LightBagel: A Light-weighted, Double Fusion Framework for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation

Unified multimodal models have recently shown remarkable gains in both capability and versatility, yet most leading systems are still trained from scratch and require substantial computational resources. In this paper, we show that competitive performance can be obtained far more efficiently by strategically fusing publicly available models specialized for either generation or understanding. Our key design is to retain the original blocks while additionally interleaving multimodal self-attention blocks throughout the networks. This double fusion mechanism (1) effectively enables rich multi-modal fusion while largely preserving the original strengths of the base models, and (2) catalyzes synergistic fusion of high-level semantic representations from the understanding encoder with low-level spatial signals from the generation encoder. By training with only ~ 35B tokens, this approach achieves strong results across multiple benchmarks: 0.91 on GenEval for compositional text-to-image generation, 82.16 on DPG-Bench for complex text-to-image generation, 6.06 on GEditBench, and 3.77 on ImgEdit-Bench for image editing. By fully releasing the entire suite of code, model weights, and datasets, we hope to support future research on unified multimodal modeling.

Probing Social Identity Bias in Chinese LLMs with Gendered Pronouns and Social Groups

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in user-facing applications, raising concerns about their potential to reflect and amplify social biases. We investigate social identity framing in Chinese LLMs using Mandarin-specific prompts across ten representative Chinese LLMs, evaluating responses to ingroup ("We") and outgroup ("They") framings, and extending the setting to 240 social groups salient in the Chinese context. To complement controlled experiments, we further analyze Chinese-language conversations from a corpus of real interactions between users and chatbots. Across models, we observe systematic ingroup-positive and outgroup-negative tendencies, which are not confined to synthetic prompts but also appear in naturalistic dialogue, indicating that bias dynamics might strengthen in real interactions. Our study provides a language-aware evaluation framework for Chinese LLMs, demonstrating that social identity biases documented in English generalize cross-linguistically and intensify in user-facing contexts.

Intelligent Virtual Sonographer (IVS): Enhancing Physician-Robot-Patient Communication

The advancement and maturity of large language models (LLMs) and robotics have unlocked vast potential for human-computer interaction, particularly in the field of robotic ultrasound. While existing research primarily focuses on either patient-robot or physician-robot interaction, the role of an intelligent virtual sonographer (IVS) bridging physician-robot-patient communication remains underexplored. This work introduces a conversational virtual agent in Extended Reality (XR) that facilitates real-time interaction between physicians, a robotic ultrasound system(RUS), and patients. The IVS agent communicates with physicians in a professional manner while offering empathetic explanations and reassurance to patients. Furthermore, it actively controls the RUS by executing physician commands and transparently relays these actions to the patient. By integrating LLM-powered dialogue with speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and robotic control, our system enhances the efficiency, clarity, and accessibility of robotic ultrasound acquisition. This work constitutes a first step toward understanding how IVS can bridge communication gaps in physician-robot-patient interaction, providing more control and therefore trust into physician-robot interaction while improving patient experience and acceptance of robotic ultrasound.

SignAligner: Harmonizing Complementary Pose Modalities for Coherent Sign Language Generation

Sign language generation aims to produce diverse sign representations based on spoken language. However, achieving realistic and naturalistic generation remains a significant challenge due to the complexity of sign language, which encompasses intricate hand gestures, facial expressions, and body movements. In this work, we introduce PHOENIX14T+, an extended version of the widely-used RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014T dataset, featuring three new sign representations: Pose, Hamer and Smplerx. We also propose a novel method, SignAligner, for realistic sign language generation, consisting of three stages: text-driven pose modalities co-generation, online collaborative correction of multimodality, and realistic sign video synthesis. First, by incorporating text semantics, we design a joint sign language generator to simultaneously produce posture coordinates, gesture actions, and body movements. The text encoder, based on a Transformer architecture, extracts semantic features, while a cross-modal attention mechanism integrates these features to generate diverse sign language representations, ensuring accurate mapping and controlling the diversity of modal features. Next, online collaborative correction is introduced to refine the generated pose modalities using a dynamic loss weighting strategy and cross-modal attention, facilitating the complementarity of information across modalities, eliminating spatiotemporal conflicts, and ensuring semantic coherence and action consistency. Finally, the corrected pose modalities are fed into a pre-trained video generation network to produce high-fidelity sign language videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SignAligner significantly improves both the accuracy and expressiveness of the generated sign videos.

CLEAR: A Clinically-Grounded Tabular Framework for Radiology Report Evaluation

Existing metrics often lack the granularity and interpretability to capture nuanced clinical differences between candidate and ground-truth radiology reports, resulting in suboptimal evaluation. We introduce a Clinically-grounded tabular framework with Expert-curated labels and Attribute-level comparison for Radiology report evaluation (CLEAR). CLEAR not only examines whether a report can accurately identify the presence or absence of medical conditions, but also assesses whether it can precisely describe each positively identified condition across five key attributes: first occurrence, change, severity, descriptive location, and recommendation. Compared to prior works, CLEAR's multi-dimensional, attribute-level outputs enable a more comprehensive and clinically interpretable evaluation of report quality. Additionally, to measure the clinical alignment of CLEAR, we collaborate with five board-certified radiologists to develop CLEAR-Bench, a dataset of 100 chest X-ray reports from MIMIC-CXR, annotated across 6 curated attributes and 13 CheXpert conditions. Our experiments show that CLEAR achieves high accuracy in extracting clinical attributes and provides automated metrics that are strongly aligned with clinical judgment.

Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretraining

Unifying multimodal understanding and generation has shown impressive capabilities in cutting-edge proprietary systems. In this work, we introduce BAGEL, an open0source foundational model that natively supports multimodal understanding and generation. BAGEL is a unified, decoder0only model pretrained on trillions of tokens curated from large0scale interleaved text, image, video, and web data. When scaled with such diverse multimodal interleaved data, BAGEL exhibits emerging capabilities in complex multimodal reasoning. As a result, it significantly outperforms open-source unified models in both multimodal generation and understanding across standard benchmarks, while exhibiting advanced multimodal reasoning abilities such as free-form image manipulation, future frame prediction, 3D manipulation, and world navigation. In the hope of facilitating further opportunities for multimodal research, we share the key findings, pretraining details, data creation protocal, and release our code and checkpoints to the community. The project page is at https://bagel-ai.org/

InstanceBEV: Unifying Instance and BEV Representation for Global Modeling

Occupancy Grid Maps are widely used in navigation for their ability to represent 3D space occupancy. However, existing methods that utilize multi-view cameras to construct Occupancy Networks for perception modeling suffer from cubic growth in data complexity. Adopting a Bird's-Eye View (BEV) perspective offers a more practical solution for autonomous driving, as it provides higher semantic density and mitigates complex object occlusions. Nonetheless, BEV-based approaches still require extensive engineering optimizations to enable efficient large-scale global modeling. To address this challenge, we propose InstanceBEV, the first method to introduce instance-level dimensionality reduction for BEV, enabling global modeling with transformers without relying on sparsification or acceleration operators. Different from other BEV methods, our approach directly employs transformers to aggregate global features. Compared to 3D object detection models, our method samples global feature maps into 3D space. Experiments on OpenOcc-NuScenes dataset show that InstanceBEV achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining a simple, efficient framework without requiring additional optimizations.

Seed1.5-VL Technical Report

We present Seed1.5-VL, a vision-language foundation model designed to advance general-purpose multimodal understanding and reasoning. Seed1.5-VL is composed with a 532M-parameter vision encoder and a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLM of 20B active parameters. Despite its relatively compact architecture, it delivers strong performance across a wide spectrum of public VLM benchmarks and internal evaluation suites, achieving the state-of-the-art performance on 38 out of 60 public benchmarks. Moreover, in agent-centric tasks such as GUI control and gameplay, Seed1.5-VL outperforms leading multimodal systems, including OpenAI CUA and Claude 3.7. Beyond visual and video understanding, it also demonstrates strong reasoning abilities, making it particularly effective for multimodal reasoning challenges such as visual puzzles. We believe these capabilities will empower broader applications across diverse tasks. In this report, we mainly provide a comprehensive review of our experiences in building Seed1.5-VL across model design, data construction, and training at various stages, hoping that this report can inspire further research. Seed1.5-VL is now accessible at https://www.volcengine.com/ (Volcano Engine Model ID: doubao-1-5-thinking-vision-pro-250428)

EvEnhancer: Empowering Effectiveness, Efficiency and Generalizability for Continuous Space-Time Video Super-Resolution with Events

Continuous space-time video super-resolution (C-STVSR) endeavors to upscale videos simultaneously at arbitrary spatial and temporal scales, which has recently garnered increasing interest. However, prevailing methods struggle to yield satisfactory videos at out-of-distribution spatial and temporal scales. On the other hand, event streams characterized by high temporal resolution and high dynamic range, exhibit compelling promise in vision tasks. This paper presents EvEnhancer, an innovative approach that marries the unique advantages of event streams to elevate effectiveness, efficiency, and generalizability for C-STVSR. Our approach hinges on two pivotal components: 1) Event-adapted synthesis capitalizes on the spatiotemporal correlations between frames and events to discern and learn long-term motion trajectories, enabling the adaptive interpolation and fusion of informative spatiotemporal features; 2) Local implicit video transformer integrates local implicit video neural function with cross-scale spatiotemporal attention to learn continuous video representations utilized to generate plausible videos at arbitrary resolutions and frame rates. Experiments show that EvEnhancer achieves superiority on synthetic and real-world datasets and preferable generalizability on out-of-distribution scales against state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/W-Shuoyan/EvEnhancer.

NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Event-Based Image Deblurring: Methods and Results

This paper presents an overview of NTIRE 2025 the First Challenge on Event-Based Image Deblurring, detailing the proposed methodologies and corresponding results. The primary goal of the challenge is to design an event-based method that achieves high-quality image deblurring, with performance quantitatively assessed using Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR). Notably, there are no restrictions on computational complexity or model size. The task focuses on leveraging both events and images as inputs for single-image deblurring. A total of 199 participants registered, among whom 15 teams successfully submitted valid results, offering valuable insights into the current state of event-based image deblurring. We anticipate that this challenge will drive further advancements in event-based vision research.