Eric
Abstract:Optimizer selection for large-scale model training has become a system-level design decision constrained jointly by compute, memory, tuning budget, and task diversity, yet the landscape of over one hundred methods remains fragmented. We therefore present OmniOpt, a unified survey and benchmark cookbook of optimizers for the research community. OmniOpt rests on four coupled components. First, we treat every optimizer update as a structured transformation through a five-stage meta-pipeline, and show that most methods engage only one or two of these stages. Second, we use norm-constrained linear minimization oracles (LMOs) to unify different optimizers. Third, these two views ground a dual-dimension taxonomy, one dimension assigning each method to a mechanism family and the other recording the measurable training objectives it aims to improve. Fourth, and at the core of this paper, we instantiate the full taxonomy in a unified cross-domain benchmark spanning representative optimizers, model scales, and training regimes from language model pretraining to image classification, systematically analyzing each method family across multiple effect objectives and laying out their trade-offs. OmniOpt thus supplies the research community with an operational coordinate system for selecting optimizers under explicit mechanism and objective assumptions, and charts a direction for the future development of the optimizer community.
Abstract:Graphical user interface (GUI) agents build on vision-language models to complete user tasks end-to-end in real applications through interface actions such as tapping, swiping, text entry, and navigation. However, existing GUI agents are trained and evaluated largely on offline trajectories, simulated environments, and standardized benchmarks. These differ substantially from real applications in interface layout, interaction logic, and abnormal-state distribution, and cannot faithfully characterize execution stability in real-world use, where account states, permission dialogs, payment authentication, and risk control continually reshape the state distribution and open a persistent gap between benchmark scores and real usability. To close this gap, we propose Xiaomi-GUI-0, a native multimodal GUI agent for real mobile environments, trained and evaluated within a real-device closed loop. At its core is a real-device-dominant hybrid infrastructure, where physical devices are the primary execution environment and sandboxes provide auxiliary support, so that data collection, training, rollout, and evaluation share an execution distribution close to real deployment. We construct multi-source training data spanning high-frequency head tasks, high-generalization data for long-tail intents, and capability-enhancement data for reflection and memory, and introduce an error-driven data flywheel that turns failure trajectories into corrected actions, reflective explanations, and recovery demonstrations. The model is trained through a progressive three-stage pipeline of supervised fine-tuning, step-level reinforcement learning, and agentic reinforcement learning. Evaluated on public benchmarks and our in-house RealMobile, Xiaomi-GUI-0 achieves 72.0% success on RealMobile and 78.9% on AndroidWorld, while substantially improving execution stability and abnormal-state recognition in real-world tasks.
Abstract:How to accurately predict a high-fidelity future world? While the visual world is inherently continuous, existing deterministic video prediction models operate in discrete pixel space and are mainly optimized with pixel-wise mean squared error (MSE), which often leads to over-smoothed predictions and a lack of fine-grained visual details. To address these limitations, we propose Predictive Differentiable Rendering (PDR), a novel end-to-end video prediction paradigm that bridges the gap between discrete and continuous representations. Inspired by recent progress in 3D reconstruction with 3D Gaussian Splatting, we introduce PredGS, a lightweight and plug-and-play adapter based on 2D Gaussian representation, which could be seamlessly integrated with existing pixel space predictors, significantly improving spatial detail preservation with negligible computational overhead. Furthermore, we develop predgsplat, a CUDA-accelerated differentiable 2D Gaussian renderer supporting arbitrary channels. Each Gaussian is defined by 5 + C learnable parameters (position, scale, rotation, and C channel amplitudes) and achieves up to 10x faster rendering than the baseline. Optimized by a combined L1 and SSIM loss, PDR overcomes the inherent blurring tendencies of MSE Loss, significantly enhancing the prediction performance. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world benchmarks, including TaxiBJ, WeatherBench, KTH, and Human3.6M, demonstrate that PDR consistently surpasses existing methods, delivering superior detail preservation, visual fidelity, and predictive accuracy.
Abstract:Vision-language models (VLMs) often underperform on evidence intensive tasks because decisive visual evidence are small, localized, and easy to overlook, leading to failures in evidence readout even when high-level reasoning is intact. Prior inference-time visual interventions can improve grounding without retraining, but they are largely open-loop and lack a mechanism to verify whether highlighted evidence is actually used. We study answer-span prediction entropy as a model-internal feedback signal and show that naive entropy minimization is ambiguous, since low entropy may arise from evidence-grounded confidence or shortcut collapse. To resolve this ambiguity, we introduce low-entropy anchors and an entropy-shaping objective that reduces answer uncertainty while preserving baseline high-confidence tokens. We instantiate this principle in SPOT-E, a plug-and-play test-time method that produces question-conditioned spotlights, optimized per instance via light-weight tuning based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Across all benchmarks and different VLM families, SPOT-E yields consistent gains and improved robustness under visual corruptions. Code is publicly available at: \url{https://github.com/YinBo0927/SPOT-E}
Abstract:Interleaved thinking, where a unified multimodal model alternates between textual reasoning and visual generation, has shown promise on spatial and physical tasks. However, in complex long-chain scenarios, we identify a fundamental failure mode: generated images diverge from the textual context while subsequent text ignores the visual evidence, causing the two modalities to alternate without genuinely informing each other. We term this Modal Isolation and attribute it to compounding information loss at modality boundaries. We decompose each reasoning cycle into atomic operations and define modality transition loss, quantifying cross-modal hallucination (text-to-image) and visual utilization deficit (image-to-text) at each boundary. We propose MoTiF (Modality Tiransition Fidelity), a two-stage training framework that directly optimizes these transitions: Reflective SFT trains the model to detect and recover from erroneous visual outputs; Flow-GRPO improves image generation fidelity via reinforcement learning. All training signals in MoTiF derive from transition-level fidelity rather than end-task accuracy. Across four visual puzzle benchmarks, this transition-level supervision substantially improves both cross-modal coherence and final task accuracy. The results demonstrate that effective interleaved reasoning requires explicit structural supervision at modality boundaries, not merely scaling or end-task optimization.
Abstract:Scientific paper recommendation is typically evaluated as static ranking over a fixed candidate set, yet real scientific reading unfolds as a daily, longitudinal process in which interests shift and feedback accumulates. We introduce PaperFlow, a framework that organizes it into three coupled stages: Profiling, which constructs and maintains a structured, inspectable scholarly profile from heterogeneous cold-start evidence; Recommending, which ranks each date-specific paper stream through multi-signal aggregation under a fixed display budget; and Adapting, which updates user state from semantically distinct feedback signals and models interest drift across days. We further define a longitudinal user-day benchmark that fixes users, dates, candidate pools, visible inputs, and hidden simulated relevance labels under a shared temporal information boundary. The benchmark contains 24 simulated research users, 50 daily paper streams, 1,200 user-day episodes, 20,727 unique papers, and 497,448 episode-paper records. We additionally specify a blind human-evaluation protocol to validate alignment between automatic metrics and expert judgments. Experiments against five scientific recommendation baselines show that PaperFlow achieves the strongest oracle-based ranking, the highest behavioral alignment with simulated reading selections, and the best blind human-evaluation score.
Abstract:Most visual tokenizers for image generation are bifurcated into two families with complementary limitations: continuous VAEs offer high-fidelity reconstruction but suffer from dense, entangled latents that are poorly suited for semantic control, whereas discrete VQ-based models enable autoregressive generation yet struggle with gradient sparsity, unstable training, and codebook collapse. In this work, we introduce MergeTok, a unified tokenizer that jointly optimizes continuous (VAE) and discrete (VQ) tokenizers within a encoder-decoder architecture, leveraging token merging techniques as a semantic bridge. By clustering similar tokens during encoding, MergeTok establishes a structural prior that provides dual supervision signals: (i) it imposes merged-token semantic alignment in the VAE branch, regularizing its latent space toward disentangled, semantic-aware representations; (ii) it derives group-wise constraints, promoting intra-group diversity and inter-group exclusivity that stabilize VQ training. MergeTok shows competitive reconstruction and generation performance on ImageNet-256, with substantially lower rFID than strong VAE and VQ models under matched token budgets, while producing semantically-organized token representations compatible with both autoregressive and diffusion generators. This shows that a single architecture can endow visual tokenizers with robust semantic organization and generator-friendly discreteness.
Abstract:VLM-based OCR models have become the de facto choice for document parsing, as they can accurately extract page-level elements (e.g., paragraphs within individual pages) together with their bounding boxes and textual content. However, downstream applications such as RAG require coherent document-level information, whereas these models often break cross-page continuity and fail to recover disrupted structures, such as paragraphs and tables truncated by page boundaries. Such relationships are not confined to a single page; instead, they require joint analysis of titles, paragraphs, tables, and images spanning multiple pages. A natural solution is therefore to reuse existing OCR outputs and reconstruct document-level logical structures through post-processing. To this end, we propose MinerU-Popo, a lightweight and universal framework for POst-Processing OCR outputs, which converts page-level results from diverse parsers into coherent document-level structures. MinerU-Popo decomposes the problem into four focused subtasks: text truncation recovery, table truncation recovery, title hierarchy reconstruction, and image-text association. To address these effectively, we build a task-oriented data engine with task-specific input filtering, and use the generated data (30K) to fine-tune a lightweight post-processing model (Qwen3-VL-4B). To support long documents, we introduce dynamic chunking with overlap-based synchronization, which aligns chunk-level outputs from the fine-tuned model and preserves global consistency. Finally, we assemble the aligned outputs into a tree-structured document representation, further enriched with node chunking and summaries for downstream retrieval and analysis. Empirical results show MinerU-Popo improves title-hierarchy TEDS by at least 20% across all five tested OCR models, improves RAG accuracy and reduces per-query latency.
Abstract:Distributed Image Compression (DIC) is crucial for multi-view transmission, especially when operating at extremely low bitrates (< 0.1 bpp). Its core challenge is effectively utilizing side information to achieve high-quality reconstruction under strict bitrate budgets. However, existing DIC approaches struggle to exploit global context and object-level details from side information, leading to local blurring and the loss of fine details in the reconstruction. To address these limitations, we propose a Multimodal DIC framework (MDIC), which, for the first time, leverages side information in a multimodal manner into the DIC paradigm, effectively preserving fine-grained local details and enhancing global perceptual quality in reconstructed images. Specifically, we introduce a text-to-image diffusion-based decoder conditioned on textual side information extracted from correlated images to capture shared global semantics. Moreover, we design a feature-mask generator, supervised by a multimodal fine-grained alignment task, to strengthen the exploitation of visual side information. The generated mask serves two purposes: first, it guides the extraction of fine-grained details from losslessly transmitted side information to preserve the semantic consistency of reconstructed details; second, it regulates the extraction of clustered feature representations from the quantized VQ-VAE embeddings, compensating for category information lost under the extreme compression of the primary image. Extensive experiments on the widely used KITTI Stereo and Cityscapes datasets demonstrate that MDIC achieves state-of-the-art perceptual quality at extremely low bitrates.
Abstract:Discrete autoregressive (AR) text-to-image (T2I) models pair a VQ tokenizer with an AR policy, and current post-training pipelines optimize only the policy while keeping the VQ decoder frozen. Recent diffusion T2I work, exemplified by REPA-E, has shown that the VAE itself constitutes a key alignment bottleneck, yet no analogous investigation exists for discrete AR models. We show that policy-only optimization induces Latent Covariate Shift: as the policy evolves, the resulting token distribution diverges from the ground-truth distribution on which the decoder was trained, such that reward scores improve while decoded image quality degrades. To address this mismatch, we propose RankE, the first end-to-end post-training framework for discrete T2I generation. Rather than optimizing the policy against a fixed decoder, RankE co-evolves both components through alternating optimization: each module maximizes a ranking-based alignment objective while being regularized by a stability-preserving anchor suited to its parameter space. This co-evolution breaks the fidelity--alignment trade-off that plagues frozen-decoder approaches: on LlamaGen-XL (775M), standard RL improves CLIP but degrades FID, whereas RankE improves both simultaneously (FID 15.21, CLIP 33.76 on MS-COCO 30K). Consistent gains on Janus-Pro (1B) confirm that decoder co-evolution reliably converts reward optimization into pixel-space quality improvements.