Toward Visually Realistic Simulation: A Benchmark for Evaluating Robot Manipulation in Simulation

Reliable simulation evaluation of robot manipulation policies serves as a high-fidelity proxy for real-world performance. Although existing benchmarks cover a wide range of task categories, they lack visual realism, creating a large domain gap between simulation and reality. This undermines the reliability of simulation-based evaluation in predicting real-world performance. To mitigate the sim-to-real visual gap, we conduct a systematic analysis to isolate the effects of lighting and material. Our results show that these factors play a critical role in geometric reasoning and spatial grounding, yet are largely overlooked in existing benchmarks. Motivated by the analysis, we propose VISER, a visually realistic benchmark for evaluating robot manipulation in simulation. VISER features a high-fidelity dataset of over 1,000 3D assets with physically-based rendering (PBR) materials, along with 3D scenes created from these assets through curated layouts or generation. To this end, we propose an automated pipeline leveraging Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for material-aware part segmentation and material retrieval, enabling scalable generation of physically plausible assets. Building on the high-fidelity 3D asset dataset, we construct diverse evaluation tasks, such as grasping, placing, and long-horizon tasks, enabling scalable and reproducible assessment of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. Our benchmark shows a strong correlation between simulation and real-world performance, achieving an average Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.92 across different policies.

Relit-LiVE: Relight Video by Jointly Learning Environment Video

Recent advances have shown that large-scale video diffusion models can be repurposed as neural renderers by first decomposing videos into intrinsic scene representations and then performing forward rendering under novel illumination. While promising, this paradigm fundamentally relies on accurate intrinsic decomposition, which remains highly unreliable for real-world videos and often leads to distorted appearances, broken materials, and accumulated temporal artifacts during relighting. In this work, we present Relit-LiVE, a novel video relighting framework that produces physically consistent, temporally stable results without requiring prior knowledge of camera pose. Our key insight is to explicitly introduce raw reference images into the rendering process, enabling the model to recover critical scene cues that are inevitably lost or corrupted in intrinsic representations. Furthermore, we propose a novel environment video prediction formulation that simultaneously generates relit videos and per-frame environment maps aligned with each camera viewpoint in a single diffusion process. This joint prediction enforces strong geometric-illumination alignment and naturally supports dynamic lighting and camera motion, significantly improving physical consistency in video relighting while easing the requirement of known per-frame camera pose. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Relit-LiVE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art video relighting and neural rendering methods across synthetic and real-world benchmarks. Beyond relighting, our framework naturally supports a wide range of downstream applications, including scene-level rendering, material editing, object insertion, and streaming video relighting. The Project is available at https://github.com/zhuxing0/Relit-LiVE.

Unified Graph Prompt Learning via Low-Rank Graph Message Prompting

Graph Data Prompt (GDP), which introduces specific prompts in graph data for efficiently adapting pre-trained GNNs, has become a mainstream approach to graph fine-tuning learning problem. However, existing GDPs have been respectively designed for distinct graph component (e.g., node features, edge features, edge weights) and thus operate within limited prompt spaces for graph data. To the best of our knowledge, it still lacks a unified prompter suitable for targeting all graph components simultaneously. To address this challenge, in this paper, we first propose to reinterpret a wide range of existing GDPs from an aspect of Graph Message Prompt (GMP) paradigm. Based on GMP, we then introduce a novel graph prompt learning approach, termed Low-Rank GMP (LR-GMP), which leverages low-rank prompt representation to achieve an effective and compact graph prompt learning. Unlike traditional GDPs that target distinct graph components separately, LR-GMP concurrently performs prompting on all graph components in a unified manner, thereby achieving significantly superior generalization and robustness on diverse downstream tasks. Extensive experiments on several graph benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of our proposed LR-GMP.

Recovering 3D Shapes from Ultra-Fast Motion-Blurred Images

We consider the problem of 3D shape recovery from ultra-fast motion-blurred images. While 3D reconstruction from static images has been extensively studied, recovering geometry from extreme motion-blurred images remains challenging. Such scenarios frequently occur in both natural and industrial settings, such as fast-moving objects in sports (e.g., balls) or rotating machinery, where rapid motion distorts object appearance and makes traditional 3D reconstruction techniques like Multi-View Stereo (MVS) ineffective. In this paper, we propose a novel inverse rendering approach for shape recovery from ultra-fast motion-blurred images. While conventional rendering techniques typically synthesize blur by averaging across multiple frames, we identify a major computational bottleneck in the repeated computation of barycentric weights. To address this, we propose a fast barycentric coordinate solver, which significantly reduces computational overhead and achieves a speedup of up to 4.57x, enabling efficient and photorealistic simulation of high-speed motion. Crucially, our method is fully differentiable, allowing gradients to propagate from rendered images to the underlying 3D shape, thereby facilitating shape recovery through inverse rendering. We validate our approach on two representative motion types: rapid translation and rotation. Experimental results demonstrate that our method enables efficient and realistic modeling of ultra-fast moving objects in the forward simulation. Moreover, it successfully recovers 3D shapes from 2D imagery of objects undergoing extreme translational and rotational motion, advancing the boundaries of vision-based 3D reconstruction. Project page: https://maxmilite.github.io/rec-from-ultrafast-blur/

Language as Prior, Vision as Calibration: Metric Scale Recovery for Monocular Depth Estimation

Relative-depth foundation models transfer well, yet monocular metric depth remains ill-posed due to unidentifiable global scale and heightened domain-shift sensitivity. Under a frozen-backbone calibration setting, we recover metric depth via an image-specific affine transform in inverse depth and train only lightweight calibration heads while keeping the relative-depth backbone and the CLIP text encoder fixed. Since captions provide coarse but noisy scale cues that vary with phrasing and missing objects, we use language to predict an uncertainty-aware envelope that bounds feasible calibration parameters in an unconstrained space, rather than committing to a text-only point estimate. We then use pooled multi-scale frozen visual features to select an image-specific calibration within this envelope. During training, a closed-form least-squares oracle in inverse depth provides per-image supervision for learning the envelope and the selected calibration. Experiments on NYUv2 and KITTI improve in-domain accuracy, while zero-shot transfer to SUN-RGBD and DDAD demonstrates improved robustness over strong language-only baselines.

When Prompting Meets Spiking: Graph Sparse Prompting via Spiking Graph Prompt Learning

Graph Prompt Feature (GPF) learning has been widely used in adapting pre-trained GNN model on the downstream task. GPFs first introduce some prompt atoms and then learns the optimal prompt vector for each graph node using the linear combination of prompt atoms. However, existing GPFs generally conduct prompting over node's all feature dimensions which is obviously redundant and also be sensitive to node feature noise. To overcome this issue, for the first time, this paper proposes learning sparse graph prompts by leveraging the spiking neuron mechanism, termed Spiking Graph Prompt Feature (SpikingGPF). Our approach is motivated by the observation that spiking neuron can perform inexpensive information processing and produce sparse outputs which naturally fits the task of our graph sparse prompting. Specifically, SpikingGPF has two main aspects. First, it learns a sparse prompt vector for each node by exploiting a spiking neuron architecture, enabling prompting on selective node features. This yields a more compact and lightweight prompting design while also improving robustness against node noise. Second, SpikingGPF introduces a novel prompt representation learning model based on sparse representation theory, i.e., it represents each node prompt as a sparse combination of prompt atoms. This encourages a more compact representation and also facilitates efficient computation. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of SpikingGPF.

HiMat: DiT-based Ultra-High Resolution SVBRDF Generation

Creating highly detailed SVBRDFs is essential for 3D content creation. The rise of high-resolution text-to-image generative models, based on diffusion transformers (DiT), suggests an opportunity to finetune them for this task. However, retargeting the models to produce multiple aligned SVBRDF maps instead of just RGB images, while achieving high efficiency and ensuring consistency across different maps, remains a challenge. In this paper, we introduce HiMat: a memory- and computation-efficient diffusion-based framework capable of generating native 4K-resolution SVBRDFs. A key challenge we address is maintaining consistency across different maps in a lightweight manner, without relying on training new VAEs or significantly altering the DiT backbone (which would damage its prior capabilities). To tackle this, we introduce the CrossStitch module, a lightweight convolutional module that captures inter-map dependencies through localized operations. Its weights are initialized such that the DiT backbone operation is unchanged before finetuning starts. HiMat enables generation with strong structural coherence and high-frequency details. Results with a large set of text prompts demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for 4K SVBRDF generation. Further experiments suggest generalization to tasks such as intrinsic decomposition.

WeatherDiffusion: Weather-Guided Diffusion Model for Forward and Inverse Rendering

Forward and inverse rendering have emerged as key techniques for enabling understanding and reconstruction in the context of autonomous driving (AD). However, complex weather and illumination pose great challenges to this task. The emergence of large diffusion models has shown promise in achieving reasonable results through learning from 2D priors, but these models are difficult to control and lack robustness. In this paper, we introduce WeatherDiffusion, a diffusion-based framework for forward and inverse rendering on AD scenes with various weather and lighting conditions. Our method enables authentic estimation of material properties, scene geometry, and lighting, and further supports controllable weather and illumination editing through the use of predicted intrinsic maps guided by text descriptions. We observe that different intrinsic maps should correspond to different regions of the original image. Based on this observation, we propose Intrinsic map-aware attention (MAA) to enable high-quality inverse rendering. Additionally, we introduce a synthetic dataset (\ie WeatherSynthetic) and a real-world dataset (\ie WeatherReal) for forward and inverse rendering on AD scenes with diverse weather and lighting. Extensive experiments show that our WeatherDiffusion outperforms state-of-the-art methods on several benchmarks. Moreover, our method demonstrates significant value in downstream tasks for AD, enhancing the robustness of object detection and image segmentation in challenging weather scenarios.

Experience Paper: Scaling WiFi Sensing to Millions of Commodity Devices for Ubiquitous Home Monitoring

WiFi-based home monitoring has emerged as a compelling alternative to traditional camera- and sensor-based solutions, offering wide coverage with minimal intrusion by leveraging existing wireless infrastructure. This paper presents key insights and lessons learned from developing and deploying a large-scale WiFi sensing solution, currently operational across over 10 million commodity off-the-shelf routers and 100 million smart bulbs worldwide. Through this extensive deployment, we identify four real-world challenges that hinder the practical adoption of prior research: 1) Non-human movements (e.g., pets) frequently trigger false positives; 2) Low-cost WiFi chipsets and heterogeneous hardware introduce inconsistencies in channel state information (CSI) measurements; 3) Motion interference in multi-user environments complicates occupant differentiation; 4) Computational constraints on edge devices and limited cloud transmission impede real-time processing. To address these challenges, we present a practical and scalable system, validated through comprehensive two-year evaluations involving 280 edge devices, across 16 scenarios, and over 4 million motion samples. Our solutions achieve an accuracy of 92.61% in diverse real-world homes while reducing false alarms due to non-human movements from 63.1% to 8.4% and lowering CSI transmission overhead by 99.72%. Notably, our system integrates sensing and communication, supporting simultaneous WiFi sensing and data transmission over home WiFi networks. While focused on home monitoring, our findings and strategies generalize to various WiFi sensing applications. By bridging the gaps between theoretical research and commercial deployment, this work offers practical insights for scaling WiFi sensing in real-world environments.

CSI-Bench: A Large-Scale In-the-Wild Dataset for Multi-task WiFi Sensing

WiFi sensing has emerged as a compelling contactless modality for human activity monitoring by capturing fine-grained variations in Channel State Information (CSI). Its ability to operate continuously and non-intrusively while preserving user privacy makes it particularly suitable for health monitoring. However, existing WiFi sensing systems struggle to generalize in real-world settings, largely due to datasets collected in controlled environments with homogeneous hardware and fragmented, session-based recordings that fail to reflect continuous daily activity. We present CSI-Bench, a large-scale, in-the-wild benchmark dataset collected using commercial WiFi edge devices across 26 diverse indoor environments with 35 real users. Spanning over 461 hours of effective data, CSI-Bench captures realistic signal variability under natural conditions. It includes task-specific datasets for fall detection, breathing monitoring, localization, and motion source recognition, as well as a co-labeled multitask dataset with joint annotations for user identity, activity, and proximity. To support the development of robust and generalizable models, CSI-Bench provides standardized evaluation splits and baseline results for both single-task and multi-task learning. CSI-Bench offers a foundation for scalable, privacy-preserving WiFi sensing systems in health and broader human-centric applications.