What-If World: A Causal Benchmark for General World Models in Embodied Scenarios

Video generation models are increasingly used as world simulators for tasks like driving and robotic manipulation. What matters in these settings is not whether a single video looks right, but whether the model's output changes when its input changes. We test this by giving a model two prompts describing the same scene with one physical detail varied, and checking whether the two videos diverge the way physics predicts. The wording difference between the prompts is small by design, since only one variable is changed, but the correct physical difference is not. A model that misses this can still produce two videos that each look plausible individually, and existing benchmarks score videos one at a time and cannot detect this failure. We introduce What-If World, 319 such prompt pairs built on real frames from nuScenes and DROID, organized by a taxonomy of six physical variables shared across driving and manipulation. Each pair is scored with APEO, a four-part rubric checking whether each video follows its prompt (Adherence), is physically consistent (Physics), preserves the shared scene (Environment), and ends in the correct difference (Outcome). Across nine state-of-the-art models, no system exceeds 52% on the paired score, and open-source models cluster near 28%. Every model tested fails on a large fraction of causal interventions, indicating substantial room before these models can reliably support action-conditioned simulation or model-based planning. Where models do score well, performance appears to track the visual prominence of the intervention rather than the tractability of its underlying physics. Some visually subtle interventions score as low as 14.2%, while visually pronounced ones reach 40.4%.

QUACK: Questioning, Understanding, and Auditing Communicated Knowledge in Multimodal Social Deduction Agents

Social deduction games have become a popular testbed for probing reasoning, deception, coordination, and belief modeling in Large Language Model (LLM) agents. However, most environments are scored only by game outcomes such as win rates and largely remain to text-only interaction, making it difficult to tell whether an agent's language is actually grounded in what it perceived and did, or to identify the failure modes underlying its behavior. To address this gap, we introduce QUACK, an open-source environment and evaluation framework for auditing the grounding of agent language in multimodal social reasoning. QUACK evaluates agents at three levels: game outcomes, behavioral trajectories, and utterance-level consistency. Its core Statement Verification Pipeline reconstructs each agent's ground-truth trajectory from engine logs and checks every discussion claim against it, automatically flagging spatial hallucination, unsupported accusation, deception collapse, and language-action inconsistency. Evaluating three frontier VLMs in both homogeneous and cross-model adversarial settings, we find that even the strongest agent hallucinates 15.1% of its verifiable spatial claims and makes over half of its accusations without grounded evidence. We release the full engine, evaluation framework, toolkit, and logs at https://github.com/AAAAA-Academia-Attractions/QUACK.

MDrive: Benchmarking Closed-Loop Cooperative Driving for End-to-End Multi-agent Systems

Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication has emerged as a promising paradigm for autonomous driving, enabling connected agents to share complementary perception information and negotiate with each other to benefit the final planning. Existing V2X benchmarks, however, fall short in two ways: (i) open-loop evaluations fail to capture the inherently closed-loop nature of driving, leading to evaluation gaps, and (ii) current closed-loop evaluations lack behavioral and interactive diversity to reflect real-world driving. Thus, it is still unclear the extent of benefits of multi-agent systems for closed-loop driving. In this paper, we introduce MDrive, a closed-loop cooperative driving benchmark comprising 225 scenarios grounded in both NHTSA pre-crash typologies and real-world V2X datasets. Our benchmark results demonstrate that multi-agent systems are generally better than single-agent counterparts. However, current multi-agent systems still face two important challenges: (i) perception sharing enhances perceptions, but doesn't always translate to better planning; (ii) negotiation improves planning performance but harms it in complex and dense traffic scenarios. MDrive further provides an open-source toolbox for scenario generation, Real2Sim conversion, and human-in-the-loop simulation. Together, MDrive establishes a reproducible foundation for evaluating and improving the generalization and robustness of cooperative driving systems.

ConFixGS: Learning to Fix Feedforward 3D Gaussian Splatting with Confidence-Aware Diffusion Priors in Driving Scenes

Feedforward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) often struggles in trajectory-based sparse-view driving scenes. Existing Gaussian repair methods mainly target optimization-based 3DGS, while diffusion-based repair is typically restricted to iterative refinement near observed viewpoints, leaving feedforward 3DGS repair underexplored. We propose ConFixGS, a plug-and-play method that learns to fix feedforward 3DGS with confidence-aware diffusion priors. Starting from a pretrained feedforward model, ConFixGS generates diffusion-enhanced local pseudo-targets and validates them through reprojection-based cross-checking against support views. The resulting dense confidence maps guide refinement, enhancing reliable details while suppressing hallucinated or inconsistent evidence. On Waymo, nuScenes, and KITTI, ConFixGS improves challenging novel view synthesis, with PSNR gains of up to 3.68 dB and FID reduced by nearly half. Our results highlight confidence-aware fusion of generative priors and support-view consistency as a key principle for robust feedforward 3D driving scene reconstruction.

MINER: Mining Multimodal Internal Representation for Efficient Retrieval

Visual document retrieval has become essential for accessing information in visually rich documents. Existing approaches fall into two camps. Late-interaction retrievers achieve strong quality through fine-grained token-level matching but store hundreds of vectors per page, incurring large index footprints and high serving costs. By contrast, dense single-vector retrievers retain storage and latency advantages but consistently lag in quality because they compress all information into a single final-layer embedding. In this work, we first conduct a layerwise diagnostic on single-vector retrievers, revealing that retrieval-relevant signal resides in internal representations. Motivated by these findings, we propose MINER (Mining Multimodal Internal RepreseNtation for Efficient Retrieval), a lightweight plug-in module that probes and fuses internal signals across transformer layers into a single compact embedding without modifying the backbone or sacrificing single-vector efficiency. The first Retrieval-Aligned Layer Probing stage attaches a lightweight probe at each layer, surfacing which dimensions carry retrieval-relevant information. The subsequent Adaptive Sparse Multi-Layer Fusion stage applies performance-adaptive neuron-level masking to the selected layers and fuses the surviving signals into the final dense vector. Across ViDoRe V1/V2/V3, MINER outperforms existing dense single-vector retrievers on the majority of benchmarks, with up to 4.5% nDCG@5 improvement over its corresponding backbone. Compared to strong late-interaction baselines, in some settings MINER substantially narrows the nDCG@$5$ gap to $0.2$ while preserving the storage and serving advantages of dense retrieval.

CCTVBench: Contrastive Consistency Traffic VideoQA Benchmark for Multimodal LLMs

Safety-critical traffic reasoning requires contrastive consistency: models must detect true hazards when an accident occurs, and reliably reject plausible-but-false hypotheses under near-identical counterfactual scenes. We present CCTVBench, a Contrastive Consistency Traffic VideoQA Benchmark built on paired real accident videos and world-model-generated counterfactual counterparts, together with minimally different, mutually exclusive hypothesis questions. CCTVBench enforces a single structured decision pattern over each video question quadruple and provides actionable diagnostics that decompose failures into positive omission, positive swap, negative hallucination, and mutual-exclusivity violation, while separating video versus question consistency. Experiments across open-source and proprietary video LLMs reveal a large and persistent gap between standard per-instance QA metrics and quadruple-level contrastive consistency, with unreliable none-of-the-above rejection as a key bottleneck. Finally, we introduce C-TCD, a contrastive decoding approach leveraging a semantically exclusive counterpart video as the contrast input at inference time, improving both instance-level QA and contrastive consistency.

Online Survival Analysis: A Bandit Approach under Cox PH Model

Survival analysis is a widely used statistical framework for modeling time-to-event data under censoring. Classical methods, such as the Cox proportional hazards (Cox PH) model, offer a semiparametric approach to estimating the effects of covariates on the hazard function. Despite its importance, survival analysis has been largely unexplored in online settings, particularly within the bandit framework, where decisions must be made sequentially to optimize treatments as new data arrive over time. In this work, we take an initial step toward integrating survival analysis into a purely online learning setting under the Cox PH model, addressing key challenges including staggered entry, delayed feedback, and right censoring. We adapt three canonical bandit algorithms to balance exploration and exploitation, with theoretical guarantees of sublinear regret bounds. Extensive simulations and semi-real experiments using SEER cancer data demonstrate that our approach enables rapid and effective learning of near-optimal treatment policies.

Exploring 6D Object Pose Estimation with Deformation

We present DeSOPE, a large-scale dataset for 6DoF deformed objects. Most 6D object pose methods assume rigid or articulated objects, an assumption that fails in practice as objects deviate from their canonical shapes due to wear, impact, or deformation. To model this, we introduce the DeSOPE dataset, which features high-fidelity 3D scans of 26 common object categories, each captured in one canonical state and three deformed configurations, with accurate 3D registration to the canonical mesh. Additionally, it features an RGB-D dataset with 133K frames across diverse scenarios and 665K pose annotations produced via a semi-automatic pipeline. We begin by annotating 2D masks for each instance, then compute initial poses using an object pose method, refine them through an object-level SLAM system, and finally perform manual verification to produce the final annotations. We evaluate several object pose methods and find that performance drops sharply with increasing deformation, suggesting that robust handling of such deformations is critical for practical applications. The project page and dataset are available at https://desope-6d.github.io/}{https://desope-6d.github.io/.

Training-Free Image Editing with Visual Context Integration and Concept Alignment

In image editing, it is essential to incorporate a context image to convey the user's precise requirements, such as subject appearance or image style. Existing training-based visual context-aware editing methods incur data collection effort and training cost. On the other hand, the training-free alternatives are typically established on diffusion inversion, which struggles with consistency and flexibility. In this work, we propose VicoEdit, a training-free and inversion-free method to inject the visual context into the pretrained text-prompted editing model. More specifically, VicoEdit directly transforms the source image into the target one based on the visual context, thereby eliminating the need for inversion that can lead to deviated trajectories. Moreover, we design a posterior sampling approach guided by concept alignment to enhance the editing consistency. Empirical results demonstrate that our training-free method achieves even better editing performance than the state-of-the-art training-based models.

CARE: Privacy-Compliant Agentic Reasoning with Evidence Discordance

Large language model (LLM) systems are increasingly used to support high-stakes decision-making, but they typically perform worse when the available evidence is internally inconsistent. Such a scenario exists in real-world healthcare settings, with patient-reported symptoms contradicting medical signs. To study this problem, we introduce MIMIC-DOS, a dataset for short-horizon organ dysfunction worsening prediction in the intensive care unit (ICU) setting. We derive this dataset from the widely recognized MIMIC-IV, a publicly available electronic health record dataset, and construct it exclusively from cases in which discordance between signs and symptoms exists. This setting poses a substantial challenge for existing LLM-based approaches, with single-pass LLMs and agentic pipelines often struggling to reconcile such conflicting signals. To address this problem, we propose CARE: a multi-stage privacy-compliant agentic reasoning framework in which a remote LLM provides guidance by generating structured categories and transitions without accessing sensitive patient data, while a local LLM uses these categories and transitions to support evidence acquisition and final decision-making. Empirically, CARE achieves stronger performance across all key metrics compared to multiple baseline settings, showing that CARE can more robustly handle conflicting clinical evidence while preserving privacy.