TRACE: Distilling Where It Matters via Token-Routed Self On-Policy Alignment

On-policy self-distillation (self-OPD) densifies reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) by letting a policy teach itself under privileged context. We find that when this guidance spans the full response, all-token KL spends gradients on mostly redundant positions and amplifies privileged-information leakage, causing entropy rise, shortened reasoning, and out-of-distribution degradation in long-horizon math training. We propose Token-Routed Alignment for Critical rEasoning (TRACE), which distills only on annotator-marked critical spans: forward KL on key spans of correct rollouts, optional reverse KL on localized error spans, and GRPO on all remaining tokens, with the KL channel annealed away after a short warm-up. Our analysis explains TRACE through two effects: forward KL provides non-vanishing lift to teacher-supported tokens that the student under-allocates, while span masking and decay keep cumulative privileged-gradient exposure finite. On four held-out math benchmarks plus GPQA-Diamond, TRACE improves over GRPO by 2.76 percentage points on average and preserves the Qwen3-8B base OOD score on GPQA-Diamond, where GRPO and all-token self-OPD baselines degrade. Gains persist under online self-annotation (+1.90 percentage points, about 69% of the strong-API gain), reducing the concern that TRACE merely imports external annotator capability. Across scales, the best routed action is base-dependent: on Qwen3-8B it is forward KL on key spans, while on Qwen3-1.7B it shifts to reverse KL on error spans.

DGPO: Beyond Pairwise Preferences with Directional Consistent Groupwise Optimization

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress, current preference optimization methods still struggle to align directional consistency while preserving reasoning diversity. To address this limitation, we propose Directional-Groupwise Preference Optimization (DGPO), a lightweight framework that aggregates supervision signals at the group level and explicitly models direction-aware alignment through multi-candidate comparisons. DGPO organizes forward and reverse question-answer instances into structured sets and optimizes a margin-based likelihood objective that separates coherent reasoning paths from inconsistent alternatives. This group-wise formulation captures richer relative information than pairwise objectives and reinforces consistency across diverse reasoning pathways. Empirical results show that our constructed reverse data yields a 3.2% average improvement across five benchmarks, while DGPO further delivers consistent gains across multiple datasets and model families, achieving average accuracy improvements of up to 3.6%.

Beyond ESG Scores: Learning Dynamic Constraints for Sequential Portfolio Optimization

ESG-aware portfolio optimization is increasingly important for sustainable capital allocation, yet most learning-based methods still operationalize ESG by appending static scores to the policy observation or reward. This creates a mismatch for sequential control: ESG scores are noisy, provider-dependent, low-frequency, and temporally misaligned with sequential portfolio decisions, while financial evidence suggests that ESG is better treated as a portfolio preference, risk-exposure, or hedge dimension than as a robust alpha factor. We propose to impose ESG constraints without modifying the financial policy's observation or reward, using a Multimodal Action-Conditioned Constraint Field (MACF) that learns mechanism-specific ESG costs from point-in-time multimodal evidence and contemplated portfolio transitions. We then introduce MACF-X, a family of optimizer-specific adapters that converts MACF costs and uncertainties into native constrained-optimization interfaces through a shared slack- and uncertainty-aware pressure layer. Across multiple constraint-integration interfaces, MACF-X reduces tail ESG budget pressure while maintaining competitive financial performance. Ablations show that this improvement depends on dynamic evidence inputs and three-head decomposition, while static ESG-score proxies are nearly indistinguishable from score-shuffled noise baselines.

Beyond Thinking: Imagining in 360$^\circ$ for Humanoid Visual Search

Humanoid Visual Search (HVS) requires agents to actively explore immersive 360$^\circ$ environments. While prior methods treat this as a monolithic task relying on cumulative, multi-turn Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, they impose heavy cognitive burdens and require expensive trajectory-level annotations. In this paper, we propose Imagining in 360$^\circ$, a novel framework that decouples the exploration process into a specialized Imaginator and an Actor. The Imaginator functions as a probabilistic predictor of spatial priors; instead of maintaining a cumulative reasoning chain, it infers the semantic layout of both observed and unobserved regions in a single step. By sampling multiple hypotheses within this semantic space, we provide the Actor with a distribution of effective spatial information, offering robust guidance that hedges against uncertainty during active search. This decoupled architecture significantly lowers data engineering costs by eliminating the need for full-trajectory CoT annotations, enabling the generation of over 1.96 million curated training samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that explicitly modeling semantic spatial priors drastically improves search efficiency and success rates in complex, in-the-wild environments.

LoViF 2026 The First Challenge on Holistic Quality Assessment for 4D World Model (PhyScore)

This paper reports on the LoViF 2026 PhyScore challenge, a competition on holistic quality assessment of world-model-generated videos across both 2D and 4D generation settings. The challenge is motivated by a central gap in current evaluation practice: perceptual quality alone is insufficient to judge whether generated dynamics are physically plausible, temporally coherent, and consistent with input conditions. Participants are required to build a metric that jointly predicts four dimensions, i.e., Video Quality, Physical Realism, Condition-Video Alignment, and Temporal Consistency. Depart from that, participants also need to localize physical anomaly timestamps for fine-grained diagnosis. The benchmark dataset contains 1,554 videos generated by seven representative world generative models, organized into three tracks (text-2D, image-to-4D, and video-to-4D) and spanning 26 categories. These categories explicitly cover physics-relevant scenarios, including dynamics, optics, and thermodynamics, together with diverse real-world and creative content. To ensure label reliability, scores and anomaly timestamps are produced through trained human annotation with an additional automated quality-control pass. Evaluation is based on both score prediction and anomaly localization, with a composite protocol that combines TimeStamp_IOU and SRCC/PLCC. This report summarizes the challenge design and provides method-level insights from submitted solutions.

DiffCap-Bench: A Comprehensive, Challenging, Robust Benchmark for Image Difference Captioning

Image Difference Captioning (IDC) generates natural language descriptions that precisely identify differences between two images, serving as a key benchmark for fine-grained change perception, cross-modal reasoning, and image editing data construction. However, existing benchmarks lack diversity and compositional complexity, and standard lexical-overlap metrics (e.g., BLEU, METEOR) fail to capture semantic consistency or penalize hallucinations, which together prevent a comprehensive and robust evaluation of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on IDC. To address these gaps, we introduce DiffCap-Bench, a comprehensive IDC benchmark covering ten distinct difference categories to ensure diversity and compositional complexity. Furthermore, we propose an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation protocol grounded in human-validated Difference Lists, enabling a robust assessment of models' ability to both capture and describe visual changes. Through extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art MLLMs, we reveal significant performance gaps between proprietary and open-source models, highlight the critical importance of reasoning capability, and identify clear limitations in model scaling. Our framework also demonstrates strong alignment with human expert judgments and strong correlation with downstream image editing data construction quality. These findings establish DiffCap-Bench as both a reliable IDC evaluation framework and a practical predictor of downstream utility. The benchmark and code will be made publicly available to support further research.

Evaluation of Winning Solutions of 2025 Low Power Computer Vision Challenge

The IEEE Low-Power Computer Vision Challenge (LPCVC) aims to promote the development of efficient vision models for edge devices, balancing accuracy with constraints such as latency, memory capacity, and energy use. The 2025 challenge featured three tracks: (1) Image classification under various lighting conditions and styles, (2) Open-Vocabulary Segmentation with Text Prompt, and (3) Monocular Depth Estimation. This paper presents the design of LPCVC 2025, including its competition structure and evaluation framework, which integrates the Qualcomm AI Hub for consistent and reproducible benchmarking. The paper also introduces the top-performing solutions from each track and outlines key trends and observations. The paper concludes with suggestions for future computer vision competitions.

LoViF 2026 Challenge on Real-World All-in-One Image Restoration: Methods and Results

This paper presents a review for the LoViF Challenge on Real-World All-in-One Image Restoration. The challenge aimed to advance research on real-world all-in-one image restoration under diverse real-world degradation conditions, including blur, low-light, haze, rain, and snow. It provided a unified benchmark to evaluate the robustness and generalization ability of restoration models across multiple degradation categories within a common framework. The competition attracted 124 registered participants and received 9 valid final submissions with corresponding fact sheets, significantly contributing to the progress of real-world all-in-one image restoration. This report provides a detailed analysis of the submitted methods and corresponding results, emphasizing recent progress in unified real-world image restoration. The analysis highlights effective approaches and establishes a benchmark for future research in real-world low-level vision.

Nemotron 3 Super: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

We describe the pre-training, post-training, and quantization of Nemotron 3 Super, a 120 billion (active 12 billion) parameter hybrid Mamba-Attention Mixture-of-Experts model. Nemotron 3 Super is the first model in the Nemotron 3 family to 1) be pre-trained in NVFP4, 2) leverage LatentMoE, a new Mixture-of-Experts architecture that optimizes for both accuracy per FLOP and accuracy per parameter, and 3) include MTP layers for inference acceleration through native speculative decoding. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Super on 25 trillion tokens followed by post-training using supervised fine tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). The final model supports up to 1M context length and achieves comparable accuracy on common benchmarks, while also achieving up to 2.2x and 7.5x higher inference throughput compared to GPT-OSS-120B and Qwen3.5-122B, respectively. Nemotron 3 Super datasets, along with the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, are open-sourced on HuggingFace.

LoViF 2026 The First Challenge on Weather Removal in Videos

This paper presents a review of the LoViF 2026 Challenge on Weather Removal in Videos. The challenge encourages the development of methods for restoring clean videos from inputs degraded by adverse weather conditions such as rain and snow, with an emphasis on achieving visually plausible and temporally consistent results while preserving scene structure and motion dynamics. To support this task, we introduce a new short-form WRV dataset tailored for video weather removal. It consists of 18 videos 1,216 synthesized frames paired with 1,216 real-world ground-truth frames at a resolution of 832 x 480, and is split into training, validation, and test sets with a ratio of 1:1:1. The goal of this challenge is to advance robust and realistic video restoration under real-world weather conditions, with evaluation protocols that jointly consider fidelity and perceptual quality. The challenge attracted 37 participants and received 5 valid final submissions with corresponding fact sheets, contributing to progress in weather removal for videos. The project is publicly available at https://www.codabench.org/competitions/13462/.