, we formalize the problem setting and learning objectives, and propose a three-axis taxonomy encompassing: (1) Functionality, Decision-Coupled vs. General-Purpose; (2) Temporal Modeling, Sequential Simulation and Inference vs. Global Difference Prediction; (3) Spatial Representation, Global Latent Vector, Token Feature Sequence, Spatial Latent Grid, and Decomposed Rendering Representation. We systematize data resources and metrics across robotics, autonomous driving, and general video settings, covering pixel prediction quality, state-level understanding, and task performance. Furthermore, we offer a quantitative comparison of state-of-the-art models and distill key open challenges, including the scarcity of unified datasets and the need for evaluation metrics that assess physical consistency over pixel fidelity, the trade-off between model performance and the computational efficiency required for real-time control, and the core modeling difficulty of achieving long-horizon temporal consistency while mitigating error accumulation. Finally, we maintain a curated bibliography at https://github.com/Li-Zn-H/AwesomeWorldModels.

The chart-to-code generation task requires MLLMs to convert chart images into executable code. This task faces two main challenges: limited data diversity and the difficulty of maintaining visual consistency between generated charts and the original ones. Existing datasets mainly rely on synthetic seed data to prompt GPT models for code generation, resulting in homogeneous samples that limit model generalization to real-world chart styles. To address this, we propose ReChartPrompt, leveraging real-world, human-designed charts extracted from arXiv papers as prompts. By harnessing the rich content and diverse visual styles of arXiv charts, we construct ReChartPrompt-240K, a large-scale and highly diverse dataset that better reflects realistic chart variations. For the second challenge, although SFT improves code understanding by optimizing next-token prediction, it does not provide direct supervision on visual features. As a result, it often fails to guarantee that the generated charts visually match the original ones. To address this, we propose ChartSimRL, a GRPO-based reinforcement learning algorithm guided by a novel chart similarity reward. This reward consists of two components: attribute similarity, which measures the overlap of chart attributes like layout and color between the generated and original charts, and visual similarity, which evaluates overall visual features, including texture, using convolutional neural networks. Unlike traditional text-based rewards, our reward accounts for the multimodal nature of the chart-to-code generation task, significantly enhancing the model's ability to accurately reproduce charts. Integrating ReChartPrompt and ChartSimRL, we develop the ChartMaster model, achieving SOTA results among 7B-parameter models and rivaling GPT-4o on various chart-to-code benchmarks. All resources are available at https://github.com/WentaoTan/ChartMaster.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in numerous real-world applications. While the vast majority of research conducted from an experimental perspective is progressing rapidly, it demands substantial computational power, data, and other resources. Therefore, how to open the black-box of LLMs from a theoretical standpoint has become a critical challenge. This paper takes the theory of rate-distortion function, directed information, and Granger causality as its starting point to investigate the information-theoretic principles behind LLMs, leading to the development of semantic information theory for LLMs, where the fundamental unit is token, rather than bits that lacks any semantic meaning. By defining the probabilistic model of LLMs, we discuss structure-agnostic information-theoretic measures, such as the directed rate-distortion function in pre-training, the directed rate-reward function in post-training, and the semantic information flow in inference phase. This paper also delves deeply into the theory of token-level semantic embedding and the information-theoretically optimal vectorization method. Thereafter, we propose a general definition of autoregression LLM, where the Transformer architecture and its performance such as ELBO, generalization error bound, memory capacity, and semantic information measures can be derived theoretically. Other architectures, such as Mamba/Mamba2 and LLaDA, are also discussed in our framework. Consequently, this paper provides a theoretical framework for understanding LLMs from the perspective of semantic information theory, which also offers the necessary theoretical tools for further in-depth research.

Are Capture-the-Flag competitions obsolete? In 2025, Cybersecurity AI (CAI) systematically conquered some of the world's most prestigious hacking competitions, achieving Rank #1 at multiple events and consistently outperforming thousands of human teams. Across five major circuits-HTB's AI vs Humans, Cyber Apocalypse (8,129 teams), Dragos OT CTF, UWSP Pointer Overflow, and the Neurogrid CTF showdown-CAI demonstrated that Jeopardy-style CTFs have become a solved game for well-engineered AI agents. At Neurogrid, CAI captured 41/45 flags to claim the 50,000 top prize; at Dragos OT, it sprinted 37% faster to 10K points than elite human teams; even when deliberately paused mid-competition, it maintained top-tier rankings. Critically, CAI achieved this dominance through our specialized alias1 model architecture, which delivers enterprise-scale AI security operations at unprecedented cost efficiency and with augmented autonomy-reducing 1B token inference costs from 5,940 to just $119, making continuous security agent operation financially viable for the first time. These results force an uncomfortable reckoning: if autonomous agents now dominate competitions designed to identify top security talent at negligible cost, what are CTFs actually measuring? This paper presents comprehensive evidence of AI capability across the 2025 CTF circuit and argues that the security community must urgently transition from Jeopardy-style contests to Attack & Defense formats that genuinely test adaptive reasoning and resilience-capabilities that remain uniquely human, for now.

Audio-Visual Large Language Models (AV-LLMs) face prohibitive computational overhead from massive audio and video tokens. Token reduction, while extensively explored for video-only LLMs, is insufficient for the audio-visual domain, as these unimodal methods cannot leverage audio-visual cross-modal synergies. Furthermore, the distinct and dynamic information densities of audio and video render static budgets per modality suboptimal. How to perform token reduction on a joint audio-visual stream thus remains an unaddressed bottleneck. To fill this gap, we introduce EchoingPixels, a framework inspired by the coexistence and interaction of visuals and sound in real-world scenes. The core of our framework is the Cross-Modal Semantic Sieve (CS2), a module enabling early audio-visual interaction. Instead of compressing modalities independently, CS2 co-attends to the joint multimodal stream and reduces tokens from an entire combined pool of audio-visual tokens rather than using fixed budgets per modality. This single-pool approach allows it to adaptively allocate the token budget across both modalities and dynamically identify salient tokens in concert. To ensure this aggressive reduction preserves the vital temporal modeling capability, we co-design a Synchronization-Augmented RoPE (Sync-RoPE) to maintain critical temporal relationships for the sparsely selected tokens. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EchoingPixels achieves performance comparable to strong baselines using only 5-20% of the original tokens, with a 2-3x speedup and memory reduction.

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.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) suffer from high computational costs due to excessive visual tokens, particularly in high-resolution and video-based scenarios. Existing token reduction methods typically focus on isolated pipeline components and often neglect textual alignment, leading to performance degradation. In this paper, we propose VisionTrim, a unified framework for training-free MLLM acceleration, integrating two effective plug-and-play modules: 1) the Dominant Vision Token Selection (DVTS) module, which preserves essential visual tokens via a global-local view, and 2) the Text-Guided Vision Complement (TGVC) module, which facilitates context-aware token merging guided by textual cues. Extensive experiments across diverse image and video multimodal benchmarks demonstrate the performance superiority of our VisionTrim, advancing practical MLLM deployment in real-world applications. The code is available at: https://github.com/hanxunyu/VisionTrim.

CLI agents are the closest thing language models have to an embodied setting: the model emits commands, the terminal executes them, and the returned stream -- stdout, errors, files, logs, and traces -- records the consequences. We argue that this stream is a supervision signal, but standard agent RL discards it: GRPO-style training updates action tokens with sparse outcome-level rewards while ignoring environment responses already in the rollout. Failed rollouts provide little policy-gradient signal despite containing rich evidence about how the environment responds. We introduce ECHO (Environment Cross-entropy Hybrid Objective), a hybrid objective that combines the standard policy-gradient loss on action tokens with an auxiliary loss that trains the policy to predict environment observation tokens resulting from its own actions. ECHO reuses the same forward pass as GRPO, requires no additional rollouts, and turns terminal feedback into dense supervision for all rollouts. ECHO doubles GRPO pass@1 on TerminalBench-2.0: Qwen3-8B improves from 2.70% to 5.17%, and Qwen3-14B from 5.17% to 10.79%. ECHO also produces policies that better predict terminal dynamics, even on trajectories they did not generate: across held-out rollouts, it sharply reduces environment-token cross-entropy while GRPO alone barely changes it. From base Qwen3-8B, ECHO matches expert-SFT-then-GRPO performance on held-out terminal tasks without expert demonstrations, and recovers roughly half of the expert-SFT initialization benefit on TerminalBench-2.0. In some settings, the environment prediction loss alone enables verifier-free self-improvement, allowing policies to improve on unseen OOD tasks by learning only from environment interactions. Together, these results suggest that environment observations are not merely context for future actions, but a dense, on-policy supervision signal already present in every rollout.

World Action Models (WAMs) generate actions together with predicted futures, offering a powerful interface for robot decision making. In contact-rich manipulation, however, visually plausible futures can be physically incomplete: insertion, assembly, search, and reorientation often depend on slip, jamming, contact normals, or small alignment errors that are weakly visible or hidden in RGB. A natural solution is to predict future tactile states, however, we identify tactile pollution, a failure mode where unconstrained tactile-token injection degrades video and action prediction by forcing a visual dynamics model to absorb sparse, local, event-driven contact signals. To address this, we propose Tactile-WAM, a touch-aware WAM with a Tactile Asymmetric Attention Mechanism (TAAM). TAAM combines a VideoClean mask, which blocks video-query access to tactile key/value tokens while preserving action-query access, with a touch-aware bias for action attention. The VideoClean mask protects visual prediction while keeping contact information available for action generation; the touch-aware bias is derived from predicted touch changes and modulates action attention to tactile tokens during denoising. On ManiFeel, Tactile-WAM improves the mean success rate by 38.9% overall and by 86% on contact-rich tasks.

Recent 3D vision-language models (3D VLMs) construct geometry aware tokens by projecting 2D visual features into world coordinates, enabling spatial reasoning for tasks such as 3D question answering. However, this design generates thousands of tokens per scene, resulting in substantial computational and memory overhead. While token compression has been extensively studied in 2D VLMs, existing approaches rely on semantic relevance or attention-based selection that overlook the structured spatial nature of 3D tokens. Moreover, redundancy in 3D representations cannot be resolved by spatial proximity alone, as object-level token imbalance persists even after spatial aggregation. To address this, we propose 3DZip, a three-stage token compression framework that first applies coarse voxelization to remove point-level redundancy, then selects anchor tokens based on feature-space diversity via a Determinantal Point Process, and finally merges remaining tokens under spatial constraints to preserve geometric coherence. Experiments on three 3D question answering benchmarks demonstrate that 3DZip consistently outperforms existing compression methods, retaining 94.7% of the original performance with only 128 tokens, achieving a 1.92times faster inference speed.

Recent vision-language navigation (VLN) systems increasingly adapt pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) into vision-language-action (VLA) policies that map egocentric observations and language instructions directly to navigation actions. Although semantically capable, such action-centric training does not explicitly model how the agent's visual observations should evolve under its predicted motion. Generative world-action models (WAMs) jointly predict future observations and actions, yet existing WAMs for continuous VLN do not condition joint future-view and action generation on geometry-aware representations inferred from the observed history. We present WNM-3D, a generative World Navigation Model with 3D scene conditioning for continuous VLN. To consolidate past observations into persistent scene context, a frozen feed-forward geometry encoder extracts geometry-aware representations from the monocular egocentric RGB history, and a trainable 3D Scene-to-Token Adapter converts them into a fixed-length prefix in the token space of the world-action Diffusion Transformer. Through block-causal attention, this prefix conditions every future video-action block, providing a shared geometric context for both future-view and action generation. We train WNM-3D through supervised world-action fine-tuning on A*-generated demonstrations, DAgger-style adaptation on policy-visited states, and DanceGRPO-based closed-loop policy optimization. Experiments on GN-Bench show that WNM-3D outperforms strong VLM-based navigation policies and its 2D-conditioned counterpart in closed-loop navigation. On a fixed near-goal evaluation set, WNM-3D also achieves higher flow-action consistency and lower visual-motion error.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models typically inject proprioception only as a late conditioning signal, preventing robot state from grounding instruction understanding or directing visual attention. We introduce ThinkProprio, which discretizes proprioception into VLM-vocabulary tokens and uses them jointly with the instruction to gate visual patches before VLM computation, steering the model toward action-relevant evidence while discarding redundant tokens early. We find that proprioception added as a passive conditioning signal leaves performance essentially unchanged; its value emerges when token-form state acts as an active query that, with the instruction, selects which visual patches the VLM processes. Systematic ablations show that VLM-vocabulary tokens outperform learned projectors as the state encoding, and that retaining only about 12{\percent} of the visual tokens surpasses on CALVIN ABCtoD. Across CALVIN, LIBERO, and real-world manipulation, ThinkProprio reduces end-to-end inference latency while improving the matched full-token baseline.

Training-free token reduction accelerates vision transformers by removing redundant tokens across layers, recovering most of the original accuracy at a fraction of the compute. These methods, however, are designed and evaluated primarily on clean data, and under real-world distribution shift their accuracy gap to the uncompressed model widens with the removal rate. We show that this gap is governed by the reduction schedule, the depth profile of removal, usually left fixed as an implementation detail. Concretely, we introduce a one-parameter late-concentrated power-law schedule that consistently improves out-of-distribution accuracy over flat at no extra inference cost. On ImageNet-C with DeiT-S, the late schedule closes 83% of that gap at a 26% compute reduction (+1.17pp), and 99% of it at a lighter 7% reduction (+0.26pp). The gain cannot be attributed to retaining more tokens or using extra compute: held to flat's compute, the late schedule removes more tokens in total and leaves fewer tokens at the end, yet still wins. Single-layer probes point to a mechanism: earlier reductions perturb features that pass through more remaining layers, front-loading reduction error in depth. The effect is broad, holding across five token-reduction methods (ToMe, EViT, ATS, ATC, PiToMe), nine backbones, all ImageNet-C corruption types, eight further shift suites, and two further modalities, video and vision-language QA. It is also specific to shift, still positive on clean and rising monotonically to ~4x that at the highest severity 5. The schedule keeps its gain under six test-time adaptation methods, and needs no per-input or per-domain tuning.

We introduce Transfusion, a recipe for training a multi-modal model over discrete and continuous data. Transfusion combines the language modeling loss function (next token prediction) with diffusion to train a single transformer over mixed-modality sequences. We pretrain multiple Transfusion models up to 7B parameters from scratch on a mixture of text and image data, establishing scaling laws with respect to a variety of uni- and cross-modal benchmarks. Our experiments show that Transfusion scales significantly better than quantizing images and training a language model over discrete image tokens. By introducing modality-specific encoding and decoding layers, we can further improve the performance of Transfusion models, and even compress each image to just 16 patches. We further demonstrate that scaling our Transfusion recipe to 7B parameters and 2T multi-modal tokens produces a model that can generate images and text on a par with similar scale diffusion models and language models, reaping the benefits of both worlds.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on various natural language tasks. However, they are trained on static corpora and their knowledge can become outdated quickly in the fast-changing world. This motivates the development of knowledge editing (KE) to update specific knowledge in LLMs without changing unrelated others or compromising their pre-trained capabilities. Previous efforts sought to update a small amount of parameters of a LLM and proved effective for making selective updates. Nonetheless, the edited LLM often exhibits degraded ability to reason about the new knowledge. In this work, we identify a key issue: heterogeneous token overfitting (HTO), where the LLM overfits different tokens in the provided knowledge at varying rates. To tackle this, we propose OVERTONE, a token-level smoothing method that mitigates HTO by adaptively refining the target distribution. Theoretically, OVERTONE offers better parameter updates with negligible computation overhead. It also induces an implicit DPO but does not require preference data pairs. Extensive experiments across four editing methods, two LLMs, and diverse scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of our method.