Instance-level Visual Active Tracking with Occlusion-Aware Planning

Visual Active Tracking (VAT) aims to control cameras to follow a target in 3D space, which is critical for applications like drone navigation and security surveillance. However, it faces two key bottlenecks in real-world deployment: confusion from visually similar distractors caused by insufficient instance-level discrimination and severe failure under occlusions due to the absence of active planning. To address these, we propose OA-VAT, a unified pipeline with three complementary modules. First, a training-free Instance-Aware Offline Prototype Initialization aggregates multi-view augmented features via DINOv3 to construct discriminative instance prototypes, mitigating distractor confusion. Second, an Online Prototype Enhancement Tracker enhances prototypes online and integrates a confidence-aware Kalman filter for stable tracking under appearance and motion changes. Third, an Occlusion-Aware Trajectory Planner, trained on our new Planning-20k dataset, uses conditional diffusion to generate obstacle-avoiding paths for occlusion recovery. Experiments demonstrate OA-VAT achieves 0.93 average SR on UnrealCV (+2.2% vs. SOTA TrackVLA), 90.8% average CAR on real-world datasets (+12.1% vs. SOTA GC-VAT), and 81.6% TSR on a DJI Tello drone. Running at 35 FPS on an RTX 3090, it delivers robust, real-time performance for practical deployment.

AceTone: Bridging Words and Colors for Conditional Image Grading

Color affects how we interpret image style and emotion. Previous color grading methods rely on patch-wise recoloring or fixed filter banks, struggling to generalize across creative intents or align with human aesthetic preferences. In this study, we propose AceTone, the first approach that supports multimodal conditioned color grading within a unified framework. AceTone formulates grading as a generative color transformation task, where a model directly produces 3D-LUTs conditioned on text prompts or reference images. We develop a VQ-VAE based tokenizer which compresses a $3\times32^3$ LUT vector to 64 discrete tokens with $ΔE<2$ fidelity. We further build a large-scale dataset, AceTone-800K, and train a vision-language model to predict LUT tokens, followed by reinforcement learning to align outputs with perceptual fidelity and aesthetics. Experiments show that AceTone achieves state-of-the-art performance on both text-guided and reference-guided grading tasks, improving LPIPS by up to 50% over existing methods. Human evaluations confirm that AceTone's results are visually pleasing and stylistically coherent, demonstrating a new pathway toward language-driven, aesthetic-aligned color grading.

LongVideo-R1: Smart Navigation for Low-cost Long Video Understanding

This paper addresses the critical and underexplored challenge of long video understanding with low computational budgets. We propose LongVideo-R1, an active, reasoning-equipped multimodal large language model (MLLM) agent designed for efficient video context navigation, avoiding the redundancy of exhaustive search. At the core of LongVideo-R1 lies a reasoning module that leverages high-level visual cues to infer the most informative video clip for subsequent processing. During inference, the agent initiates traversal from top-level visual summaries and iteratively refines its focus, immediately halting the exploration process upon acquiring sufficient knowledge to answer the query. To facilitate training, we first extract hierarchical video captions from CGBench, a video corpus with grounding annotations, and guide GPT-5 to generate 33K high-quality chain-of-thought-with-tool trajectories. The LongVideo-R1 agent is fine-tuned upon the Qwen-3-8B model through a two-stage paradigm: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL), where RL employs a specifically designed reward function to maximize selective and efficient clip navigation. Experiments on multiple long video benchmarks validate the effectiveness of name, which enjoys superior tradeoff between QA accuracy and efficiency. All curated data and source code are provided in the supplementary material and will be made publicly available. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/qiujihao19/LongVideo-R1

Balancing Understanding and Generation in Discrete Diffusion Models

In discrete generative modeling, two dominant paradigms demonstrate divergent capabilities: Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLM) excel at semantic understanding and zero-shot generalization, whereas Uniform-noise Diffusion Language Models (UDLM) achieve strong few-step generation quality, yet neither attains balanced performance across both dimensions. To address this, we propose XDLM, which bridges the two paradigms via a stationary noise kernel. XDLM offers two key contributions: (1) it provides a principled theoretical unification of MDLM and UDLM, recovering each paradigm as a special case; and (2) an alleviated memory bottleneck enabled by an algebraic simplification of the posterior probabilities. Experiments demonstrate that XDLM advances the Pareto frontier between understanding capability and generation quality. Quantitatively, XDLM surpasses UDLM by 5.4 points on zero-shot text benchmarks and outperforms MDLM in few-step image generation (FID 54.1 vs. 80.8). When scaled to tune an 8B-parameter large language model, XDLM achieves 15.0 MBPP in just 32 steps, effectively doubling the baseline performance. Finally, analysis of training dynamics reveals XDLM's superior potential for long-term scaling. Code is available at https://github.com/MzeroMiko/XDLM

Thinking with Images via Self-Calling Agent

Thinking-with-images paradigms have showcased remarkable visual reasoning capability by integrating visual information as dynamic elements into the Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, optimizing interleaved multimodal CoT (iMCoT) through reinforcement learning remains challenging, as it relies on scarce high-quality reasoning data. In this study, we propose Self-Calling Chain-of-Thought (sCoT), a novel visual reasoning paradigm that reformulates iMCoT as a language-only CoT with self-calling. Specifically, a main agent decomposes the complex visual reasoning task to atomic subtasks and invokes its virtual replicas, i.e. parameter-sharing subagents, to solve them in isolated context. sCoT enjoys substantial training effectiveness and efficiency, as it requires no explicit interleaving between modalities. sCoT employs group-relative policy optimization to reinforce effective reasoning behavior to enhance optimization. Experiments on HR-Bench 4K show that sCoT improves the overall reasoning performance by up to $1.9\%$ with $\sim 75\%$ fewer GPU hours compared to strong baseline approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/YWenxi/think-with-images-through-self-calling.

Geometric-Mean Policy Optimization

Recent advancements, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), have enhanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models by optimizing the arithmetic mean of token-level rewards. However, GRPO suffers from unstable policy updates when processing tokens with outlier importance-weighted rewards, which manifests as extreme importance sampling ratios during training, i.e., the ratio between the sampling probabilities assigned to a token by the current and old policies. In this work, we propose Geometric-Mean Policy Optimization (GMPO), a stabilized variant of GRPO. Instead of optimizing the arithmetic mean, GMPO maximizes the geometric mean of token-level rewards, which is inherently less sensitive to outliers and maintains a more stable range of importance sampling ratio. In addition, we provide comprehensive theoretical and experimental analysis to justify the design and stability benefits of GMPO. Beyond improved stability, GMPO-7B outperforms GRPO by an average of 4.1% on multiple mathematical benchmarks and 1.4% on multimodal reasoning benchmark, including AIME24, AMC, MATH500, OlympiadBench, Minerva, and Geometry3K. Code is available at https://github.com/callsys/GMPO.

ReDDiT: Rehashing Noise for Discrete Visual Generation

Discrete diffusion models are gaining traction in the visual generative area for their efficiency and compatibility. However, the pioneered attempts still fall behind the continuous counterparts, which we attribute to the noise (absorbing state) design and sampling heuristics. In this study, we propose the rehashing noise framework for discrete diffusion transformer, termed ReDDiT, to extend absorbing states and improve expressive capacity of discrete diffusion models. ReDDiT enriches the potential paths that latent variables can traverse during training with randomized multi-index corruption. The derived rehash sampler, which reverses the randomized absorbing paths, guarantees the diversity and low discrepancy of the generation process. These reformulations lead to more consistent and competitive generation quality, mitigating the need for heavily tuned randomness. Experiments show that ReDDiT significantly outperforms the baseline (reducing gFID from 6.18 to 1.61) and is on par with the continuous counterparts with higher efficiency.

Delving Deep into Semantic Relation Distillation

Knowledge distillation has become a cornerstone technique in deep learning, facilitating the transfer of knowledge from complex models to lightweight counterparts. Traditional distillation approaches focus on transferring knowledge at the instance level, but fail to capture nuanced semantic relationships within the data. In response, this paper introduces a novel methodology, Semantics-based Relation Knowledge Distillation (SeRKD), which reimagines knowledge distillation through a semantics-relation lens among each sample. By leveraging semantic components, \ie, superpixels, SeRKD enables a more comprehensive and context-aware transfer of knowledge, which skillfully integrates superpixel-based semantic extraction with relation-based knowledge distillation for a sophisticated model compression and distillation. Particularly, the proposed method is naturally relevant in the domain of Vision Transformers (ViTs), where visual tokens serve as fundamental units of representation. Experimental evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of SeRKD over existing methods, underscoring its efficacy in enhancing model performance and generalization capabilities.

Adaptive Keyframe Sampling for Long Video Understanding

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled open-world visual understanding by injecting visual input as extra tokens into large language models (LLMs) as contexts. However, when the visual input changes from a single image to a long video, the above paradigm encounters difficulty because the vast amount of video tokens has significantly exceeded the maximal capacity of MLLMs. Therefore, existing video-based MLLMs are mostly established upon sampling a small portion of tokens from input data, which can cause key information to be lost and thus produce incorrect answers. This paper presents a simple yet effective algorithm named Adaptive Keyframe Sampling (AKS). It inserts a plug-and-play module known as keyframe selection, which aims to maximize the useful information with a fixed number of video tokens. We formulate keyframe selection as an optimization involving (1) the relevance between the keyframes and the prompt, and (2) the coverage of the keyframes over the video, and present an adaptive algorithm to approximate the best solution. Experiments on two long video understanding benchmarks validate that Adaptive Keyframe Sampling improves video QA accuracy (beyond strong baselines) upon selecting informative keyframes. Our study reveals the importance of information pre-filtering in video-based MLLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/ncTimTang/AKS.

YOLOv12: Attention-Centric Real-Time Object Detectors

Enhancing the network architecture of the YOLO framework has been crucial for a long time, but has focused on CNN-based improvements despite the proven superiority of attention mechanisms in modeling capabilities. This is because attention-based models cannot match the speed of CNN-based models. This paper proposes an attention-centric YOLO framework, namely YOLOv12, that matches the speed of previous CNN-based ones while harnessing the performance benefits of attention mechanisms. YOLOv12 surpasses all popular real-time object detectors in accuracy with competitive speed. For example, YOLOv12-N achieves 40.6% mAP with an inference latency of 1.64 ms on a T4 GPU, outperforming advanced YOLOv10-N / YOLOv11-N by 2.1%/1.2% mAP with a comparable speed. This advantage extends to other model scales. YOLOv12 also surpasses end-to-end real-time detectors that improve DETR, such as RT-DETR / RT-DETRv2: YOLOv12-S beats RT-DETR-R18 / RT-DETRv2-R18 while running 42% faster, using only 36% of the computation and 45% of the parameters. More comparisons are shown in Figure 1.