InfSplign: Inference-Time Spatial Alignment of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models generate high-quality images but often fail to capture the spatial relations specified in text prompts. This limitation can be traced to two factors: lack of fine-grained spatial supervision in training data and inability of text embeddings to encode spatial semantics. We introduce InfSplign, a training-free inference-time method that improves spatial alignment by adjusting the noise through a compound loss in every denoising step. Proposed loss leverages different levels of cross-attention maps extracted from the backbone decoder to enforce accurate object placement and a balanced object presence during sampling. The method is lightweight, plug-and-play, and compatible with any diffusion backbone. Our comprehensive evaluations on VISOR and T2I-CompBench show that InfSplign establishes a new state-of-the-art (to the best of our knowledge), achieving substantial performance gains over the strongest existing inference-time baselines and even outperforming the fine-tuning-based methods. Codebase is available at GitHub.

Reassessing the Role of Supervised Fine-Tuning: An Empirical Study in VLM Reasoning

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) reasoning have been largely attributed to the rise of reinforcement Learning (RL), which has shifted the community's focus away from the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) paradigm. Many studies suggest that introducing the SFT stage not only fails to improve reasoning ability but may also negatively impact model training. In this study, we revisit this RL-centric belief through a systematic and controlled comparison of SFT and RL on VLM Reasoning. Using identical data sources, we find that the relative effectiveness of SFT and RL is conditional and strongly influenced by model capacity, data scale, and data distribution. Contrary to common assumptions, our findings show that SFT plays a crucial role across several scenarios: (1) Effectiveness for weaker models. SFT more reliably elicits reasoning capabilities in smaller or weaker VLMs. (2) Data efficiency. SFT with only 2K achieves comparable or better reasoning performance to RL with 20K. (3) Cross-modal transferability. SFT demonstrates stronger generalization across modalities. Moreover, we identify a pervasive issue of deceptive rewards, where higher rewards fail to correlate with better reasoning accuracy in RL. These results challenge the prevailing "RL over SFT" narrative. They highlight that the role of SFT may have been underestimated and support a more balanced post-training pipeline in which SFT and RL function as complementary components.

GILT: An LLM-Free, Tuning-Free Graph Foundational Model for In-Context Learning

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful tools for precessing relational data but often struggle to generalize to unseen graphs, giving rise to the development of Graph Foundational Models (GFMs). However, current GFMs are challenged by the extreme heterogeneity of graph data, where each graph can possess a unique feature space, label set, and topology. To address this, two main paradigms have emerged. The first leverages Large Language Models (LLMs), but is fundamentally text-dependent, thus struggles to handle the numerical features in vast graphs. The second pre-trains a structure-based model, but the adaptation to new tasks typically requires a costly, per-graph tuning stage, creating a critical efficiency bottleneck. In this work, we move beyond these limitations and introduce \textbf{G}raph \textbf{I}n-context \textbf{L}earning \textbf{T}ransformer (GILT), a framework built on an LLM-free and tuning-free architecture. GILT introduces a novel token-based framework for in-context learning (ICL) on graphs, reframing classification tasks spanning node, edge and graph levels in a unified framework. This mechanism is the key to handling heterogeneity, as it is designed to operate on generic numerical features. Further, its ability to understand class semantics dynamically from the context enables tuning-free adaptation. Comprehensive experiments show that GILT achieves stronger few-shot performance with significantly less time than LLM-based or tuning-based baselines, validating the effectiveness of our approach.

A Comprehensive Survey on Trustworthiness in Reasoning with Large Language Models

The development of Long-CoT reasoning has advanced LLM performance across various tasks, including language understanding, complex problem solving, and code generation. This paradigm enables models to generate intermediate reasoning steps, thereby improving both accuracy and interpretability. However, despite these advancements, a comprehensive understanding of how CoT-based reasoning affects the trustworthiness of language models remains underdeveloped. In this paper, we survey recent work on reasoning models and CoT techniques, focusing on five core dimensions of trustworthy reasoning: truthfulness, safety, robustness, fairness, and privacy. For each aspect, we provide a clear and structured overview of recent studies in chronological order, along with detailed analyses of their methodologies, findings, and limitations. Future research directions are also appended at the end for reference and discussion. Overall, while reasoning techniques hold promise for enhancing model trustworthiness through hallucination mitigation, harmful content detection, and robustness improvement, cutting-edge reasoning models themselves often suffer from comparable or even greater vulnerabilities in safety, robustness, and privacy. By synthesizing these insights, we hope this work serves as a valuable and timely resource for the AI safety community to stay informed on the latest progress in reasoning trustworthiness. A full list of related papers can be found at \href{https://github.com/ybwang119/Awesome-reasoning-safety}{https://github.com/ybwang119/Awesome-reasoning-safety}.

A Survey of Scientific Large Language Models: From Data Foundations to Agent Frontiers

Scientific Large Language Models (Sci-LLMs) are transforming how knowledge is represented, integrated, and applied in scientific research, yet their progress is shaped by the complex nature of scientific data. This survey presents a comprehensive, data-centric synthesis that reframes the development of Sci-LLMs as a co-evolution between models and their underlying data substrate. We formulate a unified taxonomy of scientific data and a hierarchical model of scientific knowledge, emphasizing the multimodal, cross-scale, and domain-specific challenges that differentiate scientific corpora from general natural language processing datasets. We systematically review recent Sci-LLMs, from general-purpose foundations to specialized models across diverse scientific disciplines, alongside an extensive analysis of over 270 pre-/post-training datasets, showing why Sci-LLMs pose distinct demands -- heterogeneous, multi-scale, uncertainty-laden corpora that require representations preserving domain invariance and enabling cross-modal reasoning. On evaluation, we examine over 190 benchmark datasets and trace a shift from static exams toward process- and discovery-oriented assessments with advanced evaluation protocols. These data-centric analyses highlight persistent issues in scientific data development and discuss emerging solutions involving semi-automated annotation pipelines and expert validation. Finally, we outline a paradigm shift toward closed-loop systems where autonomous agents based on Sci-LLMs actively experiment, validate, and contribute to a living, evolving knowledge base. Collectively, this work provides a roadmap for building trustworthy, continually evolving artificial intelligence (AI) systems that function as a true partner in accelerating scientific discovery.

Scene-Agnostic Traversability Labeling and Estimation via a Multimodal Self-supervised Framework

Traversability estimation is critical for enabling robots to navigate across diverse terrains and environments. While recent self-supervised learning methods achieve promising results, they often fail to capture the characteristics of non-traversable regions. Moreover, most prior works concentrate on a single modality, overlooking the complementary strengths offered by integrating heterogeneous sensory modalities for more robust traversability estimation. To address these limitations, we propose a multimodal self-supervised framework for traversability labeling and estimation. First, our annotation pipeline integrates footprint, LiDAR, and camera data as prompts for a vision foundation model, generating traversability labels that account for both semantic and geometric cues. Then, leveraging these labels, we train a dual-stream network that jointly learns from different modalities in a decoupled manner, enhancing its capacity to recognize diverse traversability patterns. In addition, we incorporate sparse LiDAR-based supervision to mitigate the noise introduced by pseudo labels. Finally, extensive experiments conducted across urban, off-road, and campus environments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The proposed automatic labeling method consistently achieves around 88% IoU across diverse datasets. Compared to existing self-supervised state-of-the-art methods, our multimodal traversability estimation network yields consistently higher IoU, improving by 1.6-3.5% on all evaluated datasets.

Vision Generalist Model: A Survey

Recently, we have witnessed the great success of the generalist model in natural language processing. The generalist model is a general framework trained with massive data and is able to process various downstream tasks simultaneously. Encouraged by their impressive performance, an increasing number of researchers are venturing into the realm of applying these models to computer vision tasks. However, the inputs and outputs of vision tasks are more diverse, and it is difficult to summarize them as a unified representation. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of the vision generalist models, delving into their characteristics and capabilities within the field. First, we review the background, including the datasets, tasks, and benchmarks. Then, we dig into the design of frameworks that have been proposed in existing research, while also introducing the techniques employed to enhance their performance. To better help the researchers comprehend the area, we take a brief excursion into related domains, shedding light on their interconnections and potential synergies. To conclude, we provide some real-world application scenarios, undertake a thorough examination of the persistent challenges, and offer insights into possible directions for future research endeavors.

UNO: Unified Self-Supervised Monocular Odometry for Platform-Agnostic Deployment

This work presents UNO, a unified monocular visual odometry framework that enables robust and adaptable pose estimation across diverse environments, platforms, and motion patterns. Unlike traditional methods that rely on deployment-specific tuning or predefined motion priors, our approach generalizes effectively across a wide range of real-world scenarios, including autonomous vehicles, aerial drones, mobile robots, and handheld devices. To this end, we introduce a Mixture-of-Experts strategy for local state estimation, with several specialized decoders that each handle a distinct class of ego-motion patterns. Moreover, we introduce a fully differentiable Gumbel-Softmax module that constructs a robust inter-frame correlation graph, selects the optimal expert decoder, and prunes erroneous estimates. These cues are then fed into a unified back-end that combines pre-trained, scale-independent depth priors with a lightweight bundling adjustment to enforce geometric consistency. We extensively evaluate our method on three major benchmark datasets: KITTI (outdoor/autonomous driving), EuRoC-MAV (indoor/aerial drones), and TUM-RGBD (indoor/handheld), demonstrating state-of-the-art performance.

OGGSplat: Open Gaussian Growing for Generalizable Reconstruction with Expanded Field-of-View

Reconstructing semantic-aware 3D scenes from sparse views is a challenging yet essential research direction, driven by the demands of emerging applications such as virtual reality and embodied AI. Existing per-scene optimization methods require dense input views and incur high computational costs, while generalizable approaches often struggle to reconstruct regions outside the input view cone. In this paper, we propose OGGSplat, an open Gaussian growing method that expands the field-of-view in generalizable 3D reconstruction. Our key insight is that the semantic attributes of open Gaussians provide strong priors for image extrapolation, enabling both semantic consistency and visual plausibility. Specifically, once open Gaussians are initialized from sparse views, we introduce an RGB-semantic consistent inpainting module applied to selected rendered views. This module enforces bidirectional control between an image diffusion model and a semantic diffusion model. The inpainted regions are then lifted back into 3D space for efficient and progressive Gaussian parameter optimization. To evaluate our method, we establish a Gaussian Outpainting (GO) benchmark that assesses both semantic and generative quality of reconstructed open-vocabulary scenes. OGGSplat also demonstrates promising semantic-aware scene reconstruction capabilities when provided with two view images captured directly from a smartphone camera.

Compositional Scene Understanding through Inverse Generative Modeling

Generative models have demonstrated remarkable abilities in generating high-fidelity visual content. In this work, we explore how generative models can further be used not only to synthesize visual content but also to understand the properties of a scene given a natural image. We formulate scene understanding as an inverse generative modeling problem, where we seek to find conditional parameters of a visual generative model to best fit a given natural image. To enable this procedure to infer scene structure from images substantially different than those seen during training, we further propose to build this visual generative model compositionally from smaller models over pieces of a scene. We illustrate how this procedure enables us to infer the set of objects in a scene, enabling robust generalization to new test scenes with an increased number of objects of new shapes. We further illustrate how this enables us to infer global scene factors, likewise enabling robust generalization to new scenes. Finally, we illustrate how this approach can be directly applied to existing pretrained text-to-image generative models for zero-shot multi-object perception. Code and visualizations are at https://energy-based-model.github.io/compositional-inference.