Not All Points Are Equal: Uncertainty-Aware 4D LiDAR Scene Synthesis

Constructing faithful 4D worlds from LiDAR-acquired sequences is crucial for embodied AI, yet current generative frameworks apply uniform modeling capacity across all spatial regions. This ignores that perceptual difficulty varies dramatically within a single scan: distant surfaces, occluded boundaries, and small-scale objects carry far higher uncertainty than well-observed structures. We present U4D, a new framework that explicitly leverages spatial uncertainty to guide LiDAR scene generation in a "hard-to-easy" schedule. U4D derives per-point uncertainty maps via Shannon Entropy from a pretrained segmentor, then applies an unconditional diffusion stage to synthesize high-entropy areas with precise geometry, followed by a conditional completion stage that fills in the remaining regions using these structures as priors. A MoST (Mixture of Spatio-Temporal) block further maintains cross-frame coherence by dynamically balancing spatial detail and temporal continuity. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and SemanticKITTI demonstrate state-of-the-art scene fidelity, temporal consistency, and downstream performance.

AI for Auto-Research: Roadmap & User Guide

AI-assisted research is crossing a threshold: fully automated systems can now generate research papers for as little as $15, while long-horizon agents can execute experiments, draft manuscripts, and simulate critique with minimal human input. Yet this productivity frontier exposes a deeper integrity problem: under scientific pressure, even frontier LLMs still fabricate results, miss hidden errors, and fail to judge novelty reliably. Studying developments through April 2026, we present an end-to-end analysis of AI across the complete research lifecycle, organized into four epistemological phases: Creation (idea generation, literature review, coding & experiments, tables & figures), Writing (paper writing), Validation (peer review, rebuttal & revision), and Dissemination (posters, slides, videos, social media, project pages, and interactive agents). We identify a sharp, stage-dependent boundary between reliable assistance and unreliable autonomy: AI excels at structured, retrieval-grounded, and tool-mediated tasks, but remains fragile for genuinely novel ideas, research-level experiments, and scientific judgment. Generated ideas often degrade after implementation, research code lags far behind pattern-matching benchmarks, and end-to-end autonomous systems have not yet consistently reached major-venue acceptance standards. We further show that greater automation can obscure rather than eliminate failure modes, making human-governed collaboration the most credible deployment paradigm. Finally, we provide a structured taxonomy, benchmark suite, and tool inventory, cross-stage design principles, and a practitioner-oriented playbook, with resources maintained at our project page.

OmniLiDAR: A Unified Diffusion Framework for Multi-Domain 3D LiDAR Generation

LiDAR scene generation is increasingly important for scalable simulation and synthetic data creation, especially under diverse sensing conditions that are costly to capture at scale. Typically, diffusion-based LiDAR generators are developed under single-domain settings, requiring separate models for different datasets or sensing conditions and hindering unified, controllable synthesis under heterogeneous distribution shifts. To this end, we present OmniLiDAR, a unified text-conditioned diffusion framework that generates LiDAR scans in a shared range-image representation across eight representative domains spanning three shift types: adverse weather, sensor-configuration changes (e.g., reduced beams), and cross-platform acquisition (vehicle, drone, and quadruped). To enable training a single model over heterogeneous domains without isolating optimization by domain, we introduce a Cross-Domain Training Strategy (CDTS) that mixes domains within each mini-batch and leverages conditioning to steer generation. We further propose Cross-Domain Feature Modeling (CDFM), which captures directional dependencies along azimuth and elevation axes to reflect the anisotropic scanning structure of range images, and Domain-Adaptive Feature Scaling (DAFS) as a lightweight modulation to account for structured domain-dependent feature shifts during denoising. In the absence of a public consolidated benchmark, we construct an 8-domain dataset by combining real-world scans with physically based weather simulation and systematic beam reduction while following official splits. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong generation fidelity and consistent gains in downstream use cases, including generative data augmentation for LiDAR semantic segmentation and 3D object detection, as well as robustness evaluation under corruptions, with consistent benefits in limited-label regimes.

Is Your Driving World Model an All-Around Player?

Today's driving world models can generate remarkably realistic dash-cam videos, yet no single model excels universally. Some generate photorealistic textures but violate basic physics; others maintain geometric consistency but fail when subjected to closed-loop planning. This disconnect exposes a critical gap: the field evaluates how real generated worlds appear, but rarely whether they behave realistically. We introduce WorldLens, a unified benchmark that measures world-model fidelity across the full spectrum, from pixel quality and 4D geometry to closed-loop driving and human perceptual alignment, through five complementary aspects and 24 standardized dimensions. Our evaluation of six representative models reveals that no existing approach dominates across all axes: texture-rich models violate geometry, geometry-aware models lack behavioral fidelity, and even the strongest performers achieve only 2-3 out of 10 on human realism ratings. To bridge algorithmic metrics with human perception, we further contribute WorldLens-26K, a 26,808-entry human-annotated preference dataset pairing numerical scores with textual rationales, and WorldLens-Agent, a vision-language evaluator distilled from these judgments that enables scalable, explainable auto-assessment. Together, the benchmark, dataset, and agent form a unified ecosystem for assessing generated worlds not merely by visual appeal, but by physical and behavioral fidelity.

Masked Generative Transformer Is What You Need for Image Editing

Diffusion models dominate image editing, yet their global denoising mechanism entangles edited regions with surrounding context, causing modifications to propagate into areas that should remain intact. We propose a fundamentally different approach by leveraging Masked Generative Transformers (MGTs), whose localized token-prediction paradigm naturally confines changes to intended regions. We present EditMGT, an MGT-based editing framework that is the first of its kind. Our approach employs multi-layer attention consolidation to aggregate cross-attention maps into precise edit localization signals, and region-hold sampling to explicitly prevent token flipping in non-target areas. To support training, we construct CrispEdit-2M, a 2M-sample high-resolution (>1024) editing dataset spanning seven categories. With only 960M parameters, EditMGT achieves state-of-the-art image similarity on multiple benchmarks while delivering 6x faster editing, demonstrating that MGTs offer a compelling alternative to diffusion-based editing.

Agentic World Modeling: Foundations, Capabilities, Laws, and Beyond

As AI systems move from generating text to accomplishing goals through sustained interaction, the ability to model environment dynamics becomes a central bottleneck. Agents that manipulate objects, navigate software, coordinate with others, or design experiments require predictive environment models, yet the term world model carries different meanings across research communities. We introduce a "levels x laws" taxonomy organized along two axes. The first defines three capability levels: L1 Predictor, which learns one-step local transition operators; L2 Simulator, which composes them into multi-step, action-conditioned rollouts that respect domain laws; and L3 Evolver, which autonomously revises its own model when predictions fail against new evidence. The second identifies four governing-law regimes: physical, digital, social, and scientific. These regimes determine what constraints a world model must satisfy and where it is most likely to fail. Using this framework, we synthesize over 400 works and summarize more than 100 representative systems spanning model-based reinforcement learning, video generation, web and GUI agents, multi-agent social simulation, and AI-driven scientific discovery. We analyze methods, failure modes, and evaluation practices across level-regime pairs, propose decision-centric evaluation principles and a minimal reproducible evaluation package, and outline architectural guidance, open problems, and governance challenges. The resulting roadmap connects previously isolated communities and charts a path from passive next-step prediction toward world models that can simulate, and ultimately reshape, the environments in which agents operate.

The First Challenge on Remote Sensing Infrared Image Super-Resolution at NTIRE 2026: Benchmark Results and Method Overview

This paper presents the NTIRE 2026 Remote Sensing Infrared Image Super-Resolution (x4) Challenge, one of the associated challenges of NTIRE 2026. The challenge aims to recover high-resolution (HR) infrared images from low-resolution (LR) inputs generated through bicubic downsampling with a x4 scaling factor. The objective is to develop effective models or solutions that achieve state-of-the-art performance for infrared image SR in remote sensing scenarios. To reflect the characteristics of infrared data and practical application needs, the challenge adopts a single-track setting. A total of 115 participants registered for the competition, with 13 teams submitting valid entries. This report summarizes the challenge design, dataset, evaluation protocol, main results, and the representative methods of each team. The challenge serves as a benchmark to advance research in infrared image super-resolution and promote the development of effective solutions for real-world remote sensing applications.

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

AdaSFormer: Adaptive Serialized Transformers for Monocular Semantic Scene Completion from Indoor Environments

Indoor monocular semantic scene completion (MSSC) is notably more challenging than its outdoor counterpart due to complex spatial layouts and severe occlusions. While transformers are well suited for modeling global dependencies, their high memory cost and difficulty in reconstructing fine-grained details have limited their use in indoor MSSC. To address these limitations, we introduce AdaSFormer, a serialized transformer framework tailored for indoor MSSC. Our model features three key designs: (1) an Adaptive Serialized Transformer with learnable shifts that dynamically adjust receptive fields; (2) a Center-Relative Positional Encoding that captures spatial information richness; and (3) a Convolution-Modulated Layer Normalization that bridges heterogeneous representations between convolutional and transformer features. Extensive experiments on NYUv2 and Occ-ScanNet demonstrate that AdaSFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/alanWXZ/AdaSFormer.

NavThinker: Action-Conditioned World Models for Coupled Prediction and Planning in Social Navigation

Social navigation requires robots to act safely in dynamic human environments. Effective behavior demands thinking ahead: reasoning about how the scene and pedestrians evolve under different robot actions rather than reacting to current observations alone. This creates a coupled prediction-planning challenge, where robot actions and human motion mutually influence each other. To address this challenge, we propose NavThinker, a future-aware framework that couples an action-conditioned world model with on-policy reinforcement learning. The world model operates in the Depth Anything V2 patch feature space and performs autoregressive prediction of future scene geometry and human motion; multi-head decoders then produce future depth maps and human trajectories, yielding a future-aware state aligned with traversability and interaction risk. Crucially, we train the policy with DD-PPO while injecting world-model think-ahead signals via: (i) action-conditioned future features fused into the current observation embedding and (ii) social reward shaping from predicted human trajectories. Experiments on single- and multi-robot Social-HM3D show state-of-the-art navigation success, with zero-shot transfer to Social-MP3D and real-world deployment on a Unitree Go2, validating generalization and practical applicability. Webpage: https://github.com/hutslib/NavThinker.