Bridging the Know-Act Gap via Task-Level Autoregressive Reasoning

LLMs often generate seemingly valid answers to flawed or ill-posed inputs. This is not due to missing knowledge: under discriminative prompting, the same models can mostly identify such issues, yet fail to reflect this in standard generative responses. This reveals a fundamental know-act gap between discriminative recognition and generative behavior. Prior work largely characterizes this issue in narrow settings, such as math word problems or question answering, with limited focus on how to integrate these two modes. In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis using FaultyScience, a newly constructed large-scale, cross-disciplinary benchmark of faulty scientific questions. We show that the gap is pervasive and stems from token-level autoregression, which entangles task selection (validate vs. answer) with content generation, preventing discriminative knowledge from being utilized. To address this, we propose DeIllusionLLM, a task-level autoregressive framework that explicitly models this decision. Through self-distillation, the model unifies discriminative judgment and generative reasoning within a single backbone. Empirically, DeIllusionLLM substantially reduces answer-despite-error failures under natural prompting while maintaining general reasoning performance, demonstrating that self-distillation is an effective and scalable solution for bridging the discriminative-generative know-act gap

Cluster-Aware Attention-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning for Pickup and Delivery Problems

The Pickup and Delivery Problem (PDP) is a fundamental and challenging variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem, characterized by tightly coupled pickup--delivery pairs, precedence constraints, and spatial layouts that often exhibit clustering. Existing deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches either model all nodes on a flat graph, relying on implicit learning to enforce constraints, or achieve strong performance through inference-time collaborative search at the cost of substantial latency. In this paper, we propose \emph{CAADRL} (Cluster-Aware Attention-based Deep Reinforcement Learning), a DRL framework that explicitly exploits the multi-scale structure of PDP instances via cluster-aware encoding and hierarchical decoding. The encoder builds on a Transformer and combines global self-attention with intra-cluster attention over depot, pickup, and delivery nodes, producing embeddings that are both globally informative and locally role-aware. Based on these embeddings, we introduce a Dynamic Dual-Decoder with a learnable gate that balances intra-cluster routing and inter-cluster transitions at each step. The policy is trained end-to-end with a POMO-style policy gradient scheme using multiple symmetric rollouts per instance. Experiments on synthetic clustered and uniform PDP benchmarks show that CAADRL matches or improves upon strong state-of-the-art baselines on clustered instances and remains highly competitive on uniform instances, particularly as problem size increases. Crucially, our method achieves these results with substantially lower inference time than neural collaborative-search baselines, suggesting that explicitly modeling cluster structure provides an effective and efficient inductive bias for neural PDP solvers.

RELIC: Evaluating Compositional Instruction Following via Language Recognition

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly expected to perform tasks based only on a specification of the task provided in context, without examples of inputs and outputs; this ability is referred to as instruction following. We introduce the Recognition of Languages In-Context (RELIC) framework to evaluate instruction following using language recognition: the task of determining if a string is generated by formal grammar. Unlike many standard evaluations of LLMs' ability to use their context, this task requires composing together a large number of instructions (grammar productions) retrieved from the context. Because the languages are synthetic, the task can be increased in complexity as LLMs' skills improve, and new instances can be automatically generated, mitigating data contamination. We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs on RELIC and find that their accuracy can be reliably predicted from the complexity of the grammar and the individual example strings, and that even the most advanced LLMs currently available show near-chance performance on more complex grammars and samples, in line with theoretical expectations. We also use RELIC to diagnose how LLMs attempt to solve increasingly difficult reasoning tasks, finding that as the complexity of the language recognition task increases, models switch to relying on shallow heuristics instead of following complex instructions.

High-Quality 3D Head Reconstruction from Any Single Portrait Image

In this work, we introduce a novel high-fidelity 3D head reconstruction method from a single portrait image, regardless of perspective, expression, or accessories. Despite significant efforts in adapting 2D generative models for novel view synthesis and 3D optimization, most methods struggle to produce high-quality 3D portraits. The lack of crucial information, such as identity, expression, hair, and accessories, limits these approaches in generating realistic 3D head models. To address these challenges, we construct a new high-quality dataset containing 227 sequences of digital human portraits captured from 96 different perspectives, totalling 21,792 frames, featuring diverse expressions and accessories. To further improve performance, we integrate identity and expression information into the multi-view diffusion process to enhance facial consistency across views. Specifically, we apply identity- and expression-aware guidance and supervision to extract accurate facial representations, which guide the model and enforce objective functions to ensure high identity and expression consistency during generation. Finally, we generate an orbital video around the portrait consisting of 96 multi-view frames, which can be used for 3D portrait model reconstruction. Our method demonstrates robust performance across challenging scenarios, including side-face angles and complex accessories

Rapid Word Learning Through Meta In-Context Learning

Humans can quickly learn a new word from a few illustrative examples, and then systematically and flexibly use it in novel contexts. Yet the abilities of current language models for few-shot word learning, and methods for improving these abilities, are underexplored. In this study, we introduce a novel method, Meta-training for IN-context learNing Of Words (Minnow). This method trains language models to generate new examples of a word's usage given a few in-context examples, using a special placeholder token to represent the new word. This training is repeated on many new words to develop a general word-learning ability. We find that training models from scratch with Minnow on human-scale child-directed language enables strong few-shot word learning, comparable to a large language model (LLM) pre-trained on orders of magnitude more data. Furthermore, through discriminative and generative evaluations, we demonstrate that finetuning pre-trained LLMs with Minnow improves their ability to discriminate between new words, identify syntactic categories of new words, and generate reasonable new usages and definitions for new words, based on one or a few in-context examples. These findings highlight the data efficiency of Minnow and its potential to improve language model performance in word learning tasks.

TD-RD: A Top-Down Benchmark with Real-Time Framework for Road Damage Detection

Object detection has witnessed remarkable advancements over the past decade, largely driven by breakthroughs in deep learning and the proliferation of large scale datasets. However, the domain of road damage detection remains relatively under explored, despite its critical significance for applications such as infrastructure maintenance and road safety. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a novel top down benchmark that offers a complementary perspective to existing datasets, specifically tailored for road damage detection. Our proposed Top Down Road Damage Detection Dataset (TDRD) includes three primary categories of road damage cracks, potholes, and patches captured from a top down viewpoint. The dataset consists of 7,088 high resolution images, encompassing 12,882 annotated instances of road damage. Additionally, we present a novel real time object detection framework, TDYOLOV10, designed to handle the unique challenges posed by the TDRD dataset. Comparative studies with state of the art models demonstrate competitive baseline results. By releasing TDRD, we aim to accelerate research in this crucial area. A sample of the dataset will be made publicly available upon the paper's acceptance.

GeneMAN: Generalizable Single-Image 3D Human Reconstruction from Multi-Source Human Data

Given a single in-the-wild human photo, it remains a challenging task to reconstruct a high-fidelity 3D human model. Existing methods face difficulties including a) the varying body proportions captured by in-the-wild human images; b) diverse personal belongings within the shot; and c) ambiguities in human postures and inconsistency in human textures. In addition, the scarcity of high-quality human data intensifies the challenge. To address these problems, we propose a Generalizable image-to-3D huMAN reconstruction framework, dubbed GeneMAN, building upon a comprehensive multi-source collection of high-quality human data, including 3D scans, multi-view videos, single photos, and our generated synthetic human data. GeneMAN encompasses three key modules. 1) Without relying on parametric human models (e.g., SMPL), GeneMAN first trains a human-specific text-to-image diffusion model and a view-conditioned diffusion model, serving as GeneMAN 2D human prior and 3D human prior for reconstruction, respectively. 2) With the help of the pretrained human prior models, the Geometry Initialization-&-Sculpting pipeline is leveraged to recover high-quality 3D human geometry given a single image. 3) To achieve high-fidelity 3D human textures, GeneMAN employs the Multi-Space Texture Refinement pipeline, consecutively refining textures in the latent and the pixel spaces. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that GeneMAN could generate high-quality 3D human models from a single image input, outperforming prior state-of-the-art methods. Notably, GeneMAN could reveal much better generalizability in dealing with in-the-wild images, often yielding high-quality 3D human models in natural poses with common items, regardless of the body proportions in the input images.

Towards Efficient Moion Planning for UAVs: Lazy A* Search with Motion Primitives

Search-based motion planning algorithms have been widely utilized for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, deploying these algorithms on real UAVs faces challenges due to limited onboard computational resources. The algorithms struggle to find solutions in high-dimensional search spaces and require considerable time to ensure that the trajectories are dynamically feasible. This paper incorporates the lazy search concept into search-based planning algorithms to address the critical issue of real-time planning for collision-free and dynamically feasible trajectories on UAVs. We demonstrate that the lazy search motion planning algorithm can efficiently find optimal trajectories and significantly improve computational efficiency.

LaDTalk: Latent Denoising for Synthesizing Talking Head Videos with High Frequency Details

Audio-driven talking head generation is a pivotal area within film-making and Virtual Reality. Although existing methods have made significant strides following the end-to-end paradigm, they still encounter challenges in producing videos with high-frequency details due to their limited expressivity in this domain. This limitation has prompted us to explore an effective post-processing approach to synthesize photo-realistic talking head videos. Specifically, we employ a pretrained Wav2Lip model as our foundation model, leveraging its robust audio-lip alignment capabilities. Drawing on the theory of Lipschitz Continuity, we have theoretically established the noise robustness of Vector Quantised Auto Encoders (VQAEs). Our experiments further demonstrate that the high-frequency texture deficiency of the foundation model can be temporally consistently recovered by the Space-Optimised Vector Quantised Auto Encoder (SOVQAE) we introduced, thereby facilitating the creation of realistic talking head videos. We conduct experiments on both the conventional dataset and the High-Frequency TalKing head (HFTK) dataset that we curated. The results indicate that our method, LaDTalk, achieves new state-of-the-art video quality and out-of-domain lip synchronization performance.

FoAM: Foresight-Augmented Multi-Task Imitation Policy for Robotic Manipulation

Multi-task imitation learning (MTIL) has shown significant potential in robotic manipulation by enabling agents to perform various tasks using a unified policy. This simplifies the policy deployment and enhances the agent's adaptability across different contexts. However, key challenges remain, such as maintaining action reliability (e.g., avoiding abnormal action sequences that deviate from nominal task trajectories), distinguishing between similar tasks, and generalizing to unseen scenarios. To address these challenges, we introduce the Foresight-Augmented Manipulation Policy (FoAM), an innovative MTIL framework. FoAM not only learns to mimic expert actions but also predicts the visual outcomes of those actions to enhance decision-making. Additionally, it integrates multi-modal goal inputs, such as visual and language prompts, overcoming the limitations of single-conditioned policies. We evaluated FoAM across over 100 tasks in both simulation and real-world settings, demonstrating that it significantly improves IL policy performance, outperforming current state-of-the-art IL baselines by up to 41% in success rate. Furthermore, we released a simulation benchmark for robotic manipulation, featuring 10 task suites and over 80 challenging tasks designed for multi-task policy training and evaluation. See project homepage https://projFoAM.github.io/ for project details.