GenArena: How Can We Achieve Human-Aligned Evaluation for Visual Generation Tasks?

The rapid advancement of visual generation models has outpaced traditional evaluation approaches, necessitating the adoption of Vision-Language Models as surrogate judges. In this work, we systematically investigate the reliability of the prevailing absolute pointwise scoring standard, across a wide spectrum of visual generation tasks. Our analysis reveals that this paradigm is limited due to stochastic inconsistency and poor alignment with human perception. To resolve these limitations, we introduce GenArena, a unified evaluation framework that leverages a pairwise comparison paradigm to ensure stable and human-aligned evaluation. Crucially, our experiments uncover a transformative finding that simply adopting this pairwise protocol enables off-the-shelf open-source models to outperform top-tier proprietary models. Notably, our method boosts evaluation accuracy by over 20% and achieves a Spearman correlation of 0.86 with the authoritative LMArena leaderboard, drastically surpassing the 0.36 correlation of pointwise methods. Based on GenArena, we benchmark state-of-the-art visual generation models across diverse tasks, providing the community with a rigorous and automated evaluation standard for visual generation.

Unified Personalized Reward Model for Vision Generation

Recent advancements in multimodal reward models (RMs) have significantly propelled the development of visual generation. Existing frameworks typically adopt Bradley-Terry-style preference modeling or leverage generative VLMs as judges, and subsequently optimize visual generation models via reinforcement learning. However, current RMs suffer from inherent limitations: they often follow a one-size-fits-all paradigm that assumes a monolithic preference distribution or relies on fixed evaluation rubrics. As a result, they are insensitive to content-specific visual cues, leading to systematic misalignment with subjective and context-dependent human preferences. To this end, inspired by human assessment, we propose UnifiedReward-Flex, a unified personalized reward model for vision generation that couples reward modeling with flexible and context-adaptive reasoning. Specifically, given a prompt and the generated visual content, it first interprets the semantic intent and grounds on visual evidence, then dynamically constructs a hierarchical assessment by instantiating fine-grained criteria under both predefined and self-generated high-level dimensions. Our training pipeline follows a two-stage process: (1) we first distill structured, high-quality reasoning traces from advanced closed-source VLMs to bootstrap SFT, equipping the model with flexible and context-adaptive reasoning behaviors; (2) we then perform direct preference optimization (DPO) on carefully curated preference pairs to further strengthen reasoning fidelity and discriminative alignment. To validate the effectiveness, we integrate UnifiedReward-Flex into the GRPO framework for image and video synthesis, and extensive results demonstrate its superiority.

UniReason 1.0: A Unified Reasoning Framework for World Knowledge Aligned Image Generation and Editing

Unified multimodal models often struggle with complex synthesis tasks that demand deep reasoning, and typically treat text-to-image generation and image editing as isolated capabilities rather than interconnected reasoning steps. To address this, we propose UniReason, a unified framework that harmonizes these two tasks through a dual reasoning paradigm. We formulate generation as world knowledge-enhanced planning to inject implicit constraints, and leverage editing capabilities for fine-grained visual refinement to further correct visual errors via self-reflection. This approach unifies generation and editing within a shared representation, mirroring the human cognitive process of planning followed by refinement. We support this framework by systematically constructing a large-scale reasoning-centric dataset (~300k samples) covering five major knowledge domains (e.g., cultural commonsense, physics, etc.) for planning, alongside an agent-generated corpus for visual self-correction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniReason achieves advanced performance on reasoning-intensive benchmarks such as WISE, KrisBench and UniREditBench, while maintaining superior general synthesis capabilities.

Federated-inspired Single-cell Batch Integration in Latent Space

Advances in single-cell RNA sequencing enable the rapid generation of massive, high-dimensional datasets, yet the accumulation of data across experiments introduces batch effects that obscure true biological signals. Existing batch correction approaches either insufficiently correct batch effects or require centralized retraining on the complete dataset, limiting their applicability in distributed and continually evolving single-cell data settings. We introduce scBatchProx, a post-hoc optimization method inspired by federated learning principles for refining cell-level embeddings produced by arbitrary upstream methods. Treating each batch as a client, scBatchProx learns batch-conditioned adapters under proximal regularization, correcting batch structure directly in latent space without requiring raw expression data or centralized optimization. The method is lightweight and deployable, optimizing batch-specific adapter parameters only. Extensive experiments show that scBatchProx consistently yields relative gains of approximately 3-8% in overall embedding quality, with batch correction and biological conservation improving in 90% and 85% of data-method pairs, respectively. We envision this work as a step toward the practical refinement of learned representations in dynamic single-cell data systems.

System 1&2 Synergy via Dynamic Model Interpolation

Training a unified language model that adapts between intuitive System 1 and deliberative System 2 remains challenging due to interference between their cognitive modes. Recent studies have thus pursued making System 2 models more efficient. However, these approaches focused on output control, limiting what models produce. We argue that this paradigm is misaligned: output length is merely a symptom of the model's cognitive configuration, not the root cause. In this work, we shift the focus to capability control, which modulates \textit{how models think} rather than \textit{what they produce}. To realize this, we leverage existing Instruct and Thinking checkpoints through dynamic parameter interpolation, without additional training. Our pilot study establishes that linear interpolation yields a convex, monotonic Pareto frontier, underpinned by representation continuity and structural connectivity. Building on this, we propose \textbf{DAMI} (\textbf{D}yn\textbf{A}mic \textbf{M}odel \textbf{I}nterpolation), a framework that estimates a query-specific Reasoning Intensity $λ(q)$ to configure cognitive depth. For training-based estimation, we develop a preference learning method encoding accuracy and efficiency criteria. For zero-shot deployment, we introduce a confidence-based method leveraging inter-model cognitive discrepancy. Experiments on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that DAMI achieves higher accuracy than the Thinking model while remaining efficient, effectively combining the efficiency of System 1 with the reasoning depth of System 2.

Pixel-Grounded Retrieval for Knowledgeable Large Multimodal Models

Visual Question Answering (VQA) often requires coupling fine-grained perception with factual knowledge beyond the input image. Prior multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MM-RAG) systems improve factual grounding but lack an internal policy for when and how to retrieve. We propose PixSearch, the first end-to-end Segmenting Large Multimodal Model (LMM) that unifies region-level perception and retrieval-augmented reasoning. During encoding, PixSearch emits <search> tokens to trigger retrieval, selects query modalities (text, image, or region), and generates pixel-level masks that directly serve as visual queries, eliminating the reliance on modular pipelines (detectors, segmenters, captioners, etc.). A two-stage supervised fine-tuning regimen with search-interleaved supervision teaches retrieval timing and query selection while preserving segmentation ability. On egocentric and entity-centric VQA benchmarks, PixSearch substantially improves factual consistency and generalization, yielding a 19.7% relative gain in accuracy on CRAG-MM compared to whole image retrieval, while retaining competitive reasoning performance on various VQA and text-only QA tasks.

STARS: Shared-specific Translation and Alignment for missing-modality Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation

Multimodal remote sensing technology significantly enhances the understanding of surface semantics by integrating heterogeneous data such as optical images, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), and Digital Surface Models (DSM). However, in practical applications, the missing of modality data (e.g., optical or DSM) is a common and severe challenge, which leads to performance decline in traditional multimodal fusion models. Existing methods for addressing missing modalities still face limitations, including feature collapse and overly generalized recovered features. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{STARS} (\textbf{S}hared-specific \textbf{T}ranslation and \textbf{A}lignment for missing-modality \textbf{R}emote \textbf{S}ensing), a robust semantic segmentation framework for incomplete multimodal inputs. STARS is built on two key designs. First, we introduce an asymmetric alignment mechanism with bidirectional translation and stop-gradient, which effectively prevents feature collapse and reduces sensitivity to hyperparameters. Second, we propose a Pixel-level Semantic sampling Alignment (PSA) strategy that combines class-balanced pixel sampling with cross-modality semantic alignment loss, to mitigate alignment failures caused by severe class imbalance and improve minority-class recognition.

PROST-LLM: Progressively Enhancing the Speech-to-Speech Translation Capability in LLMs

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in many tasks, their application to Speech-to-Speech Translation (S2ST) is underexplored and hindered by data scarcity. To bridge this gap, we propose PROST-LLM (PROgressive Speech-to-speech Translation) to enhance the S2ST capabilities in LLMs progressively. First, we fine-tune the LLMs with the CVSS corpus, employing designed tri-task learning and chain of modality methods to boost the initial performance. Then, leveraging the fine-tuned model, we generate preference pairs through self-sampling and back-translation without human evaluation. Finally, these preference pairs are used for preference optimization to enhance the model's S2ST capability further. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of our proposed PROST-LLM in improving the S2ST capability of LLMs.

VideoThinker: Building Agentic VideoLLMs with LLM-Guided Tool Reasoning

Long-form video understanding remains a fundamental challenge for current Video Large Language Models. Most existing models rely on static reasoning over uniformly sampled frames, which weakens temporal localization and leads to substantial information loss in long videos. Agentic tools such as temporal retrieval, spatial zoom, and temporal zoom offer a natural way to overcome these limitations by enabling adaptive exploration of key moments. However, constructing agentic video understanding data requires models that already possess strong long-form video comprehension, creating a circular dependency. We address this challenge with VideoThinker, an agentic Video Large Language Model trained entirely on synthetic tool interaction trajectories. Our key idea is to convert videos into rich captions and employ a powerful agentic language model to generate multi-step tool use sequences in caption space. These trajectories are subsequently grounded back to video by replacing captions with the corresponding frames, yielding a large-scale interleaved video and tool reasoning dataset without requiring any long-form understanding from the underlying model. Training on this synthetic agentic dataset equips VideoThinker with dynamic reasoning capabilities, adaptive temporal exploration, and multi-step tool use. Remarkably, VideoThinker significantly outperforms both caption-only language model agents and strong video model baselines across long-video benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of tool augmented synthetic data and adaptive retrieval and zoom reasoning for long-form video understanding.

Highly Deformable Proprioceptive Membrane for Real-Time 3D Shape Reconstruction

Reconstructing the three-dimensional (3D) geometry of object surfaces is essential for robot perception, yet vision-based approaches are generally unreliable under low illumination or occlusion. This limitation motivates the design of a proprioceptive membrane that conforms to the surface of interest and infers 3D geometry by reconstructing its own deformation. Conventional shape-aware membranes typically rely on resistive, capacitive, or magneto-sensitive mechanisms. However, these methods often encounter challenges such as structural complexity, limited compliance during large-scale deformation, and susceptibility to electromagnetic interference. This work presents a soft, flexible, and stretchable proprioceptive silicone membrane based on optical waveguide sensing. The membrane sensor integrates edge-mounted LEDs and centrally distributed photodiodes (PDs), interconnected via liquid-metal traces embedded within a multilayer elastomeric composite. Rich deformation-dependent light intensity signals are decoded by a data-driven model to recover the membrane geometry as a 3D point cloud. On a customized 140 mm square membrane, real-time reconstruction of large-scale out-of-plane deformation is achieved at 90 Hz with an average reconstruction error of 1.3 mm, measured by Chamfer distance, while maintaining accuracy for indentations up to 25 mm. The proposed framework provides a scalable, robust, and low-profile solution for global shape perception in deformable robotic systems.