UniVR: Thinking in Visual Space for Unified Visual Reasoning

Learning broad world knowledge directly from raw visual data is a fundamental capability of intelligence. We introduce UniVR, the first investigation into simultaneously learning complex reasoning, fine-grained physical dynamics, and long-term planning from pure visual demonstrations. At its core, UniVR features VR-GRPO, a reinforcement learning paradigm with complementary global and step-level rewards. This approach enforces logical coherence and physical consistency throughout the reasoning process without requiring task-specific heuristics or image-text pairs. To train and evaluate UniVR, we construct VR-X, a large-scale benchmark curated from 16 diverse sources spanning long-horizon manipulation, spatial puzzles, and physical reasoning. It is the first comprehensive suite to assess these heterogeneous capabilities under a purely visual protocol. Remarkably, UniVR achieves up to a 25% improvement on VR-X, and its superior visual reasoning also boosts performance on various multimodal understanding benchmarks. These findings underscore the vast potential of reasoning within visual spaces, with all code, data, and models are open-sourced for further research.

CineDance: Towards Next-Generation Multi-Shot Long-Form Cinematic Audio-Video Generation

The fidelity and structural diversity of training datasets fundamentally determine the capabilities of video generation models. While commercial systems showremarkableabilitytogeneratecinematicnarratives, the progress of open-source models remains limited by the scarcity of high-quality training data. To bridge this gap, we introduce CineDance-1M, a large-scale, open research Text-to-Audio-Video (T2AV) dataset designed specifically for multi-shot, long-form joint audio-video generation. Averaging 92.8 seconds and 24.2 continuous shots per video, it provides configurable, structured annotations for both audio and video modalities. This exceptional quality is achieved through a rigorous three-stage curation pipeline: i) diverse sourcing and comprehensive cleansing, ii) film-theory-inspired narrative parsing, and iii) hierarchical dual-modal captioning. For a comprehensive assessment, we propose CineBench, featuring a diverse prompt suite and a six-dimensional, human-aligned metric system tailored for complex narrative audio-video evaluation. Furthermore, we adapt LTX-2.3 into CineDance, which demonstrates exceptional single-modality quality alongside precise audio-video alignment and robust subject and environment consistency, effectively validating our curation strategy and the high quality of CineDance-1M. We anticipate that this work will serve as a solid foundation for accelerating future research in multi-shot, long-form joint audio-video generation. Our project page is available at https://aliothchen.github.io/projects/CineDance/.

Is Your Driving World Model an All-Around Player?

Today's driving world models can generate remarkably realistic dash-cam videos, yet no single model excels universally. Some generate photorealistic textures but violate basic physics; others maintain geometric consistency but fail when subjected to closed-loop planning. This disconnect exposes a critical gap: the field evaluates how real generated worlds appear, but rarely whether they behave realistically. We introduce WorldLens, a unified benchmark that measures world-model fidelity across the full spectrum, from pixel quality and 4D geometry to closed-loop driving and human perceptual alignment, through five complementary aspects and 24 standardized dimensions. Our evaluation of six representative models reveals that no existing approach dominates across all axes: texture-rich models violate geometry, geometry-aware models lack behavioral fidelity, and even the strongest performers achieve only 2-3 out of 10 on human realism ratings. To bridge algorithmic metrics with human perception, we further contribute WorldLens-26K, a 26,808-entry human-annotated preference dataset pairing numerical scores with textual rationales, and WorldLens-Agent, a vision-language evaluator distilled from these judgments that enables scalable, explainable auto-assessment. Together, the benchmark, dataset, and agent form a unified ecosystem for assessing generated worlds not merely by visual appeal, but by physical and behavioral fidelity.

Masked Generative Transformer Is What You Need for Image Editing

Diffusion models dominate image editing, yet their global denoising mechanism entangles edited regions with surrounding context, causing modifications to propagate into areas that should remain intact. We propose a fundamentally different approach by leveraging Masked Generative Transformers (MGTs), whose localized token-prediction paradigm naturally confines changes to intended regions. We present EditMGT, an MGT-based editing framework that is the first of its kind. Our approach employs multi-layer attention consolidation to aggregate cross-attention maps into precise edit localization signals, and region-hold sampling to explicitly prevent token flipping in non-target areas. To support training, we construct CrispEdit-2M, a 2M-sample high-resolution (>1024) editing dataset spanning seven categories. With only 960M parameters, EditMGT achieves state-of-the-art image similarity on multiple benchmarks while delivering 6x faster editing, demonstrating that MGTs offer a compelling alternative to diffusion-based editing.

SPIRAL: A Closed-Loop Framework for Self-Improving Action World Models via Reflective Planning Agents

We introduce SPIRAL, a self-improving planning and iterative reflective action world modeling closed-loop framework that enables controllable long-horizon video generation conditioned on high-level semantic actions. Existing one-shot video generation models operate in open-loop, often resulting in incomplete action execution, weak semantic grounding, and temporal drift. SPIRAL formulates ActWM as a closed-loop think-act-reflect process, where generation proceeds step by step under explicit planning and feedback. A PlanAgent decomposes abstract actions into object-centric sub-actions, while a CriticAgent evaluates intermediate results and guides iterative refinement with long-horizon memory. This closed-loop design naturally supports RL evolving optimization, improving semantic alignment and temporal consistency over extended horizons. We further introduce the ActWM-Dataset and ActWM-Bench for training and evaluation. Experiments across multiple TI2V backbones demonstrate consistent gains on ActWM-Bench and mainstream video generation benchmarks, validating SPIRAL's effectiveness.

Synergizing Understanding and Generation with Interleaved Analyzing-Drafting Thinking

Unified Vision-Language Models (UVLMs) aim to advance multimodal learning by supporting both understanding and generation within a single framework. However, existing approaches largely focus on architectural unification while overlooking the need for explicit interaction between the two capabilities during task solving. As a result, current models treat understanding and generation as parallel skills rather than synergistic processes. To achieve real synergy, we introduce the interleaved Analyzing-Drafting problem-solving loop (AD-Loop), a new think paradigm that dynamically alternates between analytic and drafting operations. By interleaving textual thoughts with visual thoughts, AD-Loop enables models to iteratively refine both comprehension and outputs, fostering genuine synergy. To train this mechanism, we design a two-stage strategy: supervised learning on interleaved thought data to initialize alternation, followed by reinforcement learning to promote adaptive and autonomous control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AD-Loop consistently improves performance across standard benchmarks for both understanding and generation, with strong transferability to various UVLMs architectures. Visual analyses further validate the effectiveness of implicit visual thoughts. These results highlight AD-Loop as a principled and broadly applicable strategy for synergizing comprehension and creation. The project page is at https://sqwu.top/AD-Loop.

Prism: Efficient Test-Time Scaling via Hierarchical Search and Self-Verification for Discrete Diffusion Language Models

Inference-time compute has re-emerged as a practical way to improve LLM reasoning. Most test-time scaling (TTS) algorithms rely on autoregressive decoding, which is ill-suited to discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs) due to their parallel decoding over the entire sequence. As a result, developing effective and efficient TTS methods to unlock dLLMs' full generative potential remains an underexplored challenge. To address this, we propose Prism (Pruning, Remasking, and Integrated Self-verification Method), an efficient TTS framework for dLLMs that (i) performs Hierarchical Trajectory Search (HTS) which dynamically prunes and reallocates compute in an early-to-mid denoising window, (ii) introduces Local branching with partial remasking to explore diverse implementations while preserving high-confidence tokens, and (iii) replaces external verifiers with Self-Verified Feedback (SVF) obtained via self-evaluation prompts on intermediate completions. Across four mathematical reasoning and code generation benchmarks on three dLLMs, including LLaDA 8B Instruct, Dream 7B Instruct, and LLaDA 2.0-mini, our Prism achieves a favorable performance-efficiency trade-off, matching best-of-N performance with substantially fewer function evaluations (NFE). The code is released at https://github.com/viiika/Prism.

SAMTok: Representing Any Mask with Two Words

Pixel-wise capabilities are essential for building interactive intelligent systems. However, pixel-wise multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs) remain difficult to scale due to complex region-level encoders, specialized segmentation decoders, and incompatible training objectives. To address these challenges, we present SAMTok, a discrete mask tokenizer that converts any region mask into two special tokens and reconstructs the mask using these tokens with high fidelity. By treating masks as new language tokens, SAMTok enables base MLLMs (such as the QwenVL series) to learn pixel-wise capabilities through standard next-token prediction and simple reinforcement learning, without architectural modifications and specialized loss design. SAMTok builds on SAM2 and is trained on 209M diverse masks using a mask encoder and residual vector quantizer to produce discrete, compact, and information-rich tokens. With 5M SAMTok-formatted mask understanding and generation data samples, QwenVL-SAMTok attains state-of-the-art or comparable results on region captioning, region VQA, grounded conversation, referring segmentation, scene graph parsing, and multi-round interactive segmentation. We further introduce a textual answer-matching reward that enables efficient reinforcement learning for mask generation, delivering substantial improvements on GRES and GCG benchmarks. Our results demonstrate a scalable and straightforward paradigm for equipping MLLMs with strong pixel-wise capabilities. Our code and models are available.

Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving: Past, Present, and Future

Autonomous driving has long relied on modular "Perception-Decision-Action" pipelines, where hand-crafted interfaces and rule-based components often break down in complex or long-tailed scenarios. Their cascaded design further propagates perception errors, degrading downstream planning and control. Vision-Action (VA) models address some limitations by learning direct mappings from visual inputs to actions, but they remain opaque, sensitive to distribution shifts, and lack structured reasoning or instruction-following capabilities. Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal learning has motivated the emergence of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) frameworks, which integrate perception with language-grounded decision making. By unifying visual understanding, linguistic reasoning, and actionable outputs, VLAs offer a pathway toward more interpretable, generalizable, and human-aligned driving policies. This work provides a structured characterization of the emerging VLA landscape for autonomous driving. We trace the evolution from early VA approaches to modern VLA frameworks and organize existing methods into two principal paradigms: End-to-End VLA, which integrates perception, reasoning, and planning within a single model, and Dual-System VLA, which separates slow deliberation (via VLMs) from fast, safety-critical execution (via planners). Within these paradigms, we further distinguish subclasses such as textual vs. numerical action generators and explicit vs. implicit guidance mechanisms. We also summarize representative datasets and benchmarks for evaluating VLA-based driving systems and highlight key challenges and open directions, including robustness, interpretability, and instruction fidelity. Overall, this work aims to establish a coherent foundation for advancing human-compatible autonomous driving systems.

RecTok: Reconstruction Distillation along Rectified Flow

Visual tokenizers play a crucial role in diffusion models. The dimensionality of latent space governs both reconstruction fidelity and the semantic expressiveness of the latent feature. However, a fundamental trade-off is inherent between dimensionality and generation quality, constraining existing methods to low-dimensional latent spaces. Although recent works have leveraged vision foundation models to enrich the semantics of visual tokenizers and accelerate convergence, high-dimensional tokenizers still underperform their low-dimensional counterparts. In this work, we propose RecTok, which overcomes the limitations of high-dimensional visual tokenizers through two key innovations: flow semantic distillation and reconstruction--alignment distillation. Our key insight is to make the forward flow in flow matching semantically rich, which serves as the training space of diffusion transformers, rather than focusing on the latent space as in previous works. Specifically, our method distills the semantic information in VFMs into the forward flow trajectories in flow matching. And we further enhance the semantics by introducing a masked feature reconstruction loss. Our RecTok achieves superior image reconstruction, generation quality, and discriminative performance. It achieves state-of-the-art results on the gFID-50K under both with and without classifier-free guidance settings, while maintaining a semantically rich latent space structure. Furthermore, as the latent dimensionality increases, we observe consistent improvements. Code and model are available at https://shi-qingyu.github.io/rectok.github.io.