GoalEvolve: From Handcrafted Algorithm Priors to Goal-Driven Evolution of Physical Design Algorithms

Physical design algorithms operate within tightly coupled, multi-stage optimization flows, where stage-local gains may vanish or induce downstream degradation. Existing program-evolution frameworks often rely on stage-local objectives or undifferentiated multi-metric feedback, which neither guarantee better final results nor identify which unmet requirement should guide the next iteration. We present GoalEvolve, a goal-driven framework that makes physical design algorithm evolution accountable for the final quality of results (QoR) of the complete flow. Given a multi-objective QoR target region, GoalEvolve converts unmet requirements into normalized target gaps, identifies the dominant bottleneck, and uses stage-resolved checkpoint evidence to locate the responsible stage. An LLM-based Teacher then narrows the search to a relevant algorithmic decision and source region, while parallel Student agents implement and validate hypotheses through full-flow evaluation. Local effects, optimization debt, and downstream retention are retained as mechanism evidence for subsequent evolution. Across eight ASAP7 designs, GoalEvolve improves post-route TNS by 30.67% on average and reduces leakage and dynamic power by 21.18% and 9.42% versus default OpenROAD. Relative to commercial-tool goals, it closes 62.20% of the normalized power gap on power-dominant designs, surpasses the TNS goals on both timing-dominant designs, and closes 32.48% of the equal-weight timing-power gap on joint designs. Across all three designs evaluated against Codex goal mode under matched budgets, GoalEvolve further improves TNS by 26.46% while reducing leakage and dynamic power by 12.38% and 0.76%, respectively.

CSGen: A Multi-Domain Curvilinear Structure Generation Model via Hierarchical Multimodal Diffusion

Curvilinear structure analysis is an important and fundamental task in multimedia. However, the controllable generation of images with precise curvilinear structure objects remains an open challenge. To address this, we propose CSGen, a hierarchical multimodal diffusion model that synthesizes high-fidelity images precisely aligned with multiple control conditions. The CSGen is built upon three key innovations: 1) We construct a multi-domain and multimodal dataset, including over 24K samples from 5 domains and 7 different types of annotations, to train the unified generation model. 2) We propose a novel hierarchical progressive control strategy that decouples topology clues from visual context by a phased signal injection, mitigating semantic drift while ensuring the topological integrity of sparse structures. 3) We design a sparsity-aware loss re-weighting mechanism to address the extreme sparsity of curvilinear structures, significantly enhancing the attention on thin and fragile structures during optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CSGen generates images with superior structure accuracy and visual realism, significantly improving downstream segmentation performance while maintaining robustness across diverse prompts. Our results confirm CSGen as a scalable, data-centric paradigm for the analysis of complex curvilinear structures in diverse multimedia applications. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ShanZard/CSGen.

From Foundation to Application: Improving VLA Models in Practice

Despite recent progress of VLA foundation models, the disparity between laboratory conditions and real-world applications continues to impede their practical implementation. To bridge this gap, we present LingBot-VLA 2.0, which advances LingBot-VLA through improvements in three functional domains. (1) Generalization across tasks and embodiments. Compared to the previous version, we revamp the data processing pipeline and curate around 60,000 hours of data for pretraining, including 50,000 hours of robot trajectories spanning 20 robot configurations and 10,000 hours of egocentric human videos. (2) Expanded action space in addition to dual-arm hardware platforms. In particular, our system accommodates degrees of freedom for the heads, waists, mobile bases, and dexterous hands, thereby empowering the robots to tackle more complex tasks in practical scenarios. (3) Predictive dynamics modeling for improved temporal reasoning. Specifically, we formulate future prediction as a proxy task, facilitated by a video representation model for semantic priors and a depth estimation model for geometric cues. Evaluations on the GM-100 benchmark, conducted in a generalist setting, validate the beneficial impact of these proposed modifications. Furthermore, benefiting from the expanded pretraining data that covers whole-body degrees of freedom, LingBot-VLA-2.0 demonstrates strong cross-embodiment long-horizon mobile manipulation capability across the two robotic platforms.

OneVLA: A Unified Framework for Embodied Tasks

Navigation and manipulation are fundamental capabilities of embodied intelligence, enabling robots to interpret natural language commands and interact physically with their surroundings. However, current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models remain constrained by task-specific architectures, specializing in either navigation or manipulation, which hinders the development of general-purpose robotic agents. To bridge this gap, we introduce OneVLA, a unified architecture that integrates these distinct tasks into a single, cohesive framework. Specifically, we design a unified action head capable of generating both navigation and manipulation actions without requiring task-specific variants. Furthermore, we propose a multi stage progressive training strategy-incorporating curated data construction and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) fine-tuning that facilitates strong positive transfer and mutual reinforcement between the two domains. Extensive experiments in both simulated and real-world environments demonstrate that OneVLA achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming both specialized single-task and existing cross-task models. By unifying these core capabilities, OneVLA paves the way for truly general-purpose robotic systems. The model and source code will be publicly released.

SlotMemory: Object-Centric KV Memory for Streaming Long-Video Generation

Streaming video generation models typically rely on temporal-centric memory, which organizes historical context as raw frames, chunk segments, or unclustered tokens. This organization frequently leads to identity drift and semantic inconsistency when entities exit the frame or during interactive prompt transitions. To address these limitations, we propose SlotMemory, an object-centric Key-Value memory mechanism for streaming video diffusion. Our approach shifts the memory abstraction from "when" an event occurred to "what" is being represented by decomposing the transformer's key-value manifold into discrete, reusable semantic slots. By utilizing these slots as routing addresses to index and store high-fidelity key-value tokens, we enable entity-level persistence and prompt-aware retrieval across long horizons. Evaluated on 60-second interactive narratives using the Wan2.1-T2V-1.3B backbone, SlotMemory achieves a state-of-the-art quality score of 81.61 and a 22.8 percent relative improvement in dynamic consistency over the strongest existing streaming baseline. Our results demonstrate that structured semantic representation, rather than raw temporal capacity, is the essential primitive for persistent long-form video synthesis. Our codes and checkpoints are available at https://tj12323.github.io/SlotMemory/.

Compass: Navigating Global Marine Lead Data Integration through Expert-Guided LLM Agent

Marine lead (Pb) and its isotopes are critical tracers for ocean circulation and anthropogenic pollution, yet in-situ observations remain costly and sparse. While vast historical records exist, they lie buried within the unstructured content of academic papers, creating "data silos" inaccessible to comprehensive analysis. Manual extraction is unscalable, while general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) lack the necessary domain-specific knowledge, leading to hallucinations and scientifically invalid outputs. To address this, we introduce an expert-guided adaptation approach that enables LLMs to perform rigorous scientific data extraction without fine-tuning. We operationalize this approach through Compass, an LLM agent framework enhanced by a Knowledge Tree co-designed with marine scientists, which decomposes complex tasks into verifiable steps, guiding the agent's reasoning to ensure scientific validity. Deploying Compass across a corpus of over 230,000 relevant open-access papers, we successfully extract 3,751 previously unincorporated Pb records. This effort establishes the largest integrated marine Pb database to date. Beyond standard metrics, Compass demonstrates superior reliability through multi-layered validation, achieving 92% accuracy as confirmed through expert manual verification. The newly integrated data expand coverage in previously under-sampled regions such as the East China Sea and the Southern Ocean, providing an enriched data foundation for future scientific discoveries. We release an interactive visualization platform to facilitate open scientific access. Our work demonstrates that expert-guided agents can effectively bridge the gap between general-purpose LLMs and high-stakes scientific domains, enabling scalable data discovery in geosciences.

OmniISR: A Unified Framework for Centralized and Federated Learning via Intermediate Supervision and Regularization

The global deployment of edge intelligence operates across heterogeneous legal frameworks. While some regions permit centralized learning (CL) via cloud data aggregation, others enforce strict data localization, necessitating federated learning (FL). This operational dichotomy introduces two incompatible optimization regimes (i.e., unbiased global gradients yet coupled with internal covariate shift in CL versus biased, drift-prone local updates in FL), resulting in that any naive integration of the two lacks rigorous theoretical guarantees. To fill this gap, we propose OmniISR, a unified framework that fuses pure CL, pure FL, and hybrid CL-FL training modes via equipping intermediate supervision and regularization (ISR) signals at multiple hidden layers. Specifically, we propose (i) to use mutual-information (MI) as intermediate supervision to align shifting internal covariate in CL and client-drifting representations in FL, and (ii) to adopt negative-entropy (NE) as intermediate regularizer to penalize overconfident prediction, preserve representational uncertainty, and avoid device-specific collapse. On the theory side, we derive (i) a unified, ISR-agnostic, and non-asymptotic O(1/sqrt(T)) convergence bound that shows the introduced ISR does not violate standard SGD convergence, (ii) a federated drift-bound that quantifies the ISR-reduced client drift, (iii) a gradient-alignment guarantee that ensures non-conflicting CL and FL updates under mild bias, and (iv) an explicit escape-time bound that indicates that CL-FL hybrid mixing enlarges effective stochasticity and accelerates escape from strict saddles. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OmniISR consistently improves model performance in both centralized and federated paradigms, reduces the CL-FL gap by 22.60%, and yields 37/48 paired metric wins across multiple FL algorithms.

Green-Red Watermarking for Recommender Systems

The widespread open-sourcing of advanced recommendation algorithms and the rising threat of model extraction attacks have made safeguarding the intellectual property of recommender systems an imperative task. While watermarking serves as a potent defense, existing methods primarily rely on forcing models to memorize pre-defined interaction patterns. Such memorization-based approaches often require excessive synthetic data injection and are vulnerable to removal attacks due to their detectable statistical deviations from natural user behavior. To address these limitations, we propose GREW, a novel Green-REd Watermarking framework for recommender systems. GREW leverages a secret key to partition the item space into "green" items for soft promotion and "red" items as anchors, thereby shifting the paradigm from fragile memorization to a stealthy, key-controlled output bias. By integrating watermark signals directly into the intrinsic ranking process, GREW employs three recommendation-tailored modules: (1) Semantic-Consistent Hashing, which utilizes the secret key to cluster green items for performance-aware stealthiness; (2) Decision-Aligned Masking, which confines signal injection to the competitive item subset to preserve ranking logic; and (3) Confidence-Aware Scaling, which dynamically modulates injection intensity based on model uncertainty. Ownership verification is performed via statistical hypothesis testing on aggregated black-box outputs, enabled by the keyed re-partitioning of the item space. Experiments on multiple base models demonstrate that GREW achieves strong ownership verification and robustness against extraction attacks compared to existing baselines while requiring no data injection. Our code is available at https://github.com/Loche2/GREW.

OneVL: One-Step Latent Reasoning and Planning with Vision-Language Explanation

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has become a powerful driver of trajectory prediction in VLA-based autonomous driving, yet its autoregressive nature imposes a latency cost that is prohibitive for real-time deployment. Latent CoT methods attempt to close this gap by compressing reasoning into continuous hidden states, but consistently fall short of their explicit counterparts. We suggest that this is due to purely linguistic latent representations compressing a symbolic abstraction of the world, rather than the causal dynamics that actually govern driving. Thus, we present OneVL (One-step latent reasoning and planning with Vision-Language explanations), a unified VLA and World Model framework that routes reasoning through compact latent tokens supervised by dual auxiliary decoders. Alongside a language decoder that reconstructs text CoT, we introduce a visual world model decoder that predicts future-frame tokens, forcing the latent space to internalize the causal dynamics of road geometry, agent motion, and environmental change. A three-stage training pipeline progressively aligns these latents with trajectory, language, and visual objectives, ensuring stable joint optimization. At inference, the auxiliary decoders are discarded and all latent tokens are prefilled in a single parallel pass, matching the speed of answer-only prediction. Across four benchmarks, OneVL becomes the first latent CoT method to surpass explicit CoT, delivering state-of-the-art accuracy at answer-only latency, and providing direct evidence that tighter compression, when guided in both language and world-model supervision, produces more generalizable representations than verbose token-by-token reasoning. Project Page: https://xiaomi-embodied-intelligence.github.io/OneVL

Learning 3D Reconstruction with Priors in Test Time

We introduce a test-time framework for multiview Transformers (MVTs) that incorporates priors (e.g., camera poses, intrinsics, and depth) to improve 3D tasks without retraining or modifying pre-trained image-only networks. Rather than feeding priors into the architecture, we cast them as constraints on the predictions and optimize the network at inference time. The optimization loss consists of a self-supervised objective and prior penalty terms. The self-supervised objective captures the compatibility among multi-view predictions and is implemented using photometric or geometric loss between renderings from other views and each view itself. Any available priors are converted into penalty terms on the corresponding output modalities. Across a series of 3D vision benchmarks, including point map estimation and camera pose estimation, our method consistently improves performance over base MVTs by a large margin. On the ETH3D, 7-Scenes, and NRGBD datasets, our method reduces the point-map distance error by more than half compared with the base image-only models. Our method also outperforms retrained prior-aware feed-forward methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of our test-time constrained optimization (TCO) framework for incorporating priors into 3D vision tasks.