Abstract:We propose Flow-GRPO, the first method integrating online reinforcement learning (RL) into flow matching models. Our approach uses two key strategies: (1) an ODE-to-SDE conversion that transforms a deterministic Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) into an equivalent Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE) that matches the original model's marginal distribution at all timesteps, enabling statistical sampling for RL exploration; and (2) a Denoising Reduction strategy that reduces training denoising steps while retaining the original inference timestep number, significantly improving sampling efficiency without performance degradation. Empirically, Flow-GRPO is effective across multiple text-to-image tasks. For complex compositions, RL-tuned SD3.5 generates nearly perfect object counts, spatial relations, and fine-grained attributes, boosting GenEval accuracy from $63\%$ to $95\%$. In visual text rendering, its accuracy improves from $59\%$ to $92\%$, significantly enhancing text generation. Flow-GRPO also achieves substantial gains in human preference alignment. Notably, little to no reward hacking occurred, meaning rewards did not increase at the cost of image quality or diversity, and both remained stable in our experiments.
Abstract:Collecting demonstrations enriched with fine-grained tactile information is critical for dexterous manipulation, particularly in contact-rich tasks that require precise force control and physical interaction. While prior works primarily focus on teleoperation or video-based retargeting, they often suffer from kinematic mismatches and the absence of real-time tactile feedback, hindering the acquisition of high-fidelity tactile data. To mitigate this issue, we propose KineDex, a hand-over-hand kinesthetic teaching paradigm in which the operator's motion is directly transferred to the dexterous hand, enabling the collection of physically grounded demonstrations enriched with accurate tactile feedback. To resolve occlusions from human hand, we apply inpainting technique to preprocess the visual observations. Based on these demonstrations, we then train a visuomotor policy using tactile-augmented inputs and implement force control during deployment for precise contact-rich manipulation. We evaluate KineDex on a suite of challenging contact-rich manipulation tasks, including particularly difficult scenarios such as squeezing toothpaste onto a toothbrush, which require precise multi-finger coordination and stable force regulation. Across these tasks, KineDex achieves an average success rate of 74.4%, representing a 57.7% improvement over the variant without force control. Comparative experiments with teleoperation and user studies further validate the advantages of KineDex in data collection efficiency and operability. Specifically, KineDex collects data over twice as fast as teleoperation across two tasks of varying difficulty, while maintaining a near-100% success rate, compared to under 50% for teleoperation.
Abstract:Interactive Generative Video (IGV) has emerged as a crucial technology in response to the growing demand for high-quality, interactive video content across various domains. In this paper, we define IGV as a technology that combines generative capabilities to produce diverse high-quality video content with interactive features that enable user engagement through control signals and responsive feedback. We survey the current landscape of IGV applications, focusing on three major domains: 1) gaming, where IGV enables infinite exploration in virtual worlds; 2) embodied AI, where IGV serves as a physics-aware environment synthesizer for training agents in multimodal interaction with dynamically evolving scenes; and 3) autonomous driving, where IGV provides closed-loop simulation capabilities for safety-critical testing and validation. To guide future development, we propose a comprehensive framework that decomposes an ideal IGV system into five essential modules: Generation, Control, Memory, Dynamics, and Intelligence. Furthermore, we systematically analyze the technical challenges and future directions in realizing each component for an ideal IGV system, such as achieving real-time generation, enabling open-domain control, maintaining long-term coherence, simulating accurate physics, and integrating causal reasoning. We believe that this systematic analysis will facilitate future research and development in the field of IGV, ultimately advancing the technology toward more sophisticated and practical applications.
Abstract:In this article, a joint security and latency analysis of short packet-based low-altitude communications when the eavesdropper is close to the receiver is addressed. To reveal the impacts of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and block-length on latency in communications, we propose a new metric named secure latency (SL) and derive the expressions for the effective secure probability (ESP) and the average SL. To minimize the average SL, different transmission designs are analyzed, in which the optimal solutions of SNR and block-length are provided. Numerical results validate our analysis and reveal the trade-off between reliability and security and the impacts of the block-length, SNR, and packet-generating rate on average SL, of which SNR and the block-length account for main factors. In addition, we find that the performance of SL can be enhanced by allocating less SNR.
Abstract:Exponentially growing short video platforms (SVPs) face significant challenges in moderating content detrimental to users' mental health, particularly for minors. The dissemination of such content on SVPs can lead to catastrophic societal consequences. Although substantial efforts have been dedicated to moderating such content, existing methods suffer from critical limitations: (1) Manual review is prone to human bias and incurs high operational costs. (2) Automated methods, though efficient, lack nuanced content understanding, resulting in lower accuracy. (3) Industrial moderation regulations struggle to adapt to rapidly evolving trends due to long update cycles. In this paper, we annotate the first SVP content moderation benchmark with authentic user/reviewer feedback to fill the absence of benchmark in this field. Then we evaluate various methods on the benchmark to verify the existence of the aforementioned limitations. We further propose our common-law content moderation framework named KuaiMod to address these challenges. KuaiMod consists of three components: training data construction, offline adaptation, and online deployment & refinement. Leveraging large vision language model (VLM) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, KuaiMod adequately models video toxicity based on sparse user feedback and fosters dynamic moderation policy with rapid update speed and high accuracy. Offline experiments and large-scale online A/B test demonstrates the superiority of KuaiMod: KuaiMod achieves the best moderation performance on our benchmark. The deployment of KuaiMod reduces the user reporting rate by 20% and its application in video recommendation increases both Daily Active User (DAU) and APP Usage Time (AUT) on several Kuaishou scenarios. We have open-sourced our benchmark at https://kuaimod.github.io.
Abstract:Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a foundational paradigm for knowledge-grounded text generation. However, existing RAG pipelines often fail to ensure that the reasoning trajectories align with the evidential constraints imposed by retrieved content. In this paper, we reframe RAG as a problem of retrieval-aware reasoning and identify a core challenge: reasoning misalignment-the mismatch between a model's reasoning trajectory and the retrieved evidence. To address this challenge, we propose AlignRAG, a novel test-time framework that mitigates reasoning misalignment through iterative Critique-Driven Alignment (CDA) steps. In contrast to prior approaches that rely on static training or post-hoc selection, AlignRAG actively refines reasoning trajectories during inference by enforcing fine-grained alignment with evidence. Our framework introduces a new paradigm for retrieval-aware reasoning by: (1) constructing context-rich training corpora; (2) generating contrastive critiques from preference-aware reasoning trajectories; (3) training a dedicated \textit{Critic Language Model (CLM)} to identify reasoning misalignments; and (4) applying CDA steps to optimize reasoning trajectories iteratively. Empirical results demonstrate that AlignRAG consistently outperforms all baselines and could integrate as a plug-and-play module into existing RAG pipelines without further changes. By reconceptualizing RAG as a structured reasoning trajectory and establishing the test-time framework for correcting reasoning misalignments in RAG, AlignRAG provides practical advancements for retrieval-aware generation.
Abstract:Pipeline Parallelism (PP) serves as a crucial technique for training Large Language Models (LLMs), owing to its capability to alleviate memory pressure from model states with relatively low communication overhead. However, in long-context scenarios, existing pipeline parallelism methods fail to address the substantial activation memory pressure, primarily due to the peak memory consumption resulting from the accumulation of activations across multiple microbatches. Moreover, these approaches inevitably introduce considerable pipeline bubbles, further hindering efficiency. To tackle these challenges, we propose SlimPipe, a novel approach to fine-grained pipeline parallelism that employs uniform sequence slicing coupled with one-forward-one-backward (1F1B) schedule. It reduces the accumulated activations from several microbatches to just one, which is split into several slices. Although the slices are evenly partitioned, the computation cost is not equal across slices due to causal attention. We develop a sophisticated workload redistribution technique to address this load imbalance. SlimPipe achieves (1) near-zero memory overhead and (2) minimal pipeline bubbles simultaneously. The effectiveness of SlimPipe has been proven by thorough testing with diverse model architectures, context window sizes, and SlimPipe-specific configurations. For example, on the Llama 70B model, compared to state-of-the-art methods, SlimPipe significantly boosts the Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU) to up to $1.57\times$ for a context length of 512K. More notably, for a context length of 2048K, it maintains over 45% utilization on 256 NVIDIA Hopper 80GB GPUs, while other approaches either suffer significant performance drops or fail entirely due to memory constraints.
Abstract:Reinforcement Learning from Human/AI Feedback (RLHF/RLAIF) has been extensively utilized for preference alignment of text-to-image models. Existing methods face certain limitations in terms of both data and algorithm. For training data, most approaches rely on manual annotated preference data, either by directly fine-tuning the generators or by training reward models to provide training signals. However, the high annotation cost makes them difficult to scale up, the reward model consumes extra computation and cannot guarantee accuracy. From an algorithmic perspective, most methods neglect the value of text and only take the image feedback as a comparative signal, which is inefficient and sparse. To alleviate these drawbacks, we propose the InstructEngine framework. Regarding annotation cost, we first construct a taxonomy for text-to-image generation, then develop an automated data construction pipeline based on it. Leveraging advanced large multimodal models and human-defined rules, we generate 25K text-image preference pairs. Finally, we introduce cross-validation alignment method, which refines data efficiency by organizing semantically analogous samples into mutually comparable pairs. Evaluations on DrawBench demonstrate that InstructEngine improves SD v1.5 and SDXL's performance by 10.53% and 5.30%, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines, with ablation study confirming the benefits of InstructEngine's all components. A win rate of over 50% in human reviews also proves that InstructEngine better aligns with human preferences.
Abstract:Long-context video understanding in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) faces a critical challenge: balancing computational efficiency with the retention of fine-grained spatio-temporal patterns. Existing approaches (e.g., sparse sampling, dense sampling with low resolution, and token compression) suffer from significant information loss in temporal dynamics, spatial details, or subtle interactions, particularly in videos with complex motion or varying resolutions. To address this, we propose $\mathbf{Mavors}$, a novel framework that introduces $\mathbf{M}$ulti-gr$\mathbf{a}$nularity $\mathbf{v}$ide$\mathbf{o}$ $\mathbf{r}$epre$\mathbf{s}$entation for holistic long-video modeling. Specifically, Mavors directly encodes raw video content into latent representations through two core components: 1) an Intra-chunk Vision Encoder (IVE) that preserves high-resolution spatial features via 3D convolutions and Vision Transformers, and 2) an Inter-chunk Feature Aggregator (IFA) that establishes temporal coherence across chunks using transformer-based dependency modeling with chunk-level rotary position encodings. Moreover, the framework unifies image and video understanding by treating images as single-frame videos via sub-image decomposition. Experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate Mavors' superiority in maintaining both spatial fidelity and temporal continuity, significantly outperforming existing methods in tasks requiring fine-grained spatio-temporal reasoning.
Abstract:Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) enables efficient spectrum utilization and reduces hardware costs for beyond 5G (B5G) and 6G networks, facilitating intelligent applications that require both high-performance communication and precise sensing capabilities. This survey provides a comprehensive review of the evolution of ISAC over the years. We examine the expansion of the spectrum across RF and optical ISAC, highlighting the role of advanced technologies, along with key challenges and synergies. We further discuss the advancements in network architecture from single-cell to multi-cell systems, emphasizing the integration of collaborative sensing and interference mitigation strategies. Moreover, we analyze the progress from single-modal to multi-modal sensing, with a focus on the integration of edge intelligence to enable real-time data processing, reduce latency, and enhance decision-making. Finally, we extensively review standardization efforts by 3GPP, IEEE, and ITU, examining the transition of ISAC-related technologies and their implications for the deployment of 6G networks.