DyWeight: Dynamic Gradient Weighting for Few-Step Diffusion Sampling

Diffusion Models (DMs) have achieved state-of-the-art generative performance across multiple modalities, yet their sampling process remains prohibitively slow due to the need for hundreds of function evaluations. Recent progress in multi-step ODE solvers has greatly improved efficiency by reusing historical gradients, but existing methods rely on handcrafted coefficients that fail to adapt to the non-stationary dynamics of diffusion sampling. To address this limitation, we propose Dynamic Gradient Weighting (DyWeight), a lightweight, learning-based multi-step solver that introduces a streamlined implicit coupling paradigm. By relaxing classical numerical constraints, DyWeight learns unconstrained time-varying parameters that adaptively aggregate historical gradients while intrinsically scaling the effective step size. This implicit time calibration accurately aligns the solver's numerical trajectory with the model's internal denoising dynamics under large integration steps, avoiding complex decoupled parameterizations and optimizations. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, FFHQ, AFHQv2, ImageNet64, LSUN-Bedroom, Stable Diffusion and FLUX.1-dev demonstrate that DyWeight achieves superior visual fidelity and stability with significantly fewer function evaluations, establishing a new state-of-the-art among efficient diffusion solvers. Code is available at https://github.com/Westlake-AGI-Lab/DyWeight

ConfCtrl: Enabling Precise Camera Control in Video Diffusion via Confidence-Aware Interpolation

We address the challenge of novel view synthesis from only two input images under large viewpoint changes. Existing regression-based methods lack the capacity to reconstruct unseen regions, while camera-guided diffusion models often deviate from intended trajectories due to noisy point cloud projections or insufficient conditioning from camera poses. To address these issues, we propose ConfCtrl, a confidence-aware video interpolation framework that enables diffusion models to follow prescribed camera poses while completing unseen regions. ConfCtrl initializes the diffusion process by combining a confidence-weighted projected point cloud latent with noise as the conditioning input. It then applies a Kalman-inspired predict-update mechanism, treating the projected point cloud as a noisy measurement and using learned residual corrections to balance pose-driven predictions with noisy geometric observations. This allows the model to rely on reliable projections while down-weighting uncertain regions, yielding stable, geometry-aware generation. Experiments on multiple datasets show that ConfCtrl produces geometrically consistent and visually plausible novel views, effectively reconstructing occluded regions under large viewpoint changes.

DIVE: Scaling Diversity in Agentic Task Synthesis for Generalizable Tool Use

Recent work synthesizes agentic tasks for post-training tool-using LLMs, yet robust generalization under shifts in tasks and toolsets remains an open challenge. We trace this brittleness to insufficient diversity in synthesized tasks. Scaling diversity is difficult because training requires tasks to remain executable and verifiable, while generalization demands coverage of diverse tool types, toolset combinations, and heterogeneous tool-use patterns. We propose DIVE, an evidence-driven recipe that inverts synthesis order, executing diverse, real-world tools first and reverse-deriving tasks strictly entailed by the resulting traces, thereby providing grounding by construction. DIVE scales structural diversity along two controllable axes, tool-pool coverage and per-task toolset variety, and an Evidence Collection--Task Derivation loop further induces rich multi-step tool-use patterns across 373 tools in five domains. Training Qwen3-8B on DIVE data (48k SFT + 3.2k RL) improves by +22 average points across 9 OOD benchmarks and outperforms the strongest 8B baseline by +68. Remarkably, controlled scaling analysis reveals that diversity scaling consistently outperforms quantity scaling for OOD generalization, even with 4x less data.

Tensegrity Robot Endcap-Ground Contact Estimation with Symmetry-aware Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network

Tensegrity robots possess lightweight and resilient structures but present significant challenges for state estimation due to compliant and distributed ground contacts. This paper introduces a symmetry-aware heterogeneous graph neural network (Sym-HGNN) that infers contact states directly from proprioceptive measurements, including IMU and cable-length histories, without dedicated contact sensors. The network incorporates the robot's dihedral symmetry $D_3$ into the message-passing process to enhance sample efficiency and generalization. The predicted contacts are integrated into a state-of-the-art contact-aided invariant extended Kalman filter (InEKF) for improved pose estimation. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves up to 15% higher accuracy and 5% higher F1-score using only 20% of the training data compared to the CNN and MI-HGNN baselines, while maintaining low-drift and physically consistent state estimation results comparable to ground truth contacts. This work highlights the potential of fully proprioceptive sensing for accurate and robust state estimation in tensegrity robots. Code available at: https://github.com/Jonathan-Twz/Tensegrity-Sym-HGNN

Human or Machine? A Preliminary Turing Test for Speech-to-Speech Interaction

The pursuit of human-like conversational agents has long been guided by the Turing test. For modern speech-to-speech (S2S) systems, a critical yet unanswered question is whether they can converse like humans. To tackle this, we conduct the first Turing test for S2S systems, collecting 2,968 human judgments on dialogues between 9 state-of-the-art S2S systems and 28 human participants. Our results deliver a clear finding: no existing evaluated S2S system passes the test, revealing a significant gap in human-likeness. To diagnose this failure, we develop a fine-grained taxonomy of 18 human-likeness dimensions and crowd-annotate our collected dialogues accordingly. Our analysis shows that the bottleneck is not semantic understanding but stems from paralinguistic features, emotional expressivity, and conversational persona. Furthermore, we find that off-the-shelf AI models perform unreliably as Turing test judges. In response, we propose an interpretable model that leverages the fine-grained human-likeness ratings and delivers accurate and transparent human-vs-machine discrimination, offering a powerful tool for automatic human-likeness evaluation. Our work establishes the first human-likeness evaluation for S2S systems and moves beyond binary outcomes to enable detailed diagnostic insights, paving the way for human-like improvements in conversational AI systems.

SwitchCraft: Training-Free Multi-Event Video Generation with Attention Controls

Recent advances in text-to-video diffusion models have enabled high-fidelity and temporally coherent videos synthesis. However, current models are predominantly optimized for single-event generation. When handling multi-event prompts, without explicit temporal grounding, such models often produce blended or collapsed scenes that break the intended narrative. To address this limitation, we present SwitchCraft, a training-free framework for multi-event video generation. Our key insight is that uniform prompt injection across time ignores the correspondence between events and frames. To this end, we introduce Event-Aligned Query Steering (EAQS), which steers frame-level attention to align with relevant event prompts. Furthermore, we propose Auto-Balance Strength Solver (ABSS), which adaptively balances steering strength to preserve temporal consistency and visual fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SwitchCraft substantially improves prompt alignment, event clarity, and scene consistency compared with existing baselines, offering a simple yet effective solution for multi-event video generation.

Beyond Static Artifacts: A Forensic Benchmark for Video Deepfake Reasoning in Vision Language Models

Current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for deepfake detection excel at identifying spatial artifacts but overlook a critical dimension: temporal inconsistencies in video forgeries. Adapting VLMs to reason about these dynamic cues remains a distinct challenge. To bridge this gap, we propose Forensic Answer-Questioning (FAQ), a large-scale benchmark that formulates temporal deepfake analysis as a multiple-choice task. FAQ introduces a three-level hierarchy to progressively evaluate and equip VLMs with forensic capabilities: (1) Facial Perception, testing the ability to identify static visual artifacts; (2) Temporal Deepfake Grounding, requiring the localization of dynamic forgery artifacts across frames; and (3) Forensic Reasoning, challenging models to synthesize evidence for final authenticity verdicts. We evaluate a range of VLMs on FAQ and generate a corresponding instruction-tuning set, FAQ-IT. Extensive experiments show that models fine-tuned on FAQ-IT achieve advanced performance on both in-domain and cross-dataset detection benchmarks. Ablation studies further validate the impact of our key design choices, confirming that FAQ is the driving force behind the temporal reasoning capabilities of these VLMs.

Geometry-as-context: Modulating Explicit 3D in Scene-consistent Video Generation to Geometry Context

Scene-consistent video generation aims to create videos that explore 3D scenes based on a camera trajectory. Previous methods rely on video generation models with external memory for consistency, or iterative 3D reconstruction and inpainting, which accumulate errors during inference due to incorrect intermediary outputs, non-differentiable processes, and separate models. To overcome these limitations, we introduce ``geometry-as-context". It iteratively completes the following steps using an autoregressive camera-controlled video generation model: (1) estimates the geometry of the current view necessary for 3D reconstruction, and (2) simulates and restores novel view images rendered by the 3D scene. Under this multi-task framework, we develop the camera gated attention module to enhance the model's capability to effectively leverage camera poses. During the training phase, text contexts are utilized to ascertain whether geometric or RGB images should be generated. To ensure that the model can generate RGB-only outputs during inference, the geometry context is randomly dropped from the interleaved text-image-geometry training sequence. The method has been tested on scene video generation with one-direction and forth-and-back trajectories. The results show its superiority over previous approaches in maintaining scene consistency and camera control.

CleanStyle: Plug-and-Play Style Conditioning Purification for Text-to-Image Stylization

Style transfer in diffusion models enables controllable visual generation by injecting the style of a reference image. However, recent encoder-based methods, while efficient and tuning-free, often suffer from content leakage, where semantic elements from the style image undesirably appear in the output, impairing prompt fidelity and stylistic consistency. In this work, we introduce CleanStyle, a plug-and-play framework that filters out content-related noise from the style embedding without retraining. Motivated by empirical analysis, we observe that such leakage predominantly stems from the tail components of the style embedding, which are isolated via Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). To address this, we propose CleanStyleSVD (CS-SVD), which dynamically suppresses tail components using a time-aware exponential schedule, providing clean, style-preserving conditional embeddings throughout the denoising process. Furthermore, we present Style-Specific Classifier-Free Guidance (SS-CFG), which reuses the suppressed tail components to construct style-aware unconditional inputs. Unlike conventional methods that use generic negative embeddings (e.g., zero vectors), SS-CFG introduces targeted negative signals that reflect style-specific but prompt-irrelevant visual elements. This enables the model to effectively suppress these distracting patterns during generation, thereby improving prompt fidelity and enhancing the overall visual quality of stylized outputs. Our approach is lightweight, interpretable, and can be seamlessly integrated into existing encoder-based diffusion models without retraining. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CleanStyle substantially reduces content leakage, improves stylization quality and improves prompt alignment across a wide range of style references and prompts.

CRAFT-LoRA: Content-Style Personalization via Rank-Constrained Adaptation and Training-Free Fusion

Personalized image generation requires effectively balancing content fidelity with stylistic consistency when synthesizing images based on text and reference examples. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) offers an efficient personalization approach, with potential for precise control through combining LoRA weights on different concepts. However, existing combination techniques face persistent challenges: entanglement between content and style representations, insufficient guidance for controlling elements' influence, and unstable weight fusion that often require additional training. We address these limitations through CRAFT-LoRA, with complementary components: (1) rank-constrained backbone fine-tuning that injects low-rank projection residuals to encourage learning decoupled content and style subspaces; (2) a prompt-guided approach featuring an expert encoder with specialized branches that enables semantic extension and precise control through selective adapter aggregation; and (3) a training-free, timestep-dependent classifier-free guidance scheme that enhances generation stability by strategically adjusting noise predictions across diffusion steps. Our method significantly improves content-style disentanglement, enables flexible semantic control over LoRA module combinations, and achieves high-fidelity generation without additional retraining overhead.