GeoWeaver: Grounding Visual Tokens with Geometric Evidence before Scene Reasoning

Spatio-temporal reasoning in vision-language models requires visual representations that preserve physical geometry rather than merely semantic appearance. Recent multimodal models incorporate geometric information through structural branches, 3D-aware supervision, reasoning-stage fusion, or long-horizon memory. While these approaches demonstrate the importance of geometry for spatial intelligence, they typically treat geometric cues as a shared signal across all visual tokens. We note that this overlooks a finer-grained challenge: different visual tokens require different geometric evidence depending on their spatial roles. To address this limitation, we introduce GeoWeaver, a pre-reasoning geometric grounding framework that treats geometry as a representational prerequisite for spatio-temporal reasoning. GeoWeaver constructs a multi-level geometry bank from a frozen geometry encoder and performs token-adaptive geometric evidence allocation, enabling each visual token to retrieve the most relevant geometric abstractions. The selected evidence is incorporated into visual tokens via a residual grounding operation prior to language modeling, yielding geometry-grounded representations for downstream reasoning. Extensive evaluations on spatial reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that GeoWeaver consistently enhances geometry-aware reasoning while retaining general multimodal capabilities. This indicates that geometric information yields the greatest benefit not as a late-fusion auxiliary signal but as a fundamental prerequisite that shapes the representational foundation on which large language models perform reasoning. All source code and models will be released at https://github.com/yahooo-m/GeoWeaver .

Fast Reconstruction of Exact Maxwell Dynamics from Sparse Data

We introduce FLASH-MAX, a shallow, exact-by-construction neural network architecture for predicting homogeneous electromagnetic fields from sparse pointwise observations. Each hidden neuron represents a separate exact solution to Maxwell's equations, so that the network satisfies the governing equations symbolically by construction and can be trained end-to-end from sparse data within seconds. We prove a universal approximation result showing that this exact model class remains universal on arbitrary domains. FLASH-MAX reaches sub-1% relative validation error from about 1K sparse pointwise observations in seconds, all while maintaining a zero PDE residual, and keeps single-digit errors even for only 100 observations sampled from 3D space. These results suggest that moving governing structure from the loss into the hypothesis class can dramatically improve the trade-off between precision and optimization speed in scientific machine learning.

OmniLiDAR: A Unified Diffusion Framework for Multi-Domain 3D LiDAR Generation

LiDAR scene generation is increasingly important for scalable simulation and synthetic data creation, especially under diverse sensing conditions that are costly to capture at scale. Typically, diffusion-based LiDAR generators are developed under single-domain settings, requiring separate models for different datasets or sensing conditions and hindering unified, controllable synthesis under heterogeneous distribution shifts. To this end, we present OmniLiDAR, a unified text-conditioned diffusion framework that generates LiDAR scans in a shared range-image representation across eight representative domains spanning three shift types: adverse weather, sensor-configuration changes (e.g., reduced beams), and cross-platform acquisition (vehicle, drone, and quadruped). To enable training a single model over heterogeneous domains without isolating optimization by domain, we introduce a Cross-Domain Training Strategy (CDTS) that mixes domains within each mini-batch and leverages conditioning to steer generation. We further propose Cross-Domain Feature Modeling (CDFM), which captures directional dependencies along azimuth and elevation axes to reflect the anisotropic scanning structure of range images, and Domain-Adaptive Feature Scaling (DAFS) as a lightweight modulation to account for structured domain-dependent feature shifts during denoising. In the absence of a public consolidated benchmark, we construct an 8-domain dataset by combining real-world scans with physically based weather simulation and systematic beam reduction while following official splits. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong generation fidelity and consistent gains in downstream use cases, including generative data augmentation for LiDAR semantic segmentation and 3D object detection, as well as robustness evaluation under corruptions, with consistent benefits in limited-label regimes.

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%.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.