Focus When Necessary: Adaptive Routing and Collaborative Grounding for Training-Free Visual Grounding

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel in cross-modal reasoning, they often struggle to perceive fine-grained details in complex high-resolution images. Recent training-free methods address this through image scaling and localized cropping. However, applying these manipulations indiscriminately introduces computational redundancy for simple queries and can degrade accuracy by truncating essential global context or introducing irrelevant background noise. To this end, we propose LazyMCoT, a dynamic and training-free framework that adaptively allocates visual grounding efforts based on sample difficulty. The framework features an Adaptive Routing mechanism that evaluates predictive uncertainty using first-token statistics from a single forward pass. This efficiently bypasses confident cases while ensuring the recall of difficult samples via conformal calibration. For these challenging cases, a Collaborative Grounding module integrates the inherent cross-modal attention of the model with an external visual expert through a two-stage refinement process. This refinement process generates a precise localized display to recover small or occluded targets. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that LazyMCoT rivals training-based approaches by simultaneously improving reasoning accuracy and reducing average inference latency. Our code is availble at https://github.com/TencentBAC/LazyMCoT.

EgoTactile: Learning Grasp Pressure for Everyday Objects from Egocentric Video

Estimating full-hand grasp pressure from egocentric video is critical for immersive VR and robotic manipulation, yet dense tactile sensing often relies on intrusive hardware. Existing vision-based methods predominantly rely on planar surfaces or fingertip contacts, failing to generalize to complex 3D object interactions. Therefore, we introduce EgoTactile, a benchmark pairing egocentric video with full-hand pressure supervision for diverse everyday objects, incorporating a bare-hand transfer subset to enable generalization to natural scenarios. Leveraging this benchmark, we first establish EgoPressureFormer as a discriminative baseline. Beyond this, to explicitly address the uncertainty in partial observations, we propose EgoPressureDiff, a conditional diffusion framework that adapts a large-scale pre-trained video diffusion backbone. By combining rich world knowledge priors with a Physically-Informed Feature Rectification layer to inject semantic constraints, our approach effectively infers plausible contact patterns and resolves visual-physical ambiguities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance on the benchmark and robust transferability to in-the-wild scenarios. Our project page is available at https://egotactile.github.io/.

EgoPressDiff: Multimodal Video Diffusion for Egocentric UV-Domain Hand-Pressure Estimation

Estimating hand-surface contact pressure from an egocentric view is crucial for AR/VR devices, robotic imitation, and ergonomic analysis. Existing methods often discretize pressure signal and process frames independently, leading to quantization errors and temporal inconsistencies. We present \emph{EgoPressDiff}, a conditional video diffusion framework that generates UV-pressure maps from visual input. The core of our approach is a multi-modal conditioning strategy, introducing a PoseNet and a Vertex Encoder to efficiently extract features from hand pose and 3D mesh vertices. These signals, along with depth information, guide the generative process to ensure the pressure fields are physically grounded. To effectively fuse these heterogeneous features, we further propose a Distribution-Calibrated Spatial Layer, which aligns their statistical properties before combination. Evaluated on the EgoPressure ego-view setting, EgoPressDiff achieves state-of-the-art results, improving Volumetric IoU by over 34\% relative to prior baseline, while reducing MAE and maintaining high temporal accuracy. Our project page is at https://egopressdiff.github.io/.

Beyond Skeletons: Learning Animation Directly from Driving Videos with Same2X Training Strategy

Human image animation aims to generate a video from a static reference image, guided by pose information extracted from a driving video. Existing approaches often rely on pose estimators to extract intermediate representations, but such signals are prone to errors under occlusion or complex poses. Building on these observations, we present DirectAnimator, a framework that bypasses pose extraction and directly learns from raw driving videos. We introduce a Driving Cue Triplet consisting of pose, face, and location cues that captures motion, expression, and alignment in a semantically rich yet stable form, and we fuse them through a CueFusion DiT block for reliable control during denoising. To make learning dependable when the driving and reference identities differ, we devise a Same2X training strategy that aligns cross-ID features with those learned from same-ID data, regularizing optimization and accelerating convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DirectAnimator attains state-of-the-art visual quality and identity preservation while remaining robust to occlusions and complex articulation, and it does so with fewer computational resources. Our project page is at https://directanimator.github.io/.

AVBench: Human-Aligned and Automated Evaluation Benchmark for Audio-Video Generative Models

Rapid advances in audio-video (AV) generation have enabled high-fidelity synthesis with synchronized sound, particularly for human-related scenarios involving speech and interactions. Yet evaluation for AV generation remains at an early stage, with only a few coarse-grained benchmarks for human-related scenarios and relying on limited preset evaluations with generic multimodal LLMs, leading to inaccurate assessments of model capabilities. To address these issues, we introduce AVBench, a fully automated benchmark tailored for human-centric AV generation. AVBench is built on two key designs for comprehensive and accurate evaluation: (i) Human-centric and fine-grained metrics. AVBench integrates ten evaluation dimensions designed for human-centered real-world scenarios, covering visual quality, audio quality, and multi-level consistency across modalities. These practical metrics capture human-related details that existing benchmarks often overlook. (ii) Specialized evaluators via preference learning. To address the lack of specialized training data, we construct large-scale supervision by transforming real-world videos into diverse training pairs with controlled perturbations. After fine-tuning on this high-quality dataset, the evaluators learn to reliably detect subtle cross-modal inconsistencies. Crucially, instead of producing discrete textual judgment, AVBench derives continuous evaluation scores from the model's prediction confidence on binary decisions. This probabilistic scoring mechanism enables a more reliable assessment than traditional VQA-style evaluation and aligns closely with human judgment. Taken together, AVBench offers automated evaluation for AV generation, demonstrates strong potential for data filtering, and serves as a differentiable reward signal for Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF).

Divide and Conquer: Decoupled Representation Alignment for Multimodal World Models

Emerging multi-modal world models attempt to jointly generate videos across diverse modalities (e.g., RGB, depth, and mask), yet they fail to fully exploit the rich priors of existing foundation models. We propose $M^2$-REPA, the first representation alignment method tailored for multi-modal video generation. Our key insight is that foundation models trained on different modality spaces naturally capture distinct domain-specific priors, acting as complementary "experts." Specifically, we first decouple modality-specific features from the diffusion model's intermediate representations, then align each with its corresponding expert foundation model. To this end, we design two synergistic objectives: a multi-modal representation alignment loss that enforces feature-to-expert matching, and a modality-specific decoupling regularization that encourages complementarity across different modalities. This design enables joint optimization, fully exploiting priors from multiple foundation models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms baselines in visual quality and long-term consistency.

CoRe-ECG: Advancing Self-Supervised Representation Learning for 12-Lead ECG via Contrastive and Reconstructive Synergy

Accurate interpretation of electrocardiogram (ECG) remains challenging due to the scarcity of labeled data and the high cost of expert annotation. Self-supervised learning (SSL) offers a promising solution by enabling models to learn expressive representations from unlabeled signals. Existing ECG SSL methods typically rely on either contrastive learning or reconstructive learning. However, each approach in isolation provides limited supervisory signals and suffers from additional limitations, including non-physiological distortions introduced by naive augmentations and trivial correlations across multiple leads that models may exploit as shortcuts. In this work, we propose CoRe-ECG, a unified contrastive and reconstructive pretraining paradigm that establishes a synergistic interaction between global semantic modeling and local structural learning. CoRe-ECG aligns global representations during reconstruction, enabling instance-level discriminative signals to guide local waveform recovery. To further enhance pretraining, we introduce Frequency Dynamic Augmentation (FDA) to adaptively perturb ECG signals based on their frequency-domain importance, and Spatio-Temporal Dual Masking (STDM) to break linear dependencies across leads, increasing the difficulty of reconstructive tasks. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple downstream ECG datasets. Ablation studies further demonstrate the necessity and complementarity of each component. This approach provides a robust and physiologically meaningful representation learning framework for ECG analysis.

TGM-VLA: Task-Guided Mixup for Sampling-Efficient and Robust Robotic Manipulation

The performance of robotic imitation learning is fundamentally limited by data quality and training strategies. Prevalent sampling strategies on RLBench suffer from severe keyframe redundancy and imbalanced temporal distribution, leading to inefficient memory usage and unstable optimization. Moreover, reprojecting point clouds onto multi-view images with a black background--while more efficient than voxel-based methods--often causes dark objects to be indistinguishable and hard to manipulate. In this work, we propose a novel holistic framework that significantly improves both model performance and training efficiency. First, we redesign and optimize the keyframe sampling strategy, reducing memory consumption by 80% and accelerating training speed by 5x. Second, we augment the model with a color inversion projection branch--a simple yet effective module that resolves the ambiguity of dark objects. Finally, we propose a task-guided mixup technique that dynamically fuses point clouds and action heatmaps according to task instructions, greatly improving robustness to distractors and performance in multi-goal scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with a 90.5% success rate on RLBench and 68.8% on the COLOSSEUM benchmark under challenging interference conditions. Our code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/PuFanqi23/TGM-VLA.

TLDiffGAN: A Latent Diffusion-GAN Framework with Temporal Information Fusion for Anomalous Sound Detection

Existing generative models for unsupervised anomalous sound detection are limited by their inability to fully capture the complex feature distribution of normal sounds, while the potential of powerful diffusion models in this domain remains largely unexplored. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework, TLDiffGAN, which consists of two complementary branches. One branch incorporates a latent diffusion model into the GAN generator for adversarial training, thereby making the discriminator's task more challenging and improving the quality of generated samples. The other branch leverages pretrained audio model encoders to extract features directly from raw audio waveforms for auxiliary discrimination. This framework effectively captures feature representations of normal sounds from both raw audio and Mel spectrograms. Moreover, we introduce a TMixup spectrogram augmentation technique to enhance sensitivity to subtle and localized temporal patterns that are often overlooked. Extensive experiments on the DCASE 2020 Challenge Task 2 dataset demonstrate the superior detection performance of TLDiffGAN, as well as its strong capability in anomalous time-frequency localization.

VividVoice: A Unified Framework for Scene-Aware Visually-Driven Speech Synthesis

We introduce and define a novel task-Scene-Aware Visually-Driven Speech Synthesis, aimed at addressing the limitations of existing speech generation models in creating immersive auditory experiences that align with the real physical world. To tackle the two core challenges of data scarcity and modality decoupling, we propose VividVoice, a unified generative framework. First, we constructed a large-scale, high-quality hybrid multimodal dataset, Vivid-210K, which, through an innovative programmatic pipeline, establishes a strong correlation between visual scenes, speaker identity, and audio for the first time. Second, we designed a core alignment module, D-MSVA, which leverages a decoupled memory bank architecture and a cross-modal hybrid supervision strategy to achieve fine-grained alignment from visual scenes to timbre and environmental acoustic features. Both subjective and objective experimental results provide strong evidence that VividVoice significantly outperforms existing baseline models in terms of audio fidelity, content clarity, and multimodal consistency. Our demo is available at https://chengyuann.github.io/VividVoice/.