GIVE: Grounding Human Gestures in Vision-Language-Action Models

Human communication is inherently multimodal, where language is often accompanied by non-verbal cues such as gestures to convey intentions. However, current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models treat robotic manipulation as a pure text-driven task, overlooking the important role of gestures in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). This often leads to inaccurate intent grounding and unreliable manipulation when language instructions are ambiguous or underspecified. To address this challenge, we propose GIVE (Gesture Intent via Visual-Semantic Enhancement), an effective approach that enhances pre-trained VLA models with human gesture understanding without architectural modifications. Specifically, GIVE incorporates gesture information through two complementary pathways: a visual pathway that overlays hand skeletons and fingertip rays onto robot observations for explicit object grounding, and a semantic pathway that generates high-level descriptions of human gestures and task instructions for robust intent grounding. By jointly leveraging visual and semantic guidance, GIVE enables VLA policies to better associate gestures with manipulation behaviors and adapt to dynamic interaction intents. In real-world HRI experiments, GIVE substantially outperforms the baseline, improving target object recognition accuracy by 40% and overall task success rate by 80%, while demonstrating strong robustness and generalization to unseen spatial layouts and diverse participants.

Morphology-Aware Sample Assignment: Overcoming IoU Insensitivity for Surface Defect Detection

Intersection-over-Union (IoU), as a pivotal metric for evaluating the spatial alignment between candidate proposals and ground-truth annotations, directly determines the quality of positive sample sets and the training efficacy of visual detection models. Through theoretical modeling and analysis, we uncover a non-sensitive region on the IoU response curve, within which samples yield nearly identical IoU scores despite distinct geometric overlaps. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a set of morphological similarity metrics covering area, shape, and aspect ratio, to refine the positive sample assignment process, thereby ensuring more discriminative and reliable matching. A supplementary matching score is derived via mean-based aggregation of these multidimensional similarities, compensating for the intrinsic limitation of IoU in representing structural correspondence. Theoretically, incorporating morphological similarity reshapes the response distribution of the matching function, yielding both effective directional gradients and polygon-like iso-response contours, which tightly confine high-response regions around each ground-truth instance and substantially enhance the precision of positive sample selection. Experiments based on the YOLOv9 framework demonstrate consistent performance gains on both NEUDET and GC10- DET datasets. Notably, the proposed approach is fully plug-and-play and incurs zero additional inference overhead, thereby ensuring deployment efficiency for industrial visual inspection.

World-Language-Action Model for Unified World Modeling, Language Reasoning, and Action Synthesis

We propose world-language-action (WLA) models as a new class of embodied foundation models. WLA takes textual instructions, images, and robot states as inputs to jointly predict textual subtasks, subgoal images, and robot actions, conjoining the \emph{world modeling interface} to learn from extensive egocentric videos as in the world-action model (WAM) and the \emph{language reasoning} capacities to solve complex long-horizon tasks as in vision-language-action (VLA) models. At the core of WLA lies an \emph{autoregressive (AR)} Transformer backbone, instead of a bidirectional diffusion Transformer as in WAMs, to predict the \emph{next state}, comprising the \emph{semantic-level} textual intention and complementary \emph{fine-grained} physical dynamics. The physical dynamics are supervised by the world modeling objective based on a dedicated World Expert, and are leveraged to ease the characterization of the state-action correlation for the Action Expert. WLA leverages meta-queries to make the world prediction \emph{implicitly} impact the action generation so that the former can be disabled during inference. The world prediction can also be activated to enable test-time scaling for improved robot control. Our WLA-0 prototype, with 2B active parameters, achieves 40 ms per inference on an NVIDIA RTX 5090. Evaluations across simulated and real-world environments demonstrate that WLA-0 achieves state-of-the-art multi-task and long-horizon learning abilities, e.g., 92.94\% success rate on RoboTwin2.0 Clean and 56.5\% success rate on RMBench. WLA-0 also holds the promise to learn novel tasks directly from \emph{cross-embodiment robot videos} without action annotations.

SenseNova-U1: Unifying Multimodal Understanding and Generation with NEO-unify Architecture

Recent large vision-language models (VLMs) remain fundamentally constrained by a persistent dichotomy: understanding and generation are treated as distinct problems, leading to fragmented architectures, cascaded pipelines, and misaligned representation spaces. We argue that this divide is not merely an engineering artifact, but a structural limitation that hinders the emergence of native multimodal intelligence. Hence, we introduce SenseNova-U1, a native unified multimodal paradigm built upon NEO-unify, in which understanding and generation evolve as synergistic views of a single underlying process. We launch two native unified variants, SenseNova-U1-8B-MoT and SenseNova-U1-A3B-MoT, built on dense (8B) and mixture-of-experts (30B-A3B) understanding baselines, respectively. Designed from first principles, they rival top-tier understanding-only VLMs across text understanding, vision-language perception, knowledge reasoning, agentic decision-making, and spatial intelligence. Meanwhile, they deliver strong semantic consistency and visual fidelity, excelling in conventional or knowledge-intensive any-to-image (X2I) synthesis, complex text-rich infographic generation, and interleaved vision-language generation, with or without think patterns. Beyond performance, we show detailed model design, data preprocessing, pre-/post-training, and inference strategies to support community research. Last but not least, preliminary evidence demonstrates that our models extend beyond perception and generation, performing strongly in vision-language-action (VLA) and world model (WM) scenarios. This points toward a broader roadmap where models do not translate between modalities, but think and act across them in a native manner. Multimodal AI is no longer about connecting separate systems, but about building a unified one and trusting the necessary capabilities to emerge from within.

AcademiClaw: When Students Set Challenges for AI Agents

Benchmarks within the OpenClaw ecosystem have thus far evaluated exclusively assistant-level tasks, leaving the academic-level capabilities of OpenClaw largely unexamined. We introduce AcademiClaw, a bilingual benchmark of 80 complex, long-horizon tasks sourced directly from university students' real academic workflows -- homework, research projects, competitions, and personal projects -- that they found current AI agents unable to solve effectively. Curated from 230 student-submitted candidates through rigorous expert review, the final task set spans 25+ professional domains, ranging from olympiad-level mathematics and linguistics problems to GPU-intensive reinforcement learning and full-stack system debugging, with 16 tasks requiring CUDA GPU execution. Each task executes in an isolated Docker sandbox and is scored on task completion by multi-dimensional rubrics combining six complementary techniques, with an independent five-category safety audit providing additional behavioral analysis. Experiments on six frontier models show that even the best achieves only a 55\% pass rate. Further analysis uncovers sharp capability boundaries across task domains, divergent behavioral strategies among models, and a disconnect between token consumption and output quality, providing fine-grained diagnostic signals beyond what aggregate metrics reveal. We hope that AcademiClaw and its open-sourced data and code can serve as a useful resource for the OpenClaw community, driving progress toward agents that are more capable and versatile across the full breadth of real-world academic demands. All data and code are available at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/AcademiClaw.

V-STC: A Time-Efficient Multi-Vehicle Coordinated Trajectory Planning Approach

Coordinating the motions of multiple autonomous vehicles (AVs) requires planning frameworks that ensure safety while making efficient use of space and time. This paper presents a new approach, termed variable-time-step spatio-temporal corridor (V-STC), that enhances the temporal efficiency of multi-vehicle coordination. An optimization model is formulated to construct a V-STC for each AV, in which both the spatial configuration of the corridor cubes and their time durations are treated as decision variables. By allowing the corridor's spatial position and time step to vary, the constructed V-STC reduces the overall temporal occupancy of each AV while maintaining collision-free separation in the spatio-temporal domain. Based on the generated V-STC, a dynamically feasible trajectory is then planned independently for each AV. Simulation studies demonstrate that the proposed method achieves safe multi-vehicle coordination and yields more time-efficient motion compared with existing STC approaches.

Hybrid Policy Distillation for LLMs

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a powerful paradigm for compressing large language models (LLMs), whose effectiveness depends on intertwined choices of divergence direction, optimization strategy, and data regime. We break down the design of existing KD methods and present a unified view that establishes connections between them, reformulating KD as a reweighted log-likelihood objective at the token level. We further propose Hybrid Policy Distillation (HPD), which integrates the complementary advantages of forward and reverse KL to balance mode coverage and mode-seeking, and combines off-policy data with lightweight, approximate on-policy sampling. We validate HPD on long-generation math reasoning as well as short-generation dialogue and code tasks, demonstrating improved optimization stability, computational efficiency, and final performance across diverse model families and scales. The code related to this work is available at https://github.com/zwhong714/Hybrid-Policy-Distillation.

AlphaEval: Evaluating Agents in Production

The rapid deployment of AI agents in commercial settings has outpaced the development of evaluation methodologies that reflect production realities. Existing benchmarks measure agent capabilities through retrospectively curated tasks with well-specified requirements and deterministic metrics -- conditions that diverge fundamentally from production environments where requirements contain implicit constraints, inputs are heterogeneous multi-modal documents with information fragmented across sources, tasks demand undeclared domain expertise, outputs are long-horizon professional deliverables, and success is judged by domain experts whose standards evolve over time. We present AlphaEval, a production-grounded benchmark of 94 tasks sourced from seven companies deploying AI agents in their core business, spanning six O*NET (Occupational Information Network) domains. Unlike model-centric benchmarks, AlphaEval evaluates complete agent products -- Claude Code, Codex, etc. -- as commercial systems, capturing performance variations invisible to model-level evaluation. Our evaluation framework covers multiple paradigms (LLM-as-a-Judge, reference-driven metrics, formal verification, rubric-based assessment, automated UI testing, etc.), with individual domains composing multiple paradigms. Beyond the benchmark itself, we contribute a requirement-to-benchmark construction framework -- a systematic methodology that transforms authentic production requirements into executable evaluation tasks in minimal time. This framework standardizes the entire pipeline from requirement to evaluation, providing a reproducible, modular process that any organization can adopt to construct production-grounded benchmarks for their own domains.

SepSeq: A Training-Free Framework for Long Numerical Sequence Processing in LLMs

While transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) theoretically support massive context windows, they suffer from severe performance degradation when processing long numerical sequences. We attribute this failure to the attention dispersion in the Softmax mechanism, which prevents the model from concentrating attention. To overcome this, we propose Separate Sequence (SepSeq), a training-free, plug-and-play framework to mitigate dispersion by strategically inserting separator tokens. Mechanistically, we demonstrate that separator tokens act as an attention sink, recalibrating attention to focus on local segments while preserving global context. Extensive evaluations on 9 widely-adopted LLMs confirm the effectiveness of our approach: SepSeq yields an average relative accuracy improvement of 35.6% across diverse domains while reducing total inference token consumption by 16.4% on average.

Rubrics to Tokens: Bridging Response-level Rubrics and Token-level Rewards in Instruction Following Tasks

Rubric-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with complex, open-domain instruction following tasks. However, existing methods predominantly rely on response-level rewards, introducing severe reward sparsity and reward ambiguity problems. To address these issues, we propose Rubrics to Tokens (RTT), a novel rubric-based RL framework that bridges coarse response-level scores and fine-grained token-level credit assignment. RTT introduces a Token-Level Relevance Discriminator to predict which tokens in the response are responsible for a specific constraint, and optimizes the policy model via RTT-GRPO, which integrates response-level and token-level advantages within a unified framework. Furthermore, when transitioning from one-dimensional, outcome-level reward to three-dimensional reward space in the token-level rubric-based RL, we propose a novel group normalization method, called Intra-sample Token Group Normalization, to accommodate this shift. Extensive experiments and benchmarks demonstrate that RTT consistently outperforms other baselines in both instruction- and rubric-level accuracy across different models.