PSDiffusion: Harmonized Multi-Layer Image Generation via Layout and Appearance Alignment

Diffusion models have made remarkable advancements in generating high-quality images from textual descriptions. Recent works like LayerDiffuse have extended the previous single-layer, unified image generation paradigm to transparent image layer generation. However, existing multi-layer generation methods fail to handle the interactions among multiple layers such as rational global layout, physics-plausible contacts and visual effects like shadows and reflections while maintaining high alpha quality. To solve this problem, we propose PSDiffusion, a unified diffusion framework for simultaneous multi-layer text-to-image generation. Our model can automatically generate multi-layer images with one RGB background and multiple RGBA foregrounds through a single feed-forward process. Unlike existing methods that combine multiple tools for post-decomposition or generate layers sequentially and separately, our method introduces a global-layer interactive mechanism that generates layered-images concurrently and collaboratively, ensuring not only high quality and completeness for each layer, but also spatial and visual interactions among layers for global coherence.

MLE-Dojo: Interactive Environments for Empowering LLM Agents in Machine Learning Engineering

We introduce MLE-Dojo, a Gym-style framework for systematically reinforcement learning, evaluating, and improving autonomous large language model (LLM) agents in iterative machine learning engineering (MLE) workflows. Unlike existing benchmarks that primarily rely on static datasets or single-attempt evaluations, MLE-Dojo provides an interactive environment enabling agents to iteratively experiment, debug, and refine solutions through structured feedback loops. Built upon 200+ real-world Kaggle challenges, MLE-Dojo covers diverse, open-ended MLE tasks carefully curated to reflect realistic engineering scenarios such as data processing, architecture search, hyperparameter tuning, and code debugging. Its fully executable environment supports comprehensive agent training via both supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, facilitating iterative experimentation, realistic data sampling, and real-time outcome verification. Extensive evaluations of eight frontier LLMs reveal that while current models achieve meaningful iterative improvements, they still exhibit significant limitations in autonomously generating long-horizon solutions and efficiently resolving complex errors. Furthermore, MLE-Dojo's flexible and extensible architecture seamlessly integrates diverse data sources, tools, and evaluation protocols, uniquely enabling model-based agent tuning and promoting interoperability, scalability, and reproducibility. We open-source our framework and benchmarks to foster community-driven innovation towards next-generation MLE agents.

Rethinking the Global Convergence of Softmax Policy Gradient with Linear Function Approximation

Policy gradient (PG) methods have played an essential role in the empirical successes of reinforcement learning. In order to handle large state-action spaces, PG methods are typically used with function approximation. In this setting, the approximation error in modeling problem-dependent quantities is a key notion for characterizing the global convergence of PG methods. We focus on Softmax PG with linear function approximation (referred to as $\texttt{Lin-SPG}$) and demonstrate that the approximation error is irrelevant to the algorithm's global convergence even for the stochastic bandit setting. Consequently, we first identify the necessary and sufficient conditions on the feature representation that can guarantee the asymptotic global convergence of $\texttt{Lin-SPG}$. Under these feature conditions, we prove that $T$ iterations of $\texttt{Lin-SPG}$ with a problem-specific learning rate result in an $O(1/T)$ convergence to the optimal policy. Furthermore, we prove that $\texttt{Lin-SPG}$ with any arbitrary constant learning rate can ensure asymptotic global convergence to the optimal policy.

Representation Learning via Non-Contrastive Mutual Information

Labeling data is often very time consuming and expensive, leaving us with a majority of unlabeled data. Self-supervised representation learning methods such as SimCLR (Chen et al., 2020) or BYOL (Grill et al., 2020) have been very successful at learning meaningful latent representations from unlabeled image data, resulting in much more general and transferable representations for downstream tasks. Broadly, self-supervised methods fall into two types: 1) Contrastive methods, such as SimCLR; and 2) Non-Contrastive methods, such as BYOL. Contrastive methods are generally trying to maximize mutual information between related data points, so they need to compare every data point to every other data point, resulting in high variance, and thus requiring large batch sizes to work well. Non-contrastive methods like BYOL have much lower variance as they do not need to make pairwise comparisons, but are much trickier to implement as they have the possibility of collapsing to a constant vector. In this paper, we aim to develop a self-supervised objective that combines the strength of both types. We start with a particular contrastive method called the Spectral Contrastive Loss (HaoChen et al., 2021; Lu et al., 2024), and we convert it into a more general non-contrastive form; this removes the pairwise comparisons resulting in lower variance, but keeps the mutual information formulation of the contrastive method preventing collapse. We call our new objective the Mutual Information Non-Contrastive (MINC) loss. We test MINC by learning image representations on ImageNet (similar to SimCLR and BYOL) and show that it consistently improves upon the Spectral Contrastive loss baseline.

A simulation-heuristics dual-process model for intuitive physics

The role of mental simulation in human physical reasoning is widely acknowledged, but whether it is employed across scenarios with varying simulation costs and where its boundary lies remains unclear. Using a pouring-marble task, our human study revealed two distinct error patterns when predicting pouring angles, differentiated by simulation time. While mental simulation accurately captured human judgments in simpler scenarios, a linear heuristic model better matched human predictions when simulation time exceeded a certain boundary. Motivated by these observations, we propose a dual-process framework, Simulation-Heuristics Model (SHM), where intuitive physics employs simulation for short-time simulation but switches to heuristics when simulation becomes costly. By integrating computational methods previously viewed as separate into a unified model, SHM quantitatively captures their switching mechanism. The SHM aligns more precisely with human behavior and demonstrates consistent predictive performance across diverse scenarios, advancing our understanding of the adaptive nature of intuitive physical reasoning.

Multi-identity Human Image Animation with Structural Video Diffusion

Generating human videos from a single image while ensuring high visual quality and precise control is a challenging task, especially in complex scenarios involving multiple individuals and interactions with objects. Existing methods, while effective for single-human cases, often fail to handle the intricacies of multi-identity interactions because they struggle to associate the correct pairs of human appearance and pose condition and model the distribution of 3D-aware dynamics. To address these limitations, we present Structural Video Diffusion, a novel framework designed for generating realistic multi-human videos. Our approach introduces two core innovations: identity-specific embeddings to maintain consistent appearances across individuals and a structural learning mechanism that incorporates depth and surface-normal cues to model human-object interactions. Additionally, we expand existing human video dataset with 25K new videos featuring diverse multi-human and object interaction scenarios, providing a robust foundation for training. Experimental results demonstrate that Structural Video Diffusion achieves superior performance in generating lifelike, coherent videos for multiple subjects with dynamic and rich interactions, advancing the state of human-centric video generation.

Ordering-based Conditions for Global Convergence of Policy Gradient Methods

We prove that, for finite-arm bandits with linear function approximation, the global convergence of policy gradient (PG) methods depends on inter-related properties between the policy update and the representation. textcolor{blue}{First}, we establish a few key observations that frame the study: \textbf{(i)} Global convergence can be achieved under linear function approximation without policy or reward realizability, both for the standard Softmax PG and natural policy gradient (NPG). \textbf{(ii)} Approximation error is not a key quantity for characterizing global convergence in either algorithm. \textbf{(iii)} The conditions on the representation that imply global convergence are different between these two algorithms. Overall, these observations call into question approximation error as an appropriate quantity for characterizing the global convergence of PG methods under linear function approximation. \textcolor{blue}{Second}, motivated by these observations, we establish new general results: \textbf{(i)} NPG with linear function approximation achieves global convergence \emph{if and only if} the projection of the reward onto the representable space preserves the optimal action's rank, a quantity that is not strongly related to approximation error. \textbf{(ii)} The global convergence of Softmax PG occurs if the representation satisfies a non-domination condition and can preserve the ranking of rewards, which goes well beyond policy or reward realizability. We provide experimental results to support these theoretical findings.

TokenHSI: Unified Synthesis of Physical Human-Scene Interactions through Task Tokenization

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/

Infinite Mobility: Scalable High-Fidelity Synthesis of Articulated Objects via Procedural Generation

Large-scale articulated objects with high quality are desperately needed for multiple tasks related to embodied AI. Most existing methods for creating articulated objects are either data-driven or simulation based, which are limited by the scale and quality of the training data or the fidelity and heavy labour of the simulation. In this paper, we propose Infinite Mobility, a novel method for synthesizing high-fidelity articulated objects through procedural generation. User study and quantitative evaluation demonstrate that our method can produce results that excel current state-of-the-art methods and are comparable to human-annotated datasets in both physics property and mesh quality. Furthermore, we show that our synthetic data can be used as training data for generative models, enabling next-step scaling up. Code is available at https://github.com/Intern-Nexus/Infinite-Mobility

Towards Synthesized and Editable Motion In-Betweening Through Part-Wise Phase Representation

Styled motion in-betweening is crucial for computer animation and gaming. However, existing methods typically encode motion styles by modeling whole-body motions, often overlooking the representation of individual body parts. This limitation reduces the flexibility of infilled motion, particularly in adjusting the motion styles of specific limbs independently. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel framework that models motion styles at the body-part level, enhancing both the diversity and controllability of infilled motions. Our approach enables more nuanced and expressive animations by allowing precise modifications to individual limb motions while maintaining overall motion coherence. Leveraging phase-related insights, our framework employs periodic autoencoders to automatically extract the phase of each body part, capturing distinctive local style features. Additionally, we effectively decouple the motion source from synthesis control by integrating motion manifold learning and conditional generation techniques from both image and motion domains. This allows the motion source to generate high-quality motions across various styles, with extracted motion and style features readily available for controlled synthesis in subsequent tasks. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves superior speed, robust generalization, and effective generation of extended motion sequences.