Unified Noise Steering for Efficient Human-Guided VLA Adaptation

Diffusion-based vision-language-action (VLA) models have emerged as strong priors for robotic manipulation, yet adapting them to real-world distributions remains challenging. In particular, on-robot reinforcement learning (RL) is expensive and time-consuming, so effective adaptation depends on efficient policy improvement within a limited budget of real-world interactions. Noise-space RL lowers the cost by keeping the pretrained VLA fixed as a denoising generator while updating only a lightweight actor that predicts the noise. However, its performance is still limited due to inefficient autonomous exploration. Human corrective interventions can reduce this exploration burden, but they are naturally provided in action space, whereas noise-space finetuning requires supervision over noise variables. To address these challenges, we propose UniSteer, a Unified Noise Steering framework that combines human corrective guidance with noise-space RL through approximate action-to-noise inversion. Given a human corrective action, UniSteer inverts the frozen flow-matching decoder to recover a noise target, which provides supervised guidance for the same noise actor that is simultaneously optimized via reinforcement learning. Real-world experiments on diverse manipulation tasks show that UniSteer adapts more efficiently than strong noise-space RL and action-space human-in-the-loop baselines, improving the success rate from 20% to 90% in 66 minutes on average across four real-world adaptation tasks.

VLA-GSE: Boosting Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning in VLA with Generalized and Specialized Experts

Vision-language-action (VLA) models inherit rich visual-semantic priors from pre-trained vision-language backbones, but adapting them to robotic control remains challenging. Full fine-tuning (FFT) is prone to overfitting on downstream robotic data and catastrophic forgetting of pretrained vision-language capabilities. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) better preserves pre-trained knowledge, yet existing PEFT methods still struggle to adapt effectively to robot control tasks. To address this gap, we propose VLA-GSE, a parameter-efficient VLA fine-tuning framework that improves control adaptation while retaining PEFT's knowledge preservation advantage. Specifically, VLA-GSE (Generalized and Specialized Experts) is initialized by spectrally decomposing the frozen backbone, assigning leading singular components to generalized experts (shared experts) and disjoint residual components to specialized experts (routed experts). This decomposition improves adaptation capacity under a fixed trainable-parameter budget. Under a comparable parameter budget, VLA-GSE updates only 2.51% of the full model parameters and consistently outperforms strong FFT and PEFT baselines. It achieves 81.2% average zero-shot success on LIBERO-Plus, preserves pre-trained VLM capability comparably to LoRA on multimodal understanding benchmarks, and improves real-world manipulation success under multiple distribution shifts. Code is available at: https://github.com/YuhuaJiang2002/VLA-GSE

Bringing Value Models Back: Generative Critics for Value Modeling in LLM Reinforcement Learning

Credit assignment is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Classical actor-critic methods address this challenge through fine-grained advantage estimation based on a learned value function. However, learned value models are often avoided in modern large language model (LLM) RL because conventional discriminative critics are difficult to train reliably. We revisit value modeling and argue that this difficulty is partly due to limited expressiveness. In particular, representation complexity theory suggests that value functions can be hard to approximate under the one-shot prediction paradigm used by existing value models, and our scaling experiments show that such critics do not improve reliably with scale. Motivated by this observation, we propose Generative Actor-Critic (GenAC), which replaces one-shot scalar value prediction with a generative critic that performs chain-of-thought reasoning before producing a value estimate. We further introduce In-Context Conditioning, which helps the critic remain calibrated to the current actor throughout training. GenAC improves value approximation, ranking reliability, and out-of-distribution generalization, and these gains translate into stronger downstream RL performance than both value-based and value-free baselines. Overall, our results suggest that stronger value modeling is a promising direction for improving credit assignment in LLM reinforcement learning.

Learning Additively Compositional Latent Actions for Embodied AI

Latent action learning infers pseudo-action labels from visual transitions, providing an approach to leverage internet-scale video for embodied AI. However, most methods learn latent actions without structural priors that encode the additive, compositional structure of physical motion. As a result, latents often entangle irrelevant scene details or information about future observations with true state changes and miscalibrate motion magnitude. We introduce Additively Compositional Latent Action Model (AC-LAM), which enforces scene-wise additive composition structure over short horizons on the latent action space. These AC constraints encourage simple algebraic structure in the latent action space~(identity, inverse, cycle consistency) and suppress information that does not compose additively. Empirically, AC-LAM learns more structured, motion-specific, and displacement-calibrated latent actions and provides stronger supervision for downstream policy learning, outperforming state-of-the-art LAMs across simulated and real-world tabletop tasks.

EPOFusion: Exposure aware Progressive Optimization Method for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

Overexposure frequently occurs in practical scenarios, causing the loss of critical visual information. However, existing infrared and visible fusion methods still exhibit unsatisfactory performance in highly bright regions. To address this, we propose EPOFusion, an exposure-aware fusion model. Specifically, a guidance module is introduced to facilitate the encoder in extracting fine-grained infrared features from overexposed regions. Meanwhile, an iterative decoder incorporating a multiscale context fusion module is designed to progressively enhance the fused image, ensuring consistent details and superior visual quality. Finally, an adaptive loss function dynamically constrains the fusion process, enabling an effective balance between the modalities under varying exposure conditions. To achieve better exposure awareness, we construct the first infrared and visible overexposure dataset (IVOE) with high quality infrared guided annotations for overexposed regions. Extensive experiments show that EPOFusion outperforms existing methods. It maintains infrared cues in overexposed regions while achieving visually faithful fusion in non-overexposed areas, thereby enhancing both visual fidelity and downstream task performance. Code, fusion results and IVOE dataset will be made available at https://github.com/warren-wzw/EPOFusion.git.

BridgeDiff: Bridging Human Observations and Flat-Garment Synthesis for Virtual Try-Off

Virtual try-off (VTOFF) aims to recover canonical flat-garment representations from images of dressed persons for standardized display and downstream virtual try-on. Prior methods often treat VTOFF as direct image translation driven by local masks or text-only prompts, overlooking the gap between on-body appearances and flat layouts. This gap frequently leads to inconsistent completion in unobserved regions and unstable garment structure. We propose BridgeDiff, a diffusion-based framework that explicitly bridges human-centric observations and flat-garment synthesis through two complementary components. First, the Garment Condition Bridge Module (GCBM) builds a garment-cue representation that captures global appearance and semantic identity, enabling robust inference of continuous details under partial visibility. Second, the Flat Structure Constraint Module (FSCM) injects explicit flat-garment structural priors via Flat-Constraint Attention (FC-Attention) at selected denoising stages, improving structural stability beyond text-only conditioning. Extensive experiments on standard VTOFF benchmarks show that BridgeDiff achieves state-of-the-art performance, producing higher-quality flat-garment reconstructions while preserving fine-grained appearance and structural integrity.

MVP-LAM: Learning Action-Centric Latent Action via Cross-Viewpoint Reconstruction

Learning \emph{latent actions} from diverse human videos enables scaling robot learning beyond embodiment-specific robot datasets, and these latent actions have recently been used as pseudo-action labels for vision-language-action (VLA) model pretraining. To make VLA pretraining effective, latent actions should contain information about the underlying agent's actions despite the absence of ground-truth labels. We propose \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{V}iew\textbf{P}oint \textbf{L}atent \textbf{A}ction \textbf{M}odel (\textbf{MVP-LAM}), which learns discrete latent actions that are highly informative about ground-truth actions from time-synchronized multi-view videos. MVP-LAM trains latent actions with a \emph{cross-viewpoint reconstruction} objective, so that a latent action inferred from one view must explain the future in another view, reducing reliance on viewpoint-specific cues. On Bridge V2, MVP-LAM produces more action-centric latent actions, achieving higher mutual information with ground-truth actions and improved action prediction, including under out-of-distribution evaluation. Finally, pretraining VLAs with MVP-LAM latent actions improves downstream manipulation performance on the SIMPLER and LIBERO-Long benchmarks.

Trade-R1: Bridging Verifiable Rewards to Stochastic Environments via Process-Level Reasoning Verification

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to achieve remarkable reasoning in domains like mathematics and coding, where verifiable rewards provide clear signals. However, extending this paradigm to financial decision is challenged by the market's stochastic nature: rewards are verifiable but inherently noisy, causing standard RL to degenerate into reward hacking. To address this, we propose Trade-R1, a model training framework that bridges verifiable rewards to stochastic environments via process-level reasoning verification. Our key innovation is a verification method that transforms the problem of evaluating reasoning over lengthy financial documents into a structured Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) task. We construct a triangular consistency metric, assessing pairwise alignment between retrieved evidence, reasoning chains, and decisions to serve as a validity filter for noisy market returns. We explore two reward integration strategies: Fixed-effect Semantic Reward (FSR) for stable alignment signals, and Dynamic-effect Semantic Reward (DSR) for coupled magnitude optimization. Experiments on different country asset selection demonstrate that our paradigm reduces reward hacking, with DSR achieving superior cross-market generalization while maintaining the highest reasoning consistency.

Alpha-R1: Alpha Screening with LLM Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning

Signal decay and regime shifts pose recurring challenges for data-driven investment strategies in non-stationary markets. Conventional time-series and machine learning approaches, which rely primarily on historical correlations, often struggle to generalize when the economic environment changes. While large language models (LLMs) offer strong capabilities for processing unstructured information, their potential to support quantitative factor screening through explicit economic reasoning remains underexplored. Existing factor-based methods typically reduce alphas to numerical time series, overlooking the semantic rationale that determines when a factor is economically relevant. We propose Alpha-R1, an 8B-parameter reasoning model trained via reinforcement learning for context-aware alpha screening. Alpha-R1 reasons over factor logic and real-time news to evaluate alpha relevance under changing market conditions, selectively activating or deactivating factors based on contextual consistency. Empirical results across multiple asset pools show that Alpha-R1 consistently outperforms benchmark strategies and exhibits improved robustness to alpha decay. The full implementation and resources are available at https://github.com/FinStep-AI/Alpha-R1.

How Do VLAs Effectively Inherit from VLMs?

Vision-language-action (VLA) models hold the promise to attain generalizable embodied control. To achieve this, a pervasive paradigm is to leverage the rich vision-semantic priors of large vision-language models (VLMs). However, the fundamental question persists: How do VLAs effectively inherit the prior knowledge from VLMs? To address this critical question, we introduce a diagnostic benchmark, GrinningFace, an emoji tabletop manipulation task where the robot arm is asked to place objects onto printed emojis corresponding to language instructions. This task design is particularly revealing -- knowledge associated with emojis is ubiquitous in Internet-scale datasets used for VLM pre-training, yet emojis themselves are largely absent from standard robotics datasets. Consequently, they provide a clean proxy: successful task completion indicates effective transfer of VLM priors to embodied control. We implement this diagnostic task in both simulated environment and a real robot, and compare various promising techniques for knowledge transfer. Specifically, we investigate the effects of parameter-efficient fine-tuning, VLM freezing, co-training, predicting discretized actions, and predicting latent actions. Through systematic evaluation, our work not only demonstrates the critical importance of preserving VLM priors for the generalization of VLA but also establishes guidelines for future research in developing truly generalizable embodied AI systems.