Abstract:Human image animation, which aims to generate a video of a reference subject following a provided action sequence, has received increasing research interest. With the development of diffusion-based/flow-based video foundation models, existing animation works have began to upgrade the guidance information from 2D skeleton/pose to 3D modeling conditions. Despite achieving reasonable results, these approaches face challenges in synthesizing trajectory-controllable human motion within natural scene under changed camera views. In this work, we present a scene-adaptive human image animation framework that controls both human motion and camera trajectories within a reconstructed 3D environment for video generation. To achieve this, we first develop a ground-adaptive 3D motion retargeting approach to enable user-friendly motion trajectory control adapting to the changes of elevations of ground and orientations automatically. Then we design a viewpoint-adaptive latent fusion mechanism to inject point-cloud geometric priors through scene-visibility masking into the generative process, providing precise guidance of viewpoint changes under camera control. Experiments on two standard human image animation benchmark datasets demonstrate remarkable improvements of our method over the state of the arts in related video generation metics. Project page: https://robinhood256100.github.io/web-disp
Abstract:World action models~(WAMs) have shown great promise for autonomous driving and urban navigation. Built upon Vision-Language-Action models or video generation models, existing approaches suffer key limitations: (1) High inference latency due to future observation prediction at test time, and (2) tightly coupled video and action modeling leading to representational mismatch and degraded generalization. To address both issues, we propose Metis, an end-to-end WAM framework that decouples video generation and action prediction. Specifically, Metis employs a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture with dedicated experts for video generation and action prediction, preserving the intrinsic distributional properties of each task. To enhance efficiency, we introduce an asymmetric attention mask that enables joint training of both experts while allowing the action model to bypass explicit video generation during inference. This design ensures training-inference consistency and significantly reduces computational costs without compromising planning performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the NAVSIM navhard and navtest benchmarks and the CityWalker navigation benchmark, validating both the generalizability and efficiency across diverse tasks. Real-robot deployments further confirm the practical feasibility of our approach.
Abstract:Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can listen and see, but how do audio and visual signals actually travel through the network to shape an answer? Despite their growing role in research and real-world applications, the internal pathways through which audio and visual tokens influence the final prediction remain poorly understood. In this study, we examine audio-visual information flow inside Audio-Visual Large Language Models (AVLLMs), tracing how AVLLMs route, utilize, and integrate audio and visual information across two input configurations, audio-visual video and multiple interleaved audio-visual items. We find that for audio-visual video, AVLLMs follow the sequential information flow pathway established for VLMs and VideoLLMs, with audio and visual contribution flowing along this pathway in proportion to the task's reliance on each modality. In settings with multiple interleaved audio-visual items, this routing shifts to different parallel streams. Furthermore, we demonstrate that audio-visual and other token types can be discarded once their information is transferred to LLM, with minimal impact on the model's prediction or even slight improvement, generalizing across multiple tasks and datasets, enabling more efficient inference. These findings hold across multiple models and scales, Qwen2.5-Omni and Video-SALMONN2 Plus at 3B and 7B scales, leading to hypotheses on why these flow structures emerge. Together, these results deliver the first coherent picture of how AVLLMs orchestrate sound and sight inside the network and lay the groundwork for the next wave of interpretability, design, and efficiency advances in audio-visual and broader MLLMs.
Abstract:Existing zero-shot video editing methods rely on pre-trained diffusion models, successfully achieving spatial control and basic temporal consistency but fundamentally fail to preserve the video's original temporal structure.This distinction is critical: temporal consistency ensures visual smoothness, but temporal structure dictates the video's high-level narrative, rhythm, and semantic flow. Without this preservation, the edited output, especially for long videos with complex semantic variations, becomes narratively incoherent and semantically ambiguous. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel zero-shot editing approach that, for the first time, explicitly focuses on preserving the source video's temporal structure. We achieve this by adaptively partitioning the video into semantically distinct clips based on feature similarity and selecting a representative anchor frame for each clip. To enhance both intra-clip fidelity and computational efficiency, we design a clip-adaptive token merging strategy which leverages the anchor's semantic dominance to stabilize the editing. Furthermore, we employ an alternating combination strategy that ensures seamless inter-clip transitions while maintaining semantic distinction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results, successfully balancing the preservation of original temporal structure with computational efficiency, and setting a new benchmark for zero-shot video editing fidelity.
Abstract:Multi-modal Domain Generalization (MMDG) seeks to leverage complementary modalities to enhance model robustness on unseen domains. Despite extensive progress in Multi-modal Learning (MML) and Domain Generalization (DG) as individual fields, their systematic integration remains under-explored. Current MMDG research is largely confined to action recognition and lacks standardized evaluation protocols. To address this, we introduce MMDG-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark featuring two foundational frameworks: DG then MML (D2M) and MML then DG (M2D). We provide unified experimental protocols across diverse tasks, including video-audio-flow action recognition and RGB-Depth-IR face anti-spoofing. By instantiating ten MMDG baselines through pairing a unified MML configuration with five DG techniques under both D2M and M2D orderings, we demonstrate that these structured combinations frequently outperform existing state-of-the-art methods, underscoring the necessity of a unified benchmarking effort. Our analysis yields three key insights: (1) Integrating DG techniques provides consistent generalization gains across various backbones, whereas non-DG methods are highly sensitive to backbone shifts; (2) The optimal framework choice depends on inter-modal stability: D2M excels when modal relations are stable across domains, while M2D is more robust to cross-domain relational variance; (3) Stronger backbones yield amplified performance dividends when integrated into our structured frameworks. MMDG-Bench provides a principled foundation and actionable design guidelines for future research in multi-modal robustness. Code is released at https://github.com/qszhan/MMDG-Bench.
Abstract:Video generation models offer a promising imagination mechanism for robot manipulation by predicting long-horizon future observations, but effectively exploiting these imagined futures for action execution remains challenging. Existing approaches either condition policies on predicted frames or directly decode generated videos into actions, both suffering from a mismatch between visual realism and control relevance. As a result, predicted observations emphasize perceptual fidelity rather than action-centric causes of state transitions, leading to indirect and unstable control. To address this gap, we propose MoLA (Mixture of Latent Actions), a control-oriented interface that transforms imagined future videos into executable representations. Instead of passing predicted frames directly to the policy, MoLA leverages a mixture of pretrained inverse dynamics models to infer a mixture of latent actions implied by generated visual transitions. These modality-aware inverse dynamics models capture complementary semantic, depth, and flow cues, providing a structured and physically grounded action representation that bridges video imagination and policy execution. We evaluate our approach on simulated benchmarks (LIBERO, CALVIN, and LIBERO-Plus) and real-world robot manipulation tasks, achieving consistent gains in task success, temporal consistency, and generalization.
Abstract:Open-vocabulary object detection with vision-language models (VLMs) such as Grounding DINO suffers from performance degradation under test-time distribution shifts, primarily due to semantic misalignment between text embeddings and shifted visual embeddings of region proposals. While recent test-time adaptive object detection methods for VLM-based either rely on costly backpropagation or bypass semantic misalignment via external memory, none directly and efficiently align text and vision in a training-free manner. To address this, we propose Reward-Guided Semantic Evolution (RGSE), a training-free framework that directly refines the text embeddings at test time. Inspired by evolutionary search, RGSE treats text embedding adaptation as a semantic search process: it perturbs text embeddings as candidate variants, evaluates them via cosine similarity with current and historical high-confidence visual proposals as a reward signal, and fuses them into a refined embedding through reward-weighted averaging. Without any backpropagation, RGSE achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple detection benchmarks while adding minimal computational overhead. Our code will be open source upon publication.
Abstract:Open-vocabulary object detection often fails under distribution shifts, as it can be misled by spurious correlations between non-causal visual attributes (e.g., brightness, texture) and object categories. Existing test-time adaptation (TTA) methods either depend on costly online optimization or perform global calibration, overlooking the attribute-specific nature of these failures. To address this, we propose FACTOR (counterFACtual training-free Test-time adaptation for Open-vocabulaRy object detection), a lightweight framework grounded in counterfactual reasoning. By perturbing test images along non-causal attributes and comparing region-level predictions between original and counterfactual views, FACTOR quantifies attribute sensitivity, semantic relevance, and prediction variation to selectively suppress attribute-dependent predictions-without parameter updates. Experiments on PASCAL-C, COCO-C, and FoggyCityscapes show that FACTOR consistently outperforms prior TTA methods, demonstrating that explicit counterfactual reasoning effectively improves robustness under distribution shifts.
Abstract:Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) seeks to adapt a source model, which is pre-trained on a supervised source domain, for a target domain, with only access to unlabeled target training data. Relying on pseudo labeling and/or auxiliary supervision, conventional methods are inevitably error-prone. To mitigate this limitation, in this work we for the first time explore the potentials of off-the-shelf vision-language (ViL) multimodal models (e.g., CLIP) with rich whilst heterogeneous knowledge. We find that directly applying the ViL model to the target domain in a zero-shot fashion is unsatisfactory, as it is not specialized for this particular task but largely generic. To make it task-specific, we propose a novel DIFO++ approach. Specifically, DIFO++ alternates between two steps during adaptation: (i) Customizing the ViL model by maximizing the mutual information with the target model in a prompt learning manner, (ii) Distilling the knowledge of this customized ViL model to the target model, centering on gap region reduction. During progressive knowledge adaptation, we first identify and focus on the gap region, where enclosed features are entangled and class-ambiguous, as it often captures richer task-specific semantics. Reliable pseudo-labels are then generated by fusing predictions from the target and ViL models, supported by a memory mechanism. Finally, gap region reduction is guided by category attention and predictive consistency for semantic alignment, complemented by referenced entropy minimization to suppress uncertainty. Extensive experiments show that DIFO++ significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art alternatives. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/tntek/DIFO-Plus.
Abstract:Autonomous driving requires reasoning about how the environment evolves and planning actions accordingly. Existing world-model-based approaches typically predict future scenes first and plan afterwards, resulting in open-loop imagination that may drift from the actual decision process. In this paper, we present Uni-World VLA, a unified vision-language-action (VLA) model that tightly interleaves future frame prediction and trajectory planning. Instead of generating a full world rollout before planning, our model alternates between predicting future frames and ego actions step by step, allowing planning decisions to be continuously conditioned on the imagined future observations. This interleaved generation forms a closed-loop interaction between world modeling and control, enabling more adaptive decision-making in dynamic traffic scenarios. In addition, we incorporate monocular depth information into frames to provide stronger geometric cues for world modeling, improving long-horizon scene prediction. Experiments on the NAVSIM benchmark show that our approach achieves competitive closed-loop planning performance while producing high-fidelity future frame predictions. These results demonstrate that tightly coupling world prediction and planning is a promising direction for scalable VLA driving systems.