StepAudio 2.5 Technical Report

Unified audio-language modeling has emerged as a prominent trend in modern speech systems, promising to bring the reasoning capabilities of large language models to auditory tasks. However, existing unified foundations often struggle to match the depth of specialized systems across automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech synthesis (TTS), and realtime spoken interaction. Bridging this gap remains an open challenge. This report presents StepAudio 2.5, a unified audio-language foundation model that matches or exceeds specialized systems across all three capabilities. Rather than treating these tasks as architecturally distinct, we operate on the premise that once text and audio share a multimodal representational space, task specialization becomes a matter of operational regimes: data construction, optimization targets, and decoding constraints. Guided by this insight, we advance the post-training paradigm from standard supervised learning to task-tailored Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), using it as the primary mechanism to define complex optimization targets. We leverage this RLHF-centric alignment, alongside specialized decoding, to shape a shared backbone into three distinct operational modes. Concretely, the ASR branch advances transcription efficiency via verifiable multi-token decoding; the TTS branch achieves controllable, expressive synthesis through preference-based RLHF and context-rich supervision; and the Realtime branch realizes low-latency, persona-consistent dialogue via generative reward modeling within an RLHF framework. On standard benchmarks, StepAudio 2.5 achieves state-of-the-art results across ASR, TTS, and Realtime, demonstrating that a singular audio-language foundation can successfully internalize the distinct deployment objectives of speech understanding, generation, and live interaction.

DeformMaster: An Interactive Physics-Neural World Model for Deformable Objects from Videos

World models for deformable objects should recover not only geometry and appearance, but also underlying physical dynamics, interaction grounding, and material behavior. Learning such a model from real videos is challenging because deformable linear, planar, and volumetric objects evolve under high-dimensional deformation, noisy interactions, and complex material response. The model must therefore infer a physical state from visual observations, roll it forward under new interactions, and render the resulting dynamics with high visual fidelity. We present DeformMaster, a video-derived interactive physics--neural world model that turns real interaction videos into an online interactive model of deformable objects within a unified dynamics-and-appearance framework. DeformMaster preserves structured physical rollout while using a neural residual to compensate for unmodeled effects, grounds sparse hand motion as distributed compliant actuator for hand--continuum interaction, represents material response with spatially varying constitutive experts, and drives high-fidelity 4D appearance from the predicted physical evolution. Experiments on real-world deformable-object sequences demonstrate DeformMaster's ability to roll out future dynamics and render dynamic appearance, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines while supporting novel action rollout, material-parameter variation, and dynamic novel-view synthesis.

Move-Then-Operate: Behavioral Phasing for Human-Like Robotic Manipulation

We present Move-Then-Operate, a Vision language action framework that explicitly decouples robotic manipulation into two distinct behavioral phases: coarse relocation (move) and contact-critical interaction (operate). Unlike monolithic policies that conflate these heterogeneous regimes, our architecture employs a dual-expert policy routed by a learnable phase selector, introducing a structural inductive bias that isolates phase-specific dynamics. Phase labels are automatically generated via an MLLM-based pipeline conditioned on lightweight contextual cues such as end-effector velocity and subtask decomposition to ensure alignment with human motor patterns. Evaluated on the RoboTwin2 benchmark, our method achieves an average success rate of $68.9\%$, outperforming the monolithic $π_0$ baseline by $24\%$. It matches or exceeds models trained on $10\times$ more data and reaches peak performance in $40\%$ fewer training steps, demonstrating that architectural disentanglement of move and operate phases is a highly effective and efficient strategy for mastering high-precision manipulation.

NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Short-form UGC Video Restoration in the Wild with Generative Models: Datasets, Methods and Results

This paper presents an overview of the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Short-form UGC Video Restoration in the Wild with Generative Models. This challenge utilizes a new short-form UGC (S-UGC) video restoration benchmark, termed KwaiVIR, which is contributed by USTC and Kuaishou Technology. It contains both synthetically distorted videos and real-world short-form UGC videos in the wild. For this edition, the released data include 200 synthetic training videos, 48 wild training videos, 11 validation videos, and 20 testing videos. The primary goal of this challenge is to establish a strong and practical benchmark for restoring short-form UGC videos under complex real-world degradations, especially in the emerging paradigm of generative-model-based S-UGC video restoration. This challenge has two tracks: (i) the primary track is a subjective track, where the evaluation is based on a user study; (ii) the second track is an objective track. These two tracks enable a comprehensive assessment of restoration quality. In total, 95 teams have registered for this competition. And 12 teams submitted valid final solutions and fact sheets for the testing phase. The submitted methods achieved strong performance on the KwaiVIR benchmark, demonstrating encouraging progress in short-form UGC video restoration in the wild.

Instructing LLMs to Negotiate using Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

The recent advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has established their potential as autonomous interactive agents. However, they often struggle in strategic games of incomplete information, such as bilateral price negotiation. In this paper, we investigate if Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) can effectively teach LLMs to negotiate. Specifically, we explore the strategic behaviors that emerge during the learning process. We introduce a framework that trains a mid-sized buyer agent against a regulated LLM seller across a wide distribution of real-world products. By grounding reward signals directly in the maximization of economic surplus and strict adherence to private budget constraints, we reveal a novel four-phase strategic evolution. The agent progresses from naive bargaining to using aggressive starting prices, moves through a phase of deadlock, and ultimately develops sophisticated persuasive skills. Our results demonstrate that this verifiable training allows a 30B agent to significantly outperform frontier models over ten times its size in extracting surplus. Furthermore, the trained agent generalizes robustly to stronger counterparties unseen during training and remains effective even when facing hostile, adversarial seller personas.

DISCOVER: A Solver for Distributional Counterfactual Explanations

Counterfactual explanations (CE) explain model decisions by identifying input modifications that lead to different predictions. Most existing methods operate at the instance level. Distributional Counterfactual Explanations (DCE) extend this setting by optimizing an optimal transport objective that balances proximity to a factual input distribution and alignment to a target output distribution, with statistical certification via chance constrained bounds. However, DCE relies on gradient based optimization, while many real-world tabular pipelines are dominated by non-differentiable models. We propose DISCOVER, a model-agnostic solver for distributional counterfactual explanations. DISCOVER preserves the original DCE objective and certification while replacing gradient descent with a sparse propose-and-select search paradigm. It exploits a sample-wise decomposition of the transport objective to compute per-row impact scores and enforce a top-$k$ intervention budget, focusing edits on the most influential samples. To guide candidate generation without predictor gradients, DISCOVER introduces an OT-guided cone sampling primitive driven by input-side transport geometry. Experiments on multiple tabular datasets demonstrate strong joint alignment of input and output distributions, extending distributional counterfactual reasoning to modern black box learning pipelines. A code repository is available at https://github.com/understanding-ml/DCE.

MiM-DiT: MoE in MoE with Diffusion Transformers for All-in-One Image Restoration

All-in-one image restoration is challenging because different degradation types, such as haze, blur, noise, and low-light, impose diverse requirements on restoration strategies, making it difficult for a single model to handle them effectively. In this paper, we propose a unified image restoration framework that integrates a dual-level Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with a pretrained diffusion model. The framework operates at two levels: the Inter-MoE layer adaptively combines expert groups to handle major degradation types, while the Intra-MoE layer further selects specialized sub-experts to address fine-grained variations within each type. This design enables the model to achieve coarse-grained adaptation across diverse degradation categories while performing fine-grained modulation for specific intra-class variations, ensuring both high specialization in handling complex, real-world corruptions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art approaches on multiple image restoration task.

DMAligner: Enhancing Image Alignment via Diffusion Model Based View Synthesis

Image alignment is a fundamental task in computer vision with broad applications. Existing methods predominantly employ optical flow-based image warping. However, this technique is susceptible to common challenges such as occlusions and illumination variations, leading to degraded alignment visual quality and compromised accuracy in downstream tasks. In this paper, we present DMAligner, a diffusion-based framework for image alignment through alignment-oriented view synthesis. DMAligner is crafted to tackle the challenges in image alignment from a new perspective, employing a generation-based solution that showcases strong capabilities and avoids the problems associated with flow-based image warping. Specifically, we propose a Dynamics-aware Diffusion Training approach for learning conditional image generation, synthesizing a novel view for image alignment. This incorporates a Dynamics-aware Mask Producing (DMP) module to adaptively distinguish dynamic foreground regions from static backgrounds, enabling the diffusion model to more effectively handle challenges that classical methods struggle to solve. Furthermore, we develop the Dynamic Scene Image Alignment (DSIA) dataset using Blender, which includes 1,033 indoor and outdoor scenes with over 30K image pairs tailored for image alignment. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach on DSIA benchmarks, as well as on a series of widely-used video datasets for qualitative comparisons. Our code is available at https://github.com/boomluo02/DMAligner.

OpAgent: Operator Agent for Web Navigation

To fulfill user instructions, autonomous web agents must contend with the inherent complexity and volatile nature of real-world websites. Conventional paradigms predominantly rely on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) using static datasets. However, these methods suffer from severe distributional shifts, as offline trajectories fail to capture the stochastic state transitions and real-time feedback of unconstrained wide web environments. In this paper, we propose a robust Online Reinforcement Learning WebAgent, designed to optimize its policy through direct, iterative interactions with unconstrained wide websites. Our approach comprises three core innovations: 1) Hierarchical Multi-Task Fine-tuning: We curate a comprehensive mixture of datasets categorized by functional primitives -- Planning, Acting, and Grounding -- establishing a Vision-Language Model (VLM) with strong instruction-following capabilities for Web GUI tasks. 2) Online Agentic RL in the Wild: We develop an online interaction environment and fine-tune the VLM using a specialized RL pipeline. We introduce a Hybrid Reward Mechanism that combines a ground-truth-agnostic WebJudge for holistic outcome assessment with a Rule-based Decision Tree (RDT) for progress reward. This system effectively mitigates the credit assignment challenge in long-horizon navigation. Notably, our RL-enhanced model achieves a 38.1\% success rate (pass@5) on WebArena, outperforming all existing monolithic baselines. 3) Operator Agent: We introduce a modular agentic framework, namely \textbf{OpAgent}, orchestrating a Planner, Grounder, Reflector, and Summarizer. This synergy enables robust error recovery and self-correction, elevating the agent's performance to a new State-of-the-Art (SOTA) success rate of \textbf{71.6\%}.

RAW-Flow: Advancing RGB-to-RAW Image Reconstruction with Deterministic Latent Flow Matching

RGB-to-RAW reconstruction, or the reverse modeling of a camera Image Signal Processing (ISP) pipeline, aims to recover high-fidelity RAW data from RGB images. Despite notable progress, existing learning-based methods typically treat this task as a direct regression objective and struggle with detail inconsistency and color deviation, due to the ill-posed nature of inverse ISP and the inherent information loss in quantized RGB images. To address these limitations, we pioneer a generative perspective by reformulating RGB-to-RAW reconstruction as a deterministic latent transport problem and introduce a novel framework named RAW-Flow, which leverages flow matching to learn a deterministic vector field in latent space, to effectively bridge the gap between RGB and RAW representations and enable accurate reconstruction of structural details and color information. To further enhance latent transport, we introduce a cross-scale context guidance module that injects hierarchical RGB features into the flow estimation process. Moreover, we design a dual-domain latent autoencoder with a feature alignment constraint to support the proposed latent transport framework, which jointly encodes RGB and RAW inputs while promoting stable training and high-fidelity reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RAW-Flow outperforms state-of-the-art approaches both quantitatively and visually.