Step-Level On-Policy Distillation: Interpolating Between On-Policy Distillation and Supervised Fine-Tuning

On-policy distillation (OPD) aligns a student model with a teacher's logit distribution on student-generated trajectories. This approach has achieved strong empirical gains and can often surpass conventional off-policy distillation with substantially less data. However, standard token-level OPD can provide only fragmented corrections along an erroneous student trajectory and cannot unfold a complete and correct repair path. Motivated by this limitation, we propose \emph{Step-Level On-Policy Distillation} (SOPD), which combines the long-horizon correction of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with the on-policy advantage of OPD to provide step-level supervision over complete student-generated trajectories. We show that, at different limits of step length, SOPD reduces to SFT or approximates OPD. Compared with SFT, the teacher responses in SOPD are conditioned on student trajectories and therefore align more closely with student-visited states; compared with OPD, SOPD provides longer-horizon corrections rather than fragmented token-level guidance. Across both reasoning and agent tasks, SOPD substantially outperforms conventional SFT and OPD. For example, on ALFWorld, SOPD improves the average success rate by 13.4 points over Vanilla OPD. We hope this work offers a new perspective for future research on distillation methods.

MDLMPE: Distribution Aware Positional Encoding for Masked Diffusion Language Models

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) enable parallel generation and bidirectional context modeling, but their positional context differs fundamentally from that of autoregressive (AR) models. Whereas AR decoding exposes a contiguous prefix, MDLM denoising produces dynamic, non-contiguous configurations of revealed and masked tokens. Conventional positional encodings such as RoPE capture sequence order and pairwise displacement but remain insensitive to this evolving token-availability structure. To address this limitation, we propose MDLMPE, a positional encoding designed specifically for masked diffusion. To the best of our knowledge, MDLMPE is the first method to make positional representations explicitly aware of the changing revealed/masked configuration. It represents token availability as a binary sequence, applies distance-aware Gaussian weighting, and projects the resulting pattern through a cosine basis to obtain distribution-aware positional features. These features are added to token embeddings and mapped by a lightweight MLP to angular offsets that modulate the standard RoPE phases. Extensive experiments on LLaDA and DREAM demonstrate that MDLMPE generally outperforms conventional positional encoding methods across supervised fine-tuning, pretraining, zero-shot evaluation, and block-diffusion settings. Further ablations show that the complete combination of availability state, Gaussian locality, spectral basis, and embedding injection yields the strongest result. These results establish the evolving token-availability distribution as a useful positional signal for masked diffusion language models.

DAPM: UAV Monocular Depth Estimation from Any Height, Pitch, Roll and FOV

Monocular depth estimation is a fundamental prerequisite for 3D reconstruction and autonomous navigation in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). In practical deployments, UAVs operate under highly dynamic camera poses characterized by continuous variations in height, pitch, roll, and field of view (FOV). Existing monocular depth estimation methods frequently fail to generalize across such diverse perspectives and the expansive scale of depth distributions inherent in aerial scenes. To address these challenges, we establish a quantitative representation of UAV viewing angles through rigorous theoretical analysis, deriving the geometric correspondence between viewing angles and view distances using the ground plane as a reference for observation. Building upon this, we propose Depth Estimation for Any Perspectives Model (DAPM), representing the first monocular framework specifically designed for UAV aerial imagery to jointly estimate camera pose and depth under continuously varying viewpoints. Specifically, we introduce an Ideal Ground Depth (IGD) module that leverages the derived geometric relationships between UAV perspectives and view distances to implement dense camera-pose supervision and enhance depth features. And we further develop a coarse-to-fine Progressive Quantization Bins (PQB) module. By incorporating progressive supervision and hierarchical quantization bins, the PQB module enables robust estimation in complex UAV aerial imagery. To evaluate the proposed framework, we present the UAV Any Perspectives Depth (UAPD) dataset, featuring comprehensive and continuous distributions of pose parameters. Experimental results on UAPD demonstrate that DAPM achieves state-of-the-art performance across both depth and camera-pose estimation metrics. The source code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/ThisIsLT/DAPM.

RingMo-Agent: A Unified Remote Sensing Foundation Model for Multi-Platform and Multi-Modal Reasoning

Remote sensing (RS) images from multiple modalities and platforms exhibit diverse details due to differences in sensor characteristics and imaging perspectives. Existing vision-language research in RS largely relies on relatively homogeneous data sources. Moreover, they still remain limited to conventional visual perception tasks such as classification or captioning. As a result, these methods fail to serve as a unified and standalone framework capable of effectively handling RS imagery from diverse sources in real-world applications. To address these issues, we propose RingMo-Agent, a model designed to handle multi-modal and multi-platform data that performs perception and reasoning tasks based on user textual instructions. Compared with existing models, RingMo-Agent 1) is supported by a large-scale vision-language dataset named RS-VL3M, comprising over 3 million image-text pairs, spanning optical, SAR, and infrared (IR) modalities collected from both satellite and UAV platforms, covering perception and challenging reasoning tasks; 2) learns modality adaptive representations by incorporating separated embedding layers to construct isolated features for heterogeneous modalities and reduce cross-modal interference; 3) unifies task modeling by introducing task-specific tokens and employing a token-based high-dimensional hidden state decoding mechanism designed for long-horizon spatial tasks. Extensive experiments on various RS vision-language tasks demonstrate that RingMo-Agent not only proves effective in both visual understanding and sophisticated analytical tasks, but also exhibits strong generalizability across different platforms and sensing modalities.

Inconsistency-aware Uncertainty Estimation for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

In semi-supervised medical image segmentation, most previous works draw on the common assumption that higher entropy means higher uncertainty. In this paper, we investigate a novel method of estimating uncertainty. We observe that, when assigned different misclassification costs in a certain degree, if the segmentation result of a pixel becomes inconsistent, this pixel shows a relative uncertainty in its segmentation. Therefore, we present a new semi-supervised segmentation model, namely, conservative-radical network (CoraNet in short) based on our uncertainty estimation and separate self-training strategy. In particular, our CoraNet model consists of three major components: a conservative-radical module (CRM), a certain region segmentation network (C-SN), and an uncertain region segmentation network (UC-SN) that could be alternatively trained in an end-to-end manner. We have extensively evaluated our method on various segmentation tasks with publicly available benchmark datasets, including CT pancreas, MR endocardium, and MR multi-structures segmentation on the ACDC dataset. Compared with the current state of the art, our CoraNet has demonstrated superior performance. In addition, we have also analyzed its connection with and difference from conventional methods of uncertainty estimation in semi-supervised medical image segmentation.

Class Distribution Alignment for Adversarial Domain Adaptation

Most existing unsupervised domain adaptation methods mainly focused on aligning the marginal distributions of samples between the source and target domains. This setting does not sufficiently consider the class distribution information between the two domains, which could adversely affect the reduction of domain gap. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach called Conditional ADversarial Image Translation (CADIT) to explicitly align the class distributions given samples between the two domains. It integrates a discriminative structure-preserving loss and a joint adversarial generation loss. The former effectively prevents undesired label-flipping during the whole process of image translation, while the latter maintains the joint distribution alignment of images and labels. Furthermore, our approach enforces the classification consistence of target domain images before and after adaptation to aid the classifier training in both domains. Extensive experiments were conducted on multiple benchmark datasets including Digits, Faces, Scenes and Office31, showing that our approach achieved superior classification in the target domain when compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Also, both qualitative and quantitative results well supported our motivation that aligning the class distributions can indeed improve domain adaptation.