Frank
Abstract:Diversity is a fundamental criterion for evaluating generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems, yet its measurement remains inherently ambiguous. Existing approaches typically represent generated samples in an embedding space, compute pairwise distances or similarities, and aggregate them into a single scalar score. Such scalar summaries are convenient, but they often encode different inductive biases and may yield contradictory rankings of the same sample sets. In this paper, we argue that diversity evaluation for AI-generated content is intrinsically under-specified when reduced to a single number. We first review representative diversity metrics, and then diagnose their limitations from two complementary perspectives: an axiomatic analysis showing that no representative scalar metric satisfies all desirable properties simultaneously, and an empirical analysis showing that high-dimensional representation spaces can induce concentrated, modality-dependent distance distributions. To address these issues, we propose diversity profiles: curve-valued, condition-aware summaries that evaluate a parameterized diversity family across a range of thresholds, scales, exponents, or orders under a specified representation and distance or kernel function. Diversity profiles reveal whether a comparison is robust across resolutions or instead depends on an arbitrary parameter choice. We instantiate profiles for several representative metric families and demonstrate their practical use in generative AI evaluation. Overall, diversity profiles provide a more transparent and resolution-aware framework for comparing the diversity of AI-generated content.
Abstract:Industrial software-engineering teams increasingly need LLM agents that turn bug reports into correct patches, yet benchmark-scale operation adds long horizons, tool-use discipline, context persistence, heterogeneous clusters, and evaluation reuse. We present Kozuchi Agent, a language-agnostic open-weight repair agent and CI-operated evaluation pipeline. Explicit phases, persistent state, deterministic tools, a model-independent action interface, and cross-agent test-time selection make runs auditable and repeatable. With locally hosted Qwen3.5-27B, no fine-tuning, and TTS@8, Kozuchi resolves 374/500 SWE-bench Verified instances on the official evaluator. Unchanged on Multi-SWE-bench Java, the same 27-billion-parameter agent resolves 41/128 instances (32.03%), ranking first among strict open-weight submissions and fourth of 42 overall; on Python it ranks 12th of 135 and first among open-weight systems. Per-phase behavior remains within +/-5 percentage points across languages. Remaining failures mainly reflect semantic correctness, Java-specific harness issues, and selection errors. Across both tracks, results compare favorably with open/local peers by parameter count. Analysis of candidate diversity, selector regret, and patch reliability shows that the remaining gap is primarily semantic correctness and selection rather than edit formatting or proprietary-model access. Operationally, reusable CI stages reduce operator touch-points from five to one across heterogeneous internal clusters.
Abstract:Training high-resolution AI-based Earth forecasting models is memory-intensive. Window-based Swin Transformers reduce the quadratic cost of global attention, but existing distributed systems such as AERIS primarily target pixel-level models and do not jointly support convolutional sampling modules and shifted-window execution. Long-lead rollout finetuning further increases activation memory. To address these challenges, we present TERRA, a hierarchical parallel training framework for high-resolution Earth forecasting. TERRA introduces Sampling-Aware Window, Sequence, and Tensor Parallelism (SAWSTP), which preserves spatially contiguous layouts for sampling modules and routes tokens into topology-aware ragged window layouts for Transformer execution. For long-lead finetuning, Memory Orchestration (MO) provides rollout-aware checkpoint planning and combines input buffering with budget-constrained activation offloading. Experiments on the $1/12^\circ$ GLORYS-based Wenhai workload show that TERRA supports models with up to 11.4B parameters on 96 H200 GPUs and sustains up to $39.76$ PFLOPS, achieving $65.0\%$ strong-scaling and $94.1\%$ weak-scaling efficiency. Compared with checkpoint-only policies, MO further reduces peak allocated GPU memory by $32.2\%$--$51.8\%$ with at most $20.0\%$ step-time overhead, which makes finetuning with smaller patch sizes and longer rollouts feasible for improved forecasting accuracy.
Abstract:Model merging plays a crucial role in consolidating multiple specialized models into a single, unified model, especially in the era of large language models (LLMs). Recent research has primarily focused on developing strategies to enhance merging performance with the trained models, while the impact of training paradigms, such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), on the effectiveness of model merging remains underexplored. In this study, we systematically explore the merging behavior of RL-trained LLMs compared to those trained with traditional SFT. Through comprehensive evaluations across five representative tasks, we find that RL significantly reduces task conflicts and results in less performance degradation after merging, making RL-trained models particularly well-suited for this process. To unearth the reasons behind the superior suitability of RL for model merging, we conduct extensive empirical experiments and theoretical analyses. Our findings highlight three key factors: (1) On-policy training data in RL control the gradient updates in a smaller magnitude, reducing the risk of overwriting existing knowledge for other tasks in the model. (2) The RL optimization objective, which favors ``\textit{enough is as good as a feast}", progressively reduces the magnitude and the number of conflict parameter updates as the model converges. (3) Joint optimization of positive and negative examples in RL steers the model towards an unbiased task-specific parameter subspace, ensuring robust performance while further preventing parameter conflicts.
Abstract:Vision-language models (VLMs) have made interactive digital museums increasingly feasible by connecting 3D digitization with natural-language artifact exploration. However, in cultural heritage domains such as ancient Greek pottery, reliable VLM assistance is limited by two challenges. First, open-ended interpretation requires grounding fine-grained 2D/3D visual evidence in specialized curatorial knowledge, yet the retrieval process may introduce weak sources and unverifiable references. Second, when the available evidence is incomplete, noisy, or ambiguous, VLMs often produce confident but unsupported answers instead of calibrated uncertainty. To address these challenges, we propose VaseMuseum, a lightweight and modular multimodal agent framework for intelligent digital museums of ancient Greek pottery. VaseMuseum combines an interactive virtual museum with VaseAgent, which supports both 2D images and 3D artifacts through multimodal perception, 3D-aware reasoning, external knowledge retrieval, and inference-time reliability control. Specifically, VaseAgent retrieves evidence from authoritative web and museum knowledge sources, and source-level control selects diverse and verifiable evidence before generation. Meanwhile, response-level control checks generated claims against the evidence pool and encourages neutral, evidence-bounded answers when support is insufficient or conflicting. Moreover, a training-free GRPO-style selection mechanism favors responses with valid references and calibrated confidence without updating the VLM backbone. Experiments in a realistic digital museum simulation show that VaseMuseum improves citation validity, reduces hallucinations on knowledge-intensive queries, and produces more neutral answers under ambiguity compared with search-enabled VLM baselines.
Abstract:3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has garnered significant attention in Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) due to its advances in capturing fine-grained geometry features and synthesizing novel views. For SLAM in large-scale scenes, such as autonomous driving, 3DGS-SLAM faces a critical limitation: memory consumption increases continuously over time as Gaussian points accumulate, leading to poor memory efficiency and limiting its applicability. In this work, we propose a rendering-area-aware pruning strategy that selectively removes Gaussians based on their contribution to the effective rendering area, rather than solely relying on Gaussian-level heuristics such as opacity or gradient magnitude. This perspective directly targets the sources of memory redundancy, effectively reducing the peak memory footprint of 3DGS-SLAM during runtime. Evaluations on the EuRoC and KITTI datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing pruning approaches in large-scale outdoor scenes, achieving over 60% memory reduction and more than 2 times FPS improvement while preserving localization and mapping accuracy. These results highlight rendering-area-aware pruning as a promising direction for scaling 3DGS-SLAM to real-world autonomous driving scenarios. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/UMN-ZhaoLab/Pocket-SLAM.git.
Abstract:High-quality 4D head avatars from one or a few source portraits are central to telepresence, AR/VR, and digital-human interaction. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as the dominant representation, with two complementary regimes (generalizable feed-forward predictors and per-subject refiners) maturing in parallel. However, existing feed-forward predictors are trained on a single dataset family with a hard-coded source count, inheriting the corresponding domain bias. Per-subject refiners require 300K--600K iterations and rely on adaptive densification that destroys upstream Gaussian layouts, preventing the two regimes from sharing a representation end-to-end. To bridge both regimes we propose SpatialAvatar-0 on a shared FLAME-mesh-bound Gaussian representation: a feed-forward generator with a parameter-free K-source mean-pool and a monocular-temporal to multi-view-spatial two-phase schedule that anchors against identity-prior collapse onto the smaller multi-view set. We further introduce a 10K-iter layout-preserving per-subject refinement loop that freezes the FLAME-binding and Gaussian count and replaces densification with a three-component anti-spike regularization. On VFHQ/HDTF cross-domain zero-shot we surpass the in-domain leader GAGAvatar by +1.5 dB PSNR despite never training on either test domain, and on the SplattingAvatar monocular benchmark we lead every reported metric, surpassing the 300K-iter GeoAvatar by +1.3 dB PSNR at up to 60x shorter per-subject schedule than common SOTA baselines. Website: https://spatialwalk.github.io/SpatialAvatar-0.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) drive significant financial innovations, yet their high-concurrency deployment is severely bottlenecked by KV cache memory overhead, which inflates infrastructure costs and throttles scalability. To address this, we propose YouZhi-LLM, a highly efficient financial LLM empowered by a comprehensive structural transition and training pipeline natively built on the Huawei Ascend ecosystem. At its algorithmic core, YouZhi-LLM features a layer-adaptive GQA-to-MLA transition framework that dynamically assigns per-layer FreqFold sizes, maximizing KV-cache compression while minimizing perplexity degradation. To recover representation capacity and inject domain expertise, the Ascend-based training pipeline seamlessly integrates generalized knowledge distillation with financial-specific supervised fine-tuning. Evaluations demonstrate the superiority of this systematic approach, with the adaptive transition reducing perplexity degradation by up to 35% over uniform baselines. Crucially, when evaluated on Ascend NPUs via vLLM-Ascend, the massive KV-cache reduction translates directly into deployment efficiency. Compared to their respective base models, YouZhi-7B yields a 12.3% improvement in average financial benchmark score alongside a 2.69$\times$ increase in maximum concurrency; similarly, YouZhi-14B achieves a 7.0% accuracy gain and a 2.43$\times$ concurrency boost, establishing a new paradigm for cost-effective, high-throughput financial inference.
Abstract:Embodied visual navigation, where an agent perceives a complex environment and acts to reach a goal from raw sensory input, underpins a wide range of applications such as household service robotics, assistive robotics, and large-scale autonomous exploration. However, recent attempts to unify vision-and-language navigation (VLN) and object goal navigation (ObjNav) remain at the level of architectural fusion, mixed-task training, and large vision-language pretraining, without examining whether independently trained vision and language encoders may already share a common semantic structure. Moreover, even object-centric topological maps still ground language goals through explicit cross-modal supervision such as CLIP or large vision-language models, leaving open whether such grounding is possible from a purely vision-built map. To address these challenges, we extend the Platonic Representation Hypothesis to embodied navigation and recast vision-only ObjNav, cross-modal ObjNav, and VLN as three different interfaces to the same object-centric semantic manifold. We further introduce PlatonicNav, a training-free framework whose Platonic Topological Map fuses geometric and semantic node distances from a self-supervised visual encoder, and grounds language goals via blind matching without any paired vision-language data. Extensive experiments on simulation benchmarks including HM3D-IIN, OVON, and R2R-CE on MP3D, together with deployment on Unitree Go2, demonstrate that PlatonicNav generalizes across tasks, modalities, and embodiments without explicit cross-modal training. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/PlatonicNav. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/PlatonicNav.
Abstract:Unified multimodal models (UMMs) aim to handle perception and generation in a single model. Yet existing UMMs still rely on a frozen, separately pretrained VAE for image generation, imposing a structural bottleneck. Naively removing it introduces a quality gap, as the model must learn both high-level structure and low-level details from raw pixels. In this paper, we propose Representation Forcing (RF), a technique that closes this gap by making representation prediction a native capability of the model. Concretely, RF forces the decoder to autoregressively predict visual representations as intermediate tokens before pixels; these tokens then stay in context to guide pixel diffusion within the same backbone. By turning representations from perception outputs into generation targets, RF eliminates the need for any external generative latent space. We find that RF benefits both understanding and generation. On image generation, our pixel-space model with RF matches state-of-the-art VAE-based unified models. On image understanding, pixel-space RF generally outperforms its VAE-based variant. Together, these results offer an effective step toward end-to-end, bottleneck-free UMMs.