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May 14

TAD: Temporal-Aware Trajectory Self-Distillation for Fast and Accurate Diffusion LLM

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer a promising paradigm for parallel text generation, but in practice they face an accuracy-parallelism trade-off, where increasing tokens per forward (TPF) often degrades generation quality. Existing acceleration methods often gain speed at the cost of accuracy. To address this limitation, we propose TAD, a Temporal-Aware trajectory self-Distillation framework. During data construction, we condition a teacher model on both the prompt and the ground-truth response to generate decoding trajectories, recording the intermediate masked states throughout the process. Based on how many decoding steps remain before each masked token is revealed, we partition masked positions into near and distant subsets. For near tokens, we train the student with a hard cross-entropy loss using the teacher trajectory tokens as labels, encouraging confident predictions for tokens that are about to be decoded. For distant tokens, we apply a soft KL divergence loss between the teacher and student token distributions, providing softer supervision and preserving future planning knowledge. This temporal-aware partition naturally gives rise to two deployment configurations: a Quality model that prioritizes accuracy and a Speed model that favors more aggressive acceleration. Experiments show that TAD consistently improves the accuracy-parallelism trade-off. On LLaDA, it raises average accuracy from 46.2\% to 51.6\% with the Quality model and average AUP from 46.2 to 257.1 with the Speed model. Our code is available at: https://github.com/BHmingyang/TAD

  • 7 authors
·
May 9

ReflectDrive-2: Reinforcement-Learning-Aligned Self-Editing for Discrete Diffusion Driving

We introduce ReflectDrive-2, a masked discrete diffusion planner with separate action expert for autonomous driving that represents plans as discrete trajectory tokens and generates them through parallel masked decoding. This discrete token space enables in-place trajectory revision: AutoEdit rewrites selected tokens using the same model, without requiring an auxiliary refinement network. To train this capability, we use a two-stage procedure. First, we construct structure-aware perturbations of expert trajectories along longitudinal progress and lateral heading directions and supervise the model to recover the original expert trajectory. We then fine-tune the full decision--draft--reflect rollout with reinforcement learning (RL), assigning terminal driving reward to the final post-edit trajectory and propagating policy-gradient credit through full-rollout transitions. Full-rollout RL proves crucial for coupling drafting and editing: under supervised training alone, inference-time AutoEdit improves PDMS by at most 0.3, whereas RL increases its gain to 1.9. We also co-design an efficient reflective decoding stack for the decision--draft--reflect pipeline, combining shared-prefix KV reuse, Alternating Step Decode, and fused on-device unmasking. On NAVSIM, ReflectDrive-2 achieves 91.0 PDMS with camera-only input and 94.8 PDMS in a best-of-6 oracle setting, while running at 31.8 ms average latency on NVIDIA Thor.

  • 10 authors
·
May 5 3

Agentic Harness Engineering: Observability-Driven Automatic Evolution of Coding-Agent Harnesses

Harnesses are now central to coding-agent performance, mediating how models interact with tools and execution environments. Yet harness engineering remains a manual craft, because automating it faces a heterogeneous action space across editable components, voluminous trajectories that bury actionable signal, and edits whose effect is hard to attribute. We introduce Agentic Harness Engineering (AHE), a closed loop that addresses these challenges through three matched observability pillars: (1) component observability gives every editable harness component a file-level representation so the action space is explicit and revertible; (2) experience observability distills millions of raw trajectory tokens into a layered, drill-down evidence corpus that an evolving agent can actually consume; and (3) decision observability pairs every edit with a self-declared prediction, later verified against the next round's task-level outcomes. Together, these pillars turn every edit into a falsifiable contract, so harness evolution proceeds autonomously without collapsing into trial-and-error. Empirically, ten AHE iterations lift pass@1 on Terminal-Bench 2 from 69.7% to 77.0%, surpassing the human-designed harness Codex-CLI (71.9%) and the self-evolving baselines ACE and TF-GRPO. The frozen harness transfers without re-evolution: on SWE-bench-verified it tops aggregate success at 12% fewer tokens than the seed, and on Terminal-Bench 2 it yields +5.1 to +10.1pp cross-family gains across three alternate model families, indicating the evolved components encode general engineering experience rather than benchmark-specific tuning. Ablations localize the gain to tools, middleware, and long-term memory rather than the system prompt, suggesting factual harness structure transfers while prose-level strategy does not.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 29

DiTraj: training-free trajectory control for video diffusion transformer

Diffusion Transformers (DiT)-based video generation models with 3D full attention exhibit strong generative capabilities. Trajectory control represents a user-friendly task in the field of controllable video generation. However, existing methods either require substantial training resources or are specifically designed for U-Net, do not take advantage of the superior performance of DiT. To address these issues, we propose DiTraj, a simple but effective training-free framework for trajectory control in text-to-video generation, tailored for DiT. Specifically, first, to inject the object's trajectory, we propose foreground-background separation guidance: we use the Large Language Model (LLM) to convert user-provided prompts into foreground and background prompts, which respectively guide the generation of foreground and background regions in the video. Then, we analyze 3D full attention and explore the tight correlation between inter-token attention scores and position embedding. Based on this, we propose inter-frame Spatial-Temporal Decoupled 3D-RoPE (STD-RoPE). By modifying only foreground tokens' position embedding, STD-RoPE eliminates their cross-frame spatial discrepancies, strengthening cross-frame attention among them and thus enhancing trajectory control. Additionally, we achieve 3D-aware trajectory control by regulating the density of position embedding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms previous methods in both video quality and trajectory controllability.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 25, 2025

GTPO: Trajectory-Based Policy Optimization in Large Language Models

Policy-based optimizations are widely adopted today for the training and alignment of language models, where one of the most recent and effective approaches is Group-relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). In this paper, we reveals and analyze two major limitations of GRPO: (i) tokens frequently appear in completions with both positive and negative rewards, leading to conflicting gradient updates that can reduce their output probability, even though can be essential for maintaining proper structure; (ii) negatively rewarded completions may penalize confident responses and shift model decisions toward unlikely tokens, progressively flattening the output distribution and degrading learning. To address these issues and provide a more stable and effective policy optimization strategy, we introduce GTPO (Group-relative Trajectory-based Policy Optimization), which identifies conflict tokens, tokens appearing in the same position across completions with opposite rewards, protects them by skipping negative updates, while amplifying positive ones. To further prevent policy collapse, GTPO filters out completions whose entropy exceeds a provable threshold. Unlike GRPO, GTPO does not rely on KL-divergence regularization, eliminating the need for a reference model during training, while still ensuring greater training stability and improved performance, validated through multiple experiments on GSM8K, MATH and AIME 2024 benchmarks.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 5, 2025

One Trajectory, One Token: Grounded Video Tokenization via Panoptic Sub-object Trajectory

Effective video tokenization is critical for scaling transformer models for long videos. Current approaches tokenize videos using space-time patches, leading to excessive tokens and computational inefficiencies. The best token reduction strategies degrade performance and barely reduce the number of tokens when the camera moves. We introduce grounded video tokenization, a paradigm that organizes tokens based on panoptic sub-object trajectories rather than fixed patches. Our method aligns with fundamental perceptual principles, ensuring that tokenization reflects scene complexity rather than video duration. We propose TrajViT, a video encoder that extracts object trajectories and converts them into semantically meaningful tokens, significantly reducing redundancy while maintaining temporal coherence. Trained with contrastive learning, TrajViT significantly outperforms space-time ViT (ViT3D) across multiple video understanding benchmarks, e.g., TrajViT outperforms ViT3D by a large margin of 6% top-5 recall in average at video-text retrieval task with 10x token deduction. We also show TrajViT as a stronger model than ViT3D for being the video encoder for modern VideoLLM, obtaining an average of 5.2% performance improvement across 6 VideoQA benchmarks while having 4x faster training time and 18x less inference FLOPs. TrajViT is the first efficient encoder to consistently outperform ViT3D across diverse video analysis tasks, making it a robust and scalable solution.

  • 8 authors
·
May 29, 2025

Learning Trajectory-Aware Transformer for Video Super-Resolution

Video super-resolution (VSR) aims to restore a sequence of high-resolution (HR) frames from their low-resolution (LR) counterparts. Although some progress has been made, there are grand challenges to effectively utilize temporal dependency in entire video sequences. Existing approaches usually align and aggregate video frames from limited adjacent frames (e.g., 5 or 7 frames), which prevents these approaches from satisfactory results. In this paper, we take one step further to enable effective spatio-temporal learning in videos. We propose a novel Trajectory-aware Transformer for Video Super-Resolution (TTVSR). In particular, we formulate video frames into several pre-aligned trajectories which consist of continuous visual tokens. For a query token, self-attention is only learned on relevant visual tokens along spatio-temporal trajectories. Compared with vanilla vision Transformers, such a design significantly reduces the computational cost and enables Transformers to model long-range features. We further propose a cross-scale feature tokenization module to overcome scale-changing problems that often occur in long-range videos. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed TTVSR over state-of-the-art models, by extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations in four widely-used video super-resolution benchmarks. Both code and pre-trained models can be downloaded at https://github.com/researchmm/TTVSR.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 7, 2022

STaR: Sensitive Trajectory Regulation for Unlearning in Large Reasoning Models

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have advanced automated multi-step reasoning, but their ability to generate complex Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trajectories introduces severe privacy risks, as sensitive information may be deeply embedded throughout the reasoning process. Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) unlearning approaches that typically focus on modifying only final answers are insufficient for LRMs, as they fail to remove sensitive content from intermediate steps, leading to persistent privacy leakage and degraded security. To address these challenges, we propose Sensitive Trajectory Regulation (STaR), a parameter-free, inference-time unlearning framework that achieves robust privacy protection throughout the reasoning process. Specifically, we first identify sensitive content via semantic-aware detection. Then, we inject global safety constraints through secure prompt prefix. Next, we perform trajectory-aware suppression to dynamically block sensitive content across the entire reasoning chain. Finally, we apply token-level adaptive filtering to prevent both exact and paraphrased sensitive tokens during generation. Furthermore, to overcome the inadequacies of existing evaluation protocols, we introduce two metrics: Multi-Decoding Consistency Assessment (MCS), which measures the consistency of unlearning across diverse decoding strategies, and Multi-Granularity Membership Inference Attack (MIA) Evaluation, which quantifies privacy protection at both answer and reasoning-chain levels. Experiments on the R-TOFU benchmark demonstrate that STaR achieves comprehensive and stable unlearning with minimal utility loss, setting a new standard for privacy-preserving reasoning in LRMs.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 13

Any 3D Scene is Worth 1K Tokens: 3D-Grounded Representation for Scene Generation at Scale

3D scene generation has long been dominated by 2D multi-view or video diffusion models. This is due not only to the lack of scene-level 3D latent representation, but also to the fact that most scene-level 3D visual data exists in the form of multi-view images or videos, which are naturally compatible with 2D diffusion architectures. Typically, these 2D-based approaches degrade 3D spatial extrapolation to 2D temporal extension, which introduces two fundamental issues: (i) representing 3D scenes via 2D views leads to significant representation redundancy, and (ii) latent space rooted in 2D inherently limits the spatial consistency of the generated 3D scenes. In this paper, we propose, for the first time, to perform 3D scene generation directly within an implicit 3D latent space to address these limitations. First, we repurpose frozen 2D representation encoders to construct our 3D Representation Autoencoder (3DRAE), which grounds view-coupled 2D semantic representations into a view-decoupled 3D latent representation. This enables representing 3D scenes observed from arbitrary numbers of views--at any resolution and aspect ratio--with fixed complexity and rich semantics. Then we introduce 3D Diffusion Transformer (3DDiT), which performs diffusion modeling in this 3D latent space, achieving remarkably efficient and spatially consistent 3D scene generation while supporting diverse conditioning configurations. Moreover, since our approach directly generates a 3D scene representation, it can be decoded to images and optional point maps along arbitrary camera trajectories without requiring per-trajectory diffusion sampling pass, which is common in 2D-based approaches.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 12

Do Vision Language Models Need to Process Image Tokens?

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success by integrating visual encoders with large language models (LLMs). While VLMs process dense image tokens across deep transformer stacks (incurring substantial computational overhead), it remains fundamentally unclear whether sustained image-token processing is necessary for their performance or visual representations meaningfully evolve from early to later layers. In this work, we systematically investigate the functional role of image tokens in VLMs and show that visual representations rapidly converge to a bounded-complexity regime, \ie their entropy stabilizes, intrinsic dimensionality compresses, and trajectory curvature approaches a near-constant profile. In contrast, textual representations continue to undergo substantial restructuring across depth. Once stabilized, visual representations become largely interchangeable between layers, indicating limited additional transformation in deeper stages. Further, depth-wise visual truncation reveals that the necessity of visual processing is task-dependent, where single-token predictions remain comparatively robust to truncated visual depth, but multi-token generation require sustained access to visual representations. Under deterministic decoding, reducing visual depth perturbs intermediate reasoning trajectories more strongly than final outputs, suggesting that image tokens influence the structure of reasoning more than the ultimate conclusions. Collectively, these findings question the assumption that deeper visual processing is uniformly essential in VLMs, challenging the current paradigm of multimodal LLM architectures.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 9

Lookahead Tree-Based Rollouts for Enhanced Trajectory-Level Exploration in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), particularly with algorithms like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has proven highly effective in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, a critical bottleneck in current pipelines lies in the limited diversity of sampled trajectories during group rollouts. Homogeneous trajectories and their associated rewards would diminish the return signals for policy updates, thereby hindering effective policy learning. This lack of diversity stems primarily from token-level stochastic sampling, where local variations are likely to collapse into near-identical reasoning paths. To address this limitation, we propose Lookahead Tree-Based Rollouts (LATR), a novel rollout strategy designed to explicitly promotes trajectory-level diversity by enforcing branching into different candidate tokens likely to yield distinct continuations. Specifically, LATR iteratively operates in three stages: (1) branching at high-uncertainty generation steps, (2) performing lookahead simulation for each new branch, and (3) pruning branches that exhibits prolonged similarity during simulation. Compared with stochastic Sampling, LATR accelerates policy learning by 131% on average and improves final pass@1 performance by 4.2% on both GRPO and Dynamic sAmpling Policy Optimization (DAPO) algorithms across different reasoning tasks. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/starreeze/latr.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 28, 2025

Synthetic Visual Genome 2: Extracting Large-scale Spatio-Temporal Scene Graphs from Videos

We introduce Synthetic Visual Genome 2 (SVG2), a large-scale panoptic video scene graph dataset. SVG2 contains over 636K videos with 6.6M objects, 52.0M attributes, and 6.7M relations, providing an order-of-magnitude increase in scale and diversity over prior spatio-temporal scene graph datasets. To create SVG2, we design a fully automated pipeline that combines multi-scale panoptic segmentation, online-offline trajectory tracking with automatic new-object discovery, per-trajectory semantic parsing, and GPT-5-based spatio-temporal relation inference. Building on this resource, we train TRaSER, a video scene graph generation model. TRaSER augments VLMs with a trajectory-aligned token arrangement mechanism and new modules: an object-trajectory resampler and a temporal-window resampler to convert raw videos and panoptic trajectories into compact spatio-temporal scene graphs in a single forward pass. The temporal-window resampler binds visual tokens to short trajectory segments to preserve local motion and temporal semantics, while the object-trajectory resampler aggregates entire trajectories to maintain global context for objects. On the PVSG, VIPSeg, VidOR and SVG2 test datasets, TRaSER improves relation detection by +15 to 20%, object prediction by +30 to 40% over the strongest open-source baselines and by +13% over GPT-5, and attribute prediction by +15%. When TRaSER's generated scene graphs are sent to a VLM for video question answering, it delivers a +1.5 to 4.6% absolute accuracy gain over using video only or video augmented with Qwen2.5-VL's generated scene graphs, demonstrating the utility of explicit spatio-temporal scene graphs as an intermediate representation.

S2D2: Fast Decoding for Diffusion LLMs via Training-Free Self-Speculation

Block-diffusion language models offer a promising path toward faster-than-autoregressive generation by combining block-wise autoregressive decoding with within-block parallel denoising. However, in the few-step regime needed for practical acceleration, standard confidence-thresholded decoding is often brittle: aggressive thresholds hurt quality, while conservative thresholds require unnecessary denoising steps. Existing approaches that address this issue either require additional training or incur extra test-time compute. We present S2D2, a training-free self-speculative decoding framework for block-diffusion language models. Our key observation is that a block-diffusion model becomes autoregressive when the block size is reduced to one, allowing the same pretrained model to act as both drafter and verifier. S2D2 inserts a speculative verification step into standard block-diffusion decoding and uses lightweight routing policies to decide when verification is worth its cost. This yields a hybrid decoding trajectory in which diffusion proposes tokens in parallel, while the autoregressive mode acts as a local sequence-level critic. Across three mainstream block-diffusion families, S2D2 consistently improves the accuracy-speed tradeoff over strong confidence-thresholding baselines. On SDAR, we observe up to 4.7times speedup over autoregressive decoding, and up to 1.57times over a tuned dynamic decoding baseline while improving accuracy by up to 4.5 points. On LLaDA2.1-Mini, S2D2 remains complementary to built-in self-correction, including a conservative setting where it is 4.4times faster than the static baseline with slightly higher accuracy.

RedHatAI Red Hat AI
·
Mar 26 2

Tracing the Traces: Latent Temporal Signals for Efficient and Accurate Reasoning

Reasoning models improve their problem-solving ability through inference-time scaling, allocating more compute via longer token budgets. Identifying which reasoning traces are likely to succeed remains a key opportunity: reliably predicting productive paths can substantially reduce wasted computation and improve overall efficiency. We introduce Latent-Trajectory signals that characterize the temporal evolution of a model's internal representations during the generation of intermediate reasoning tokens. By measuring the overall change in latent representations between the start and end of reasoning, the change accumulated across intermediate steps, and the extent to which these changes advance toward the final state, we show that these signals predict solution accuracy more reliably than both cross-layer metrics and output-based confidence measures. When used to guide answer selection across multiple sampled generations, Latent-Trajectory signals make test-time scaling more effective and efficient than majority voting, reducing token usage by up to 70% while preserving and even improving accuracy by 2.6% on average. Moreover, these predictive signals often emerge early in the reasoning trace, enabling early selection and allocation of compute to the most promising candidates. Our findings contribute not only practical strategies for inference-time efficiency, but also a deeper interpretability perspective on how reasoning processes are represented and differentiated in latent space.

MicrosoftResearch Microsoft Research
·
Oct 12, 2025 2

Learn the Ropes, Then Trust the Wins: Self-imitation with Progressive Exploration for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) is the dominant paradigm for sharpening strategic tool use capabilities of LLMs on long-horizon, sparsely-rewarded agent tasks, yet it faces a fundamental challenge of exploration-exploitation trade-off. Existing studies stimulate exploration through the lens of policy entropy, but such mechanical entropy maximization is prone to RL training instability due to the multi-turn distribution shifting. In this paper, we target the progressive exploration-exploitation balance under the guidance of the agent own experiences without succumbing to either entropy collapsing or runaway divergence. We propose SPEAR, a curriculum-based self-imitation learning (SIL) recipe for training agentic LLMs. It extends the vanilla SIL framework, where a replay buffer stores self-generated promising trajectories for off-policy update, by gradually steering the policy evolution within a well-balanced range of entropy across stages. Specifically, our approach incorporates a curriculum to manage the exploration process, utilizing intrinsic rewards to foster skill-level exploration and facilitating action-level exploration through SIL. At first, the auxiliary tool call reward plays a critical role in the accumulation of tool-use skills, enabling broad exposure to the unfamiliar distributions of the environment feedback with an upward entropy trend. As training progresses, self-imitation gets strengthened to exploit existing successful patterns from replayed experiences for comparative action-level exploration, accelerating solution iteration without unbounded entropy growth. To further stabilize training, we recalibrate the advantages of experiences in the replay buffer to address the potential policy drift. Reugularizations such as the clipping of tokens with high covariance between probability and advantage are introduced to the trajectory-level entropy control to curb over-confidence.

tencent Tencent
·
Sep 26, 2025 4

A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models: An Action Tokenization Perspective

The remarkable advancements of vision and language foundation models in multimodal understanding, reasoning, and generation has sparked growing efforts to extend such intelligence to the physical world, fueling the flourishing of vision-language-action (VLA) models. Despite seemingly diverse approaches, we observe that current VLA models can be unified under a single framework: vision and language inputs are processed by a series of VLA modules, producing a chain of action tokens that progressively encode more grounded and actionable information, ultimately generating executable actions. We further determine that the primary design choice distinguishing VLA models lies in how action tokens are formulated, which can be categorized into language description, code, affordance, trajectory, goal state, latent representation, raw action, and reasoning. However, there remains a lack of comprehensive understanding regarding action tokens, significantly impeding effective VLA development and obscuring future directions. Therefore, this survey aims to categorize and interpret existing VLA research through the lens of action tokenization, distill the strengths and limitations of each token type, and identify areas for improvement. Through this systematic review and analysis, we offer a synthesized outlook on the broader evolution of VLA models, highlight underexplored yet promising directions, and contribute guidance for future research, hoping to bring the field closer to general-purpose intelligence.

  • 14 authors
·
Jul 2, 2025 1

NavDP: Learning Sim-to-Real Navigation Diffusion Policy with Privileged Information Guidance

Learning navigation in dynamic open-world environments is an important yet challenging skill for robots. Most previous methods rely on precise localization and mapping or learn from expensive real-world demonstrations. In this paper, we propose the Navigation Diffusion Policy (NavDP), an end-to-end framework trained solely in simulation and can zero-shot transfer to different embodiments in diverse real-world environments. The key ingredient of NavDP's network is the combination of diffusion-based trajectory generation and a critic function for trajectory selection, which are conditioned on only local observation tokens encoded from a shared policy transformer. Given the privileged information of the global environment in simulation, we scale up the demonstrations of good quality to train the diffusion policy and formulate the critic value function targets with contrastive negative samples. Our demonstration generation approach achieves about 2,500 trajectories/GPU per day, 20times more efficient than real-world data collection, and results in a large-scale navigation dataset with 363.2km trajectories across 1244 scenes. Trained with this simulation dataset, NavDP achieves state-of-the-art performance and consistently outstanding generalization capability on quadruped, wheeled, and humanoid robots in diverse indoor and outdoor environments. In addition, we present a preliminary attempt at using Gaussian Splatting to make in-domain real-to-sim fine-tuning to further bridge the sim-to-real gap. Experiments show that adding such real-to-sim data can improve the success rate by 30\% without hurting its generalization capability.

  • 9 authors
·
May 13, 2025 2

MolmoAct: Action Reasoning Models that can Reason in Space

Reasoning is central to purposeful action, yet most robotic foundation models map perception and instructions directly to control, which limits adaptability, generalization, and semantic grounding. We introduce Action Reasoning Models (ARMs), a class of vision-language-action models that integrate perception, planning, and control through a structured three-stage pipeline. Our model, MolmoAct, encodes observations and instructions into depth-aware perception tokens, generates mid-level spatial plans as editable trajectory traces, and predicts precise low-level actions, enabling explainable and steerable behavior. MolmoAct-7B-D achieves strong performance across simulation and real-world settings: 70.5% zero-shot accuracy on SimplerEnv Visual Matching tasks, surpassing closed-source Pi-0 and GR00T N1; 86.6% average success on LIBERO, including an additional 6.3% gain over ThinkAct on long-horizon tasks; and in real-world fine-tuning, an additional 10% (single-arm) and an additional 22.7% (bimanual) task progression over Pi-0-FAST. It also outperforms baselines by an additional 23.3% on out-of-distribution generalization and achieves top human-preference scores for open-ended instruction following and trajectory steering. Furthermore, we release, for the first time, the MolmoAct Dataset -- a mid-training robot dataset comprising over 10,000 high quality robot trajectories across diverse scenarios and tasks. Training with this dataset yields an average 5.5% improvement in general performance over the base model. We release all model weights, training code, our collected dataset, and our action reasoning dataset, establishing MolmoAct as both a state-of-the-art robotics foundation model and an open blueprint for building ARMs that transform perception into purposeful action through structured reasoning. Blogpost: https://allenai.org/blog/molmoact

allenai Ai2
·
Aug 11, 2025 2

VoxHammer: Training-Free Precise and Coherent 3D Editing in Native 3D Space

3D local editing of specified regions is crucial for game industry and robot interaction. Recent methods typically edit rendered multi-view images and then reconstruct 3D models, but they face challenges in precisely preserving unedited regions and overall coherence. Inspired by structured 3D generative models, we propose VoxHammer, a novel training-free approach that performs precise and coherent editing in 3D latent space. Given a 3D model, VoxHammer first predicts its inversion trajectory and obtains its inverted latents and key-value tokens at each timestep. Subsequently, in the denoising and editing phase, we replace the denoising features of preserved regions with the corresponding inverted latents and cached key-value tokens. By retaining these contextual features, this approach ensures consistent reconstruction of preserved areas and coherent integration of edited parts. To evaluate the consistency of preserved regions, we constructed Edit3D-Bench, a human-annotated dataset comprising hundreds of samples, each with carefully labeled 3D editing regions. Experiments demonstrate that VoxHammer significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of both 3D consistency of preserved regions and overall quality. Our method holds promise for synthesizing high-quality edited paired data, thereby laying the data foundation for in-context 3D generation. See our project page at https://huanngzh.github.io/VoxHammer-Page/.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 26, 2025 2

Moto: Latent Motion Token as the Bridging Language for Robot Manipulation

Recent developments in Large Language Models pre-trained on extensive corpora have shown significant success in various natural language processing tasks with minimal fine-tuning. This success offers new promise for robotics, which has long been constrained by the high cost of action-labeled data. We ask: given the abundant video data containing interaction-related knowledge available as a rich "corpus", can a similar generative pre-training approach be effectively applied to enhance robot learning? The key challenge is to identify an effective representation for autoregressive pre-training that benefits robot manipulation tasks. Inspired by the way humans learn new skills through observing dynamic environments, we propose that effective robotic learning should emphasize motion-related knowledge, which is closely tied to low-level actions and is hardware-agnostic, facilitating the transfer of learned motions to actual robot actions. To this end, we introduce Moto, which converts video content into latent Motion Token sequences by a Latent Motion Tokenizer, learning a bridging "language" of motion from videos in an unsupervised manner. We pre-train Moto-GPT through motion token autoregression, enabling it to capture diverse visual motion knowledge. After pre-training, Moto-GPT demonstrates the promising ability to produce semantically interpretable motion tokens, predict plausible motion trajectories, and assess trajectory rationality through output likelihood. To transfer learned motion priors to real robot actions, we implement a co-fine-tuning strategy that seamlessly bridges latent motion token prediction and real robot control. Extensive experiments show that the fine-tuned Moto-GPT exhibits superior robustness and efficiency on robot manipulation benchmarks, underscoring its effectiveness in transferring knowledge from video data to downstream visual manipulation tasks.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 5, 2024 2

ChronoEdit: Towards Temporal Reasoning for Image Editing and World Simulation

Recent advances in large generative models have significantly advanced image editing and in-context image generation, yet a critical gap remains in ensuring physical consistency, where edited objects must remain coherent. This capability is especially vital for world simulation related tasks. In this paper, we present ChronoEdit, a framework that reframes image editing as a video generation problem. First, ChronoEdit treats the input and edited images as the first and last frames of a video, allowing it to leverage large pretrained video generative models that capture not only object appearance but also the implicit physics of motion and interaction through learned temporal consistency. Second, ChronoEdit introduces a temporal reasoning stage that explicitly performs editing at inference time. Under this setting, the target frame is jointly denoised with reasoning tokens to imagine a plausible editing trajectory that constrains the solution space to physically viable transformations. The reasoning tokens are then dropped after a few steps to avoid the high computational cost of rendering a full video. To validate ChronoEdit, we introduce PBench-Edit, a new benchmark of image-prompt pairs for contexts that require physical consistency, and demonstrate that ChronoEdit surpasses state-of-the-art baselines in both visual fidelity and physical plausibility. Code and models for both the 14B and 2B variants of ChronoEdit will be released on the project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/toronto-ai/chronoedit

nvidia NVIDIA
·
Oct 5, 2025 2

Spotlight on Token Perception for Multimodal Reinforcement Learning

While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has advanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), most existing methods in multimodal reasoning neglect the critical role of visual perception within the RLVR optimization process. In this paper, we undertake a pioneering exploration of multimodal RLVR through the novel perspective of token perception, which measures the visual dependency of each generated token. With a granular analysis of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) processes, we uncover two key insights: first, token perception in a rollout trajectory is sparsely distributed, where only a small fraction of tokens have high visual dependency for visually-grounded reasoning; second, different trajectories exhibit significant divergence in their overall visual dependency. Based on these observations, we propose Visually-Perceptive Policy Optimization (VPPO), a novel policy gradient algorithm that explicitly leverages token perception to refine the learning signal. Specifically, VPPO achieves this through a dual mechanism: it reweights a trajectory's advantage by its overall visual dependency, and focuses policy updates exclusively on perceptually pivotal tokens. On a comprehensive suite of eight perception and reasoning benchmarks, VPPO demonstrates substantial gains over leading open-source RL-tuned models, with its effectiveness consistently validated across 7B and 32B model scales. Our findings not only establish a new token-level perceptual perspective for analyzing multimodal RLVR but also present a novel and effective optimization strategy to significantly enhance the multimodal reasoning capabilities of LVLMs.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 10, 2025 3

Reinforcement Mid-Training

The development of state-of-the-art large language models is commonly understood as a two-stage process involving pre-training and post-training. We point out the need for an additional intermediate stage called reinforcement mid-training with potential for strong performance gains. In this paper, we formally define the problem and identify three key challenges: (1) inefficient training due to excessive reasoning steps, (2) disregard of the imbalanced token entropy distribution, and (3) underutilization of token information. To address these challenges, we propose RMT, a framework for efficient, adaptive, and unified reinforcement mid-training with various innovative components. In particular, we first introduce a dynamic token budget mechanism that constrains unnecessary reasoning steps and mitigates model overthinking. Next, we design a curriculum-based adaptive sampling method that fosters a progressive learning trajectory from easy to hard tokens. Finally, we present a dual training strategy that combines reinforcement learning with next-token prediction, ensuring targeted learning on key tokens and full exploitation of all token information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of RMT over state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to +64.91% performance improvement with only 21% of the reasoning length in language modeling. We also show that checkpoints obtained after reinforcement mid-training can benefit the subsequent post-training, yielding up to +18.76% improvement in the mathematical domain.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 29, 2025 2

On GRPO Collapse in Search-R1: The Lazy Likelihood-Displacement Death Spiral

Tool-integrated (TI) reinforcement learning (RL) enables large language models (LLMs) to perform multi-step reasoning by interacting with external tools such as search engines and retrievers. Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), exemplified by the recent Search-R1, offers fast convergence and a value-free formulation that makes it appealing for this setting, yet consistently suffers from training collapse. We identify Lazy Likelihood Displacement (LLD), a systematic reduction or stagnation in the likelihood of both correct and incorrect responses, as the core mechanism driving this failure. LLD emerges early and triggers a self-reinforcing LLD Death Spiral, where declining likelihood leads to low-confidence responses, inflating gradients, and ultimately causing collapse. We empirically characterize this process across models on a Search-R1-style, search-integrated question answering task, revealing a consistent three-phase trajectory: early stagnation, steady decay, and accelerated collapse. To address this, we propose a lightweight likelihood-preserving regularization LLDS for GRPO that activates only when a trajectory's likelihood decreases, and regularizes only the tokens responsible. This fine-grained structure mitigates LLD with minimal interference to optimization. Across seven open-domain and multi-hop QA benchmarks, our method stabilizes training, prevents gradient explosion, and yields substantial performance improvements, including +37.8% gains on Qwen2.5-3B and +32.0% gains on Qwen2.5-7B. Our results establish LLD as a fundamental bottleneck in GRPO-based TIRL and provide a practical path toward stable, scalable training of tool-integrated LLM.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 3, 2025 2

ssToken: Self-modulated and Semantic-aware Token Selection for LLM Fine-tuning

Data quality plays a critical role in enhancing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) for large language models (LLMs), and token-level data selection has emerged as a promising direction for its fine-grained nature. Despite their strong empirical performance, existing token-level selection methods share two key limitations: (1) requiring training or accessing an additional reference model, and (2) relying solely on loss information for token selection, which cannot well preserve semantically important tokens that are not favored by loss-based metrics. To address these challenges, we propose ssToken, a Self-modulated and Semantic-aware Token Selection approach. ssToken leverages readily accessible history models to compute the per-token loss difference with the current model, which serves as a self-modulated signal that enables the model to adaptively select tokens along its optimization trajectory, rather than relying on excess loss from an offline-trained reference model as in prior works. We further introduce a semantic-aware, attention-based token importance estimation metric, orthogonal to loss-based selection and providing complementary semantic information for more effective filtering. Extensive experiments across different model families and scales demonstrate that both self-modulated selection and semantic-aware selection alone outperform full-data fine-tuning, while their integration--ssToken--achieves synergistic gains and further surpasses prior token-level selection methods, delivering performance improvements while maintaining training efficiency.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 20, 2025 2

Co-GRPO: Co-Optimized Group Relative Policy Optimization for Masked Diffusion Model

Recently, Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) have shown promising potential across vision, language, and cross-modal generation. However, a notable discrepancy exists between their training and inference procedures. In particular, MDM inference is a multi-step, iterative process governed not only by the model itself but also by various schedules that dictate the token-decoding trajectory (e.g., how many tokens to decode at each step). In contrast, MDMs are typically trained using a simplified, single-step BERT-style objective that masks a subset of tokens and predicts all of them simultaneously. This step-level simplification fundamentally disconnects the training paradigm from the trajectory-level nature of inference, leaving the inference schedules never optimized during training. In this paper, we introduce Co-GRPO, which reformulates MDM generation as a unified Markov Decision Process (MDP) that jointly incorporates both the model and the inference schedule. By applying Group Relative Policy Optimization at the trajectory level, Co-GRPO cooperatively optimizes model parameters and schedule parameters under a shared reward, without requiring costly backpropagation through the multi-step generation process. This holistic optimization aligns training with inference more thoroughly and substantially improves generation quality. Empirical results across four benchmarks-ImageReward, HPS, GenEval, and DPG-Bench-demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. For more details, please refer to our project page: https://co-grpo.github.io/ .

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 25, 2025

RealisMotion: Decomposed Human Motion Control and Video Generation in the World Space

Generating human videos with realistic and controllable motions is a challenging task. While existing methods can generate visually compelling videos, they lack separate control over four key video elements: foreground subject, background video, human trajectory and action patterns. In this paper, we propose a decomposed human motion control and video generation framework that explicitly decouples motion from appearance, subject from background, and action from trajectory, enabling flexible mix-and-match composition of these elements. Concretely, we first build a ground-aware 3D world coordinate system and perform motion editing directly in the 3D space. Trajectory control is implemented by unprojecting edited 2D trajectories into 3D with focal-length calibration and coordinate transformation, followed by speed alignment and orientation adjustment; actions are supplied by a motion bank or generated via text-to-motion methods. Then, based on modern text-to-video diffusion transformer models, we inject the subject as tokens for full attention, concatenate the background along the channel dimension, and add motion (trajectory and action) control signals by addition. Such a design opens up the possibility for us to generate realistic videos of anyone doing anything anywhere. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets and real-world cases demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both element-wise controllability and overall video quality.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 11, 2025

The Patient is not a Moving Document: A World Model Training Paradigm for Longitudinal EHR

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.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 29

Captain Safari: A World Engine

World engines aim to synthesize long, 3D-consistent videos that support interactive exploration of a scene under user-controlled camera motion. However, existing systems struggle under aggressive 6-DoF trajectories and complex outdoor layouts: they lose long-range geometric coherence, deviate from the target path, or collapse into overly conservative motion. To this end, we introduce Captain Safari, a pose-conditioned world engine that generates videos by retrieving from a persistent world memory. Given a camera path, our method maintains a dynamic local memory and uses a retriever to fetch pose-aligned world tokens, which then condition video generation along the trajectory. This design enables the model to maintain stable 3D structure while accurately executing challenging camera maneuvers. To evaluate this setting, we curate OpenSafari, a new in-the-wild FPV dataset containing high-dynamic drone videos with verified camera trajectories, constructed through a multi-stage geometric and kinematic validation pipeline. Across video quality, 3D consistency, and trajectory following, Captain Safari substantially outperforms state-of-the-art camera-controlled generators. It reduces MEt3R from 0.3703 to 0.3690, improves AUC@30 from 0.181 to 0.200, and yields substantially lower FVD than all camera-controlled baselines. More importantly, in a 50-participant, 5-way human study where annotators select the best result among five anonymized models, 67.6% of preferences favor our method across all axes. Our results demonstrate that pose-conditioned world memory is a powerful mechanism for long-horizon, controllable video generation and provide OpenSafari as a challenging new benchmark for future world-engine research.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 27, 2025 2

Unraveling the Mystery of Scaling Laws: Part I

Scaling law principles indicate a power-law correlation between loss and variables such as model size, dataset size, and computational resources utilized during training. These principles play a vital role in optimizing various aspects of model pre-training, ultimately contributing to the success of large language models such as GPT-4, Llama and Gemini. However, the original scaling law paper by OpenAI did not disclose the complete details necessary to derive the precise scaling law formulas, and their conclusions are only based on models containing up to 1.5 billion parameters. Though some subsequent works attempt to unveil these details and scale to larger models, they often neglect the training dependency of important factors such as the learning rate, context length and batch size, leading to their failure to establish a reliable formula for predicting the test loss trajectory. In this technical report, we confirm that the scaling law formulations proposed in the original OpenAI paper remain valid when scaling the model size up to 33 billion, but the constant coefficients in these formulas vary significantly with the experiment setup. We meticulously identify influential factors and provide transparent, step-by-step instructions to estimate all constant terms in scaling-law formulas by training on models with only 1M~60M parameters. Using these estimated formulas, we showcase the capability to accurately predict various attributes for models with up to 33B parameters before their training, including (1) the minimum possible test loss; (2) the minimum required training steps and processed tokens to achieve a specific loss; (3) the critical batch size with an optimal time/computation trade-off at any loss value; and (4) the complete test loss trajectory with arbitrary batch size.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 11, 2024

UI-Venus-1.5 Technical Report

GUI agents have emerged as a powerful paradigm for automating interactions in digital environments, yet achieving both broad generality and consistently strong task performance remains challenging.In this report, we present UI-Venus-1.5, a unified, end-to-end GUI Agent designed for robust real-world applications.The proposed model family comprises two dense variants (2B and 8B) and one mixture-of-experts variant (30B-A3B) to meet various downstream application scenarios.Compared to our previous version, UI-Venus-1.5 introduces three key technical advances: (1) a comprehensive Mid-Training stage leveraging 10 billion tokens across 30+ datasets to establish foundational GUI semantics; (2) Online Reinforcement Learning with full-trajectory rollouts, aligning training objectives with long-horizon, dynamic navigation in large-scale environments; and (3) a single unified GUI Agent constructed via Model Merging, which synthesizes domain-specific models (grounding, web, and mobile) into one cohesive checkpoint. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that UI-Venus-1.5 establishes new state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks such as ScreenSpot-Pro (69.6%), VenusBench-GD (75.0%), and AndroidWorld (77.6%), significantly outperforming previous strong baselines. In addition, UI-Venus-1.5 demonstrates robust navigation capabilities across a variety of Chinese mobile apps, effectively executing user instructions in real-world scenarios. Code: https://github.com/inclusionAI/UI-Venus; Model: https://huggingface.co/collections/inclusionAI/ui-venus

inclusionAI inclusionAI
·
Feb 9 4

Can Language Beat Numerical Regression? Language-Based Multimodal Trajectory Prediction

Language models have demonstrated impressive ability in context understanding and generative performance. Inspired by the recent success of language foundation models, in this paper, we propose LMTraj (Language-based Multimodal Trajectory predictor), which recasts the trajectory prediction task into a sort of question-answering problem. Departing from traditional numerical regression models, which treat the trajectory coordinate sequence as continuous signals, we consider them as discrete signals like text prompts. Specially, we first transform an input space for the trajectory coordinate into the natural language space. Here, the entire time-series trajectories of pedestrians are converted into a text prompt, and scene images are described as text information through image captioning. The transformed numerical and image data are then wrapped into the question-answering template for use in a language model. Next, to guide the language model in understanding and reasoning high-level knowledge, such as scene context and social relationships between pedestrians, we introduce an auxiliary multi-task question and answering. We then train a numerical tokenizer with the prompt data. We encourage the tokenizer to separate the integer and decimal parts well, and leverage it to capture correlations between the consecutive numbers in the language model. Lastly, we train the language model using the numerical tokenizer and all of the question-answer prompts. Here, we propose a beam-search-based most-likely prediction and a temperature-based multimodal prediction to implement both deterministic and stochastic inferences. Applying our LMTraj, we show that the language-based model can be a powerful pedestrian trajectory predictor, and outperforms existing numerical-based predictor methods. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/inhwanbae/LMTrajectory .

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 27, 2024 1

VQ-VLA: Improving Vision-Language-Action Models via Scaling Vector-Quantized Action Tokenizers

In this paper, we introduce an innovative vector quantization based action tokenizer built upon the largest-scale action trajectory dataset to date, leveraging over 100 times more data than previous approaches. This extensive dataset enables our tokenizer to capture rich spatiotemporal dynamics, resulting in a model that not only accelerates inference but also generates smoother and more coherent action outputs. Once trained, the tokenizer can be seamlessly adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks in a zero-shot manner, from short-horizon reactive behaviors to long-horizon planning. A key finding of our work is that the domain gap between synthetic and real action trajectories is marginal, allowing us to effectively utilize a vast amount of synthetic data during training without compromising real-world performance. To validate our approach, we conducted extensive experiments in both simulated environments and on real robotic platforms. The results demonstrate that as the volume of synthetic trajectory data increases, the performance of our tokenizer on downstream tasks improves significantly-most notably, achieving up to a 30% higher success rate on two real-world tasks in long-horizon scenarios. These findings highlight the potential of our action tokenizer as a robust and scalable solution for real-time embodied intelligence systems, paving the way for more efficient and reliable robotic control in diverse application domains.Project website: https://xiaoxiao0406.github.io/vqvla.github.io

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 1, 2025

Unlocking Implicit Experience: Synthesizing Tool-Use Trajectories from Text

Enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to effectively utilize tools in multi-turn interactions is essential for building capable autonomous agents. However, acquiring diverse and realistic multi-turn tool-use data remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose a novel text-based paradigm. We observe that textual corpora naturally contain rich, multi-step problem-solving experiences, which can serve as an untapped, scalable, and authentic data source for multi-turn tool-use tasks. Based on this insight, we introduce GEM, a data synthesis pipeline that enables the generation and extraction of multi-turn tool-use trajectories from text corpora through a four-stage process: relevance filtering, workflow & tool extraction, trajectory grounding, and complexity refinement. To reduce the computational cost, we further train a specialized Trajectory Synthesizer via supervised fine-tuning. This model distills the complex generation pipeline into an efficient, end-to-end trajectory generator. Experiments demonstrate that our GEM-32B achieve a 16.5% improvement on the BFCL V3 Multi-turn benchmark. Our models partially surpass the performance of models trained on τ - bench (Airline and Retail) in-domain data, highlighting the superior generalization capability derived from our text-based synthesis paradigm. Notably, our Trajectory Synthesizer matches the quality of the full pipeline while significantly reducing inference latency and costs.

meituan-longcat LongCat
·
Jan 15 4

StyleVLA: Driving Style-Aware Vision Language Action Model for Autonomous Driving

Vision Language Models (VLMs) bridge visual perception and linguistic reasoning. In Autonomous Driving (AD), this synergy has enabled Vision Language Action (VLA) models, which translate high-level multimodal understanding into driving behaviors, typically represented as future trajectories. However, existing VLA models mainly generate generic collision-free trajectories. Beyond collision avoidance, adapting to diverse driving styles (e.g., sporty, comfortable) is essential for personalized driving. Moreover, many methods treat trajectory generation as naive token prediction, which can produce kinematically infeasible actions. To address these limitations, we present StyleVLA, a physics-informed VLA framework for generating diverse and physically plausible driving behaviors. We introduce a hybrid loss that combines a kinematic consistency constraint with a continuous regression head to improve trajectory feasibility. To train StyleVLA, built on Qwen3-VL-4B, we construct a large-scale instruction dataset with over 1.2k scenarios, 76k Bird's Eye View (BEV) samples, and 42k First Person View (FPV) samples, with ground-truth trajectories for five driving styles and natural-language instructions. Experiments show that our 4B-parameter StyleVLA significantly outperforms proprietary models (e.g., Gemini-3-Pro) and state-of-the-art VLA models. Using a composite driving score measuring success rate, physical feasibility, and style adherence, StyleVLA achieves 0.55 on BEV and 0.51 on FPV, versus 0.32 and 0.35 for Gemini-3-Pro. These results show that a specialized, physics-informed, lightweight model can surpass closed-source models on domain-specific tasks.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 10 2

SpaceDrive: Infusing Spatial Awareness into VLM-based Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving methods built on vision language models (VLMs) have undergone rapid development driven by their universal visual understanding and strong reasoning capabilities obtained from the large-scale pretraining. However, we find that current VLMs struggle to understand fine-grained 3D spatial relationships which is a fundamental requirement for systems interacting with the physical world. To address this issue, we propose SpaceDrive, a spatial-aware VLM-based driving framework that treats spatial information as explicit positional encodings (PEs) instead of textual digit tokens, enabling joint reasoning over semantic and spatial representations. SpaceDrive employs a universal positional encoder to all 3D coordinates derived from multi-view depth estimation, historical ego-states, and text prompts. These 3D PEs are first superimposed to augment the corresponding 2D visual tokens. Meanwhile, they serve as a task-agnostic coordinate representation, replacing the digit-wise numerical tokens as both inputs and outputs for the VLM. This mechanism enables the model to better index specific visual semantics in spatial reasoning and directly regress trajectory coordinates rather than generating digit-by-digit, thereby enhancing planning accuracy. Extensive experiments validate that SpaceDrive achieves state-of-the-art open-loop performance on the nuScenes dataset and the second-best Driving Score of 78.02 on the Bench2Drive closed-loop benchmark over existing VLM-based methods.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 11, 2025

Critical Tokens Matter: Token-Level Contrastive Estimation Enhence LLM's Reasoning Capability

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable performance on reasoning tasks. They utilize autoregressive token generation to construct reasoning trajectories, enabling the development of a coherent chain of thought. In this work, we explore the impact of individual tokens on the final outcomes of reasoning tasks. We identify the existence of ``critical tokens'' that lead to incorrect reasoning trajectories in LLMs. Specifically, we find that LLMs tend to produce positive outcomes when forced to decode other tokens instead of critical tokens. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel approach - cDPO - designed to automatically recognize and conduct token-level rewards for the critical tokens during the alignment process. Specifically, we develop a contrastive estimation approach to automatically identify critical tokens. It is achieved by comparing the generation likelihood of positive and negative models. To achieve this, we separately fine-tune the positive and negative models on various reasoning trajectories, consequently, they are capable of identifying identify critical tokens within incorrect trajectories that contribute to erroneous outcomes. Moreover, to further align the model with the critical token information during the alignment process, we extend the conventional DPO algorithms to token-level DPO and utilize the differential likelihood from the aforementioned positive and negative model as important weight for token-level DPO learning.Experimental results on GSM8K and MATH500 benchmarks with two-widely used models Llama-3 (8B and 70B) and deepseek-math (7B) demonstrate the effectiveness of the propsoed approach cDPO.

  • 9 authors
·
Nov 29, 2024 7

Priority-Centric Human Motion Generation in Discrete Latent Space

Text-to-motion generation is a formidable task, aiming to produce human motions that align with the input text while also adhering to human capabilities and physical laws. While there have been advancements in diffusion models, their application in discrete spaces remains underexplored. Current methods often overlook the varying significance of different motions, treating them uniformly. It is essential to recognize that not all motions hold the same relevance to a particular textual description. Some motions, being more salient and informative, should be given precedence during generation. In response, we introduce a Priority-Centric Motion Discrete Diffusion Model (M2DM), which utilizes a Transformer-based VQ-VAE to derive a concise, discrete motion representation, incorporating a global self-attention mechanism and a regularization term to counteract code collapse. We also present a motion discrete diffusion model that employs an innovative noise schedule, determined by the significance of each motion token within the entire motion sequence. This approach retains the most salient motions during the reverse diffusion process, leading to more semantically rich and varied motions. Additionally, we formulate two strategies to gauge the importance of motion tokens, drawing from both textual and visual indicators. Comprehensive experiments on the HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets confirm that our model surpasses existing techniques in fidelity and diversity, particularly for intricate textual descriptions.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 28, 2023

Fibration Policy Optimization

Large language models are increasingly trained as heterogeneous systems spanning multiple domains, expert partitions, and agentic pipelines, yet prevalent proximal objectives operate at a single scale and lack a principled mechanism for coupling token-level, trajectory-level, and higher-level hierarchical stability control. To bridge this gap, we derive the Aggregational Policy Censoring Objective (APC-Obj), the first exact unconstrained reformulation of sample-based TV-TRPO, establishing that clipping-based surrogate design and trust-region optimization are dual formulations of the same problem. Building on this foundation, we develop Fiber Bundle Gating (FBG), an algebraic framework that organizes sampled RL data as a fiber bundle and decomposes ratio gating into a base-level gate on trajectory aggregates and a fiber-level gate on per-token residuals, with provable first-order agreement with the true RL objective near on-policy. From APC-Obj and FBG we derive Fibration Policy Optimization (or simply, FiberPO), a concrete objective whose Jacobian is block-diagonal over trajectories, reduces to identity at on-policy, and provides better update direction thus improving token efficiency. The compositional nature of the framework extends beyond the trajectory-token case: fibrations compose algebraically into a Fibration Gating Hierarchy (FGH) that scales the same gating mechanism to arbitrary hierarchical depth without new primitives, as demonstrated by FiberPO-Domain, a four-level instantiation with independent trust-region budgets at the domain, prompt group, trajectory, and token levels. Together, these results connect the trust-region theory, a compositional algebraic structure, and practical multi-scale stability control into a unified framework for LLM policy optimization.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 9

Progressive Pretext Task Learning for Human Trajectory Prediction

Human trajectory prediction is a practical task of predicting the future positions of pedestrians on the road, which typically covers all temporal ranges from short-term to long-term within a trajectory. However, existing works attempt to address the entire trajectory prediction with a singular, uniform training paradigm, neglecting the distinction between short-term and long-term dynamics in human trajectories. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a novel Progressive Pretext Task learning (PPT) framework, which progressively enhances the model's capacity of capturing short-term dynamics and long-term dependencies for the final entire trajectory prediction. Specifically, we elaborately design three stages of training tasks in the PPT framework. In the first stage, the model learns to comprehend the short-term dynamics through a stepwise next-position prediction task. In the second stage, the model is further enhanced to understand long-term dependencies through a destination prediction task. In the final stage, the model aims to address the entire future trajectory task by taking full advantage of the knowledge from previous stages. To alleviate the knowledge forgetting, we further apply a cross-task knowledge distillation. Additionally, we design a Transformer-based trajectory predictor, which is able to achieve highly efficient two-step reasoning by integrating a destination-driven prediction strategy and a group of learnable prompt embeddings. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks have demonstrated that our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance with high efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/iSEE-Laboratory/PPT.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 16, 2024

VisionTrap: Vision-Augmented Trajectory Prediction Guided by Textual Descriptions

Predicting future trajectories for other road agents is an essential task for autonomous vehicles. Established trajectory prediction methods primarily use agent tracks generated by a detection and tracking system and HD map as inputs. In this work, we propose a novel method that also incorporates visual input from surround-view cameras, allowing the model to utilize visual cues such as human gazes and gestures, road conditions, vehicle turn signals, etc, which are typically hidden from the model in prior methods. Furthermore, we use textual descriptions generated by a Vision-Language Model (VLM) and refined by a Large Language Model (LLM) as supervision during training to guide the model on what to learn from the input data. Despite using these extra inputs, our method achieves a latency of 53 ms, making it feasible for real-time processing, which is significantly faster than that of previous single-agent prediction methods with similar performance. Our experiments show that both the visual inputs and the textual descriptions contribute to improvements in trajectory prediction performance, and our qualitative analysis highlights how the model is able to exploit these additional inputs. Lastly, in this work we create and release the nuScenes-Text dataset, which augments the established nuScenes dataset with rich textual annotations for every scene, demonstrating the positive impact of utilizing VLM on trajectory prediction. Our project page is at https://moonseokha.github.io/VisionTrap/

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 17, 2024

(1D) Ordered Tokens Enable Efficient Test-Time Search

Tokenization is a key component of autoregressive (AR) generative models, converting raw data into more manageable units for modeling. Commonly, tokens describe local information, such as regions of pixels in images or word pieces in text, and AR generation predicts these tokens in a fixed order. A worthwhile question is whether token structures affect the ability to steer the generation through test-time search, where multiple candidate generations are explored and evaluated by a verifier. Using image generation as our testbed, we hypothesize that recent 1D ordered tokenizers with coarse-to-fine structure can be more amenable to search than classical 2D grid structures. This is rooted in the fact that the intermediate states in coarse-to-fine sequences carry semantic meaning that verifiers can reliably evaluate, enabling effective steering during generation. Through controlled experiments, we find that AR models trained on coarse-to-fine ordered tokens exhibit improved test-time scaling behavior compared to grid-based counterparts. Moreover, we demonstrate that, thanks to the ordered structure, pure test-time search over token sequences (i.e., without training an AR model) can perform training-free text-to-image generation when guided by an image-text verifier. Beyond this, we systematically study how classical search algorithms (best-of-N, beam search, lookahead search) interact with different token structures, as well as the role of different verifiers and AR priors. Our results highlight the impact of token structure on inference-time scalability and provide practical guidance for test-time scaling in AR models.

EPFL-VILAB EPFL VILAB
·
Apr 15 2

Interactive Spatiotemporal Token Attention Network for Skeleton-based General Interactive Action Recognition

Recognizing interactive action plays an important role in human-robot interaction and collaboration. Previous methods use late fusion and co-attention mechanism to capture interactive relations, which have limited learning capability or inefficiency to adapt to more interacting entities. With assumption that priors of each entity are already known, they also lack evaluations on a more general setting addressing the diversity of subjects. To address these problems, we propose an Interactive Spatiotemporal Token Attention Network (ISTA-Net), which simultaneously model spatial, temporal, and interactive relations. Specifically, our network contains a tokenizer to partition Interactive Spatiotemporal Tokens (ISTs), which is a unified way to represent motions of multiple diverse entities. By extending the entity dimension, ISTs provide better interactive representations. To jointly learn along three dimensions in ISTs, multi-head self-attention blocks integrated with 3D convolutions are designed to capture inter-token correlations. When modeling correlations, a strict entity ordering is usually irrelevant for recognizing interactive actions. To this end, Entity Rearrangement is proposed to eliminate the orderliness in ISTs for interchangeable entities. Extensive experiments on four datasets verify the effectiveness of ISTA-Net by outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Necolizer/ISTA-Net

SunYatsen Sun Yat-Sen University
·
Jul 14, 2023

R2R: Efficiently Navigating Divergent Reasoning Paths with Small-Large Model Token Routing

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve impressive reasoning capabilities at the cost of substantial inference overhead, posing substantial deployment challenges. Although distilled Small Language Models (SLMs) significantly enhance efficiency, their performance suffers as they fail to follow LLMs' reasoning paths. Luckily, we reveal that only a small fraction of tokens genuinely diverge reasoning paths between LLMs and SLMs. Most generated tokens are either identical or exhibit neutral differences, such as minor variations in abbreviations or expressions. Leveraging this insight, we introduce **Roads to Rome (R2R)**, a neural token routing method that selectively utilizes LLMs only for these critical, path-divergent tokens, while leaving the majority of token generation to the SLM. We also develop an automatic data generation pipeline that identifies divergent tokens and generates token-level routing labels to train the lightweight router. We apply R2R to combine R1-1.5B and R1-32B models from the DeepSeek family, and evaluate on challenging math, coding, and QA benchmarks. With an average activated parameter size of 5.6B, R2R surpasses the average accuracy of R1-7B by 1.6x, outperforming even the R1-14B model. Compared to R1-32B, it delivers a 2.8x wall-clock speedup with comparable performance, advancing the Pareto frontier of test-time scaling efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/thu-nics/R2R.

  • 9 authors
·
May 27, 2025 2

Regions are Who Walk Them: a Large Pre-trained Spatiotemporal Model Based on Human Mobility for Ubiquitous Urban Sensing

User profiling and region analysis are two tasks of significant commercial value. However, in practical applications, modeling different features typically involves four main steps: data preparation, data processing, model establishment, evaluation, and optimization. This process is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Repeating this workflow for each feature results in abundant development time for tasks and a reduced overall volume of task development. Indeed, human mobility data contains a wealth of information. Several successful cases suggest that conducting in-depth analysis of population movement data could potentially yield meaningful profiles about users and areas. Nonetheless, most related works have not thoroughly utilized the semantic information within human mobility data and trained on a fixed number of the regions. To tap into the rich information within population movement, based on the perspective that Regions Are Who walk them, we propose a large spatiotemporal model based on trajectories (RAW). It possesses the following characteristics: 1) Tailored for trajectory data, introducing a GPT-like structure with a parameter count of up to 1B; 2) Introducing a spatiotemporal fine-tuning module, interpreting trajectories as collection of users to derive arbitrary region embedding. This framework allows rapid task development based on the large spatiotemporal model. We conducted extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of our proposed large spatiotemporal model. It's evident that our proposed method, relying solely on human mobility data without additional features, exhibits a certain level of relevance in user profiling and region analysis. Moreover, our model showcases promising predictive capabilities in trajectory generation tasks based on the current state, offering the potential for further innovative work utilizing this large spatiotemporal model.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 17, 2023

SingularTrajectory: Universal Trajectory Predictor Using Diffusion Model

There are five types of trajectory prediction tasks: deterministic, stochastic, domain adaptation, momentary observation, and few-shot. These associated tasks are defined by various factors, such as the length of input paths, data split and pre-processing methods. Interestingly, even though they commonly take sequential coordinates of observations as input and infer future paths in the same coordinates as output, designing specialized architectures for each task is still necessary. For the other task, generality issues can lead to sub-optimal performances. In this paper, we propose SingularTrajectory, a diffusion-based universal trajectory prediction framework to reduce the performance gap across the five tasks. The core of SingularTrajectory is to unify a variety of human dynamics representations on the associated tasks. To do this, we first build a Singular space to project all types of motion patterns from each task into one embedding space. We next propose an adaptive anchor working in the Singular space. Unlike traditional fixed anchor methods that sometimes yield unacceptable paths, our adaptive anchor enables correct anchors, which are put into a wrong location, based on a traversability map. Finally, we adopt a diffusion-based predictor to further enhance the prototype paths using a cascaded denoising process. Our unified framework ensures the generality across various benchmark settings such as input modality, and trajectory lengths. Extensive experiments on five public benchmarks demonstrate that SingularTrajectory substantially outperforms existing models, highlighting its effectiveness in estimating general dynamics of human movements. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/inhwanbae/SingularTrajectory .

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 27, 2024 1

Order-agnostic Identifier for Large Language Model-based Generative Recommendation

Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for generative recommendation has attracted significant research interest, where item tokenization is a critical step. It involves assigning item identifiers for LLMs to encode user history and generate the next item. Existing approaches leverage either token-sequence identifiers, representing items as discrete token sequences, or single-token identifiers, using ID or semantic embeddings. Token-sequence identifiers face issues such as the local optima problem in beam search and low generation efficiency due to step-by-step generation. In contrast, single-token identifiers fail to capture rich semantics or encode Collaborative Filtering (CF) information, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address these issues, we propose two fundamental principles for item identifier design: 1) integrating both CF and semantic information to fully capture multi-dimensional item information, and 2) designing order-agnostic identifiers without token dependency, mitigating the local optima issue and achieving simultaneous generation for generation efficiency. Accordingly, we introduce a novel set identifier paradigm for LLM-based generative recommendation, representing each item as a set of order-agnostic tokens. To implement this paradigm, we propose SETRec, which leverages CF and semantic tokenizers to obtain order-agnostic multi-dimensional tokens. To eliminate token dependency, SETRec uses a sparse attention mask for user history encoding and a query-guided generation mechanism for simultaneous token generation. We instantiate SETRec on T5 and Qwen (from 1.5B to 7B). Extensive experiments demonstrate its effectiveness under various scenarios (e.g., full ranking, warm- and cold-start ranking, and various item popularity groups). Moreover, results validate SETRec's superior efficiency and show promising scalability on cold-start items as model sizes increase.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 15, 2025

UltraHorizon: Benchmarking Agent Capabilities in Ultra Long-Horizon Scenarios

Autonomous agents have recently achieved remarkable progress across diverse domains, yet most evaluations focus on short-horizon, fully observable tasks. In contrast, many critical real-world tasks, such as large-scale software development, commercial investment, and scientific discovery, unfold in long-horizon and partially observable scenarios where success hinges on sustained reasoning, planning, memory management, and tool use. Existing benchmarks rarely capture these long-horizon challenges, leaving a gap in systematic evaluation. To bridge this gap, we introduce UltraHorizon a novel benchmark that measures the foundational capabilities essential for complex real-world challenges. We use exploration as a unifying task across three distinct environments to validate these core competencies. Agents are designed in long-horizon discovery tasks where they must iteratively uncover hidden rules through sustained reasoning, planning, memory and tools management, and interaction with environments. Under the heaviest scale setting, trajectories average 200k+ tokens and 400+ tool calls, whereas in standard configurations they still exceed 35k tokens and involve more than 60 tool calls on average. Our extensive experiments reveal that LLM-agents consistently underperform in these settings, whereas human participants achieve higher scores, underscoring a persistent gap in agents' long-horizon abilities. We also observe that simple scaling fails in our task. To better illustrate the failure of agents, we conduct an in-depth analysis of collected trajectories. We identify eight types of errors and attribute them to two primary causes: in-context locking and functional fundamental capability gaps. https://github.com/StarDewXXX/UltraHorizon{Our code will be available here.}

  • 18 authors
·
Sep 25, 2025 2

Learning Trajectory-Word Alignments for Video-Language Tasks

In a video, an object usually appears as the trajectory, i.e., it spans over a few spatial but longer temporal patches, that contains abundant spatiotemporal contexts. However, modern Video-Language BERTs (VDL-BERTs) neglect this trajectory characteristic that they usually follow image-language BERTs (IL-BERTs) to deploy the patch-to-word (P2W) attention that may over-exploit trivial spatial contexts and neglect significant temporal contexts. To amend this, we propose a novel TW-BERT to learn Trajectory-Word alignment by a newly designed trajectory-to-word (T2W) attention for solving video-language tasks. Moreover, previous VDL-BERTs usually uniformly sample a few frames into the model while different trajectories have diverse graininess, i.e., some trajectories span longer frames and some span shorter, and using a few frames will lose certain useful temporal contexts. However, simply sampling more frames will also make pre-training infeasible due to the largely increased training burdens. To alleviate the problem, during the fine-tuning stage, we insert a novel Hierarchical Frame-Selector (HFS) module into the video encoder. HFS gradually selects the suitable frames conditioned on the text context for the later cross-modal encoder to learn better trajectory-word alignments. By the proposed T2W attention and HFS, our TW-BERT achieves SOTA performances on text-to-video retrieval tasks, and comparable performances on video question-answering tasks with some VDL-BERTs trained on much more data. The code will be available in the supplementary material.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 5, 2023

EigenTrajectory: Low-Rank Descriptors for Multi-Modal Trajectory Forecasting

Capturing high-dimensional social interactions and feasible futures is essential for predicting trajectories. To address this complex nature, several attempts have been devoted to reducing the dimensionality of the output variables via parametric curve fitting such as the B\'ezier curve and B-spline function. However, these functions, which originate in computer graphics fields, are not suitable to account for socially acceptable human dynamics. In this paper, we present EigenTrajectory (ET), a trajectory prediction approach that uses a novel trajectory descriptor to form a compact space, known here as ET space, in place of Euclidean space, for representing pedestrian movements. We first reduce the complexity of the trajectory descriptor via a low-rank approximation. We transform the pedestrians' history paths into our ET space represented by spatio-temporal principle components, and feed them into off-the-shelf trajectory forecasting models. The inputs and outputs of the models as well as social interactions are all gathered and aggregated in the corresponding ET space. Lastly, we propose a trajectory anchor-based refinement method to cover all possible futures in the proposed ET space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our EigenTrajectory predictor can significantly improve both the prediction accuracy and reliability of existing trajectory forecasting models on public benchmarks, indicating that the proposed descriptor is suited to represent pedestrian behaviors. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/inhwanbae/EigenTrajectory .

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 18, 2023

TITAN: Future Forecast using Action Priors

We consider the problem of predicting the future trajectory of scene agents from egocentric views obtained from a moving platform. This problem is important in a variety of domains, particularly for autonomous systems making reactive or strategic decisions in navigation. In an attempt to address this problem, we introduce TITAN (Trajectory Inference using Targeted Action priors Network), a new model that incorporates prior positions, actions, and context to forecast future trajectory of agents and future ego-motion. In the absence of an appropriate dataset for this task, we created the TITAN dataset that consists of 700 labeled video-clips (with odometry) captured from a moving vehicle on highly interactive urban traffic scenes in Tokyo. Our dataset includes 50 labels including vehicle states and actions, pedestrian age groups, and targeted pedestrian action attributes that are organized hierarchically corresponding to atomic, simple/complex-contextual, transportive, and communicative actions. To evaluate our model, we conducted extensive experiments on the TITAN dataset, revealing significant performance improvement against baselines and state-of-the-art algorithms. We also report promising results from our Agent Importance Mechanism (AIM), a module which provides insight into assessment of perceived risk by calculating the relative influence of each agent on the future ego-trajectory. The dataset is available at https://usa.honda-ri.com/titan

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 30, 2020

ReAct Meets ActRe: When Language Agents Enjoy Training Data Autonomy

Language agents have demonstrated autonomous decision-making abilities by reasoning with foundation models. Recently, efforts have been made to train language agents for performance improvement, with multi-step reasoning and action trajectories as the training data. However, collecting such trajectories still requires considerable human effort, by either artificial annotation or implementations of diverse prompting frameworks. In this work, we propose A^3T, a framework that enables the Autonomous Annotation of Agent Trajectories in the style of ReAct. The central role is an ActRe prompting agent, which explains the reason for an arbitrary action. When randomly sampling an external action, the ReAct-style agent could query the ActRe agent with the action to obtain its textual rationales. Novel trajectories are then synthesized by prepending the posterior reasoning from ActRe to the sampled action. In this way, the ReAct-style agent executes multiple trajectories for the failed tasks, and selects the successful ones to supplement its failed trajectory for contrastive self-training. Realized by policy gradient methods with binarized rewards, the contrastive self-training with accumulated trajectories facilitates a closed loop for multiple rounds of language agent self-improvement. We conduct experiments using QLoRA fine-tuning with the open-sourced Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2. In AlfWorld, the agent trained with A^3T obtains a 1-shot success rate of 96%, and 100% success with 4 iterative rounds. In WebShop, the 1-shot performance of the A^3T agent matches human average, and 4 rounds of iterative refinement lead to the performance approaching human experts. A^3T agents significantly outperform existing techniques, including prompting with GPT-4, advanced agent frameworks, and fully fine-tuned LLMs.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 21, 2024

OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated human-like computer control capability. Despite their utility in advancing digital automation, a critical bottleneck persists: collecting high-quality trajectory data for training. Common practices for collecting such data rely on human supervision or synthetic data generation through executing pre-defined tasks, which are either resource-intensive or unable to guarantee data quality. Moreover, these methods suffer from limited data diversity and significant gaps between synthetic data and real-world environments. To address these challenges, we propose OS-Genesis, a novel GUI data synthesis pipeline that reverses the conventional trajectory collection process. Instead of relying on pre-defined tasks, OS-Genesis enables agents first to perceive environments and perform step-wise interactions, then retrospectively derive high-quality tasks to enable trajectory-level exploration. A trajectory reward model is then employed to ensure the quality of the generated trajectories. We demonstrate that training GUI agents with OS-Genesis significantly improves their performance on highly challenging online benchmarks. In-depth analysis further validates OS-Genesis's efficiency and its superior data quality and diversity compared to existing synthesis methods. Our codes, data, and checkpoints are available at https://qiushisun.github.io/OS-Genesis-Home/{OS-Genesis Homepage}.

  • 15 authors
·
Dec 27, 2024 4

GPSToken: Gaussian Parameterized Spatially-adaptive Tokenization for Image Representation and Generation

Effective and efficient tokenization plays an important role in image representation and generation. Conventional methods, constrained by uniform 2D/1D grid tokenization, are inflexible to represent regions with varying shapes and textures and at different locations, limiting their efficacy of feature representation. In this work, we propose GPSToken, a novel Gaussian Parameterized Spatially-adaptive Tokenization framework, to achieve non-uniform image tokenization by leveraging parametric 2D Gaussians to dynamically model the shape, position, and textures of different image regions. We first employ an entropy-driven algorithm to partition the image into texture-homogeneous regions of variable sizes. Then, we parameterize each region as a 2D Gaussian (mean for position, covariance for shape) coupled with texture features. A specialized transformer is trained to optimize the Gaussian parameters, enabling continuous adaptation of position/shape and content-aware feature extraction. During decoding, Gaussian parameterized tokens are reconstructed into 2D feature maps through a differentiable splatting-based renderer, bridging our adaptive tokenization with standard decoders for end-to-end training. GPSToken disentangles spatial layout (Gaussian parameters) from texture features to enable efficient two-stage generation: structural layout synthesis using lightweight networks, followed by structure-conditioned texture generation. Experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of GPSToken, which achieves rFID and FID scores of 0.65 and 1.50 on image reconstruction and generation tasks using 128 tokens, respectively. Codes and models of GPSToken can be found at https://github.com/xtudbxk/GPSToken{https://github.com/xtudbxk/GPSToken}.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 1, 2025

What's the Magic Word? A Control Theory of LLM Prompting

Prompt engineering is crucial for deploying LLMs but is poorly understood mathematically. We formalize LLM systems as a class of discrete stochastic dynamical systems to explore prompt engineering through the lens of control theory. We investigate the reachable set of output token sequences R_y(mathbf x_0) for which there exists a control input sequence mathbf u for each mathbf y in R_y(mathbf x_0) that steers the LLM to output mathbf y from initial state sequence mathbf x_0. We offer analytic analysis on the limitations on the controllability of self-attention in terms of reachable set, where we prove an upper bound on the reachable set of outputs R_y(mathbf x_0) as a function of the singular values of the parameter matrices. We present complementary empirical analysis on the controllability of a panel of LLMs, including Falcon-7b, Llama-7b, and Falcon-40b. Our results demonstrate a lower bound on the reachable set of outputs R_y(mathbf x_0) w.r.t. initial state sequences mathbf x_0 sampled from the Wikitext dataset. We find that the correct next Wikitext token following sequence mathbf x_0 is reachable over 97% of the time with prompts of kleq 10 tokens. We also establish that the top 75 most likely next tokens, as estimated by the LLM itself, are reachable at least 85% of the time with prompts of kleq 10 tokens. Intriguingly, short prompt sequences can dramatically alter the likelihood of specific outputs, even making the least likely tokens become the most likely ones. This control-centric analysis of LLMs demonstrates the significant and poorly understood role of input sequences in steering output probabilities, offering a foundational perspective for enhancing language model system capabilities.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 2, 2023

Which Reasoning Trajectories Teach Students to Reason Better? A Simple Metric of Informative Alignment

Long chain-of-thought (CoT) trajectories provide rich supervision signals for distilling reasoning from teacher to student LLMs. However, both prior work and our experiments show that trajectories from stronger teachers do not necessarily yield better students, highlighting the importance of data-student suitability in distillation. Existing methods assess suitability primarily through student likelihood, favoring trajectories that closely align with the model's current behavior but overlooking more informative ones. Addressing this, we propose Rank-Surprisal Ratio (RSR), a simple metric that captures both alignment and informativeness to assess the suitability of a reasoning trajectory. RSR is motivated by the observation that effective trajectories typically combine low absolute probability with relatively high-ranked tokens under the student model, balancing learning signal strength and behavioral alignment. Concretely, RSR is defined as the ratio of a trajectory's average token-wise rank to its average negative log-likelihood, and is straightforward to compute and interpret. Across five student models and reasoning trajectories from 11 diverse teachers, RSR strongly correlates with post-training performance (average Spearman 0.86), outperforming existing metrics. We further demonstrate its practical utility in both trajectory selection and teacher selection.

On Randomness in Agentic Evals

Agentic systems are evaluated on benchmarks where agents interact with environments to solve tasks. Most papers report a pass@1 score computed from a single run per task, assuming this gives a reliable performance estimate. We test this assumption by collecting 60,000 agentic trajectories on SWE-Bench-Verified, spanning three models and two scaffolds. We find substantial variance: single-run pass@1 estimates vary by 2.2 to 6.0 percentage points depending on which run is selected, with standard deviations exceeding 1.5 percentage points even at temperature 0. This variance has critical implications: reported improvements of 2--3 percentage points may reflect evaluation noise rather than genuine algorithmic progress. Through token-level analysis, we show that trajectories diverge early, often within the first few percent of tokens, and that these small differences cascade into different solution strategies. To enable reliable evaluation of agentic systems, we recommend three concrete practices: (1) estimate pass@1 from multiple independent runs per task, especially when measuring small improvements, (2) use statistical power analysis to determine the number of runs needed to detect expected effect sizes, and (3) consider metrics like pass@k (optimistic bound) and pass^k (pessimistic bound) with k>1 to better characterize the full performance envelope. While these practices increase evaluation cost, they are essential for distinguishing genuine scientific progress from statistical noise.

Interaction Dataset of Autonomous Vehicles with Traffic Lights and Signs

This paper presents the development of a comprehensive dataset capturing interactions between Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and traffic control devices, specifically traffic lights and stop signs. Derived from the Waymo Motion dataset, our work addresses a critical gap in the existing literature by providing real-world trajectory data on how AVs navigate these traffic control devices. We propose a methodology for identifying and extracting relevant interaction trajectory data from the Waymo Motion dataset, incorporating over 37,000 instances with traffic lights and 44,000 with stop signs. Our methodology includes defining rules to identify various interaction types, extracting trajectory data, and applying a wavelet-based denoising method to smooth the acceleration and speed profiles and eliminate anomalous values, thereby enhancing the trajectory quality. Quality assessment metrics indicate that trajectories obtained in this study have anomaly proportions in acceleration and jerk profiles reduced to near-zero levels across all interaction categories. By making this dataset publicly available, we aim to address the current gap in datasets containing AV interaction behaviors with traffic lights and signs. Based on the organized and published dataset, we can gain a more in-depth understanding of AVs' behavior when interacting with traffic lights and signs. This will facilitate research on AV integration into existing transportation infrastructures and networks, supporting the development of more accurate behavioral models and simulation tools.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 21, 2025

Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks for Speed Control in Trajectory Simulation

Motion behaviour is driven by several factors -- goals, presence and actions of neighbouring agents, social relations, physical and social norms, the environment with its variable characteristics, and further. Most factors are not directly observable and must be modelled from context. Trajectory prediction, is thus a hard problem, and has seen increasing attention from researchers in the recent years. Prediction of motion, in application, must be realistic, diverse and controllable. In spite of increasing focus on multimodal trajectory generation, most methods still lack means for explicitly controlling different modes of the data generation. Further, most endeavours invest heavily in designing special mechanisms to learn the interactions in latent space. We present Conditional Speed GAN (CSG), that allows controlled generation of diverse and socially acceptable trajectories, based on user controlled speed. During prediction, CSG forecasts future speed from latent space and conditions its generation based on it. CSG is comparable to state-of-the-art GAN methods in terms of the benchmark distance metrics, while being simple and useful for simulation and data augmentation for different contexts such as fast or slow paced environments. Additionally, we compare the effect of different aggregation mechanisms and show that a naive approach of concatenation works comparable to its attention and pooling alternatives.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 21, 2021