Beyond Rigid: Benchmarking Non-Rigid Video Editing

Despite the remarkable progress in text-driven video editing, generating coherent non-rigid deformations remains a critical challenge, often plagued by physical distortion and temporal flicker. To bridge this gap, we propose NRVBench, the first dedicated and comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate non-rigid video editing. First, we curate a high-quality dataset consisting of 180 non-rigid motion videos from six physics-based categories, equipped with 2,340 fine-grained task instructions and 360 multiple-choice questions. Second, we propose NRVE-Acc, a novel evaluation metric based on Vision-Language Models that can rigorously assess physical compliance, temporal consistency, and instruction alignment, overcoming the limitations of general metrics in capturing complex dynamics. Third, we introduce a training-free baseline, VM-Edit, which utilizes a dual-region denoising mechanism to achieve structure-aware control, balancing structural preservation and dynamic deformation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that while current methods have shortcomings in maintaining physical plausibility, our method achieves excellent performance across both standard and proposed metrics. We believe the benchmark could serve as a standard testing platform for advancing physics-aware video editing.

Character-R1: Enhancing Role-Aware Reasoning in Role-Playing Agents via RLVR

Current role-playing agents (RPAs) are typically constructed by imitating surface-level behaviors, but this approach lacks internal cognitive consistency, often causing out-of-character errors in complex situations. To address this, we propose Character-R1, a framework designed to provide comprehensive verifiable reward signals for effective role-aware reasoning, which are missing in recent studies. Specifically, our framework comprises three core designs: (1) Cognitive Focus Reward, which enforces explicit label-based analysis of 10 character elements (e.g., worldview) to structure internal cognition; (2) Reference-Guided Reward, which utilizes overlap-based metrics with reference responses as optimization anchors to enhance exploration and performance; and (3) Character-Conditioned Reward Normalization, which adjusts reward distributions based on character categories to ensure robust optimization across heterogeneous roles. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Character-R1 significantly outperforms existing methods in knowledge, memory and others.

From Bias to Balance: Exploring and Mitigating Spatial Bias in LVLMs

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of multimodal tasks, yet their robustness to spatial variations remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we present a systematic study of the spatial bias of LVLMs, focusing on how models respond when identical key visual information is placed at different locations within an image. Through a carefully designed probing dataset, we demonstrate that current LVLMs often produce inconsistent outputs under such spatial shifts, revealing a fundamental limitation in their spatial-semantic understanding. Further analysis shows that this phenomenon originates not from the vision encoder, which reliably perceives and interprets visual content across positions, but from the unbalanced design of position embeddings in the language model component. In particular, the widely adopted position embedding strategies, such as RoPE, introduce imbalance during cross-modal interaction, leading image tokens at different positions to exert unequal influence on semantic understanding. To mitigate this issue, we introduce Balanced Position Assignment (BaPA), a simple yet effective mechanism that assigns identical position embeddings to all image tokens, promoting a more balanced integration of visual information. Extensive experiments show that BaPA enhances the spatial robustness of LVLMs without retraining and further boosts their performance across diverse multimodal benchmarks when combined with lightweight fine-tuning. Further analysis of information flow reveals that BaPA yields balanced attention, enabling more holistic visual understanding.

Evaluating and Steering Modality Preferences in Multimodal Large Language Model

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on complex tasks with multimodal context. However, it is still understudied whether they exhibit modality preference when processing multimodal contexts. To study this question, we first build a \textbf{MC\textsuperscript{2}} benchmark under controlled evidence conflict scenarios to systematically evaluate modality preference, which is the tendency to favor one modality over another when making decisions based on multimodal conflicting evidence. Our extensive evaluation reveals that all 18 tested MLLMs generally demonstrate clear modality bias, and modality preference can be influenced by external interventions. An in-depth analysis reveals that the preference direction can be captured within the latent representations of MLLMs. Built on this, we propose a probing and steering method based on representation engineering to explicitly control modality preference without additional fine-tuning or carefully crafted prompts. Our method effectively amplifies modality preference toward a desired direction and applies to downstream tasks such as hallucination mitigation and multimodal machine translation, yielding promising improvements.

Handling Imbalanced Pseudolabels for Vision-Language Models with Concept Alignment and Confusion-Aware Calibrated Margin

Adapting vision-language models (VLMs) to downstream tasks with pseudolabels has gained increasing attention. A major obstacle is that the pseudolabels generated by VLMs tend to be imbalanced, leading to inferior performance. While existing methods have explored various strategies to address this, the underlying causes of imbalance remain insufficiently investigated. To fill this gap, we delve into imbalanced pseudolabels and identify two primary contributing factors: concept mismatch and concept confusion. To mitigate these two issues, we propose a novel framework incorporating concept alignment and confusion-aware calibrated margin mechanisms. The core of our approach lies in enhancing underperforming classes and promoting balanced predictions across categories, thus mitigating imbalance. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets with three learning paradigms demonstrate that the proposed method effectively enhances the accuracy and balance of pseudolabels, achieving a relative improvement of 6.29% over the SoTA method. Our code is avaliable at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CAP-C642/

MoK-RAG: Mixture of Knowledge Paths Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Embodied AI Environments

While human cognition inherently retrieves information from diverse and specialized knowledge sources during decision-making processes, current Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems typically operate through single-source knowledge retrieval, leading to a cognitive-algorithmic discrepancy. To bridge this gap, we introduce MoK-RAG, a novel multi-source RAG framework that implements a mixture of knowledge paths enhanced retrieval mechanism through functional partitioning of a large language model (LLM) corpus into distinct sections, enabling retrieval from multiple specialized knowledge paths. Applied to the generation of 3D simulated environments, our proposed MoK-RAG3D enhances this paradigm by partitioning 3D assets into distinct sections and organizing them based on a hierarchical knowledge tree structure. Different from previous methods that only use manual evaluation, we pioneered the introduction of automated evaluation methods for 3D scenes. Both automatic and human evaluations in our experiments demonstrate that MoK-RAG3D can assist Embodied AI agents in generating diverse scenes.

Adaptive Inner Speech-Text Alignment for LLM-based Speech Translation

Recent advancement of large language models (LLMs) has led to significant breakthroughs across various tasks, laying the foundation for the development of LLM-based speech translation systems. Existing methods primarily focus on aligning inputs and outputs across modalities while overlooking deeper semantic alignment within model representations. To address this limitation, we propose an Adaptive Inner Speech-Text Alignment (AI-STA) method to bridge the modality gap by explicitly aligning speech and text representations at selected layers within LLMs. To achieve this, we leverage the optimal transport (OT) theory to quantify fine-grained representation discrepancies between speech and text. Furthermore, we utilize the cross-modal retrieval technique to identify the layers that are best suited for alignment and perform joint training on these layers. Experimental results on speech translation (ST) tasks demonstrate that AI-STA significantly improves the translation performance of large speech-text models (LSMs), outperforming previous state-of-the-art approaches. Our findings highlight the importance of inner-layer speech-text alignment in LLMs and provide new insights into enhancing cross-modal learning.

Representation-based Reward Modeling for Efficient Safety Alignment of Large Language Model

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), encounter the challenge of distribution shift. Current approaches typically address this issue through online sampling from the target policy, which requires significant computational resources. In this paper, we hypothesize that during off-policy training, while the ranking order of output generated by policy changes, their overall distribution remains relatively stable. This stability allows the transformation of the sampling process from the target policy into a re-ranking of preference data. Building on this hypothesis, We propose a new framework that leverages the model's intrinsic safety judgment capability to extract reward signals, which are then used to calculate label confidence for preferences reordering. Extensive experimental results and theoretical analysis demonstrate that the proposed method effectively addresses the distribution shift issue, remarkably enhancing the safety performance while reducing about 300x computational overheads.

XIFBench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Multilingual Instruction Following

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable instruction-following capabilities across various applications. However, their performance in multilingual settings remains poorly understood, as existing evaluations lack fine-grained constraint analysis. We introduce XIFBench, a comprehensive constraint-based benchmark for assessing multilingual instruction-following abilities of LLMs, featuring a novel taxonomy of five constraint categories and 465 parallel instructions across six languages spanning different resource levels. To ensure consistent cross-lingual evaluation, we develop a requirement-based protocol that leverages English requirements as semantic anchors. These requirements are then used to validate the translations across languages. Extensive experiments with various LLMs reveal notable variations in instruction-following performance across resource levels, identifying key influencing factors such as constraint categories, instruction complexity, and cultural specificity.

Generator-Assistant Stepwise Rollback Framework for Large Language Model Agent

Large language model (LLM) agents typically adopt a step-by-step reasoning framework, in which they interleave the processes of thinking and acting to accomplish the given task. However, this paradigm faces a deep-rooted one-pass issue whereby each generated intermediate thought is plugged into the trajectory regardless of its correctness, which can cause irreversible error propagation. To address the issue, this paper proposes a novel framework called Generator-Assistant Stepwise Rollback (GA-Rollback) to induce better decision-making for LLM agents. Particularly, GA-Rollback utilizes a generator to interact with the environment and an assistant to examine each action produced by the generator, where the assistant triggers a rollback operation upon detection of incorrect actions. Moreover, we introduce two additional strategies tailored for the rollback scenario to further improve its effectiveness. Extensive experiments show that GA-Rollback achieves significant improvements over several strong baselines on three widely used benchmarks. Our analysis further reveals that GA-Rollback can function as a robust plug-and-play module, integrating seamlessly with other methods.