PAM: A Pose-Appearance-Motion Engine for Sim-to-Real HOI Video Generation

Hand-object interaction (HOI) reconstruction and synthesis are becoming central to embodied AI and AR/VR. Yet, despite rapid progress, existing HOI generation research remains fragmented across three disjoint tracks: (1) pose-only synthesis that predicts MANO trajectories without producing pixels; (2) single-image HOI generation that hallucinates appearance from masks or 2D cues but lacks dynamics; and (3) video generation methods that require both the entire pose sequence and the ground-truth first frame as inputs, preventing true sim-to-real deployment. Inspired by the philosophy of Joo et al. (2018), we think that HOI generation requires a unified engine that brings together pose, appearance, and motion within one coherent framework. Thus we introduce PAM: a Pose-Appearance-Motion Engine for controllable HOI video generation. The performance of our engine is validated by: (1) On DexYCB, we obtain an FVD of 29.13 (vs. 38.83 for InterDyn), and MPJPE of 19.37 mm (vs. 30.05 mm for CosHand), while generating higher-resolution 480x720 videos compared to 256x256 and 256x384 baselines. (2) On OAKINK2, our full multi-condition model improves FVD from 68.76 to 46.31. (3) An ablation over input conditions on DexYCB shows that combining depth, segmentation, and keypoints consistently yields the best results. (4) For a downstream hand pose estimation task using SimpleHand, augmenting training with 3,400 synthetic videos (207k frames) allows a model trained on only 50% of the real data plus our synthetic data to match the 100% real baseline.

The Interspeech 2026 Audio Reasoning Challenge: Evaluating Reasoning Process Quality for Audio Reasoning Models and Agents

Recent Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) excel in understanding but often lack transparent reasoning. To address this "black-box" limitation, we organized the Audio Reasoning Challenge at Interspeech 2026, the first shared task dedicated to evaluating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) quality in the audio domain. The challenge introduced MMAR-Rubrics, a novel instance-level protocol assessing the factuality and logic of reasoning chains. Featured Single Model and Agent tracks, the competition attracting 156 teams from 18 countries and regions. Results show agent systems currently lead in reasoning quality, utilizing iterative tool orchestration and cross-modal analysis. Besides, single models are rapidly advancing via reinforcement learning and sophisticated data pipeline. We details the challenge design, methodology, and a comprehensive analysis of state-of-the-art systems, providing new insights for explainable audio intelligence.

Diffusion Knows Transparency: Repurposing Video Diffusion for Transparent Object Depth and Normal Estimation

Transparent objects remain notoriously hard for perception systems: refraction, reflection and transmission break the assumptions behind stereo, ToF and purely discriminative monocular depth, causing holes and temporally unstable estimates. Our key observation is that modern video diffusion models already synthesize convincing transparent phenomena, suggesting they have internalized the optical rules. We build TransPhy3D, a synthetic video corpus of transparent/reflective scenes: 11k sequences rendered with Blender/Cycles. Scenes are assembled from a curated bank of category-rich static assets and shape-rich procedural assets paired with glass/plastic/metal materials. We render RGB + depth + normals with physically based ray tracing and OptiX denoising. Starting from a large video diffusion model, we learn a video-to-video translator for depth (and normals) via lightweight LoRA adapters. During training we concatenate RGB and (noisy) depth latents in the DiT backbone and co-train on TransPhy3D and existing frame-wise synthetic datasets, yielding temporally consistent predictions for arbitrary-length input videos. The resulting model, DKT, achieves zero-shot SOTA on real and synthetic video benchmarks involving transparency: ClearPose, DREDS (CatKnown/CatNovel), and TransPhy3D-Test. It improves accuracy and temporal consistency over strong image/video baselines, and a normal variant sets the best video normal estimation results on ClearPose. A compact 1.3B version runs at ~0.17 s/frame. Integrated into a grasping stack, DKT's depth boosts success rates across translucent, reflective and diffuse surfaces, outperforming prior estimators. Together, these results support a broader claim: "Diffusion knows transparency." Generative video priors can be repurposed, efficiently and label-free, into robust, temporally coherent perception for challenging real-world manipulation.

BSCodec: A Band-Split Neural Codec for High-Quality Universal Audio Reconstruction

Neural audio codecs have recently enabled high-fidelity reconstruction at high compression rates, especially for speech. However, speech and non-speech audio exhibit fundamentally different spectral characteristics: speech energy concentrates in narrow bands around pitch harmonics (80-400 Hz), while non-speech audio requires faithful reproduction across the full spectrum, particularly preserving higher frequencies that define timbre and texture. This poses a challenge: speech-optimized neural codecs suffer degradation on music or sound. Treating the full spectrum holistically is suboptimal: frequency bands have vastly different information density and perceptual importance by content type, yet full-band approaches apply uniform capacity across frequencies without accounting for these acoustic structures. To address this gap, we propose BSCodec (Band-Split Codec), a novel neural audio codec architecture that splits the spectral dimension into separate bands and compresses each band independently. Experimental results demonstrate that BSCodec achieves superior reconstruction over baselines across sound and music, while maintaining competitive quality in the speech domain, when trained on the same combined dataset of speech, music and sound. Downstream benchmark tasks further confirm that BSCodec shows strong potential for use in downstream applications.

Scaling Up Occupancy-centric Driving Scene Generation: Dataset and Method

Driving scene generation is a critical domain for autonomous driving, enabling downstream applications, including perception and planning evaluation. Occupancy-centric methods have recently achieved state-of-the-art results by offering consistent conditioning across frames and modalities; however, their performance heavily depends on annotated occupancy data, which still remains scarce. To overcome this limitation, we curate Nuplan-Occ, the largest semantic occupancy dataset to date, constructed from the widely used Nuplan benchmark. Its scale and diversity facilitate not only large-scale generative modeling but also autonomous driving downstream applications. Based on this dataset, we develop a unified framework that jointly synthesizes high-quality semantic occupancy, multi-view videos, and LiDAR point clouds. Our approach incorporates a spatio-temporal disentangled architecture to support high-fidelity spatial expansion and temporal forecasting of 4D dynamic occupancy. To bridge modal gaps, we further propose two novel techniques: a Gaussian splatting-based sparse point map rendering strategy that enhances multi-view video generation, and a sensor-aware embedding strategy that explicitly models LiDAR sensor properties for realistic multi-LiDAR simulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior generation fidelity and scalability compared to existing approaches, and validates its practical value in downstream tasks. Repo: https://github.com/Arlo0o/UniScene-Unified-Occupancy-centric-Driving-Scene-Generation/tree/v2

One View, Many Worlds: Single-Image to 3D Object Meets Generative Domain Randomization for One-Shot 6D Pose Estimation

Estimating the 6D pose of arbitrary unseen objects from a single reference image is critical for robotics operating in the long-tail of real-world instances. However, this setting is notoriously challenging: 3D models are rarely available, single-view reconstructions lack metric scale, and domain gaps between generated models and real-world images undermine robustness. We propose OnePoseViaGen, a pipeline that tackles these challenges through two key components. First, a coarse-to-fine alignment module jointly refines scale and pose by combining multi-view feature matching with render-and-compare refinement. Second, a text-guided generative domain randomization strategy diversifies textures, enabling effective fine-tuning of pose estimators with synthetic data. Together, these steps allow high-fidelity single-view 3D generation to support reliable one-shot 6D pose estimation. On challenging benchmarks (YCBInEOAT, Toyota-Light, LM-O), OnePoseViaGen achieves state-of-the-art performance far surpassing prior approaches. We further demonstrate robust dexterous grasping with a real robot hand, validating the practicality of our method in real-world manipulation. Project page: https://gzwsama.github.io/OnePoseviaGen.github.io/

Next Tokens Denoising for Speech Synthesis

While diffusion and autoregressive (AR) models have significantly advanced generative modeling, they each present distinct limitations. AR models, which rely on causal attention, cannot exploit future context and suffer from slow generation speeds. Conversely, diffusion models struggle with key-value (KV) caching. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Dragon-FM, a novel text-to-speech (TTS) design that unifies AR and flow-matching. This model processes 48 kHz audio codec tokens in chunks at a compact 12.5 tokens per second rate. This design enables AR modeling across chunks, ensuring global coherence, while parallel flow-matching within chunks facilitates fast iterative denoising. Consequently, the proposed model can utilize KV-cache across chunks and incorporate future context within each chunk. Furthermore, it bridges continuous and discrete feature modeling, demonstrating that continuous AR flow-matching can predict discrete tokens with finite scalar quantizers. This efficient codec and fast chunk-autoregressive architecture also makes the proposed model particularly effective for generating extended content. Experiment for demos of our work} on podcast datasets demonstrate its capability to efficiently generate high-quality zero-shot podcasts.

Light of Normals: Unified Feature Representation for Universal Photometric Stereo

Universal photometric stereo (PS) aims to recover high-quality surface normals from objects under arbitrary lighting conditions without relying on specific illumination models. Despite recent advances such as SDM-UniPS and Uni MS-PS, two fundamental challenges persist: 1) the deep coupling between varying illumination and surface normal features, where ambiguity in observed intensity makes it difficult to determine whether brightness variations stem from lighting changes or surface orientation; and 2) the preservation of high-frequency geometric details in complex surfaces, where intricate geometries create self-shadowing, inter-reflections, and subtle normal variations that conventional feature processing operations struggle to capture accurately.

Unifying Appearance Codes and Bilateral Grids for Driving Scene Gaussian Splatting

Neural rendering techniques, including NeRF and Gaussian Splatting (GS), rely on photometric consistency to produce high-quality reconstructions. However, in real-world scenarios, it is challenging to guarantee perfect photometric consistency in acquired images. Appearance codes have been widely used to address this issue, but their modeling capability is limited, as a single code is applied to the entire image. Recently, the bilateral grid was introduced to perform pixel-wise color mapping, but it is difficult to optimize and constrain effectively. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-scale bilateral grid that unifies appearance codes and bilateral grids. We demonstrate that this approach significantly improves geometric accuracy in dynamic, decoupled autonomous driving scene reconstruction, outperforming both appearance codes and bilateral grids. This is crucial for autonomous driving, where accurate geometry is important for obstacle avoidance and control. Our method shows strong results across four datasets: Waymo, NuScenes, Argoverse, and PandaSet. We further demonstrate that the improvement in geometry is driven by the multi-scale bilateral grid, which effectively reduces floaters caused by photometric inconsistency.

Towards General Discrete Speech Codec for Complex Acoustic Environments: A Study of Reconstruction and Downstream Task Consistency

Neural speech codecs excel in reconstructing clean speech signals; however, their efficacy in complex acoustic environments and downstream signal processing tasks remains underexplored. In this study, we introduce a novel benchmark named Environment-Resilient Speech Codec Benchmark (ERSB) to systematically evaluate whether neural speech codecs are environment-resilient. Specifically, we assess two key capabilities: (1) robust reconstruction, which measures the preservation of both speech and non-speech acoustic details, and (2) downstream task consistency, which ensures minimal deviation in downstream signal processing tasks when using reconstructed speech instead of the original. Our comprehensive experiments reveal that complex acoustic environments significantly degrade signal reconstruction and downstream task consistency. This work highlights the limitations of current speech codecs and raises a future direction that improves them for greater environmental resilience.