Does Reinforcement Learning Really Incentivize Reasoning Capacity in LLMs Beyond the Base Model?

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently demonstrated notable success in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, particularly in mathematics and programming tasks. It is widely believed that RLVR enables LLMs to continuously self-improve, thus acquiring novel reasoning abilities that exceed corresponding base models' capacity. In this study, however, we critically re-examines this assumption by measuring the pass@\textit{k} metric with large values of \textit{k} to explore the reasoning capability boundary of the models across a wide range of model families and benchmarks. Surprisingly, the RL does \emph{not}, in fact, elicit fundamentally new reasoning patterns. While RL-trained models outperform their base models at smaller values of $k$ (\eg, $k$=1), base models can achieve a comparable or even higher pass@$k$ score compared to their RL counterparts at large $k$ values. The reasoning paths generated by RL-trained models are already included in the base models' sampling distribution, suggesting that most reasoning abilities manifested in RL-trained models are already obtained by base models. Further analysis shows that RL training boosts the performance by biasing the model's output distribution toward paths that are more likely to yield rewards, therefore sampling correct responses more efficiently. But this also results in a narrower reasoning capability boundary compared to base models. Similar results are observed in visual reasoning tasks trained with RLVR. Moreover, we find that distillation can genuinely introduce new knowledge into the model, different from RLVR. These findings underscore a critical limitation of RLVR in advancing LLM reasoning abilities which requires us to fundamentally rethink the impact of RL training in reasoning LLMs and the need of a better paradigm. Project Page: https://limit-of-RLVR.github.io

CheXWorld: Exploring Image World Modeling for Radiograph Representation Learning

Humans can develop internal world models that encode common sense knowledge, telling them how the world works and predicting the consequences of their actions. This concept has emerged as a promising direction for establishing general-purpose machine-learning models in recent preliminary works, e.g., for visual representation learning. In this paper, we present CheXWorld, the first effort towards a self-supervised world model for radiographic images. Specifically, our work develops a unified framework that simultaneously models three aspects of medical knowledge essential for qualified radiologists, including 1) local anatomical structures describing the fine-grained characteristics of local tissues (e.g., architectures, shapes, and textures); 2) global anatomical layouts describing the global organization of the human body (e.g., layouts of organs and skeletons); and 3) domain variations that encourage CheXWorld to model the transitions across different appearance domains of radiographs (e.g., varying clarity, contrast, and exposure caused by collecting radiographs from different hospitals, devices, or patients). Empirically, we design tailored qualitative and quantitative analyses, revealing that CheXWorld successfully captures these three dimensions of medical knowledge. Furthermore, transfer learning experiments across eight medical image classification and segmentation benchmarks showcase that CheXWorld significantly outperforms existing SSL methods and large-scale medical foundation models. Code & pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/CheXWorld.

EchoWorld: Learning Motion-Aware World Models for Echocardiography Probe Guidance

Echocardiography is crucial for cardiovascular disease detection but relies heavily on experienced sonographers. Echocardiography probe guidance systems, which provide real-time movement instructions for acquiring standard plane images, offer a promising solution for AI-assisted or fully autonomous scanning. However, developing effective machine learning models for this task remains challenging, as they must grasp heart anatomy and the intricate interplay between probe motion and visual signals. To address this, we present EchoWorld, a motion-aware world modeling framework for probe guidance that encodes anatomical knowledge and motion-induced visual dynamics, while effectively leveraging past visual-motion sequences to enhance guidance precision. EchoWorld employs a pre-training strategy inspired by world modeling principles, where the model predicts masked anatomical regions and simulates the visual outcomes of probe adjustments. Built upon this pre-trained model, we introduce a motion-aware attention mechanism in the fine-tuning stage that effectively integrates historical visual-motion data, enabling precise and adaptive probe guidance. Trained on more than one million ultrasound images from over 200 routine scans, EchoWorld effectively captures key echocardiographic knowledge, as validated by qualitative analysis. Moreover, our method significantly reduces guidance errors compared to existing visual backbones and guidance frameworks, excelling in both single-frame and sequential evaluation protocols. Code is available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/EchoWorld.

DyDiT++: Dynamic Diffusion Transformers for Efficient Visual Generation

Diffusion Transformer (DiT), an emerging diffusion model for visual generation, has demonstrated superior performance but suffers from substantial computational costs. Our investigations reveal that these costs primarily stem from the \emph{static} inference paradigm, which inevitably introduces redundant computation in certain \emph{diffusion timesteps} and \emph{spatial regions}. To overcome this inefficiency, we propose \textbf{Dy}namic \textbf{Di}ffusion \textbf{T}ransformer (DyDiT), an architecture that \emph{dynamically} adjusts its computation along both \emph{timestep} and \emph{spatial} dimensions. Specifically, we introduce a \emph{Timestep-wise Dynamic Width} (TDW) approach that adapts model width conditioned on the generation timesteps. In addition, we design a \emph{Spatial-wise Dynamic Token} (SDT) strategy to avoid redundant computation at unnecessary spatial locations. TDW and SDT can be seamlessly integrated into DiT and significantly accelerates the generation process. Building on these designs, we further enhance DyDiT in three key aspects. First, DyDiT is integrated seamlessly with flow matching-based generation, enhancing its versatility. Furthermore, we enhance DyDiT to tackle more complex visual generation tasks, including video generation and text-to-image generation, thereby broadening its real-world applications. Finally, to address the high cost of full fine-tuning and democratize technology access, we investigate the feasibility of training DyDiT in a parameter-efficient manner and introduce timestep-based dynamic LoRA (TD-LoRA). Extensive experiments on diverse visual generation models, including DiT, SiT, Latte, and FLUX, demonstrate the effectiveness of DyDiT.

4D LangSplat: 4D Language Gaussian Splatting via Multimodal Large Language Models

Learning 4D language fields to enable time-sensitive, open-ended language queries in dynamic scenes is essential for many real-world applications. While LangSplat successfully grounds CLIP features into 3D Gaussian representations, achieving precision and efficiency in 3D static scenes, it lacks the ability to handle dynamic 4D fields as CLIP, designed for static image-text tasks, cannot capture temporal dynamics in videos. Real-world environments are inherently dynamic, with object semantics evolving over time. Building a precise 4D language field necessitates obtaining pixel-aligned, object-wise video features, which current vision models struggle to achieve. To address these challenges, we propose 4D LangSplat, which learns 4D language fields to handle time-agnostic or time-sensitive open-vocabulary queries in dynamic scenes efficiently. 4D LangSplat bypasses learning the language field from vision features and instead learns directly from text generated from object-wise video captions via Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Specifically, we propose a multimodal object-wise video prompting method, consisting of visual and text prompts that guide MLLMs to generate detailed, temporally consistent, high-quality captions for objects throughout a video. These captions are encoded using a Large Language Model into high-quality sentence embeddings, which then serve as pixel-aligned, object-specific feature supervision, facilitating open-vocabulary text queries through shared embedding spaces. Recognizing that objects in 4D scenes exhibit smooth transitions across states, we further propose a status deformable network to model these continuous changes over time effectively. Our results across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that 4D LangSplat attains precise and efficient results for both time-sensitive and time-agnostic open-vocabulary queries.

Towards Understanding Text Hallucination of Diffusion Models via Local Generation Bias

Score-based diffusion models have achieved incredible performance in generating realistic images, audio, and video data. While these models produce high-quality samples with impressive details, they often introduce unrealistic artifacts, such as distorted fingers or hallucinated texts with no meaning. This paper focuses on textual hallucinations, where diffusion models correctly generate individual symbols but assemble them in a nonsensical manner. Through experimental probing, we consistently observe that such phenomenon is attributed it to the network's local generation bias. Denoising networks tend to produce outputs that rely heavily on highly correlated local regions, particularly when different dimensions of the data distribution are nearly pairwise independent. This behavior leads to a generation process that decomposes the global distribution into separate, independent distributions for each symbol, ultimately failing to capture the global structure, including underlying grammar. Intriguingly, this bias persists across various denoising network architectures including MLP and transformers which have the structure to model global dependency. These findings also provide insights into understanding other types of hallucinations, extending beyond text, as a result of implicit biases in the denoising models. Additionally, we theoretically analyze the training dynamics for a specific case involving a two-layer MLP learning parity points on a hypercube, offering an explanation of its underlying mechanism.

ProxyTransformation: Preshaping Point Cloud Manifold With Proxy Attention For 3D Visual Grounding

Embodied intelligence requires agents to interact with 3D environments in real time based on language instructions. A foundational task in this domain is ego-centric 3D visual grounding. However, the point clouds rendered from RGB-D images retain a large amount of redundant background data and inherent noise, both of which can interfere with the manifold structure of the target regions. Existing point cloud enhancement methods often require a tedious process to improve the manifold, which is not suitable for real-time tasks. We propose Proxy Transformation suitable for multimodal task to efficiently improve the point cloud manifold. Our method first leverages Deformable Point Clustering to identify the point cloud sub-manifolds in target regions. Then, we propose a Proxy Attention module that utilizes multimodal proxies to guide point cloud transformation. Built upon Proxy Attention, we design a submanifold transformation generation module where textual information globally guides translation vectors for different submanifolds, optimizing relative spatial relationships of target regions. Simultaneously, image information guides linear transformations within each submanifold, refining the local point cloud manifold of target regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Proxy Transformation significantly outperforms all existing methods, achieving an impressive improvement of 7.49% on easy targets and 4.60% on hard targets, while reducing the computational overhead of attention blocks by 40.6%. These results establish a new SOTA in ego-centric 3D visual grounding, showcasing the effectiveness and robustness of our approach.

ART: Anonymous Region Transformer for Variable Multi-Layer Transparent Image Generation

Multi-layer image generation is a fundamental task that enables users to isolate, select, and edit specific image layers, thereby revolutionizing interactions with generative models. In this paper, we introduce the Anonymous Region Transformer (ART), which facilitates the direct generation of variable multi-layer transparent images based on a global text prompt and an anonymous region layout. Inspired by Schema theory suggests that knowledge is organized in frameworks (schemas) that enable people to interpret and learn from new information by linking it to prior knowledge.}, this anonymous region layout allows the generative model to autonomously determine which set of visual tokens should align with which text tokens, which is in contrast to the previously dominant semantic layout for the image generation task. In addition, the layer-wise region crop mechanism, which only selects the visual tokens belonging to each anonymous region, significantly reduces attention computation costs and enables the efficient generation of images with numerous distinct layers (e.g., 50+). When compared to the full attention approach, our method is over 12 times faster and exhibits fewer layer conflicts. Furthermore, we propose a high-quality multi-layer transparent image autoencoder that supports the direct encoding and decoding of the transparency of variable multi-layer images in a joint manner. By enabling precise control and scalable layer generation, ART establishes a new paradigm for interactive content creation.

HoVLE: Unleashing the Power of Monolithic Vision-Language Models with Holistic Vision-Language Embedding

The rapid advance of Large Language Models (LLMs) has catalyzed the development of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Monolithic VLMs, which avoid modality-specific encoders, offer a promising alternative to the compositional ones but face the challenge of inferior performance. Most existing monolithic VLMs require tuning pre-trained LLMs to acquire vision abilities, which may degrade their language capabilities. To address this dilemma, this paper presents a novel high-performance monolithic VLM named HoVLE. We note that LLMs have been shown capable of interpreting images, when image embeddings are aligned with text embeddings. The challenge for current monolithic VLMs actually lies in the lack of a holistic embedding module for both vision and language inputs. Therefore, HoVLE introduces a holistic embedding module that converts visual and textual inputs into a shared space, allowing LLMs to process images in the same way as texts. Furthermore, a multi-stage training strategy is carefully designed to empower the holistic embedding module. It is first trained to distill visual features from a pre-trained vision encoder and text embeddings from the LLM, enabling large-scale training with unpaired random images and text tokens. The whole model further undergoes next-token prediction on multi-modal data to align the embeddings. Finally, an instruction-tuning stage is incorporated. Our experiments show that HoVLE achieves performance close to leading compositional models on various benchmarks, outperforming previous monolithic models by a large margin. Model available at https://huggingface.co/OpenGVLab/HoVLE.

Uni-AdaFocus: Spatial-temporal Dynamic Computation for Video Recognition

This paper presents a comprehensive exploration of the phenomenon of data redundancy in video understanding, with the aim to improve computational efficiency. Our investigation commences with an examination of spatial redundancy, which refers to the observation that the most informative region in each video frame usually corresponds to a small image patch, whose shape, size and location shift smoothly across frames. Motivated by this phenomenon, we formulate the patch localization problem as a dynamic decision task, and introduce a spatially adaptive video recognition approach, termed AdaFocus. In specific, a lightweight encoder is first employed to quickly process the full video sequence, whose features are then utilized by a policy network to identify the most task-relevant regions. Subsequently, the selected patches are inferred by a high-capacity deep network for the final prediction. The full model can be trained in end-to-end conveniently. Furthermore, AdaFocus can be extended by further considering temporal and sample-wise redundancies, i.e., allocating the majority of computation to the most task-relevant frames, and minimizing the computation spent on relatively "easier" videos. Our resulting approach, Uni-AdaFocus, establishes a comprehensive framework that seamlessly integrates spatial, temporal, and sample-wise dynamic computation, while it preserves the merits of AdaFocus in terms of efficient end-to-end training and hardware friendliness. In addition, Uni-AdaFocus is general and flexible as it is compatible with off-the-shelf efficient backbones (e.g., TSM and X3D), which can be readily deployed as our feature extractor, yielding a significantly improved computational efficiency. Empirically, extensive experiments based on seven benchmark datasets and three application scenarios substantiate that Uni-AdaFocus is considerably more efficient than the competitive baselines.