Explicit Preference Optimization: No Need for an Implicit Reward Model

The generated responses of large language models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned to human preferences through a process called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). As RLHF relies on a challenging training sequence, whereby a separate reward model is independently learned and then later applied to LLM policy updates, ongoing research effort has targeted more straightforward alternatives. In this regard, direct preference optimization (DPO) and its many offshoots circumvent the need for a separate reward training step. Instead, through the judicious use of a reparameterization trick that induces an \textit{implicit} reward, DPO and related methods consolidate learning to the minimization of a single loss function. And yet despite demonstrable success in some real-world settings, we prove that DPO-based objectives are nonetheless subject to sub-optimal regularization and counter-intuitive interpolation behaviors, underappreciated artifacts of the reparameterizations upon which they are based. To this end, we introduce an \textit{explicit} preference optimization framework termed EXPO that requires no analogous reparameterization to achieve an implicit reward. Quite differently, we merely posit intuitively-appealing regularization factors from scratch that transparently avoid the potential pitfalls of key DPO variants, provably satisfying regularization desiderata that prior methods do not. Empirical results serve to corroborate our analyses and showcase the efficacy of EXPO.

Sparse Autoencoders, Again?

Is there really much more to say about sparse autoencoders (SAEs)? Autoencoders in general, and SAEs in particular, represent deep architectures that are capable of modeling low-dimensional latent structure in data. Such structure could reflect, among other things, correlation patterns in large language model activations, or complex natural image manifolds. And yet despite the wide-ranging applicability, there have been relatively few changes to SAEs beyond the original recipe from decades ago, namely, standard deep encoder/decoder layers trained with a classical/deterministic sparse regularizer applied within the latent space. One possible exception is the variational autoencoder (VAE), which adopts a stochastic encoder module capable of producing sparse representations when applied to manifold data. In this work we formalize underappreciated weaknesses with both canonical SAEs, as well as analogous VAEs applied to similar tasks, and propose a hybrid alternative model that circumvents these prior limitations. In terms of theoretical support, we prove that global minima of our proposed model recover certain forms of structured data spread across a union of manifolds. Meanwhile, empirical evaluations on synthetic and real-world datasets substantiate the efficacy of our approach in accurately estimating underlying manifold dimensions and producing sparser latent representations without compromising reconstruction error. In general, we are able to exceed the performance of equivalent-capacity SAEs and VAEs, as well as recent diffusion models where applicable, within domains such as images and language model activation patterns.

S4-Driver: Scalable Self-Supervised Driving Multimodal Large Language Modelwith Spatio-Temporal Visual Representation

The latest advancements in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have spurred a strong renewed interest in end-to-end motion planning approaches for autonomous driving. Many end-to-end approaches rely on human annotations to learn intermediate perception and prediction tasks, while purely self-supervised approaches--which directly learn from sensor inputs to generate planning trajectories without human annotations often underperform the state of the art. We observe a key gap in the input representation space: end-to-end approaches built on MLLMs are often pretrained with reasoning tasks in 2D image space rather than the native 3D space in which autonomous vehicles plan. To this end, we propose S4-Driver, a scalable self-supervised motion planning algorithm with spatio-temporal visual representation, based on the popular PaLI multimodal large language model. S4-Driver uses a novel sparse volume strategy to seamlessly transform the strong visual representation of MLLMs from perspective view to 3D space without the need to finetune the vision encoder. This representation aggregates multi-view and multi-frame visual inputs and enables better prediction of planning trajectories in 3D space. To validate our method, we run experiments on both nuScenes and Waymo Open Motion Dataset (with in-house camera data). Results show that S4-Driver performs favorably against existing supervised multi-task approaches while requiring no human annotations. It also demonstrates great scalability when pretrained on large volumes of unannotated driving logs.

CoMo: Learning Continuous Latent Motion from Internet Videos for Scalable Robot Learning

Learning latent motion from Internet videos is crucial for building generalist robots. However, existing discrete latent action methods suffer from information loss and struggle with complex and fine-grained dynamics. We propose CoMo, which aims to learn more informative continuous motion representations from diverse, internet-scale videos. CoMo employs a early temporal feature difference mechanism to prevent model collapse and suppress static appearance noise, effectively discouraging shortcut learning problem. Furthermore, guided by the information bottleneck principle, we constrain the latent motion embedding dimensionality to achieve a better balance between retaining sufficient action-relevant information and minimizing the inclusion of action-irrelevant appearance noise. Additionally, we also introduce two new metrics for more robustly and affordably evaluating motion and guiding motion learning methods development: (i) the linear probing MSE of action prediction, and (ii) the cosine similarity between past-to-current and future-to-current motion embeddings. Critically, CoMo exhibits strong zero-shot generalization, enabling it to generate continuous pseudo actions for previously unseen video domains. This capability facilitates unified policy joint learning using pseudo actions derived from various action-less video datasets (such as cross-embodiment videos and, notably, human demonstration videos), potentially augmented with limited labeled robot data. Extensive experiments show that policies co-trained with CoMo pseudo actions achieve superior performance with both diffusion and autoregressive architectures in simulated and real-world settings.

Aether: Geometric-Aware Unified World Modeling

The integration of geometric reconstruction and generative modeling remains a critical challenge in developing AI systems capable of human-like spatial reasoning. This paper proposes Aether, a unified framework that enables geometry-aware reasoning in world models by jointly optimizing three core capabilities: (1) 4D dynamic reconstruction, (2) action-conditioned video prediction, and (3) goal-conditioned visual planning. Through task-interleaved feature learning, Aether achieves synergistic knowledge sharing across reconstruction, prediction, and planning objectives. Building upon video generation models, our framework demonstrates unprecedented synthetic-to-real generalization despite never observing real-world data during training. Furthermore, our approach achieves zero-shot generalization in both action following and reconstruction tasks, thanks to its intrinsic geometric modeling. Remarkably, even without real-world data, its reconstruction performance is comparable with or even better than that of domain-specific models. Additionally, Aether employs camera trajectories as geometry-informed action spaces, enabling effective action-conditioned prediction and visual planning. We hope our work inspires the community to explore new frontiers in physically-reasonable world modeling and its applications.

GoalFlow: Goal-Driven Flow Matching for Multimodal Trajectories Generation in End-to-End Autonomous Driving

We propose GoalFlow, an end-to-end autonomous driving method for generating high-quality multimodal trajectories. In autonomous driving scenarios, there is rarely a single suitable trajectory. Recent methods have increasingly focused on modeling multimodal trajectory distributions. However, they suffer from trajectory selection complexity and reduced trajectory quality due to high trajectory divergence and inconsistencies between guidance and scene information. To address these issues, we introduce GoalFlow, a novel method that effectively constrains the generative process to produce high-quality, multimodal trajectories. To resolve the trajectory divergence problem inherent in diffusion-based methods, GoalFlow constrains the generated trajectories by introducing a goal point. GoalFlow establishes a novel scoring mechanism that selects the most appropriate goal point from the candidate points based on scene information. Furthermore, GoalFlow employs an efficient generative method, Flow Matching, to generate multimodal trajectories, and incorporates a refined scoring mechanism to select the optimal trajectory from the candidates. Our experimental results, validated on the Navsim\cite{Dauner2024_navsim}, demonstrate that GoalFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering robust multimodal trajectories for autonomous driving. GoalFlow achieved PDMS of 90.3, significantly surpassing other methods. Compared with other diffusion-policy-based methods, our approach requires only a single denoising step to obtain excellent performance. The code is available at https://github.com/YvanYin/GoalFlow.

DICEPTION: A Generalist Diffusion Model for Visual Perceptual Tasks

Our primary goal here is to create a good, generalist perception model that can tackle multiple tasks, within limits on computational resources and training data. To achieve this, we resort to text-to-image diffusion models pre-trained on billions of images. Our exhaustive evaluation metrics demonstrate that DICEPTION effectively tackles multiple perception tasks, achieving performance on par with state-of-the-art models. We achieve results on par with SAM-vit-h using only 0.06% of their data (e.g., 600K vs. 1B pixel-level annotated images). Inspired by Wang et al., DICEPTION formulates the outputs of various perception tasks using color encoding; and we show that the strategy of assigning random colors to different instances is highly effective in both entity segmentation and semantic segmentation. Unifying various perception tasks as conditional image generation enables us to fully leverage pre-trained text-to-image models. Thus, DICEPTION can be efficiently trained at a cost of orders of magnitude lower, compared to conventional models that were trained from scratch. When adapting our model to other tasks, it only requires fine-tuning on as few as 50 images and 1% of its parameters. DICEPTION provides valuable insights and a more promising solution for visual generalist models. Homepage: https://aim-uofa.github.io/Diception, Huggingface Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Canyu/Diception-Demo.

Acquisition through My Eyes and Steps: A Joint Predictive Agent Model in Egocentric Worlds

This paper addresses the task of learning an agent model behaving like humans, which can jointly perceive, predict, and act in egocentric worlds. Previous methods usually train separate models for these three abilities, leading to information silos among them, which prevents these abilities from learning from each other and collaborating effectively. In this paper, we propose a joint predictive agent model, named EgoAgent, that simultaneously learns to represent the world, predict future states, and take reasonable actions with a single transformer. EgoAgent unifies the representational spaces of the three abilities by mapping them all into a sequence of continuous tokens. Learnable query tokens are appended to obtain current states, future states, and next actions. With joint supervision, our agent model establishes the internal relationship among these three abilities and effectively mimics the human inference and learning processes. Comprehensive evaluations of EgoAgent covering image classification, egocentric future state prediction, and 3D human motion prediction tasks demonstrate the superiority of our method. The code and trained model will be released for reproducibility.

CoSurfGS:Collaborative 3D Surface Gaussian Splatting with Distributed Learning for Large Scene Reconstruction

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated impressive performance in scene reconstruction. However, most existing GS-based surface reconstruction methods focus on 3D objects or limited scenes. Directly applying these methods to large-scale scene reconstruction will pose challenges such as high memory costs, excessive time consumption, and lack of geometric detail, which makes it difficult to implement in practical applications. To address these issues, we propose a multi-agent collaborative fast 3DGS surface reconstruction framework based on distributed learning for large-scale surface reconstruction. Specifically, we develop local model compression (LMC) and model aggregation schemes (MAS) to achieve high-quality surface representation of large scenes while reducing GPU memory consumption. Extensive experiments on Urban3d, MegaNeRF, and BlendedMVS demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve fast and scalable high-fidelity surface reconstruction and photorealistic rendering. Our project page is available at \url{https://gyy456.github.io/CoSurfGS}.

Bag of Tricks for Multimodal AutoML with Image, Text, and Tabular Data

This paper studies the best practices for automatic machine learning (AutoML). While previous AutoML efforts have predominantly focused on unimodal data, the multimodal aspect remains under-explored. Our study delves into classification and regression problems involving flexible combinations of image, text, and tabular data. We curate a benchmark comprising 22 multimodal datasets from diverse real-world applications, encompassing all 4 combinations of the 3 modalities. Across this benchmark, we scrutinize design choices related to multimodal fusion strategies, multimodal data augmentation, converting tabular data into text, cross-modal alignment, and handling missing modalities. Through extensive experimentation and analysis, we distill a collection of effective strategies and consolidate them into a unified pipeline, achieving robust performance on diverse datasets.