Daily Papers

Unified vision-language models (VLMs) integrate visual understanding and visual generation within a single autoregressive backbone, but their joint training is computationally expensive and largely overlooked from an efficiency perspective. In this work, we study the feasibility and limits of token-reduction-based acceleration for unified VLM training. Through a systematic analysis of layerwise attention allocation, we uncover a fundamental asymmetry: visual understanding exhibits substantial late-layer visual redundancy, whereas visual generation maintains persistent dependence on image tokens across depth. Guided by this observation, we design task-specific accelerators that selectively reduce image-token computation for each objective. While these methods achieve significant efficiency gains in isolated settings, we observe a consistent synergy loss under unified training -- task-specific token dropping necessitates divergent parameter pathways and eliminates the mutual performance gains typically observed in joint optimization. Our findings suggest that efficient unified modeling requires preserving shared cross-task structures, highlighting the need for synergy-aware acceleration strategies. Project page: https://chicychen.github.io/TokenReductionUnifiedVLM/.

In this paper, we propose RecIS, a unified Sparse-Dense training framework designed to achieve two primary goals: 1. Unified Framework To create a Unified sparse-dense training framework based on the PyTorch ecosystem that meets the training needs of industrial-grade recommendation models that integrated with large models. 2.System Optimization To optimize the sparse component, offering superior efficiency over the TensorFlow-based recommendation models. The dense component, meanwhile, leverages existing optimization technologies within the PyTorch ecosystem. Currently, RecIS is being used in Alibaba for numerous large-model enhanced recommendation training tasks, and some traditional sparse models have also begun training in it.

In-context generation is a key component of large language models' (LLMs) open-task generalization capability. By leveraging a few examples as context, LLMs can perform both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks. Recent advancements in auto-regressive vision-language models (VLMs) built upon LLMs have showcased impressive performance in text-to-image generation. However, the potential of in-context learning for general image generation tasks remains largely unexplored. To address this, we introduce X-Prompt, a purely auto-regressive large-vision language model designed to deliver competitive performance across a wide range of both seen and unseen image generation tasks, all within a unified in-context learning framework. X-Prompt incorporates a specialized design that efficiently compresses valuable features from in-context examples, supporting longer in-context token sequences and improving its ability to generalize to unseen tasks. A unified training task for both text and image prediction enables X-Prompt to handle general image generation with enhanced task awareness from in-context examples. Extensive experiments validate the model's performance across diverse seen image generation tasks and its capacity to generalize to previously unseen tasks.

The pre-training task is indispensable for the text-to-image person re-identification (T2I-ReID) task. However, there are two underlying inconsistencies between these two tasks that may impact the performance; i) Data inconsistency. A large domain gap exists between the generic images/texts used in public pre-trained models and the specific person data in the T2I-ReID task. This gap is especially severe for texts, as general textual data are usually unable to describe specific people in fine-grained detail. ii) Training inconsistency. The processes of pre-training of images and texts are independent, despite cross-modality learning being critical to T2I-ReID. To address the above issues, we present a new unified pre-training pipeline (UniPT) designed specifically for the T2I-ReID task. We first build a large-scale text-labeled person dataset "LUPerson-T", in which pseudo-textual descriptions of images are automatically generated by the CLIP paradigm using a divide-conquer-combine strategy. Benefiting from this dataset, we then utilize a simple vision-and-language pre-training framework to explicitly align the feature space of the image and text modalities during pre-training. In this way, the pre-training task and the T2I-ReID task are made consistent with each other on both data and training levels. Without the need for any bells and whistles, our UniPT achieves competitive Rank-1 accuracy of, ie, 68.50%, 60.09%, and 51.85% on CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES and RSTPReid, respectively. Both the LUPerson-T dataset and code are available at https;//github.com/ZhiyinShao-H/UniPT.

The scale diversity of point cloud data presents significant challenges in developing unified representation learning techniques for 3D vision. Currently, there are few unified 3D models, and no existing pre-training method is equally effective for both object- and scene-level point clouds. In this paper, we introduce UniPre3D, the first unified pre-training method that can be seamlessly applied to point clouds of any scale and 3D models of any architecture. Our approach predicts Gaussian primitives as the pre-training task and employs differentiable Gaussian splatting to render images, enabling precise pixel-level supervision and end-to-end optimization. To further regulate the complexity of the pre-training task and direct the model's focus toward geometric structures, we integrate 2D features from pre-trained image models to incorporate well-established texture knowledge. We validate the universal effectiveness of our proposed method through extensive experiments across a variety of object- and scene-level tasks, using diverse point cloud models as backbones. Code is available at https://github.com/wangzy22/UniPre3D.

Building scalable vision-language models to learn from diverse, multimodal data remains an open challenge. In this paper, we introduce an Efficient Vision-languagE foundation model, namely EVE, which is one unified multimodal Transformer pre-trained solely by one unified pre-training task. Specifically, EVE encodes both vision and language within a shared Transformer network integrated with modality-aware sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) modules, which capture modality-specific information by selectively switching to different experts. To unify pre-training tasks of vision and language, EVE performs masked signal modeling on image-text pairs to reconstruct masked signals, i.e., image pixels and text tokens, given visible signals. This simple yet effective pre-training objective accelerates training by 3.5x compared to the model pre-trained with Image-Text Contrastive and Image-Text Matching losses. Owing to the combination of the unified architecture and pre-training task, EVE is easy to scale up, enabling better downstream performance with fewer resources and faster training speed. Despite its simplicity, EVE achieves state-of-the-art performance on various vision-language downstream tasks, including visual question answering, visual reasoning, and image-text retrieval.

We introduce OneDiffusion, a versatile, large-scale diffusion model that seamlessly supports bidirectional image synthesis and understanding across diverse tasks. It enables conditional generation from inputs such as text, depth, pose, layout, and semantic maps, while also handling tasks like image deblurring, upscaling, and reverse processes such as depth estimation and segmentation. Additionally, OneDiffusion allows for multi-view generation, camera pose estimation, and instant personalization using sequential image inputs. Our model takes a straightforward yet effective approach by treating all tasks as frame sequences with varying noise scales during training, allowing any frame to act as a conditioning image at inference time. Our unified training framework removes the need for specialized architectures, supports scalable multi-task training, and adapts smoothly to any resolution, enhancing both generalization and scalability. Experimental results demonstrate competitive performance across tasks in both generation and prediction such as text-to-image, multiview generation, ID preservation, depth estimation and camera pose estimation despite relatively small training dataset. Our code and checkpoint are freely available at https://github.com/lehduong/OneDiffusion

Table reasoning, encompassing tasks such as table question answering, fact verification, and text-to-SQL, requires precise understanding of structured tabular data, coupled with numerical computation and code manipulation for effective inference. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) approaches have achieved notable success but often struggle with generalization and robustness due to biases inherent in imitative learning. We introduce Reasoning-Table, the first application of reinforcement learning (RL) to table reasoning, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Through rigorous data preprocessing, reward design, and tailored training strategies, our method leverages simple rule-based outcome rewards to outperform SFT across multiple benchmarks. Unified training across diverse tasks enables Reasoning-Table to emerge as a robust table reasoning large language model, surpassing larger proprietary models like Claude-3.7-Sonnet by 4.0% on table reasoning benchmarks. The approach also achieves excellent performance on text-to-SQL tasks, reaching 68.3% performance on the BIRD dev dataset with a 7B model. Further experiments demonstrate that Reasoning-Table enhances the model's generalization capabilities and robustness.

Recently, deep learning based facial landmark detection (FLD) methods have achieved considerable success. However, in challenging scenarios such as large pose variations, illumination changes, and facial expression variations, they still struggle to accurately capture the geometric structure of the face, resulting in performance degradation. Moreover, the limited size and diversity of existing FLD datasets hinder robust model training, leading to reduced detection accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose a Frequency-Guided Task-Balancing Transformer (FGTBT), which enhances facial structure perception through frequency-domain modeling and multi-dataset unified training. Specifically, we propose a novel Fine-Grained Multi-Task Balancing loss (FMB-loss), which moves beyond coarse task-level balancing by assigning weights to individual landmarks based on their occurrence across datasets. This enables more effective unified training and mitigates the issue of inconsistent gradient magnitudes. Additionally, a Frequency-Guided Structure-Aware (FGSA) model is designed to utilize frequency-guided structure injection and regularization to help learn facial structure constraints. Extensive experimental results on popular benchmark datasets demonstrate that the integration of the proposed FMB-loss and FGSA model into our FGTBT framework achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Xi0ngxinyu/FGTBT.

Given an unconditional diffusion model and a predictor for a target property of interest (e.g., a classifier), the goal of training-free guidance is to generate samples with desirable target properties without additional training. Existing methods, though effective in various individual applications, often lack theoretical grounding and rigorous testing on extensive benchmarks. As a result, they could even fail on simple tasks, and applying them to a new problem becomes unavoidably difficult. This paper introduces a novel algorithmic framework encompassing existing methods as special cases, unifying the study of training-free guidance into the analysis of an algorithm-agnostic design space. Via theoretical and empirical investigation, we propose an efficient and effective hyper-parameter searching strategy that can be readily applied to any downstream task. We systematically benchmark across 7 diffusion models on 16 tasks with 40 targets, and improve performance by 8.5% on average. Our framework and benchmark offer a solid foundation for conditional generation in a training-free manner.

Deep learning for time series forecasting has traditionally operated within a one-model-per-dataset framework, limiting its potential to leverage the game-changing impact of large pre-trained models. The concept of universal forecasting, emerging from pre-training on a vast collection of time series datasets, envisions a single Large Time Series Model capable of addressing diverse downstream forecasting tasks. However, constructing such a model poses unique challenges specific to time series data: i) cross-frequency learning, ii) accommodating an arbitrary number of variates for multivariate time series, and iii) addressing the varying distributional properties inherent in large-scale data. To address these challenges, we present novel enhancements to the conventional time series Transformer architecture, resulting in our proposed Masked Encoder-based Universal Time Series Forecasting Transformer (Moirai). Trained on our newly introduced Large-scale Open Time Series Archive (LOTSA) featuring over 27B observations across nine domains, Moirai achieves competitive or superior performance as a zero-shot forecaster when compared to full-shot models. Code, model weights, and data will be released.

In recent times, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been trained under two predominant paradigms. Generative training has enabled Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to tackle various complex tasks, yet issues such as hallucinations and weak object discrimination persist. Discriminative training, exemplified by models like CLIP, excels in zero-shot image-text classification and retrieval, yet struggles with complex scenarios requiring fine-grained semantic differentiation. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a unified approach that integrates the strengths of both paradigms. Considering interleaved image-text sequences as the general format of input samples, we introduce a structure-induced training strategy that imposes semantic relationships between input samples and the MLLM's hidden state. This approach enhances the MLLM's ability to capture global semantics and distinguish fine-grained semantics. By leveraging dynamic sequence alignment within the Dynamic Time Warping framework and integrating a novel kernel for fine-grained semantic differentiation, our method effectively balances generative and discriminative tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art results in multiple generative tasks, especially those requiring cognitive and discrimination abilities. Additionally, our method surpasses discriminative benchmarks in interleaved and fine-grained retrieval tasks. By employing a retrieval-augmented generation strategy, our approach further enhances performance in some generative tasks within one model, offering a promising direction for future research in vision-language modeling.

Recent advances in Graphical User Interface (GUI) and embodied navigation have driven significant progress, yet these domains have largely evolved in isolation, with disparate datasets and training paradigms. In this paper, we observe that both tasks can be formulated as Markov Decision Processes (MDP), suggesting a foundational principle for their unification. Hence, we present NaviMaster, the first unified agent capable of seamlessly integrating GUI navigation and embodied navigation within a single framework. Specifically, NaviMaster (i) proposes a visual-target trajectory collection pipeline that generates trajectories for both GUI and embodied tasks in one formulation. (ii) employs a unified reinforcement learning framework on the mix data for better generalization. (iii) designs a novel distance-aware reward to ensure efficient learning from the trajectories. Through extensive experiments on out-of-domain benchmarks, NaviMaster is shown to outperform state-of-the-art agents in GUI navigation, spatial affordance prediction, and embodied navigation. Ablation studies further confirm the efficacy of our unified training strategy, data mixing strategy, and reward design.

Vision-language-action models (VLAs) have recently advanced robotic manipulation, yet the effects of different robot-data pre-training paradigms remain difficult to compare because existing models often differ in architecture, data, action space, and evaluation protocol. We present VLAFlow (Vision-Language-Action Flow), a unified flow-matching framework for controlled comparison of VLA training objectives. Using a heterogeneous robot corpus, OXEMix, containing approximately 5,000 hours of data from DROID, OpenX-Embodiment, OpenX-Augmented, and RoboCOIN, we evaluate four paradigms under the same pi0-style architecture, shared VLM backbone, action expert, and 14-dimensional action space: action-only modeling (MindPI), language-supervised co-training (MindLPI), future latent alignment (MindWPI), and their combination (MindLWPI). Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and SimplerEnv show that action-only pre-training is sensitive to heterogeneous data. In contrast, language supervision helps preserve vision-language generalization, while future latent alignment improves state-transition and action-outcome modeling. By combining both signals, MindLWPI achieves the most stable overall transfer performance across benchmarks. These results suggest a meta-action space view: language and future latent representations provide complementary intermediate constraints that make heterogeneous action supervision smoother and more transferable.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is essential for enhancing the complex reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, existing RL training pipelines are computationally inefficient and resource-intensive, with the rollout phase accounting for over 70% of total training time. Quantized RL training, particularly using FP8 precision, offers a promising approach to mitigating this bottleneck. A commonly adopted strategy applies FP8 precision during rollout while retaining BF16 precision for training. In this work, we present the first comprehensive study of FP8 RL training and demonstrate that the widely used BF16-training + FP8-rollout strategy suffers from severe training instability and catastrophic accuracy collapse under long-horizon rollouts and challenging tasks. Our analysis shows that these failures stem from the off-policy nature of the approach, which introduces substantial numerical mismatch between training and inference. Motivated by these observations, we propose Jet-RL, an FP8 RL training framework that enables robust and stable RL optimization. The key idea is to adopt a unified FP8 precision flow for both training and rollout, thereby minimizing numerical discrepancies and eliminating the need for inefficient inter-step calibration. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of Jet-RL: our method achieves up to 33% speedup in the rollout phase, up to 41% speedup in the training phase, and a 16% end-to-end speedup over BF16 training, while maintaining stable convergence across all settings and incurring negligible accuracy degradation.

Automatic Music Transcription (AMT), inferring musical notes from raw audio, is a challenging task at the core of music understanding. Unlike Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), which typically focuses on the words of a single speaker, AMT often requires transcribing multiple instruments simultaneously, all while preserving fine-scale pitch and timing information. Further, many AMT datasets are "low-resource", as even expert musicians find music transcription difficult and time-consuming. Thus, prior work has focused on task-specific architectures, tailored to the individual instruments of each task. In this work, motivated by the promising results of sequence-to-sequence transfer learning for low-resource Natural Language Processing (NLP), we demonstrate that a general-purpose Transformer model can perform multi-task AMT, jointly transcribing arbitrary combinations of musical instruments across several transcription datasets. We show this unified training framework achieves high-quality transcription results across a range of datasets, dramatically improving performance for low-resource instruments (such as guitar), while preserving strong performance for abundant instruments (such as piano). Finally, by expanding the scope of AMT, we expose the need for more consistent evaluation metrics and better dataset alignment, and provide a strong baseline for this new direction of multi-task AMT.

In-context learning is a new learning paradigm where a language model conditions on a few input-output pairs (demonstrations) and a test input, and directly outputs the prediction. It has been shown highly dependent on the provided demonstrations and thus promotes the research of demonstration retrieval: given a test input, relevant examples are retrieved from the training set to serve as informative demonstrations for in-context learning. While previous works focus on training task-specific retrievers for several tasks separately, these methods are often hard to transfer and scale on various tasks, and separately trained retrievers incur a lot of parameter storage and deployment cost. In this paper, we propose Unified Demonstration Retriever (UDR), a single model to retrieve demonstrations for a wide range of tasks. To train UDR, we cast various tasks' training signals into a unified list-wise ranking formulation by language model's feedback. Then we propose a multi-task list-wise ranking training framework, with an iterative mining strategy to find high-quality candidates, which can help UDR fully incorporate various tasks' signals. Experiments on 30+ tasks across 13 task families and multiple data domains show that UDR significantly outperforms baselines. Further analyses show the effectiveness of each proposed component and UDR's strong ability in various scenarios including different LMs (1.3B - 175B), unseen datasets, varying demonstration quantities, etc.

Sentiment analysis is a crucial task that aims to understand people's emotional states and predict emotional categories based on multimodal information. It consists of several subtasks, such as emotion recognition in conversation (ERC), aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), and multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA). However, unifying all subtasks in sentiment analysis presents numerous challenges, including modality alignment, unified input/output forms, and dataset bias. To address these challenges, we propose a Task-Specific Prompt method to jointly model subtasks and introduce a multimodal generative framework called UniSA. Additionally, we organize the benchmark datasets of main subtasks into a new Sentiment Analysis Evaluation benchmark, SAEval. We design novel pre-training tasks and training methods to enable the model to learn generic sentiment knowledge among subtasks to improve the model's multimodal sentiment perception ability. Our experimental results show that UniSA performs comparably to the state-of-the-art on all subtasks and generalizes well to various subtasks in sentiment analysis.

Autonomous driving requires real-time, robust reasoning across perception, prediction, planning, and behavior. However, conventional end-to-end models fail to generalize in complex scenarios due to the lack of structured reasoning. Recent vision-language models (VLMs) have been applied to driving tasks, but they typically rely on isolated modules and static supervision, limiting their ability to support multi-stage decision-making. We present AutoDriveRL, a unified training framework that formulates autonomous driving as a structured reasoning process over four core tasks. Each task is independently modeled as a vision-language question-answering problem and optimized using task-specific reward models, enabling fine-grained reinforcement signals at different reasoning stages. Within this framework, we train DriveRX, a cross-task reasoning VLM designed for real-time decision-making. DriveRX achieves strong performance on a public benchmark, outperforming GPT-4o in behavior reasoning and demonstrating robustness under complex or corrupted driving conditions. Our analysis further highlights the impact of vision encoder design and reward-guided reasoning compression. We will release the AutoDriveRL framework and the DriveRX model to support future research.

We introduce UniMuMo, a unified multimodal model capable of taking arbitrary text, music, and motion data as input conditions to generate outputs across all three modalities. To address the lack of time-synchronized data, we align unpaired music and motion data based on rhythmic patterns to leverage existing large-scale music-only and motion-only datasets. By converting music, motion, and text into token-based representation, our model bridges these modalities through a unified encoder-decoder transformer architecture. To support multiple generation tasks within a single framework, we introduce several architectural improvements. We propose encoding motion with a music codebook, mapping motion into the same feature space as music. We introduce a music-motion parallel generation scheme that unifies all music and motion generation tasks into a single transformer decoder architecture with a single training task of music-motion joint generation. Moreover, the model is designed by fine-tuning existing pre-trained single-modality models, significantly reducing computational demands. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniMuMo achieves competitive results on all unidirectional generation benchmarks across music, motion, and text modalities. Quantitative results are available in the https://hanyangclarence.github.io/unimumo_demo/{project page}.

Pre-trained models for Natural Languages (NL) like BERT and GPT have been recently shown to transfer well to Programming Languages (PL) and largely benefit a broad set of code-related tasks. Despite their success, most current methods either rely on an encoder-only (or decoder-only) pre-training that is suboptimal for generation (resp. understanding) tasks or process the code snippet in the same way as NL, neglecting the special characteristics of PL such as token types. We present CodeT5, a unified pre-trained encoder-decoder Transformer model that better leverages the code semantics conveyed from the developer-assigned identifiers. Our model employs a unified framework to seamlessly support both code understanding and generation tasks and allows for multi-task learning. Besides, we propose a novel identifier-aware pre-training task that enables the model to distinguish which code tokens are identifiers and to recover them when they are masked. Furthermore, we propose to exploit the user-written code comments with a bimodal dual generation task for better NL-PL alignment. Comprehensive experiments show that CodeT5 significantly outperforms prior methods on understanding tasks such as code defect detection and clone detection, and generation tasks across various directions including PL-NL, NL-PL, and PL-PL. Further analysis reveals that our model can better capture semantic information from code. Our code and pre-trained models are released at https: //github.com/salesforce/CodeT5 .

Unified fashion generation integrates tasks like virtual try-on and garment reconstruction into a single model to reduce task-specific adaptation costs. However, naive parameter sharing across semantically distinct tasks induces negative transfer through severe inter-task gradient conflict. We propose OrthoTryOn, a unified framework mitigating this interference within a shared Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) module. Its Orthogonal Subspace Projection (OSP) applies task-specific orthogonal rotations to bottleneck features, mapping them into decorrelated coordinate frames. To address residual semantic coupling at inference time, we further propose Fisher-guided Negative Guidance (FNG), a parameter-free strategy that utilizes diagonal Fisher information to quantify inter-task sensitivity overlap and explicitly repels generation trajectories from the most confusable task via Classifier-Free Guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OrthoTryOn avoids the severe performance degradation typical of naive unified training and even surpasses independently trained task-specific models, achieving state-of-the-art results across multiple benchmarks while generalizing robustly across diverse diffusion backbones. Code is available at https://github.com/NJU-PCALab/OrthoTryOn.

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) emphasize long chain-of-thought reasoning; yet, we find that their performance on visual tasks is primarily limited by a lack of visual perception as opposed to reasoning itself. In this work, we systematically study the interplay between perception and reasoning in VLM post-training by decomposing their capabilities into three separate training stages: visual perception, visual reasoning, and textual reasoning, incorporating specialized training data. We demonstrate that visual perception (a) requires targeted optimization with specialized data; (b) serves as a fundamental scaffold that should be solidified through staged training before refining visual reasoning; and (c) is more effectively learned via RL than caption-based SFT. Our experiments across multiple VLMs demonstrate that staged training consistently improves both visual perception and reasoning performance over merged training. Notably, models trained with our approach achieve 1.5% higher reasoning accuracy with 20.8% shorter reasoning traces, suggesting that superior perception reduces the need for excessive reasoning. Furthermore, we show that this capability-based staging represents a new curriculum dimension orthogonal to traditional difficulty-based curricula, and combining both yields further additive gains. Our staged-training models achieve superior performance among open-weight VLMs, establishing advanced results on several visual math and perception (e.g., +5.2% on WeMath and +3.7% on RealWorldQA) tasks compared with the base counterpart.

Many text generation applications require the generated text to be factually consistent with input information. Automatic evaluation of factual consistency is challenging. Previous work has developed various metrics that often depend on specific functions, such as natural language inference (NLI) or question answering (QA), trained on limited data. Those metrics thus can hardly assess diverse factual inconsistencies (e.g., contradictions, hallucinations) that occur in varying inputs/outputs (e.g., sentences, documents) from different tasks. In this paper, we propose AlignScore, a new holistic metric that applies to a variety of factual inconsistency scenarios as above. AlignScore is based on a general function of information alignment between two arbitrary text pieces. Crucially, we develop a unified training framework of the alignment function by integrating a large diversity of data sources, resulting in 4.7M training examples from 7 well-established tasks (NLI, QA, paraphrasing, fact verification, information retrieval, semantic similarity, and summarization). We conduct extensive experiments on large-scale benchmarks including 22 evaluation datasets, where 19 of the datasets were never seen in the alignment training. AlignScore achieves substantial improvement over a wide range of previous metrics. Moreover, AlignScore (355M parameters) matches or even outperforms metrics based on ChatGPT and GPT-4 that are orders of magnitude larger.

In this paper, we propose UniCode, a novel approach within the domain of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that learns a unified codebook to efficiently tokenize visual, text, and potentially other types of signals. This innovation addresses a critical limitation in existing MLLMs: their reliance on a text-only codebook, which restricts MLLM's ability to generate images and texts in a multimodal context. Towards this end, we propose a language-driven iterative training paradigm, coupled with an in-context pre-training task we term ``image decompression'', enabling our model to interpret compressed visual data and generate high-quality images.The unified codebook empowers our model to extend visual instruction tuning to non-linguistic generation tasks. Moreover, UniCode is adaptable to diverse stacked quantization approaches in order to compress visual signals into a more compact token representation. Despite using significantly fewer parameters and less data during training, Unicode demonstrates promising capabilities in visual reconstruction and generation. It also achieves performances comparable to leading MLLMs across a spectrum of VQA benchmarks.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate robust zero-shot capabilities across diverse vision-language tasks after training on mega-scale datasets. However, dense prediction tasks, such as semantic segmentation and keypoint detection, pose significant challenges for MLLMs when represented solely as text outputs. Simultaneously, current MLLMs utilizing latent embeddings for visual task decoding generally demonstrate limited adaptability to both multi-task learning and multi-granularity scenarios. In this work, we present REF-VLM, an end-to-end framework for unified training of various visual decoding tasks. To address complex visual decoding scenarios, we introduce the Triplet-Based Referring Paradigm (TRP), which explicitly decouples three critical dimensions in visual decoding tasks through a triplet structure: concepts, decoding types, and targets. TRP employs symbolic delimiters to enforce structured representation learning, enhancing the parsability and interpretability of model outputs. Additionally, we construct Visual-Task Instruction Following Dataset (VTInstruct), a large-scale multi-task dataset containing over 100 million multimodal dialogue samples across 25 task types. Beyond text inputs and outputs, VT-Instruct incorporates various visual prompts such as point, box, scribble, and mask, and generates outputs composed of text and visual units like box, keypoint, depth and mask. The combination of different visual prompts and visual units generates a wide variety of task types, expanding the applicability of REF-VLM significantly. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our REF-VLM outperforms other MLLMs across a variety of standard benchmarks. The code, dataset, and demo available at https://github.com/MacavityT/REF-VLM.

Controllable human voice generation, particularly for expressive domains like singing, remains a significant challenge. This paper introduces Vevo2, a unified framework for controllable speech and singing voice generation. To tackle issues like the scarcity of annotated singing data and to enable flexible controllability, Vevo2 introduces two audio tokenizers: (1) a music-notation-free prosody tokenizer that captures prosody and melody from speech, singing, and even instrumental sounds, and (2) a low-frame-rate (12.5 Hz) content-style tokenizer that encodes linguistic content, prosody, and style for both speech and singing, while enabling timbre disentanglement. Vevo2 consists of an auto-regressive (AR) content-style modeling stage, which aims to enable controllability over text, prosody, and style, as well as a flow-matching acoustic modeling stage that allows for timbre control. Particularly, during pre-training of the AR model, we propose both explicit and implicit prosody learning strategies to bridge speech and singing voice. Moreover, to further enhance the AR model's ability to follow text and prosody, we design a multi-objective post-training task that integrates both intelligibility and prosody similarity alignment. Experimental results show that the unified modeling in Vevo2 brings mutual benefits to both speech and singing voice generation. Additionally, Vevo2's effectiveness across a wide range of synthesis, conversion, and editing tasks for both speech and singing further demonstrates its strong generalization ability and versatility. Audio samples are are available at https://versasinger.github.io/.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown strong promise for robotic task planning, particularly through automatic planning domain generation. However, prior approaches largely treat generated planning domains as planning utilities, which are brittle under imperfect logical states and perception noise, overlooking their potential as scalable sources of reasoning supervision and structured reward signals. At the same time, reasoning LLMs depend on chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision that is expensive to collect for robotic tasks, and reinforcement learning (RL) faces challenges in reward engineering. We propose Self-CriTeach, an LLM self-teaching and self-critiquing framework in which an LLM autonomously generates symbolic planning domains that serve a dual role: (1) enabling large-scale generation of robotic planning problem-plan pairs, and (2) providing structured reward functions. First, the self-written domains enable large-scale generation of symbolic task plans, which are automatically transformed into extended CoT trajectories for supervised fine-tuning. Second, the self-written domains are reused as structured reward functions, providing dense feedback for reinforcement learning without manual reward engineering. This unified training pipeline yields a planning-enhanced LLM with higher planning success rates, stronger cross-task generalization, reduced inference cost, and resistance to imperfect logical states. GitHub Page: https://markli1hoshipu.github.io/Plan_LLM/

Text embedding and generative tasks are usually trained separately based on large language models (LLMs) nowadays. This causes a large amount of training cost and deployment effort. Context compression is also a challenging and pressing task, which is vital to reasoning-driven generation, and agentic tasks requiring long context and continual learning. In this paper, we explore how to unify reasoning-driven generation, reasoning-enhanced text representation and context compression tasks in one forward pass for LLMs. Through meta latent tokens and a unified generative, representative and compressive tuning approach, we propose a training framework named GRC that bridges the three tasks. The trained models can accomplish three objectives in a single forward pass while maintaining modular, LEGO-style flexibility during inference. This design greatly reduces the deployment effort for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and achieves efficient inference and three times data utilization during training. Furthermore, this framework design enables a new paradigm for text embedding: self-reason-latent embeds, and a new generation paradigm, latent memory-augmented generation, where compressed and internalized KV cache with O(1) length is used as the updatable memory. We also propose hybrid paged attention to speed up the inference of our models. Extensive experiments on reasoning-intensive retrieval benchmarks, generative tasks, document compression, latency evaluation, and RAG settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and may shed light on the truly unified model that can handle reasoning-driven generation, embedding and compression tasks seamlessly.

In this report, we introduce Ovis-U1, a 3-billion-parameter unified model that integrates multimodal understanding, text-to-image generation, and image editing capabilities. Building on the foundation of the Ovis series, Ovis-U1 incorporates a diffusion-based visual decoder paired with a bidirectional token refiner, enabling image generation tasks comparable to leading models like GPT-4o. Unlike some previous models that use a frozen MLLM for generation tasks, Ovis-U1 utilizes a new unified training approach starting from a language model. Compared to training solely on understanding or generation tasks, unified training yields better performance, demonstrating the enhancement achieved by integrating these two tasks. Ovis-U1 achieves a score of 69.6 on the OpenCompass Multi-modal Academic Benchmark, surpassing recent state-of-the-art models such as Ristretto-3B and SAIL-VL-1.5-2B. In text-to-image generation, it excels with scores of 83.72 and 0.89 on the DPG-Bench and GenEval benchmarks, respectively. For image editing, it achieves 4.00 and 6.42 on the ImgEdit-Bench and GEdit-Bench-EN, respectively. As the initial version of the Ovis unified model series, Ovis-U1 pushes the boundaries of multimodal understanding, generation, and editing.

The quadratic complexity of attention poses a critical bottleneck for long-context processing, spurring interest in hybrid attention designs. Most open-source hybrid models adopt a layer-wise strategy. Yet, prior work has noted the inherent difficulty of integrating Linear Attention (LA) with Full Attention (FA), suggesting that the design space of attention hybridization remains underexplored. To probe this space, we conduct interpretability analysis and observe that layers exhibit block-wise functional similarity, while individual heads within the same layer display distinct functional specialization despite sharing input features. This head-level heterogeneity suggests that the head dimension provides a natural and principled granularity for fusing heterogeneous attention signals. Building on this insight, we introduce HydraHead, a novel architecture that hybridizes FA and LA along the head axis. HydraHead features two key innovations: (1) an interpretability-driven selection strategy that identifies retrieval-critical heads and preserves FA only for them, and (2) a scale-normalized fusion module that reconciles the distributional gap between FA and LA head outputs. By leveraging a three-stage transfer pipeline with parameter reuse and distillation, we achieve high-performance hybrid models with minimal training overhead. Under a unified training setup, HydraHead outperforms other hybrid designs in long-context tasks while maintaining strong general reasoning. With interpretability-driven head selection, it matches a 3:1 layer-wise hybrid's long-context performance at a 7:1 LA-to-FA ratio. Crucially, trained on only 15B tokens, HydraHead achieves over 69% improvement over the baseline at 512K context length, approaching Qwen3.5, a leading model of comparable size with a native context length of 256K. This highlights the significant scaling potential of head-level hybridization.

This paper presents the Large Vision Diffusion Transformer (LaVin-DiT), a scalable and unified foundation model designed to tackle over 20 computer vision tasks in a generative framework. Unlike existing large vision models directly adapted from natural language processing architectures, which rely on less efficient autoregressive techniques and disrupt spatial relationships essential for vision data, LaVin-DiT introduces key innovations to optimize generative performance for vision tasks. First, to address the high dimensionality of visual data, we incorporate a spatial-temporal variational autoencoder that encodes data into a continuous latent space. Second, for generative modeling, we develop a joint diffusion transformer that progressively produces vision outputs. Third, for unified multi-task training, in-context learning is implemented. Input-target pairs serve as task context, which guides the diffusion transformer to align outputs with specific tasks within the latent space. During inference, a task-specific context set and test data as queries allow LaVin-DiT to generalize across tasks without fine-tuning. Trained on extensive vision datasets, the model is scaled from 0.1B to 3.4B parameters, demonstrating substantial scalability and state-of-the-art performance across diverse vision tasks. This work introduces a novel pathway for large vision foundation models, underscoring the promising potential of diffusion transformers. The code and models will be open-sourced.

Detecting cyberbullying on social media remains a critical challenge due to its subtle and varied expressions. This study investigates whether integrating aggression detection as an auxiliary task within a unified training framework can enhance the generalisation and performance of large language models (LLMs) in cyberbullying detection. Experiments are conducted on five aggression datasets and one cyberbullying dataset using instruction-tuned LLMs. We evaluated multiple strategies: zero-shot, few-shot, independent LoRA fine-tuning, and multi-task learning (MTL). Given the inconsistent results of MTL, we propose an enriched prompt pipeline approach in which aggression predictions are embedded into cyberbullying detection prompts to provide contextual augmentation. Preliminary results show that the enriched prompt pipeline consistently outperforms standard LoRA fine-tuning, indicating that aggression-informed context significantly boosts cyberbullying detection. This study highlights the potential of auxiliary tasks, such as aggression detection, to improve the generalisation of LLMs for safety-critical applications on social networks.

We present Streamo, a real-time streaming video LLM that serves as a general-purpose interactive assistant. Unlike existing online video models that focus narrowly on question answering or captioning, Streamo performs a broad spectrum of streaming video tasks, including real-time narration, action understanding, event captioning, temporal event grounding, and time-sensitive question answering. To develop such versatility, we construct Streamo-Instruct-465K, a large-scale instruction-following dataset tailored for streaming video understanding. The dataset covers diverse temporal contexts and multi-task supervision, enabling unified training across heterogeneous streaming tasks. After training end-to-end on the instruction-following dataset through a streamlined pipeline, Streamo exhibits strong temporal reasoning, responsive interaction, and broad generalization across a variety of streaming benchmarks. Extensive experiments show that Streamo bridges the gap between offline video perception models and real-time multimodal assistants, making a step toward unified, intelligent video understanding in continuous video streams.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as tool-augmented agents for multi-step decision making, yet training robust tool-using agents remains challenging. Existing methods still require manual intervention, depend on non-verifiable simulated environments, rely exclusively on either supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL), and struggle with stable long-horizon, multi-turn learning. To address these challenges, we introduce ASTRA, a fully automated end-to-end framework for training tool-augmented language model agents via scalable data synthesis and verifiable reinforcement learning. ASTRA integrates two complementary components. First, a pipeline that leverages the static topology of tool-call graphs synthesizes diverse, structurally grounded trajectories, instilling broad and transferable tool-use competence. Second, an environment synthesis framework that captures the rich, compositional topology of human semantic reasoning converts decomposed question-answer traces into independent, code-executable, and rule-verifiable environments, enabling deterministic multi-turn RL. Based on this method, we develop a unified training methodology that integrates SFT with online RL using trajectory-level rewards to balance task completion and interaction efficiency. Experiments on multiple agentic tool-use benchmarks demonstrate that ASTRA-trained models achieve state-of-the-art performance at comparable scales, approaching closed-source systems while preserving core reasoning ability. We release the full pipelines, environments, and trained models at https://github.com/LianjiaTech/astra.

Accurate, spatially explicit characterization of tropical forest structure is essential for carbon accounting and ecosystem monitoring, yet most ML pipelines predict canopy-top height proxies (e.g., RH95/RH98) or AGBD as separate scalar targets, rather than learning the forest vertical structure as an ordered profile. The community lacks a ML-ready multimodal benchmark for predicting the entire GEDI RH profile jointly with AGBD, or for evaluating methods that enforce physically consistent ordering across RH percentiles. We address this with Biomazon, a 20 m multimodal benchmark dataset over the Amazon Basin that pairs GEDI RH and AGBD targets with multi-sensor predictors (Sentinel-1/2, ALOS-2 PALSAR-2, Copernicus DEM, Dynamic World LULC, and AlphaEarth embeddings) under standardized spatial splits and evaluation protocols. Using a shared encoder-decoder with task-specific heads as a baseline framework, we conduct a comprehensive ablation study of (i) backbone/model scale, (ii) modality contributions, and (iii) the use of auxiliary embeddings under standalone and fusion settings, and we report both single-target and joint-target results to quantify tradeoffs under a unified training protocol. Finally, we contextualize baseline performance through regionally aligned comparisons against existing gridded products, including GEDI L4D RH10-RH98 and AGBD, at matching temporal scale. Biomazon, together with the accompanying protocols and baseline results, establishes a reference benchmark for future work on structurally consistent RH-profile prediction and structure-biomass modeling in tropical forests.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central post-training tool for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). In these systems, the rollout, the trajectory sampled from a prompt to termination, including intermediate reasoning steps and optional tool or environment interactions, determines the data the optimizer learns from, yet rollout design is often underreported. This survey provides an optimizer-agnostic view of rollout strategies for RL-based post-training of reasoning LLMs. We formalize rollout pipelines with unified notation and introduce Generate-Filter-Control-Replay (GFCR), a lifecycle taxonomy that decomposes rollout pipelines into four modular stages: Generate proposes candidate trajectories and topologies; Filter constructs intermediate signals via verifiers, judges, critics; Control allocates compute and makes continuation/branching/stopping decisions under budgets; and Replay retains and reuses artifacts across rollouts without weight updates, including self-evolving curricula that autonomously generate new training tasks. We complement GFCR with a criterion taxonomy of reliability, coverage, and cost sensitivity that characterizes rollout trade-offs. Using this framework, we synthesize methods spanning RL with verifiable rewards, process supervision, judge-based gating, guided and tree/segment rollouts, adaptive compute allocation, early-exit and partial rollouts, throughput optimization, and replay/recomposition for self-improvement. We ground the framework with case studies in math, code/SQL, multimodal reasoning, tool-using agents, and agentic skill benchmarks that evaluate skill induction, reuse, and cross-task transfer. Finally, we provide a diagnostic index that maps common rollout pathologies to GFCR modules and mitigation levers, alongside open challenges for building reproducible, compute-efficient, and trustworthy rollout pipelines.

Existing Maximum-Entropy (MaxEnt) Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods for continuous action spaces are typically formulated based on actor-critic frameworks and optimized through alternating steps of policy evaluation and policy improvement. In the policy evaluation steps, the critic is updated to capture the soft Q-function. In the policy improvement steps, the actor is adjusted in accordance with the updated soft Q-function. In this paper, we introduce a new MaxEnt RL framework modeled using Energy-Based Normalizing Flows (EBFlow). This framework integrates the policy evaluation steps and the policy improvement steps, resulting in a single objective training process. Our method enables the calculation of the soft value function used in the policy evaluation target without Monte Carlo approximation. Moreover, this design supports the modeling of multi-modal action distributions while facilitating efficient action sampling. To evaluate the performance of our method, we conducted experiments on the MuJoCo benchmark suite and a number of high-dimensional robotic tasks simulated by Omniverse Isaac Gym. The evaluation results demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance compared to widely-adopted representative baselines.

We present Liquid, an auto-regressive generation paradigm that seamlessly integrates visual comprehension and generation by tokenizing images into discrete codes and learning these code embeddings alongside text tokens within a shared feature space for both vision and language. Unlike previous multimodal large language model (MLLM), Liquid achieves this integration using a single large language model (LLM), eliminating the need for external pretrained visual embeddings such as CLIP. For the first time, Liquid uncovers a scaling law that performance drop unavoidably brought by the unified training of visual and language tasks diminishes as the model size increases. Furthermore, the unified token space enables visual generation and comprehension tasks to mutually enhance each other, effectively removing the typical interference seen in earlier models. We show that existing LLMs can serve as strong foundations for Liquid, saving 100x in training costs while outperforming Chameleon in multimodal capabilities and maintaining language performance comparable to mainstream LLMs like LLAMA2. Liquid also outperforms models like SD v2.1 and SD-XL (FID of 5.47 on MJHQ-30K), excelling in both vision-language and text-only tasks. This work demonstrates that LLMs such as LLAMA3.2 and GEMMA2 are powerful multimodal generators, offering a scalable solution for enhancing both vision-language understanding and generation. The code and models will be released.

Multimodal Large Language Models have demonstrated powerful cross-modal understanding and reasoning capabilities in general domains. However, in the electromagnetic (EM) domain, they still face challenges such as data scarcity and insufficient integration of domain knowledge. This paper proposes PReD, the first foundation model for the EM domain that covers the intelligent closed-loop of "perception, recognition, decision-making." We constructed a high-quality multitask EM dataset, PReD-1.3M, and an evaluation benchmark, PReD-Bench. The dataset encompasses multi-perspective representations such as raw time-domain waveform, frequency-domain spectrograms, and constellation diagrams, covering typical features of communication and radar signals. It supports a range of core tasks, including signal detection, modulation recognition, parameter estimation, protocol recognition, radio frequency fingerprint recognition, and anti-jamming decision-making. PReD adopts a multi-stage training strategy that unifies multiple tasks for EM signals. It achieves closed-loop optimization from end-to-end signal understanding to language-driven reasoning and decision-making, significantly enhancing EM domain expertise while maintaining general multimodal capabilities. Experimental results show that PReD achieves state-of-the-art performance on PReD-Bench constructed from both open-source and self-collected signal datasets. These results collectively validate the feasibility and potential of vision-aligned foundation models in advancing the understanding and reasoning of EM signals.

Post-training has demonstrated its importance in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). The primary post-training methods can be categorized into supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). SFT is efficient and well-suited for small language models, but it may lead to overfitting and limit the reasoning abilities of larger models. In contrast, RFT generally yields better generalization but depends heavily on the strength of the base model. To address the limitations of SFT and RFT, we propose Unified Fine-Tuning (UFT), a novel post-training paradigm that unifies SFT and RFT into a single, integrated process. UFT enables the model to effectively explore solutions while incorporating informative supervision signals, bridging the gap between memorizing and thinking underlying existing methods. Notably, UFT outperforms both SFT and RFT in general, regardless of model sizes. Furthermore, we theoretically prove that UFT breaks RFT's inherent exponential sample complexity bottleneck, showing for the first time that unified training can exponentially accelerate convergence on long-horizon reasoning tasks.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has demonstrated success in enhancing LLM reasoning capabilities, but remains limited to single-turn interactions without tool integration. While recent Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Tool use (ARLT) approaches have emerged to address multi-turn tool interactions, existing works develop task-specific codebases that suffer from fragmentation, synchronous execution bottlenecks, and limited extensibility across domains. These inefficiencies hinder broader community adoption and algorithmic innovation. We introduce VerlTool, a unified and modular framework that addresses these limitations through systematic design principles. VerlTool provides four key contributions: (1) upstream alignment with VeRL ensuring compatibility and simplified maintenance, (2) unified tool management via standardized APIs supporting diverse modalities including code execution, search, SQL databases, and vision processing, (3) asynchronous rollout execution achieving near 2times speedup by eliminating synchronization bottlenecks, and (4) comprehensive evaluation demonstrating competitive performance across 6 ARLT domains. Our framework formalizes ARLT as multi-turn trajectories with multi-modal observation tokens (text/image/video), extending beyond single-turn RLVR paradigms. We train and evaluate models on mathematical reasoning, knowledge QA, SQL generation, visual reasoning, web search, and software engineering tasks, achieving results comparable to specialized systems while providing unified training infrastructure. The modular plugin architecture enables rapid tool integration requiring only lightweight Python definitions, significantly reducing development overhead and providing a scalable foundation for tool-augmented RL research. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/TIGER-AI-Lab/verl-tool.

Biological intelligence systems of animals perceive the world by integrating information in different modalities and processing simultaneously for various tasks. In contrast, current machine learning research follows a task-specific paradigm, leading to inefficient collaboration between tasks and high marginal costs of developing perception models for new tasks. In this paper, we present a generic perception architecture named Uni-Perceiver, which processes a variety of modalities and tasks with unified modeling and shared parameters. Specifically, Uni-Perceiver encodes different task inputs and targets from arbitrary modalities into a unified representation space with a modality-agnostic Transformer encoder and lightweight modality-specific tokenizers. Different perception tasks are modeled as the same formulation, that is, finding the maximum likelihood target for each input through the similarity of their representations. The model is pre-trained on several uni-modal and multi-modal tasks, and evaluated on a variety of downstream tasks, including novel tasks that did not appear in the pre-training stage. Results show that our pre-trained model without any tuning can achieve reasonable performance even on novel tasks. The performance can be improved to a level close to state-of-the-art methods by conducting prompt tuning on 1% of downstream task data. Full-data fine-tuning further delivers results on par with or better than state-of-the-art results. Code shall be released.

Synthesizing diverse and physically plausible Human-Scene Interactions (HSI) is pivotal for both computer animation and embodied AI. Despite encouraging progress, current methods mainly focus on developing separate controllers, each specialized for a specific interaction task. This significantly hinders the ability to tackle a wide variety of challenging HSI tasks that require the integration of multiple skills, e.g., sitting down while carrying an object. To address this issue, we present TokenHSI, a single, unified transformer-based policy capable of multi-skill unification and flexible adaptation. The key insight is to model the humanoid proprioception as a separate shared token and combine it with distinct task tokens via a masking mechanism. Such a unified policy enables effective knowledge sharing across skills, thereby facilitating the multi-task training. Moreover, our policy architecture supports variable length inputs, enabling flexible adaptation of learned skills to new scenarios. By training additional task tokenizers, we can not only modify the geometries of interaction targets but also coordinate multiple skills to address complex tasks. The experiments demonstrate that our approach can significantly improve versatility, adaptability, and extensibility in various HSI tasks. Website: https://liangpan99.github.io/TokenHSI/

We present Lance, a lightweight native unified model supporting multimodal understanding, generation, and editing for both images and videos. Rather than relying on model capacity scaling or text-image-dominant designs, Lance explores a practical paradigm for unified multimodal modeling via collaborative multi-task training. It is grounded in two core principles: unified context modeling and decoupled capability pathways. Specifically, Lance is trained from scratch and employs a dual-stream mixture-of-experts architecture on shared interleaved multimodal sequences, enabling joint context learning while decoupling the pathways for understanding and generation. We further introduce modality-aware rotary positional encoding to mitigate interference among heterogeneous visual tokens and boost cross-task alignment. During training, Lance adopts a staged multi-task training paradigm with capability-oriented objectives and adaptive data scheduling to strengthen both semantic comprehension and visual generation performance. Experimental results demonstrate that Lance substantially outperforms existing open-source unified models in image and video generation, while retaining strong multimodal understanding capabilities. The homepage is available at https://lance-project.github.io.

Code summarization and generation empower conversion between programming language (PL) and natural language (NL), while code translation avails the migration of legacy code from one PL to another. This paper introduces PLBART, a sequence-to-sequence model capable of performing a broad spectrum of program and language understanding and generation tasks. PLBART is pre-trained on an extensive collection of Java and Python functions and associated NL text via denoising autoencoding. Experiments on code summarization in the English language, code generation, and code translation in seven programming languages show that PLBART outperforms or rivals state-of-the-art models. Moreover, experiments on discriminative tasks, e.g., program repair, clone detection, and vulnerable code detection, demonstrate PLBART's effectiveness in program understanding. Furthermore, analysis reveals that PLBART learns program syntax, style (e.g., identifier naming convention), logical flow (e.g., if block inside an else block is equivalent to else if block) that are crucial to program semantics and thus excels even with limited annotations.

Vision transformers have been widely explored in various vision tasks. Due to heavy computational cost, much interest has aroused for compressing vision transformer dynamically in the aspect of tokens. Current methods mainly pay attention to token pruning or merging to reduce token numbers, in which tokens are compressed exclusively, causing great information loss and therefore post-training is inevitably required to recover the performance. In this paper, we rethink token reduction and unify the process as an explicit form of token matrix transformation, in which all existing methods are constructing special forms of matrices within the framework. Furthermore, we propose a many-to-many Token Transforming framework that serves as a generalization of all existing methods and reserves the most information, even enabling training-free acceleration. We conduct extensive experiments to validate our framework. Specifically, we reduce 40% FLOPs and accelerate DeiT-S by times1.5 with marginal 0.1% accuracy drop. Furthermore, we extend the method to dense prediction tasks including segmentation, object detection, depth estimation, and language model generation. Results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently achieves substantial improvements, offering a better computation-performance trade-off, impressive budget reduction and inference acceleration.

Memory-augmented Large Language Models (LLMs) are essential for developing capable, long-term AI agents. Recently, applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) to optimize memory operations, such as extraction, updating, and retrieval, has emerged as a highly promising research direction. However, existing implementations remain highly fragmented and task-specific, lacking a unified infrastructure to streamline the integration, training, and evaluation of these complex pipelines. To address this gap, we present MemFactory, the first unified, highly modular training and inference framework specifically designed for memory-augmented agents. Inspired by the success of unified fine-tuning frameworks like LLaMA-Factory, MemFactory abstracts the memory lifecycle into atomic, plug-and-play components, enabling researchers to seamlessly construct custom memory agents via a "Lego-like" architecture. Furthermore, the framework natively integrates Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to fine-tune internal memory management policies driven by multi-dimensional environmental rewards. MemFactory provides out-of-the-box support for recent cutting-edge paradigms, including Memory-R1, RMM, and MemAgent. We empirically validate MemFactory on the open-source MemAgent architecture using its publicly available training and evaluation data. Across the evaluation sets, MemFactory improves performance over the corresponding base models on average, with relative gains of up to 14.8%. By providing a standardized, extensible, and easy-to-use infrastructure, MemFactory significantly lowers the barrier to entry, paving the way for future innovations in memory-driven AI agents.

Conventional Vision-Language Models(VLMs) typically utilize a fixed number of vision tokens, regardless of task complexity. This one-size-fits-all strategy introduces notable inefficiencies: using excessive tokens leads to unnecessary computational overhead in simpler tasks, whereas insufficient tokens compromise fine-grained visual comprehension in more complex contexts. To overcome these limitations, we present TokenFLEX, an innovative and adaptable vision-language framework that encodes images into a variable number of tokens for efficient integration with a Large Language Model (LLM). Our approach is underpinned by two pivotal innovations. Firstly, we present a novel training paradigm that enhances performance across varying numbers of vision tokens by stochastically modulating token counts during training. Secondly, we design a lightweight vision token projector incorporating an adaptive pooling layer and SwiGLU, allowing for flexible downsampling of vision tokens and adaptive selection of features tailored to specific token counts. Comprehensive experiments reveal that TokenFLEX consistently outperforms its fixed-token counterparts, achieving notable performance gains across various token counts enhancements of 1.6%, 1.0%, and 0.4% with 64, 144, and 256 tokens, respectively averaged over eight vision-language benchmarks. These results underscore TokenFLEX's remarkable flexibility while maintaining high-performance vision-language understanding.

The push toward large language models for biology (BioLM) has created a need for training corpora that can endow models with a genuine understanding of biology. However, existing biological resources, such as molecular databases, protein repositories, genomic annotations, single-cell atlases, and pathway databases, are scattered across heterogeneous formats and remain unorganized into a cohesive corpus for language model training. We present TheBioCollection, a 52.6B-token pre-training-scale corpus that converts these disparate resources into a unified, training-ready form spanning small molecules, proteins, genomic sequences, cells, and pathways. Beyond consolidating existing data, TheBioCollection enriches each record with tool-computed biological properties and introduces new instruction tasks for capabilities that current corpora barely cover. We pair the corpus with TheBioCollection-Eval, a matched suite probing recognition, generation, and prediction across molecular, protein, genomic, cellular, and cross-domain settings. Holding the base Gravity-16B-A3B architecture fixed, training on TheBioCollection more than doubles its overall score on TheBioCollection-Eval with gains in every domain, while leaving general linguistic ability nearly intact.

In an era where symbolic mathematical equations are indispensable for modeling complex natural phenomena, scientific inquiry often involves collecting observations and translating them into mathematical expressions. Recently, deep learning has emerged as a powerful tool for extracting insights from data. However, existing models typically specialize in either numeric or symbolic domains, and are usually trained in a supervised manner tailored to specific tasks. This approach neglects the substantial benefits that could arise from a task-agnostic unified understanding between symbolic equations and their numeric counterparts. To bridge the gap, we introduce SNIP, a Symbolic-Numeric Integrated Pre-training, which employs joint contrastive learning between symbolic and numeric domains, enhancing their mutual similarities in the pre-trained embeddings. By performing latent space analysis, we observe that SNIP provides cross-domain insights into the representations, revealing that symbolic supervision enhances the embeddings of numeric data and vice versa. We evaluate SNIP across diverse tasks, including symbolic-to-numeric mathematical property prediction and numeric-to-symbolic equation discovery, commonly known as symbolic regression. Results show that SNIP effectively transfers to various tasks, consistently outperforming fully supervised baselines and competing strongly with established task-specific methods, especially in few-shot learning scenarios where available data is limited.

The surge of pre-training has witnessed the rapid development of document understanding recently. Pre-training and fine-tuning framework has been effectively used to tackle texts in various formats, including plain texts, document texts, and web texts. Despite achieving promising performance, existing pre-trained models usually target one specific document format at one time, making it difficult to combine knowledge from multiple document formats. To address this, we propose XDoc, a unified pre-trained model which deals with different document formats in a single model. For parameter efficiency, we share backbone parameters for different formats such as the word embedding layer and the Transformer layers. Meanwhile, we introduce adaptive layers with lightweight parameters to enhance the distinction across different formats. Experimental results have demonstrated that with only 36.7% parameters, XDoc achieves comparable or even better performance on a variety of downstream tasks compared with the individual pre-trained models, which is cost effective for real-world deployment. The code and pre-trained models will be publicly available at https://aka.ms/xdoc.

Although pre-trained language models~(PLMs) have recently advanced the research progress in mathematical reasoning, they are not specially designed as a capable multi-task solver, suffering from high cost for multi-task deployment (\eg a model copy for a task) and inferior performance on complex mathematical problems in practical applications. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose JiuZhang~2.0, a unified Chinese PLM specially for multi-task mathematical problem solving. Our idea is to maintain a moderate-sized model and employ the cross-task knowledge sharing to improve the model capacity in a multi-task setting. Specially, we construct a Mixture-of-Experts~(MoE) architecture for modeling mathematical text, so as to capture the common mathematical knowledge across tasks. For optimizing the MoE architecture, we design multi-task continual pre-training and multi-task fine-tuning strategies for multi-task adaptation. These training strategies can effectively decompose the knowledge from the task data and establish the cross-task sharing via expert networks. In order to further improve the general capacity of solving different complex tasks, we leverage large language models~(LLMs) as complementary models to iteratively refine the generated solution by our PLM, via in-context learning. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our model.

Computational replication of Chinese calligraphy remains challenging. Existing methods falter, either creating high-quality isolated characters while ignoring page-level aesthetics like ligatures and spacing, or attempting page synthesis at the expense of calligraphic correctness. We introduce UniCalli, a unified diffusion framework for column-level recognition and generation. Training both tasks jointly is deliberate: recognition constrains the generator to preserve character structure, while generation provides style and layout priors. This synergy fosters concept-level abstractions that improve both tasks, especially in limited-data regimes. We curated a dataset of over 8,000 digitized pieces, with ~4,000 densely annotated. UniCalli employs asymmetric noising and a rasterized box map for spatial priors, trained on a mix of synthetic, labeled, and unlabeled data. The model achieves state-of-the-art generative quality with superior ligature continuity and layout fidelity, alongside stronger recognition. The framework successfully extends to other ancient scripts, including Oracle bone inscriptions and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Code and data can be viewed in https://github.com/EnVision-Research/UniCalli{this URL}.

Generalist models have achieved remarkable success in both language and vision-language tasks, showcasing the potential of unified modeling. However, effectively integrating fine-grained perception tasks like detection and segmentation into these models remains a significant challenge. This is primarily because these tasks often rely heavily on task-specific designs and architectures that can complicate the modeling process. To address this challenge, we present \ours, a framework that Unifies Fine-grained visual perception tasks through an Open-ended language interface. By transforming all perception targets into the language space, \ours unifies object-level detection, pixel-level segmentation, and image-level vision-language tasks into a single model. Additionally, we introduce a novel embedding retrieval approach that relies solely on the language interface to support segmentation tasks. Our framework bridges the gap between fine-grained perception and vision-language tasks, significantly simplifying architectural design and training strategies while achieving comparable or superior performance to methods with intricate task-specific designs. After multi-task training on five standard visual perception datasets, \ours outperforms the previous state-of-the-art generalist models by 12.3 mAP on COCO instance segmentation and 3.3 mIoU on ADE20K semantic segmentation. Furthermore, our method seamlessly integrates with existing MLLMs, effectively combining fine-grained perception capabilities with their advanced language abilities, thereby enabling more challenging tasks such as reasoning segmentation. Code and models will be publicly available.

In this work, we present EchoGen, a unified framework for layout-to-image generation and image grounding, capable of generating images with accurate layouts and high fidelity to text descriptions (e.g., spatial relationships), while grounding the image robustly at the same time. We believe that image grounding possesses strong text and layout understanding abilities, which can compensate for the corresponding limitations in layout-to-image generation. At the same time, images generated from layouts exhibit high diversity in content, thereby enhancing the robustness of image grounding. Jointly training both tasks within a unified model can promote performance improvements for each. However, we identify that this joint training paradigm encounters several optimization challenges and results in restricted performance. To address these issues, we propose progressive training strategies. First, the Parallel Multi-Task Pre-training (PMTP) stage equips the model with basic abilities for both tasks, leveraging shared tokens to accelerate training. Next, the Dual Joint Optimization (DJO) stage exploits task duality to sequentially integrate the two tasks, enabling unified optimization. Finally, the Cycle RL stage eliminates reliance on visual supervision by using consistency constraints as rewards, significantly enhancing the model's unified capabilities via the GRPO strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art results on both layout-to-image generation and image grounding benchmarks, and reveal clear synergistic gains from optimizing the two tasks together.

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful tool for improving diffusion-based text-to-image models, but existing methods are largely limited to single-task optimization. Extending RL to multiple tasks is challenging: joint optimization suffers from cross-task interference and imbalance, while cascade RL is cumbersome and prone to catastrophic forgetting. We propose DiffusionOPD, a new multi-task training paradigm for diffusion models based on Online Policy Distillation (OPD). DiffusionOPD first trains task-specific teachers independently, then distills their capabilities into a unified student along the student own rollout trajectories. This decouples single-task exploration from multi-task integration and avoids the optimization burden of solving all tasks jointly from scratch. Theoretically, we lift the OPD framework from discrete tokens to continuous-state Markov processes, deriving a closed-form per-step KL objective that unifies both stochastic SDE and deterministic ODE refinement via mean-matching. We formally and empirically demonstrate that this analytic gradient provides lower variance and better generality compared to conventional PPO-style policy gradients. Extensive experiments show that DiffusionOPD consistently surpasses both multi-reward RL and cascade RL baselines in training efficiency and final performance, while achieving state-of-the-art results on all evaluated benchmarks.

Video understanding tasks take many forms, from action detection to visual query localization and spatio-temporal grounding of sentences. These tasks differ in the type of inputs (only video, or video-query pair where query is an image region or sentence) and outputs (temporal segments or spatio-temporal tubes). However, at their core they require the same fundamental understanding of the video, i.e., the actors and objects in it, their actions and interactions. So far these tasks have been tackled in isolation with individual, highly specialized architectures, which do not exploit the interplay between tasks. In contrast, in this paper, we present a single, unified model for tackling query-based video understanding in long-form videos. In particular, our model can address all three tasks of the Ego4D Episodic Memory benchmark which entail queries of three different forms: given an egocentric video and a visual, textual or activity query, the goal is to determine when and where the answer can be seen within the video. Our model design is inspired by recent query-based approaches to spatio-temporal grounding, and contains modality-specific query encoders and task-specific sliding window inference that allow multi-task training with diverse input modalities and different structured outputs. We exhaustively analyze relationships among the tasks and illustrate that cross-task learning leads to improved performance on each individual task, as well as the ability to generalize to unseen tasks, such as zero-shot spatial localization of language queries.

Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models have shown impressive results in generating visually compelling images following user prompts. Building on this, various methods further fine-tune the pre-trained T2I model for specific tasks. However, this requires separate model architectures, training designs, and multiple parameter sets to handle different tasks. In this paper, we introduce UniVG, a generalist diffusion model capable of supporting a diverse range of image generation tasks with a single set of weights. UniVG treats multi-modal inputs as unified conditions to enable various downstream applications, ranging from T2I generation, inpainting, instruction-based editing, identity-preserving generation, and layout-guided generation, to depth estimation and referring segmentation. Through comprehensive empirical studies on data mixing and multi-task training, we provide detailed insights into the training processes and decisions that inform our final designs. For example, we show that T2I generation and other tasks, such as instruction-based editing, can coexist without performance trade-offs, while auxiliary tasks like depth estimation and referring segmentation enhance image editing. Notably, our model can even outperform some task-specific models on their respective benchmarks, marking a significant step towards a unified image generation model.

The rapid development of generative models has significantly advanced image and video applications. Among these, video creation, aimed at generating videos under various conditions, has gained substantial attention. However, existing video creation models either focus solely on a few specific conditions or suffer from excessively long generation times due to complex model inference, making them impractical for real-world applications. To mitigate these issues, we propose an efficient unified video creation model, named VDOT. Concretely, we model the training process with the distribution matching distillation (DMD) paradigm. Instead of using the Kullback-Leibler (KL) minimization, we additionally employ a novel computational optimal transport (OT) technique to optimize the discrepancy between the real and fake score distributions. The OT distance inherently imposes geometric constraints, mitigating potential zero-forcing or gradient collapse issues that may arise during KL-based distillation within the few-step generation scenario, and thus, enhances the efficiency and stability of the distillation process. Further, we integrate a discriminator to enable the model to perceive real video data, thereby enhancing the quality of generated videos. To support training unified video creation models, we propose a fully automated pipeline for video data annotation and filtering that accommodates multiple video creation tasks. Meanwhile, we curate a unified testing benchmark, UVCBench, to standardize evaluation. Experiments demonstrate that our 4-step VDOT outperforms or matches other baselines with 100 denoising steps.

Recently, instruction-following audio-language models have received broad attention for audio interaction with humans. However, the absence of pre-trained audio models capable of handling diverse audio types and tasks has hindered progress in this field. Consequently, most existing works have only been able to support a limited range of interaction capabilities. In this paper, we develop the Qwen-Audio model and address this limitation by scaling up audio-language pre-training to cover over 30 tasks and various audio types, such as human speech, natural sounds, music, and songs, to facilitate universal audio understanding abilities. However, directly co-training all tasks and datasets can lead to interference issues, as the textual labels associated with different datasets exhibit considerable variations due to differences in task focus, language, granularity of annotation, and text structure. To overcome the one-to-many interference, we carefully design a multi-task training framework by conditioning on a sequence of hierarchical tags to the decoder for encouraging knowledge sharing and avoiding interference through shared and specified tags respectively. Remarkably, Qwen-Audio achieves impressive performance across diverse benchmark tasks without requiring any task-specific fine-tuning, surpassing its counterparts. Building upon the capabilities of Qwen-Audio, we further develop Qwen-Audio-Chat, which allows for input from various audios and text inputs, enabling multi-turn dialogues and supporting various audio-central scenarios.

Sign language pre-training has gained increasing attention for its ability to enhance performance across various sign language understanding (SLU) tasks. However, existing methods often suffer from a gap between pre-training and fine-tuning, leading to suboptimal results. To address this, we propose Uni-Sign, a unified pre-training framework that eliminates the gap between pre-training and downstream SLU tasks through a large-scale generative pre-training strategy and a novel fine-tuning paradigm. First, we introduce CSL-News, a large-scale Chinese Sign Language (CSL) dataset containing 1,985 hours of video paired with textual annotations, which enables effective large-scale pre-training. Second, Uni-Sign unifies SLU tasks by treating downstream tasks as a single sign language translation (SLT) task during fine-tuning, ensuring seamless knowledge transfer between pre-training and fine-tuning. Furthermore, we incorporate a prior-guided fusion (PGF) module and a score-aware sampling strategy to efficiently fuse pose and RGB information, addressing keypoint inaccuracies and improving computational efficiency. Extensive experiments across multiple SLU benchmarks demonstrate that Uni-Sign achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple downstream SLU tasks. Dataset and code are available at github.com/ZechengLi19/Uni-Sign.

In this paper, we propose a unified pre-training approach called UniSpeech to learn speech representations with both unlabeled and labeled data, in which supervised phonetic CTC learning and phonetically-aware contrastive self-supervised learning are conducted in a multi-task learning manner. The resultant representations can capture information more correlated with phonetic structures and improve the generalization across languages and domains. We evaluate the effectiveness of UniSpeech for cross-lingual representation learning on public CommonVoice corpus. The results show that UniSpeech outperforms self-supervised pretraining and supervised transfer learning for speech recognition by a maximum of 13.4% and 17.8% relative phone error rate reductions respectively (averaged over all testing languages). The transferability of UniSpeech is also demonstrated on a domain-shift speech recognition task, i.e., a relative word error rate reduction of 6% against the previous approach.

While embeddings from multimodal large language models (LLMs) excel as general-purpose representations, their application to dynamic modalities like audio and video remains underexplored. We introduce WAVE (unified \& versatile audio-visual embeddings), the first LLM-based embedding that creates a unified representation space for text, audio, and video modalities. WAVE employs a novel hierarchical feature fusion strategy and a joint multi-modal, multi-task training approach to enable two key capabilities: any-to-any cross-modal retrieval and the generation of prompt-aware embeddings tailored to user instructions. Experimentally, WAVE sets a new state-of-the-art on the MMEB-v2 video benchmark and achieves superior results in audio and video-to-audio retrieval. Its prompt-aware nature also yields remarkable performance in multimodal question answering, significantly outperforming existing embedding models. Ablation studies validate our joint training strategy, demonstrating improved performance across all modalities. With a newly introduced benchmark for versatile audio-visual learning, WAVE opens up broad possibilities for cross-modal, any-to-any applications. Our code, checkpoints, and data will be released.

In the fashion domain, there exists a variety of vision-and-language (V+L) tasks, including cross-modal retrieval, text-guided image retrieval, multi-modal classification, and image captioning. They differ drastically in each individual input/output format and dataset size. It has been common to design a task-specific model and fine-tune it independently from a pre-trained V+L model (e.g., CLIP). This results in parameter inefficiency and inability to exploit inter-task relatedness. To address such issues, we propose a novel FAshion-focused Multi-task Efficient learning method for Vision-and-Language tasks (FAME-ViL) in this work. Compared with existing approaches, FAME-ViL applies a single model for multiple heterogeneous fashion tasks, therefore being much more parameter-efficient. It is enabled by two novel components: (1) a task-versatile architecture with cross-attention adapters and task-specific adapters integrated into a unified V+L model, and (2) a stable and effective multi-task training strategy that supports learning from heterogeneous data and prevents negative transfer. Extensive experiments on four fashion tasks show that our FAME-ViL can save 61.5% of parameters over alternatives, while significantly outperforming the conventional independently trained single-task models. Code is available at https://github.com/BrandonHanx/FAME-ViL.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in visual understanding tasks such as visual grounding, segmentation, and captioning. However, their ability to perceive perceptual-level image features remains limited. In this work, we present UniPercept-Bench, a unified framework for perceptual-level image understanding across three key domains: Aesthetics, Quality, Structure and Texture. We establish a hierarchical definition system and construct large-scale datasets to evaluate perceptual-level image understanding. Based on this foundation, we develop a strong baseline UniPercept trained via Domain-Adaptive Pre-Training and Task-Aligned RL, enabling robust generalization across both Visual Rating (VR) and Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks. UniPercept outperforms existing MLLMs on perceptual-level image understanding and can serve as a plug-and-play reward model for text-to-image generation. This work defines Perceptual-Level Image Understanding in the era of MLLMs and, through the introduction of a comprehensive benchmark together with a strong baseline, provides a solid foundation for advancing perceptual-level multimodal image understanding.

Diffusion language models (dLLMs) recently emerged as a promising alternative to auto-regressive LLMs. The latest works further extended it to multimodal understanding and generation tasks. In this work, we propose LaViDa-R1, a multimodal, general-purpose reasoning dLLM. Unlike existing works that build reasoning dLLMs through task-specific reinforcement learning, LaViDa-R1 incorporates diverse multimodal understanding and generation tasks in a unified manner. In particular, LaViDa-R1 is built with a novel unified post-training framework that seamlessly integrates supervised finetuning (SFT) and multi-task reinforcement learning (RL). It employs several novel training techniques, including answer-forcing, tree search, and complementary likelihood estimation, to enhance effectiveness and scalability. Extensive experiments demonstrate LaViDa-R1's strong performance on a wide range of multimodal tasks, including visual math reasoning, reason-intensive grounding, and image editing.

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), particularly through Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), have significantly enhanced their reasoning abilities. However, a critical gap persists: these models struggle with dynamic spatial interactions, a capability essential for real-world applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce M2-Reasoning-7B, a model designed to excel in both general and spatial reasoning. Our approach integrates two key innovations: (1) a novel data pipeline that generates 294.2K high-quality data samples (168K for cold-start fine-tuning and 126.2K for RLVR), which feature logically coherent reasoning trajectories and have undergone comprehensive assessment; and (2) a dynamic multi-task training strategy with step-wise optimization to mitigate conflicts between data, and task-specific rewards for delivering tailored incentive signals. This combination of curated data and advanced training allows M2-Reasoning-7B to set a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) across 8 benchmarks, showcasing superior performance in both general and spatial reasoning domains.

The computer vision domain has greatly benefited from an abundance of data across many modalities to improve on various visual tasks. Recently, there has been a lot of focus on self-supervised pre-training methods through Masked Autoencoders (MAE) he2022masked,bachmann2022multimae, usually used as a first step before optimizing for a downstream task, such as classification or regression. This is very useful as it doesn't require any manually labeled data. In this work, we introduce Probabilistic Hyper-Graphs using Masked Autoencoders (PHG-MAE): a novel model that unifies the classical work on neural graphs leordeanu2021semi with the modern approach of masked autoencoders under a common theoretical framework. Through random masking of entire modalities, not just patches, the model samples from the distribution of hyper-edges on each forward pass. Additionally, the model adapts the standard MAE algorithm by combining pre-training and fine-tuning into a single training loop. Moreover, our approach enables the creation of inference-time ensembles which, through aggregation, boost the final prediction performance and consistency. Lastly, we show that we can apply knowledge distillation on top of the ensembles with little loss in performance, even with models that have fewer than 1M parameters. While our work mostly focuses on outdoor UAV scenes that contain multiple world interpretations and modalities, the same steps can be followed in other similar domains, such as autonomous driving or indoor robotics. In order to streamline the process of integrating external pre-trained experts for computer vision multi-modal multi-task learning (MTL) scenarios, we developed a data-pipeline software. Using this tool, we have created and released a fully-automated extension of the Dronescapes dataset. All the technical details, code and reproduction steps are publicly released.

Building general-purpose embodied agents across diverse hardware remains a central challenge in robotics, often framed as the ''one-brain, many-forms'' paradigm. Progress is hindered by fragmented data, inconsistent representations, and misaligned training objectives. We present ABot-M0, a framework that builds a systematic data curation pipeline while jointly optimizing model architecture and training strategies, enabling end-to-end transformation of heterogeneous raw data into unified, efficient representations. From six public datasets, we clean, standardize, and balance samples to construct UniACT-dataset, a large-scale dataset with over 6 million trajectories and 9,500 hours of data, covering diverse robot morphologies and task scenarios. Unified pre-training improves knowledge transfer and generalization across platforms and tasks, supporting general-purpose embodied intelligence. To improve action prediction efficiency and stability, we propose the Action Manifold Hypothesis: effective robot actions lie not in the full high-dimensional space but on a low-dimensional, smooth manifold governed by physical laws and task constraints. Based on this, we introduce Action Manifold Learning (AML), which uses a DiT backbone to predict clean, continuous action sequences directly. This shifts learning from denoising to projection onto feasible manifolds, improving decoding speed and policy stability. ABot-M0 supports modular perception via a dual-stream mechanism that integrates VLM semantics with geometric priors and multi-view inputs from plug-and-play 3D modules such as VGGT and Qwen-Image-Edit, enhancing spatial understanding without modifying the backbone and mitigating standard VLM limitations in 3D reasoning. Experiments show components operate independently with additive benefits. We will release all code and pipelines for reproducibility and future research.

Empowering Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with image generation often leads to catastrophic forgetting in understanding tasks due to severe gradient conflicts. While existing paradigms like Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) mitigate this conflict through structural isolation, they fundamentally sever cross-modal synergy and suffer from capacity fragmentation. In this work, we present Symbiotic-MoE, a unified pre-training framework that resolves task interference within a native multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Transformers architecture with zero-parameter overhead. We first identify that standard MoE tuning leads to routing collapse, where generative gradients dominate expert utilization. To address this, we introduce Modality-Aware Expert Disentanglement, which partitions experts into task-specific groups while utilizing shared experts as a multimodal semantic bridge. Crucially, this design allows shared experts to absorb fine-grained visual semantics from generative tasks to enrich textual representations. To optimize this, we propose a Progressive Training Strategy featuring differential learning rates and early-stage gradient shielding. This mechanism not only shields pre-trained knowledge from early volatility but eventually transforms generative signals into constructive feedback for understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Symbiotic-MoE achieves rapid generative convergence while unlocking cross-modal synergy, boosting inherent understanding with remarkable gains on MMLU and OCRBench.

In this paper, we present an integral pre-training framework based on masked image modeling (MIM). We advocate for pre-training the backbone and neck jointly so that the transfer gap between MIM and downstream recognition tasks is minimal. We make two technical contributions. First, we unify the reconstruction and recognition necks by inserting a feature pyramid into the pre-training stage. Second, we complement mask image modeling (MIM) with masked feature modeling (MFM) that offers multi-stage supervision to the feature pyramid. The pre-trained models, termed integrally pre-trained transformer pyramid networks (iTPNs), serve as powerful foundation models for visual recognition. In particular, the base/large-level iTPN achieves an 86.2%/87.8% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, a 53.2%/55.6% box AP on COCO object detection with 1x training schedule using Mask-RCNN, and a 54.7%/57.7% mIoU on ADE20K semantic segmentation using UPerHead -- all these results set new records. Our work inspires the community to work on unifying upstream pre-training and downstream fine-tuning tasks. Code and the pre-trained models will be released at https://github.com/sunsmarterjie/iTPN.

Traditional speech systems typically rely on separate, task-specific models for text-to-speech (TTS), automatic speech recognition (ASR), and voice conversion (VC), resulting in fragmented pipelines that limit scalability, efficiency, and cross-task generalization. In this paper, we present General-Purpose Audio (GPA), a unified audio foundation model that integrates multiple core speech tasks within a single large language model (LLM) architecture. GPA operates on a shared discrete audio token space and supports instruction-driven task induction, enabling a single autoregressive model to flexibly perform TTS, ASR, and VC without architectural modifications. This unified design combines a fully autoregressive formulation over discrete speech tokens, joint multi-task training across speech domains, and a scalable inference pipeline that achieves high concurrency and throughput. The resulting model family supports efficient multi-scale deployment, including a lightweight 0.3B-parameter variant optimized for edge and resource-constrained environments. Together, these design choices demonstrate that a unified autoregressive architecture can achieve competitive performance across diverse speech tasks while remaining viable for low-latency, practical deployment.

Humans can reproduce the viewpoint specified by a target image through active head and body motion, yet spatial intelligence in foundation models has largely been studied as passive understanding of pre-collected observations. We introduce Target Viewpoint Reproduction (TVR) -- an active task where an agent adjusts its viewpoint in a 3D environment until its observation matches a given target image -- and TVRBench, an indoor-simulation benchmark spanning scene scale and target-view visual richness. TVR is far from solved: on the evaluation split, the strongest open-source and closed-source models reach only 7.8% and 12.0% success. Fine-grained analysis identifies two consistent bottlenecks: off-the-shelf models struggle with multi-turn visual history, and performance drops sharply when viewpoint reproduction requires body translation rather than in-place rotation, exposing a gap in mapping spatial discrepancies to embodied movement. To study reducing this gap, we build a unified TVR post-training framework covering expert-trajectory SFT, rationale-supervised CoT-SFT, offline Single-turn GRPO, and on-policy Multi-turn GRPO from live simulator rollouts. Visual-action SFT supplies the main gain, raising a 9B open-source model to 50.8% success; Multi-turn GRPO provides targeted multi-room refinement and reaches 51.4% overall, while CoT supervision and Single-turn GRPO degrade closed-loop performance. These results establish TVRBench as a testbed for measuring and training foundation models that actively perceive and act in 3D environments. Our code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/aim-uofa/TVRBench.

Recent endeavors towards directly using large language models (LLMs) as agent models to execute interactive planning tasks have shown commendable results. Despite their achievements, however, they still struggle with brainless trial-and-error in global planning and generating hallucinatory actions in local planning due to their poor understanding of the ''real'' physical world. Imitating humans' mental world knowledge model which provides global prior knowledge before the task and maintains local dynamic knowledge during the task, in this paper, we introduce parametric World Knowledge Model (WKM) to facilitate agent planning. Concretely, we steer the agent model to self-synthesize knowledge from both expert and sampled trajectories. Then we develop WKM, providing prior task knowledge to guide the global planning and dynamic state knowledge to assist the local planning. Experimental results on three complex real-world simulated datasets with three state-of-the-art open-source LLMs, Mistral-7B, Gemma-7B, and Llama-3-8B, demonstrate that our method can achieve superior performance compared to various strong baselines. Besides, we analyze to illustrate that our WKM can effectively alleviate the blind trial-and-error and hallucinatory action issues, providing strong support for the agent's understanding of the world. Other interesting findings include: 1) our instance-level task knowledge can generalize better to unseen tasks, 2) weak WKM can guide strong agent model planning, and 3) unified WKM training has promising potential for further development. Code will be available at https://github.com/zjunlp/WKM.

Vision-language pre-trained models have achieved impressive performance on various downstream tasks. However, their large model sizes hinder their utilization on platforms with limited computational resources. We find that directly using smaller pre-trained models and applying magnitude-based pruning on CLIP models leads to inflexibility and inferior performance. Recent efforts for VLP compression either adopt uni-modal compression metrics resulting in limited performance or involve costly mask-search processes with learnable masks. In this paper, we first propose the Module-wise Pruning Error (MoPE) metric, accurately assessing CLIP module importance by performance decline on cross-modal tasks. Using the MoPE metric, we introduce a unified pruning framework applicable to both pre-training and task-specific fine-tuning compression stages. For pre-training, MoPE-CLIP effectively leverages knowledge from the teacher model, significantly reducing pre-training costs while maintaining strong zero-shot capabilities. For fine-tuning, consecutive pruning from width to depth yields highly competitive task-specific models. Extensive experiments in two stages demonstrate the effectiveness of the MoPE metric, and MoPE-CLIP outperforms previous state-of-the-art VLP compression methods.

Scientific discovery increasingly requires AI systems that can reason over scientific evidence of heterogeneous modalities, interact with scientific tools and environments, and sustain progress across long task horizons. We present Intern-S2-Preview, a series of scientific agentic foundation models designed to support multimodal scientific understanding, reasoning, generation, and long-horizon tasks. The training pipeline begins with scientific multimodal pre-training over rendered scientific documents, interleaved image-text data, and diverse scientific corpora. Starting from the pretrained checkpoint, we apply a unified post-training pipeline consisting of supervised fine-tuning, scalable multi-task reinforcement learning (RL), black- and white-box agentic RL, and on-policy distillation. This pipeline is supported by practical techniques that improve rollout and training stability and efficiency, including partial rollout with off-policy correction, adaptive length regularization, online speculative decoding, robust multi-task optimization, and trace-aware experience assembly for agentic tasks. At the architecture level, Intern-S2-Preview-397B extends time series modelling from efficient long-sequence understanding to numerical forecasting, while Memory Decoder is studied as a separate memory-augmented path for rapid scientific specialization without modifying the frozen 397B backbone. Evaluations across scientific, multimodal, agentic, and general-purpose benchmarks show that Intern-S2-Preview-397B achieves competitive or leading results in multiple settings. The time series modules improve scientific signal understanding and forecasting on SciTS, while the separate Intern-MemDec-4B extension improves the Biology-Instructions average score from 56.92 to 60.32 without modifying the frozen 397B backbone.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show promise in embodied reasoning, yet remain far from true generalists-they often require task-specific fine-tuning, incur high compute costs, and generalize poorly to unseen tasks. We propose MetaVLA, a unified, backbone-agnostic post-training framework for efficient and scalable alignment. MetaVLA introduces Context-Aware Meta Co-Training, which consolidates diverse target tasks into a single fine-tuning stage while leveraging structurally diverse auxiliary tasks to improve in-domain generalization. Unlike naive multi-task SFT, MetaVLA integrates a lightweight meta-learning mechanism-derived from Attentive Neural Processes-to enable rapid adaptation from diverse contexts with minimal architectural change or inference overhead. On the LIBERO benchmark, MetaVLA with six auxiliary tasks outperforms OpenVLA by up to 8.0% on long-horizon tasks, reduces training steps from 240K to 75K, and cuts GPU time by ~76%. These results show that scalable, low-resource post-training is achievable-paving the way toward general-purpose embodied agents. Code will be available.

Unified vision-language models (UVLMs) must perform both understanding and generation within a single architecture, but these tasks rely on heterogeneous data and supervision, making it difficult to balance them during reinforcement learning (RL). We propose PairUni, a unified framework that reorganizes data into understanding-generation (UG) pairs and aligns optimization accordingly. We first use GPT-o3 to augment single-task data, generating captions for understanding samples and question-answer (QA) pairs for generation samples, forming aligned pairs from the same instance. Additionally, for each generation sample, we retrieve a semantically related understanding example to form a retrieved pair, linking different but related data points. These paired structures expose cross-task semantic correspondences and support consistent policy learning. To leverage this structure, we present Pair-GPRO, a pair-aware variant based on Group Relative Policy Optimization. It assigns a similarity score to each pair to modulate the advantage, strengthening learning from well-aligned examples and reducing task interference. We curate a high-quality dataset of 16K UG pairs named PairUG for RL fine-tuning and evaluate PairUni on the powerful Janus-Pro UVLMs. Our approach achieves balanced improvements on various UVLMs, outperforming strong UVLM RL baselines. Code: https://github.com/Haochen-Wang409/PairUni{github.com/Haochen-Wang409/PairUni}

Recent advances in Diffusion Transformers have driven rapid progress in video generation and editing, yet these capabilities are still handled by separate, task-specific models. Building a unified framework that supports diverse video tasks remains an open challenge: existing unified attempts either require dedicated auxiliary encoders or lack explicit mechanisms to distinguish heterogeneous conditioning tokens, struggling when the number and type of visual conditions vary across tasks. We propose TIDE, a unified framework that integrates instruction-based editing, reference-guided editing, and multi-reference generation. At its core, we introduce per-token task embeddings that assign each input token a task-specific identifier, enabling the model to explicitly disambiguate target, source, and reference tokens. To simultaneously capture high-level semantic understanding and fine-grained structural fidelity, we design a dual-path conditioning scheme that couples a vision-language model with a VAE latent path for complementary signals. We further devise a multi-task progressive training strategy that incrementally introduces tasks of increasing complexity, effectively harmonizing diverse objectives and enabling smooth generalization across heterogeneous task distributions. Extensive experiments on multiple video editing and generation benchmarks demonstrate that TIDE achieves state-of-the-art performance across all evaluated tasks. Our project page is available at https://LittleWork123.github.io/tide.

Pre-trained language models have been recently shown to benefit task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. Despite their success, existing methods often formulate this task as a cascaded generation problem which can lead to error accumulation across different sub-tasks and greater data annotation overhead. In this study, we present PPTOD, a unified plug-and-play model for task-oriented dialogue. In addition, we introduce a new dialogue multi-task pre-training strategy that allows the model to learn the primary TOD task completion skills from heterogeneous dialog corpora. We extensively test our model on three benchmark TOD tasks, including end-to-end dialogue modelling, dialogue state tracking, and intent classification. Experimental results show that PPTOD achieves new state of the art on all evaluated tasks in both high-resource and low-resource scenarios. Furthermore, comparisons against previous SOTA methods show that the responses generated by PPTOD are more factually correct and semantically coherent as judged by human annotators.

Efficiently training a multi-task neural solver for various combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) has been less studied so far. In this paper, we propose a general and efficient training paradigm based on multi-armed bandits to deliver a unified combinarotial multi-task neural solver. To this end, we resort to the theoretical loss decomposition for multiple tasks under an encoder-decoder framework, which enables more efficient training via proper bandit task-sampling algorithms through an intra-task influence matrix. Our method achieves much higher overall performance with either limited training budgets or the same training epochs, compared to standard training schedules, which can be promising for advising efficient training of other multi-task large models. Additionally, the influence matrix can provide empirical evidence of some common practices in the area of learning to optimize, which in turn supports the validity of our approach.

Graph pre-training has achieved remarkable success in recent years, delivering transferable representations for downstream adaptation. However, most existing methods are designed for either homogeneous or heterogeneous graphs, thereby hindering unified graph modeling across diverse graph types. This separation contradicts real-world applications, where mixed homogeneous and heterogeneous graphs are ubiquitous, and distribution shifts between upstream pre-training and downstream deployment are common. In this paper, we empirically demonstrate that a balanced mixture of homogeneous and heterogeneous graph pre-training benefits downstream tasks and propose a unified multi-domain Graph Pre-training method across Homogeneous and Heterogeneous graphs (GPH^{2}). To address the lack of a unified encoder for homogeneous and heterogeneous graphs, we propose a Unified Multi-View Graph Construction that simultaneously encodes both without explicit graph-type-specific designs. To cope with the increased cross-domain distribution discrepancies arising from mixed graphs, we introduce domain-specific expert encoding. Each expert is independently pre-trained on a single graph to capture domain-specific knowledge, thereby shielding the pre-training encoder from the adverse effects of cross-domain discrepancies. For downstream tasks, we further design a Task-oriented Expert Fusion Strategy that adaptively integrates multiple experts based on their discriminative strengths. Extensive experiments on mixed graphs demonstrate that GPH^{2} enables stable transfer across graph types and domains, significantly outperforming existing graph pre-training methods.

Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) has advanced the performance for many vision-language tasks. However, most existing pre-trained models only excel in either understanding-based tasks or generation-based tasks. Furthermore, performance improvement has been largely achieved by scaling up the dataset with noisy image-text pairs collected from the web, which is a suboptimal source of supervision. In this paper, we propose BLIP, a new VLP framework which transfers flexibly to both vision-language understanding and generation tasks. BLIP effectively utilizes the noisy web data by bootstrapping the captions, where a captioner generates synthetic captions and a filter removes the noisy ones. We achieve state-of-the-art results on a wide range of vision-language tasks, such as image-text retrieval (+2.7% in average recall@1), image captioning (+2.8% in CIDEr), and VQA (+1.6% in VQA score). BLIP also demonstrates strong generalization ability when directly transferred to video-language tasks in a zero-shot manner. Code, models, and datasets are released at https://github.com/salesforce/BLIP.

Large language models have shown their remarkable capabilities as a general interface for various language-related applications. Motivated by this, we target to build a unified interface for completing many vision-language tasks including image description, visual question answering, and visual grounding, among others. The challenge is to use a single model for performing diverse vision-language tasks effectively with simple multi-modal instructions. Towards this objective, we introduce MiniGPT-v2, a model that can be treated as a unified interface for better handling various vision-language tasks. We propose using unique identifiers for different tasks when training the model. These identifiers enable our model to better distinguish each task instruction effortlessly and also improve the model learning efficiency for each task. After the three-stage training, the experimental results show that MiniGPT-v2 achieves strong performance on many visual question-answering and visual grounding benchmarks compared to other vision-language generalist models. Our model and codes are available at https://minigpt-v2.github.io/

Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant research attention. However, fully harnessing the potential of LLMs for agent-based tasks presents inherent challenges due to the heterogeneous nature of diverse data sources featuring multi-turn trajectories. In this paper, we introduce AgentOhana as a comprehensive solution to address these challenges. AgentOhana aggregates agent trajectories from distinct environments, spanning a wide array of scenarios. It meticulously standardizes and unifies these trajectories into a consistent format, streamlining the creation of a generic data loader optimized for agent training. Leveraging the data unification, our training pipeline maintains equilibrium across different data sources and preserves independent randomness across devices during dataset partitioning and model training. Additionally, we present xLAM-v0.1, a large action model tailored for AI agents, which demonstrates exceptional performance across various benchmarks.

Self-supervised pre-training techniques have achieved remarkable progress in Document AI. Most multimodal pre-trained models use a masked language modeling objective to learn bidirectional representations on the text modality, but they differ in pre-training objectives for the image modality. This discrepancy adds difficulty to multimodal representation learning. In this paper, we propose LayoutLMv3 to pre-train multimodal Transformers for Document AI with unified text and image masking. Additionally, LayoutLMv3 is pre-trained with a word-patch alignment objective to learn cross-modal alignment by predicting whether the corresponding image patch of a text word is masked. The simple unified architecture and training objectives make LayoutLMv3 a general-purpose pre-trained model for both text-centric and image-centric Document AI tasks. Experimental results show that LayoutLMv3 achieves state-of-the-art performance not only in text-centric tasks, including form understanding, receipt understanding, and document visual question answering, but also in image-centric tasks such as document image classification and document layout analysis. The code and models are publicly available at https://aka.ms/layoutlmv3.

Visual Anomaly Detection (VAD) aims to identify abnormal samples in images that deviate from normal patterns, covering multiple domains, including industrial, logical, and medical fields. Due to the domain gaps between these fields, existing VAD methods are typically tailored to each domain, with specialized detection techniques and model architectures that are difficult to generalize across different domains. Moreover, even within the same domain, current VAD approaches often follow a "one-category-one-model" paradigm, requiring large amounts of normal samples to train class-specific models, resulting in poor generalizability and hindering unified evaluation across domains. To address this issue, we propose a generalized few-shot VAD method, UniVAD, capable of detecting anomalies across various domains, such as industrial, logical, and medical anomalies, with a training-free unified model. UniVAD only needs few normal samples as references during testing to detect anomalies in previously unseen objects, without training on the specific domain. Specifically, UniVAD employs a Contextual Component Clustering (C^3) module based on clustering and vision foundation models to segment components within the image accurately, and leverages Component-Aware Patch Matching (CAPM) and Graph-Enhanced Component Modeling (GECM) modules to detect anomalies at different semantic levels, which are aggregated to produce the final detection result. We conduct experiments on nine datasets spanning industrial, logical, and medical fields, and the results demonstrate that UniVAD achieves state-of-the-art performance in few-shot anomaly detection tasks across multiple domains, outperforming domain-specific anomaly detection models. Code is available at https://github.com/FantasticGNU/UniVAD.

We present VLA Foundry, an open-source framework that unifies LLM, VLM, and VLA training in a single codebase. Most open-source VLA efforts specialize on the action training stage, often stitching together incompatible pretraining pipelines. VLA Foundry instead provides a shared training stack with end-to-end control, from language pretraining to action-expert fine-tuning. VLA Foundry supports both from-scratch training and pretrained backbones from Hugging Face. To demonstrate the utility of our framework, we train and release two types of models: the first trained fully from scratch through our LLM-->VLM-->VLA pipeline and the second built on the pretrained Qwen3-VL backbone. We evaluate closed-loop policy performance of both models on LBM Eval, an open-data, open-source simulator. We also contribute usability improvements to the simulator and the STEP analysis tools for easier public use. In the nominal evaluation setting, our fully-open from-scratch model is on par with our prior closed-source work and substituting in the Qwen3-VL backbone leads to a strong multi-task table top manipulation policy outperforming our baseline by a wide margin. The VLA Foundry codebase is available at https://github.com/TRI-ML/vla_foundry and all multi-task model weights are released on https://huggingface.co/collections/TRI-ML/vla-foundry. Additional qualitative videos are available on the project website https://tri-ml.github.io/vla_foundry.

ImageNet serves as the primary dataset for evaluating the quality of computer-vision models. The common practice today is training each architecture with a tailor-made scheme, designed and tuned by an expert. In this paper, we present a unified scheme for training any backbone on ImageNet. The scheme, named USI (Unified Scheme for ImageNet), is based on knowledge distillation and modern tricks. It requires no adjustments or hyper-parameters tuning between different models, and is efficient in terms of training times. We test USI on a wide variety of architectures, including CNNs, Transformers, Mobile-oriented and MLP-only. On all models tested, USI outperforms previous state-of-the-art results. Hence, we are able to transform training on ImageNet from an expert-oriented task to an automatic seamless routine. Since USI accepts any backbone and trains it to top results, it also enables to perform methodical comparisons, and identify the most efficient backbones along the speed-accuracy Pareto curve. Implementation is available at:https://github.com/Alibaba-MIIL/Solving_ImageNet

Latent diffusion models (LDMs) enable high-fidelity synthesis by operating in learned latent spaces. However, training state-of-the-art LDMs requires complex staging: a tokenizer must be trained first, before the diffusion model can be trained in the frozen latent space. We propose UNITE - an autoencoder architecture for unified tokenization and latent diffusion. UNITE consists of a Generative Encoder that serves as both image tokenizer and latent generator via weight sharing. Our key insight is that tokenization and generation can be viewed as the same latent inference problem under different conditioning regimes: tokenization infers latents from fully observed images, whereas generation infers them from noise together with text or class conditioning. Motivated by this, we introduce a single-stage training procedure that jointly optimizes both tasks via two forward passes through the same Generative Encoder. The shared parameters enable gradients to jointly shape the latent space, encouraging a "common latent language". Across image and molecule modalities, UNITE achieves near state of the art performance without adversarial losses or pretrained encoders (e.g., DINO), reaching FID 2.12 and 1.73 for Base and Large models on ImageNet 256 x 256. We further analyze the Generative Encoder through the lenses of representation alignment and compression. These results show that single stage joint training of tokenization & generation from scratch is feasible.

Training a unified multilingual model promotes knowledge transfer but inevitably introduces negative interference. Language-specific modeling methods show promise in reducing interference. However, they often rely on heuristics to distribute capacity and struggle to foster cross-lingual transfer via isolated modules. In this paper, we explore intrinsic task modularity within multilingual networks and leverage these observations to circumvent interference under multilingual translation. We show that neurons in the feed-forward layers tend to be activated in a language-specific manner. Meanwhile, these specialized neurons exhibit structural overlaps that reflect language proximity, which progress across layers. Based on these findings, we propose Neuron Specialization, an approach that identifies specialized neurons to modularize feed-forward layers and then continuously updates them through sparse networks. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves consistent performance gains over strong baselines with additional analyses demonstrating reduced interference and increased knowledge transfer.

Sound separation (SS) and target sound extraction (TSE) are fundamental techniques for addressing complex acoustic scenarios. While existing SS methods struggle with determining the unknown number of sound sources, TSE approaches require precisely specified clues to achieve optimal performance. This paper proposes a unified framework that synergistically combines SS and TSE to overcome their individual limitations. Our architecture employs two complementary components: 1) An Encoder-Decoder Attractor (EDA) network that automatically infers both the source count and corresponding acoustic clues for SS, and 2) A multi-modal fusion network that precisely interprets diverse user-provided clues (acoustic, semantic, or visual) for TSE. Through joint training with cross-task consistency constraints, we establish a unified latent space that bridges both paradigms. During inference, the system adaptively operates in either fully autonomous SS mode or clue-driven TSE mode. Experiments demonstrate remarkable performance in both tasks, with notable improvements of 1.4 dB SDR improvement in SS compared to baseline and 86\% TSE accuracy.

As agentic systems increasingly rely on reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards, standardized ``gym'' infrastructure has become essential for rapid iteration, reproducibility, and fair comparison. Vision agents lack such infrastructure, limiting systematic study of what drives their learning and where current models fall short. We introduce Gym-V, a unified platform of 179 procedurally generated visual environments across 10 domains with controllable difficulty, enabling controlled experiments that were previously infeasible across fragmented toolkits. Using it, we find that observation scaffolding is more decisive for training success than the choice of RL algorithm, with captions and game rules determining whether learning succeeds at all. Cross-domain transfer experiments further show that training on diverse task categories generalizes broadly while narrow training can cause negative transfer, with multi-turn interaction amplifying all of these effects. Gym-V is released as a convenient foundation for training environments and evaluation toolkits, aiming to accelerate future research on agentic VLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on natural language tasks but remain unreliable in mathematical reasoning, frequently generating fluent yet logically inconsistent solutions. We present NeuroProlog, a neurosymbolic framework that ensures verifiable reasoning by compiling math word problems into executable Prolog programs with formal verification guarantees. We propose a multi-task Cocktail training strategy that jointly optimizes three synergistic objectives in a unified symbolic representation space: (i) mathematical formula-to-rule translation (KB), (ii) natural language-to-program synthesis (SOLVE), and (iii) program-answer alignment. This joint supervision enables positive transfer, where symbolic grounding in formula translation directly improves compositional reasoning capabilities. At inference, we introduce an execution-guided decoding pipeline with fine-grained error taxonomy that enables iterative program repair and quantifies model self-debugging capacity. Comprehensive evaluation on GSM8K across four model scales (3B--32B parameters) demonstrates consistent improvements: cocktail training achieves significant accuracy gains of +5.23\% (Qwen-32B, p < 0.01), +3.43\% (GPT-OSS-20B, p < 0.01), and +5.54\% (Llama-3B, p < 0.05) over single-task baselines. Systematic error analysis reveals scale-dependent learning dynamics: at 32B scale, cocktail training transforms unfixable type errors (12\% repair rate) into correctable domain errors (96\% repair rate), achieving 92.7\% overall correction; at 8B scale, the same training eliminates syntactic errors but introduces semantic failures, revealing a critical capacity threshold for type-safe symbolic reasoning.

Recent advancements in foundation models have revolutionized joint audio-video generation. However, existing approaches typically treat human-centric tasks including reference-based audio-video generation (R2AV), video editing (RV2AV) and audio-driven video animation (RA2V) as isolated objectives. Furthermore, achieving precise, disentangled control over multiple character identities and voice timbres within a single framework remains an open challenge. In this paper, we propose DreamID-Omni, a unified framework for controllable human-centric audio-video generation. Specifically, we design a Symmetric Conditional Diffusion Transformer that integrates heterogeneous conditioning signals via a symmetric conditional injection scheme. To resolve the pervasive identity-timbre binding failures and speaker confusion in multi-person scenarios, we introduce a Dual-Level Disentanglement strategy: Synchronized RoPE at the signal level to ensure rigid attention-space binding, and Structured Captions at the semantic level to establish explicit attribute-subject mappings. Furthermore, we devise a Multi-Task Progressive Training scheme that leverages weakly-constrained generative priors to regularize strongly-constrained tasks, preventing overfitting and harmonizing disparate objectives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DreamID-Omni achieves comprehensive state-of-the-art performance across video, audio, and audio-visual consistency, even outperforming leading proprietary commercial models. We will release our code to bridge the gap between academic research and commercial-grade applications.

Training a unified model integrating video-to-audio (V2A), text-to-audio (T2A), and joint video-text-to-audio (VT2A) generation offers significant application flexibility, yet faces two unexplored foundational challenges: (1) the scarcity of high-quality audio captions with tight A-V-T alignment, leading to severe semantic conflict between multimodal conditions, and (2) cross-task and intra-task competition, manifesting as an adverse V2A-T2A performance trade-off and modality bias in the VT2A task. First, to address data scarcity, we introduce SoundAtlas, a large-scale dataset (470k pairs) that significantly outperforms existing benchmarks and even human experts in quality. Powered by a novel agentic pipeline, it integrates Vision-to-Language Compression to mitigate visual bias of MLLMs, a Junior-Senior Agent Handoff for a 5 times cost reduction, and rigorous Post-hoc Filtering to ensure fidelity. Consequently, SoundAtlas delivers semantically rich and temporally detailed captions with tight V-A-T alignment. Second, we propose Omni2Sound, a unified VT2A diffusion model supporting flexible input modalities. To resolve the inherent cross-task and intra-task competition, we design a three-stage multi-task progressive training schedule that converts cross-task competition into joint optimization and mitigates modality bias in the VT2A task, maintaining both audio-visual alignment and off-screen audio generation faithfulness. Finally, we construct VGGSound-Omni, a comprehensive benchmark for unified evaluation, including challenging off-screen tracks. With a standard DiT backbone, Omni2Sound achieves unified SOTA performance across all three tasks within a single model, demonstrating strong generalization across benchmarks with heterogeneous input conditions. The project page is at https://swapforward.github.io/Omni2Sound.

Music exists in various modalities, such as score images, symbolic scores, MIDI, and audio. Translations between each modality are established as core tasks of music information retrieval, such as automatic music transcription (audio-to-MIDI) and optical music recognition (score image to symbolic score). However, most past work on multimodal translation trains specialized models on individual translation tasks. In this paper, we propose a unified approach, where we train a general-purpose model on many translation tasks simultaneously. Two key factors make this unified approach viable: a new large-scale dataset and the tokenization of each modality. Firstly, we propose a new dataset that consists of more than 1,300 hours of paired audio-score image data collected from YouTube videos, which is an order of magnitude larger than any existing music modal translation datasets. Secondly, our unified tokenization framework discretizes score images, audio, MIDI, and MusicXML into a sequence of tokens, enabling a single encoder-decoder Transformer to tackle multiple cross-modal translation as one coherent sequence-to-sequence task. Experimental results confirm that our unified multitask model improves upon single-task baselines in several key areas, notably reducing the symbol error rate for optical music recognition from 24.58% to a state-of-the-art 13.67%, while similarly substantial improvements are observed across the other translation tasks. Notably, our approach achieves the first successful score-image-conditioned audio generation, marking a significant breakthrough in cross-modal music generation.

We present a unified dataset for document Question-Answering (QA), which is obtained combining several public datasets related to Document AI and visually rich document understanding (VRDU). Our main contribution is twofold: on the one hand we reformulate existing Document AI tasks, such as Information Extraction (IE), into a Question-Answering task, making it a suitable resource for training and evaluating Large Language Models; on the other hand, we release the OCR of all the documents and include the exact position of the answer to be found in the document image as a bounding box. Using this dataset, we explore the impact of different prompting techniques (that might include bounding box information) on the performance of open-weight models, identifying the most effective approaches for document comprehension.

Existed pre-training methods either focus on single-modal tasks or multi-modal tasks, and cannot effectively adapt to each other. They can only utilize single-modal data (i.e. text or image) or limited multi-modal data (i.e. image-text pairs). In this work, we propose a unified-modal pre-training architecture, namely UNIMO, which can effectively adapt to both single-modal and multi-modal understanding and generation tasks. Large scale of free text corpus and image collections can be utilized to improve the capability of visual and textual understanding, and cross-modal contrastive learning (CMCL) is leveraged to align the textual and visual information into a unified semantic space over a corpus of image-text pairs. As the non-paired single-modal data is very rich, our model can utilize much larger scale of data to learn more generalizable representations. Moreover, the textual knowledge and visual knowledge can enhance each other in the unified semantic space. The experimental results show that UNIMO significantly improves the performance of several single-modal and multi-modal downstream tasks. Our code and pre-trained models are public at the UNIMO project page https://unimo-ptm.github.io/

GUI agents that interact with graphical interfaces on behalf of users represent a promising direction for practical AI assistants. However, training such agents is hindered by the scarcity of suitable environments. We present InfiniteWeb, a system that automatically generates functional web environments at scale for GUI agent training. While LLMs perform well on generating a single webpage, building a realistic and functional website with many interconnected pages faces challenges. We address these challenges through unified specification, task-centric test-driven development, and a combination of website seed with reference design image to ensure diversity. Our system also generates verifiable task evaluators enabling dense reward signals for reinforcement learning. Experiments show that InfiniteWeb surpasses commercial coding agents at realistic website construction, and GUI agents trained on our generated environments achieve significant performance improvements on OSWorld and Online-Mind2Web, demonstrating the effectiveness of proposed system.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great capabilities in solving a wide range of tasks in a resource-efficient manner through prompting, which does not require task-specific training, but suffers from performance fluctuation when there are multiple prompt candidates. Previous works have introduced gradient-free probability-based prompt selection methods that aim to choose the optimal prompt among the candidates for a given task but fail to provide a comprehensive and fair comparison between each other. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to interpret and evaluate the existing probability-based prompt selection methods by performing extensive experiments on 13 common NLP tasks. We find that all existing methods can be unified into some variant of the method that maximizes the mutual information between the input and the corresponding model output (denoted as MI). Using the finding, we develop several variants of MI and increases the effectiveness of the best prompt selection method from 87.79% to 94.98%, measured as the ratio of the performance of the selected prompt to that of the optimal oracle prompt. Furthermore, we propose a novel calibration method called Calibration by Marginalization (CBM) that is orthogonal to existing methods and helps increase the prompt selection effectiveness of the best method by 99.44%. The code and datasets used in our work will be released at https://github.com/soheeyang/unified-prompt-selection.

Despite significant progress in diffusion-based image generation, subject-driven generation and instruction-based editing remain challenging. Existing methods typically treat them separately, struggling with limited high-quality data and poor generalization. However, both tasks require capturing complex visual variations while maintaining consistency between inputs and outputs. Therefore, we propose MIGE, a unified framework that standardizes task representations using multimodal instructions. It treats subject-driven generation as creation on a blank canvas and instruction-based editing as modification of an existing image, establishing a shared input-output formulation. MIGE introduces a novel multimodal encoder that maps free-form multimodal instructions into a unified vision-language space, integrating visual and semantic features through a feature fusion mechanism.This unification enables joint training of both tasks, providing two key advantages: (1) Cross-Task Enhancement: By leveraging shared visual and semantic representations, joint training improves instruction adherence and visual consistency in both subject-driven generation and instruction-based editing. (2) Generalization: Learning in a unified format facilitates cross-task knowledge transfer, enabling MIGE to generalize to novel compositional tasks, including instruction-based subject-driven editing. Experiments show that MIGE excels in both subject-driven generation and instruction-based editing while setting a state-of-the-art in the new task of instruction-based subject-driven editing. Code and model have been publicly available at https://github.com/Eureka-Maggie/MIGE.

We study two foundational problems in audio language models: (1) how to design an audio tokenizer that can serve as an intermediate representation for both understanding and generation; and (2) how to build an audio foundation model that generalizes in few-shot and zero-shot settings, analogous to large language models. To this end, we make the following two contributions. First, we propose ReasoningCodec, a discrete audio codec that factorizes audio into (i) reasoning tokens, which encode text-aligned, high-level analysis and planning representations for audio understanding and hierarchical generation, and (ii) reconstruction tokens, which encode semantic-rich acoustic cues for high-fidelity waveform reconstruction. This design achieves understanding performance comparable to strong continuous representations while improving generation quality and reconstruction fidelity over prior discrete tokenizers. Second, we introduce a unified autoregressive architecture for text and audio, together with multi-stage training and multi-task data construction. Using this framework, we train UniAudio 2.0 on 100B text tokens and 60B audio tokens. Across a wide range of speech, sound, and music tasks, UniAudio 2.0 performs competitively on in-domain evaluations and demonstrates strong few-shot and zero-shot generalization to unseen tasks. Demo, code, and checkpoints will be available at https://dongchaoyang.top/UniAudio2Demo/{https://dongchaoyang.top/UniAudio2Demo/}.

Recent large language models (LLMs) have tended to leverage sparsity to reduce computations, employing the sparsely activated mixture-of-experts (MoE) technique. MoE introduces four modules, including token routing, token communication, expert computation, and expert parallelism, that impact model quality and training efficiency. To enable versatile usage of MoE models, we introduce FSMoE, a flexible training system optimizing task scheduling with three novel techniques: 1) Unified abstraction and online profiling of MoE modules for task scheduling across various MoE implementations. 2) Co-scheduling intra-node and inter-node communications with computations to minimize communication overheads. 3) To support near-optimal task scheduling, we design an adaptive gradient partitioning method for gradient aggregation and a schedule to adaptively pipeline communications and computations. We conduct extensive experiments with configured MoE layers and real-world MoE models on two GPU clusters. Experimental results show that 1) our FSMoE supports four popular types of MoE routing functions and is more efficient than existing implementations (with up to a 1.42times speedup), and 2) FSMoE outperforms the state-of-the-art MoE training systems (DeepSpeed-MoE and Tutel) by 1.18times-1.22times on 1458 MoE layers and 1.19times-3.01times on real-world MoE models based on GPT-2 and Mixtral using a popular routing function.

Recent motion-aware large language models have demonstrated promising potential in unifying motion comprehension and generation. However, existing approaches primarily focus on coarse-grained motion-text modeling, where text describes the overall semantics of an entire motion sequence in just a few words. This limits their ability to handle fine-grained motion-relevant tasks, such as understanding and controlling the movements of specific body parts. To overcome this limitation, we pioneer MG-MotionLLM, a unified motion-language model for multi-granular motion comprehension and generation. We further introduce a comprehensive multi-granularity training scheme by incorporating a set of novel auxiliary tasks, such as localizing temporal boundaries of motion segments via detailed text as well as motion detailed captioning, to facilitate mutual reinforcement for motion-text modeling across various levels of granularity. Extensive experiments show that our MG-MotionLLM achieves superior performance on classical text-to-motion and motion-to-text tasks, and exhibits potential in novel fine-grained motion comprehension and editing tasks. Project page: CVI-SZU/MG-MotionLLM

With the comprehensive research conducted on various face analysis tasks, there is a growing interest among researchers to develop a unified approach to face perception. Existing methods mainly discuss unified representation and training, which lack task extensibility and application efficiency. To tackle this issue, we focus on the unified model structure, exploring a face generalist model. As an intuitive design, Naive Faceptor enables tasks with the same output shape and granularity to share the structural design of the standardized output head, achieving improved task extensibility. Furthermore, Faceptor is proposed to adopt a well-designed single-encoder dual-decoder architecture, allowing task-specific queries to represent new-coming semantics. This design enhances the unification of model structure while improving application efficiency in terms of storage overhead. Additionally, we introduce Layer-Attention into Faceptor, enabling the model to adaptively select features from optimal layers to perform the desired tasks. Through joint training on 13 face perception datasets, Faceptor achieves exceptional performance in facial landmark localization, face parsing, age estimation, expression recognition, binary attribute classification, and face recognition, achieving or surpassing specialized methods in most tasks. Our training framework can also be applied to auxiliary supervised learning, significantly improving performance in data-sparse tasks such as age estimation and expression recognition. The code and models will be made publicly available at https://github.com/lxq1000/Faceptor.

While modern diffusion models excel at generating high-quality and diverse images, they still struggle with high-fidelity compositional and multimodal control, particularly when users simultaneously specify text prompts, subject references, spatial arrangements, pose constraints, and layout annotations. We introduce Canvas-to-Image, a unified framework that consolidates these heterogeneous controls into a single canvas interface, enabling users to generate images that faithfully reflect their intent. Our key idea is to encode diverse control signals into a single composite canvas image that the model can directly interpret for integrated visual-spatial reasoning. We further curate a suite of multi-task datasets and propose a Multi-Task Canvas Training strategy that optimizes the diffusion model to jointly understand and integrate heterogeneous controls into text-to-image generation within a unified learning paradigm. This joint training enables Canvas-to-Image to reason across multiple control modalities rather than relying on task-specific heuristics, and it generalizes well to multi-control scenarios during inference. Extensive experiments show that Canvas-to-Image significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in identity preservation and control adherence across challenging benchmarks, including multi-person composition, pose-controlled composition, layout-constrained generation, and multi-control generation.

Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) analysts routinely convert noisy, unstructured security artifacts into standardized, automation-ready representations. Although large language models (LLMs) show promise for this task, existing approaches remain brittle when producing structured CTI outputs and have largely relied on supervised fine-tuning (SFT). In contrast, CTI standards and community-maintained resources define canonical identifiers and schemas that enable deterministic verification of model outputs. We leverage this structure to study reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for CTI tasks. We introduce Minerva, a unified dataset and training pipeline spanning multiple CTI subtasks, each paired with task-specific verifiers that score structured outputs and identifier predictions. To address reward sparsity during rollout, we propose MinervaRL, a lightweight self-training mechanism that generates additional verified trajectories and distills them back into the model. Averaged across four backbones and 12 CTI benchmarks, MinervaRL improves the mean score by 15.8 percentage points over the corresponding base models and by 4.3 points over GRPO.

We introduce Being-H0.5, a foundational Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model designed for robust cross-embodiment generalization across diverse robotic platforms. While existing VLAs often struggle with morphological heterogeneity and data scarcity, we propose a human-centric learning paradigm that treats human interaction traces as a universal "mother tongue" for physical interaction. To support this, we present UniHand-2.0, the largest embodied pre-training recipe to date, comprising over 35,000 hours of multimodal data across 30 distinct robotic embodiments. Our approach introduces a Unified Action Space that maps heterogeneous robot controls into semantically aligned slots, enabling low-resource robots to bootstrap skills from human data and high-resource platforms. Built upon this human-centric foundation, we design a unified sequential modeling and multi-task pre-training paradigm to bridge human demonstrations and robotic execution. Architecturally, Being-H0.5 utilizes a Mixture-of-Transformers design featuring a novel Mixture-of-Flow (MoF) framework to decouple shared motor primitives from specialized embodiment-specific experts. Finally, to make cross-embodiment policies stable in the real world, we introduce Manifold-Preserving Gating for robustness under sensory shift and Universal Async Chunking to universalize chunked control across embodiments with different latency and control profiles. We empirically demonstrate that Being-H0.5 achieves state-of-the-art results on simulated benchmarks, such as LIBERO (98.9%) and RoboCasa (53.9%), while also exhibiting strong cross-embodiment capabilities on five robotic platforms.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has enabled large language models (LLMs) to achieve remarkable breakthroughs in reasoning tasks with objective ground-truth answers, such as mathematics and code generation. However, a significant gap remains for non-verifiable tasks, like creative writing and open-ended dialogue, where quality assessment is inherently subjective and lacks definitive references. Existing approaches for these domains often rely on scalar reward models trained with human preferences, which suffer from limited generalization and are prone to reward hacking, such as over-explanation and length bias. In this work, we propose a unified RLVR-based training paradigm that bridges the gap between non-verifiable tasks and verifiable rewards. We introduce a writing-principle-based pairwise Generative Reward Model (GenRM) and a novel Bootstrapped Relative Policy Optimization (BRPO) algorithm. The pairwise writing GenRM leverages self-principled critique to transform subjective assessments into reliable, verifiable rewards, while BRPO enables dynamic, reference-free pairwise comparison by leveraging a bootstrapped response as temporary reference from within group rollouts during RL training. Our approach empowers LLMs to develop robust writing capabilities without supervised fine-tuning, as demonstrated by Writing-Zero, which shows consistent improvement and strong resistance to reward hacking compared to scalar reward baselines. Furthermore, our method achieves competitive results on both in-house and open-source writing benchmarks. Our findings suggest the potential to unify rule-based, reference-based, and reference-free reward modeling under the RLVR framework, thus paving the way for a comprehensive and scalable RL training paradigm applicable across all language tasks.

Humans learn social norms and behaviors from verbal feedback (e.g., a parent saying "that was rude" or a friend explaining "here's why that hurt"). Yet, learning from feedback for LLMs has largely focused on domains like code and math, where RL rewards are directly verifiable and condensed into scalar values. As LLMs are increasingly used to simulate human behavior, e.g., standing in for users, patients, students, and other personas, there is a pressing need to make them more human-like, which requires embracing a fundamentally different kind of signal: feedback that is verbal, subjective, and multi-faceted. We present DITTO, a model trained by treating verbal feedback as a first-class signal in reinforcement learning. After each rollout, DITTO receives verbal feedback and generates a feedback-conditioned improved rollout; both outputs are jointly optimized with GRPO, distilling verbal guidance into the base policy without requiring feedback at test time. We also introduce SOUL (Simulation gym Of hUman-Like behavior), a unified benchmark and training data suite spanning 10 tasks across six categories: Theory of Mind, character role play, social skill, learner simulation, user simulation, and persona simulation. DITTO achieves an average 36% improvement over the base model and exceeds GPT-5.4 on 6 of 10 SOUL benchmarks, demonstrating that RL with verbal feedback is a promising direction for training LLMs to simulate human behavior.

Unified vision-language frameworks have greatly advanced in recent years, most of which adopt an encoder-decoder architecture to unify image-text tasks as sequence-to-sequence generation. However, existing video-language (VidL) models still require task-specific designs in model architecture and training objectives for each task. In this work, we explore a unified VidL framework LAVENDER, where Masked Language Modeling (MLM) is used as the common interface for all pre-training and downstream tasks. Such unification leads to a simplified model architecture, where only a lightweight MLM head, instead of a decoder with much more parameters, is needed on top of the multimodal encoder. Surprisingly, experimental results show that this unified framework achieves competitive performance on 14 VidL benchmarks, covering video question answering, text-to-video retrieval and video captioning. Extensive analyses further demonstrate the advantage of LAVENDER over existing VidL methods in: (i) supporting all downstream tasks with just a single set of parameter values when multi-task finetuned; (ii) few-shot generalization on various downstream tasks; and (iii) enabling zero-shot evaluation on video question answering tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/LAVENDER.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has drawn urgent attention to the task of machine-generated text detection (MGTD). However, existing approaches struggle in complex real-world scenarios: zero-shot detectors rely heavily on scoring model's output distribution while training-based detectors are often constrained by overfitting to the training data, limiting generalization. We found that the performance bottleneck of training-based detectors stems from the misalignment between training objective and task needs. To address this, we propose Direct Discrepancy Learning (DDL), a novel optimization strategy that directly optimizes the detector with task-oriented knowledge. DDL enables the detector to better capture the core semantics of the detection task, thereby enhancing both robustness and generalization. Built upon this, we introduce DetectAnyLLM, a unified detection framework that achieves state-of-the-art MGTD performance across diverse LLMs. To ensure a reliable evaluation, we construct MIRAGE, the most diverse multi-task MGTD benchmark. MIRAGE samples human-written texts from 10 corpora across 5 text-domains, which are then re-generated or revised using 17 cutting-edge LLMs, covering a wide spectrum of proprietary models and textual styles. Extensive experiments on MIRAGE reveal the limitations of existing methods in complex environment. In contrast, DetectAnyLLM consistently outperforms them, achieving over a 70% performance improvement under the same training data and base scoring model, underscoring the effectiveness of our DDL. Project page: {https://fjc2005.github.io/detectanyllm}.

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in Multi-Target Cross-Domain Recommendation (MTCDR), which aims to enhance recommendation performance across multiple domains simultaneously. Existing MTCDR methods primarily rely on domain-shared entities (\eg users or items) to fuse and transfer cross-domain knowledge, which may be unavailable in non-overlapped recommendation scenarios. Some studies model user preferences and item features as domain-sharable semantic representations, which can be utilized to tackle the MTCDR task. Nevertheless, they often require extensive auxiliary data for pre-training. Developing more effective solutions for MTCDR remains an important area for further exploration. Inspired by recent advancements in generative recommendation, this paper introduces GMC, a generative paradigm-based approach for multi-target cross-domain recommendation. The core idea of GMC is to leverage semantically quantized discrete item identifiers as a medium for integrating multi-domain knowledge within a unified generative model. GMC first employs an item tokenizer to generate domain-shared semantic identifiers for each item, and then formulates item recommendation as a next-token generation task by training a domain-unified sequence-to-sequence model. To further leverage the domain information to enhance performance, we incorporate a domain-aware contrastive loss into the semantic identifier learning, and perform domain-specific fine-tuning on the unified recommender. Extensive experiments on five public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of GMC compared to a range of baseline methods.

The adoption of tablets with touchscreens and styluses is increasing, and a key feature is converting handwriting to text, enabling search, indexing, and AI assistance. Meanwhile, vision-language models (VLMs) are now the go-to solution for image understanding, thanks to both their state-of-the-art performance across a variety of tasks and the simplicity of a unified approach to training, fine-tuning, and inference. While VLMs obtain high performance on image-based tasks, they perform poorly on handwriting recognition when applied naively, i.e., by rendering handwriting as an image and performing optical character recognition (OCR). In this paper, we study online handwriting recognition with VLMs, going beyond naive OCR. We propose a novel tokenized representation of digital ink (online handwriting) that includes both a time-ordered sequence of strokes as text, and as image. We show that this representation yields results comparable to or better than state-of-the-art online handwriting recognizers. Wide applicability is shown through results with two different VLM families, on multiple public datasets. Our approach can be applied to off-the-shelf VLMs, does not require any changes in their architecture, and can be used in both fine-tuning and parameter-efficient tuning. We perform a detailed ablation study to identify the key elements of the proposed representation.

This paper presents a unified Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) model. The model is unified in that (1) it can be fine-tuned for either vision-language generation (e.g., image captioning) or understanding (e.g., visual question answering) tasks, and (2) it uses a shared multi-layer transformer network for both encoding and decoding, which differs from many existing methods where the encoder and decoder are implemented using separate models. The unified VLP model is pre-trained on a large amount of image-text pairs using the unsupervised learning objectives of two tasks: bidirectional and sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) masked vision-language prediction. The two tasks differ solely in what context the prediction conditions on. This is controlled by utilizing specific self-attention masks for the shared transformer network. To the best of our knowledge, VLP is the first reported model that achieves state-of-the-art results on both vision-language generation and understanding tasks, as disparate as image captioning and visual question answering, across three challenging benchmark datasets: COCO Captions, Flickr30k Captions, and VQA 2.0. The code and the pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/LuoweiZhou/VLP.

Audio-video joint generation has progressed rapidly, yet substantial challenges still remain. Non-commercial approaches still suffer audio-visual asynchrony, poor lip-speech alignment, and unimodal degradation, which can be stemmed from weak audio-visual correspondence modeling, limited generalization, and scarce high-quality dense-caption data. To address these issues, we introduce Klear and delve into three axes--model architecture, training strategy, and data curation. Architecturally, we adopt a single-tower design with unified DiT blocks and an Omni-Full Attention mechanism, achieving tight audio-visual alignment and strong scalability. Training-wise, we adopt a progressive multitask regime--random modality masking to joint optimization across tasks, and a multistage curriculum, yielding robust representations, strengthening A-V aligned world knowledge, and preventing unimodal collapse. For datasets, we present the first large-scale audio-video dataset with dense captions, and introduce a novel automated data-construction pipeline which annotates and filters millions of diverse, high-quality, strictly aligned audio-video-caption triplets. Building on this, Klear scales to large datasets, delivering high-fidelity, semantically and temporally aligned, instruction-following generation in both joint and unimodal settings while generalizing robustly to out-of-distribution scenarios. Across tasks, it substantially outperforms prior methods by a large margin and achieves performance comparable to Veo 3, offering a unified, scalable path toward next-generation audio-video synthesis.

Humans use different modalities, such as speech, text, images, videos, etc., to communicate their intent and goals with teammates. For robots to become better assistants, we aim to endow them with the ability to follow instructions and understand tasks specified by their human partners. Most robotic policy learning methods have focused on one single modality of task specification while ignoring the rich cross-modal information. We present MUTEX, a unified approach to policy learning from multimodal task specifications. It trains a transformer-based architecture to facilitate cross-modal reasoning, combining masked modeling and cross-modal matching objectives in a two-stage training procedure. After training, MUTEX can follow a task specification in any of the six learned modalities (video demonstrations, goal images, text goal descriptions, text instructions, speech goal descriptions, and speech instructions) or a combination of them. We systematically evaluate the benefits of MUTEX in a newly designed dataset with 100 tasks in simulation and 50 tasks in the real world, annotated with multiple instances of task specifications in different modalities, and observe improved performance over methods trained specifically for any single modality. More information at https://ut-austin-rpl.github.io/MUTEX/

In this paper, we analyze the performance of a multitask end-to-end transformer model on the task of conversational recommendations, which aim to provide recommendations based on a user's explicit preferences expressed in dialogue. While previous works in this area adopt complex multi-component approaches where the dialogue management and entity recommendation tasks are handled by separate components, we show that a unified transformer model, based on the T5 text-to-text transformer model, can perform competitively in both recommending relevant items and generating conversation dialogue. We fine-tune our model on the ReDIAL conversational movie recommendation dataset, and create additional training tasks derived from MovieLens (such as the prediction of movie attributes and related movies based on an input movie), in a multitask learning setting. Using a series of probe studies, we demonstrate that the learned knowledge in the additional tasks is transferred to the conversational setting, where each task leads to a 9%-52% increase in its related probe score.