ZEUS: Accelerating Diffusion Models with Only Second-Order Predictor

Denoising generative models deliver high-fidelity generation but remain bottlenecked by inference latency due to the many iterative denoiser calls required during sampling. Training-free acceleration methods reduce latency by either sparsifying the model architecture or shortening the sampling trajectory. Current training-free acceleration methods are more complex than necessary: higher-order predictors amplify error under aggressive speedups, and architectural modifications hinder deployment. Beyond 2x acceleration, step skipping creates structural scarcity -- at most one fresh evaluation per local window -- leaving the computed output and its backward difference as the only causally grounded information. Based on this, we propose ZEUS, an acceleration method that predicts reduced denoiser evaluations using a second-order predictor, and stabilizes aggressive consecutive skipping with an interleaved scheme that avoids back-to-back extrapolations. ZEUS adds essentially zero overhead, no feature caches, and no architectural modifications, and it is compatible with different backbones, prediction objectives, and solver choices. Across image and video generation, ZEUS consistently improves the speed-fidelity performance over recent training-free baselines, achieving up to 3.2x end-to-end speedup while maintaining perceptual quality. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Ting-Justin-Jiang/ZEUS.

Multi-Camera View Scaling for Data-Efficient Robot Imitation Learning

The generalization ability of imitation learning policies for robotic manipulation is fundamentally constrained by the diversity of expert demonstrations, while collecting demonstrations across varied environments is costly and difficult in practice. In this paper, we propose a practical framework that exploits inherent scene diversity without additional human effort by scaling camera views during demonstration collection. Instead of acquiring more trajectories, multiple synchronized camera perspectives are used to generate pseudo-demonstrations from each expert trajectory, which enriches the training distribution and improves viewpoint invariance in visual representations. We analyze how different action spaces interact with view scaling and show that camera-space representations further enhance diversity. In addition, we introduce a multiview action aggregation method that allows single-view policies to benefit from multiple cameras during deployment. Extensive experiments in simulation and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate significant gains in data efficiency and generalization compared to single-view baselines. Our results suggest that scaling camera views provides a practical and scalable solution for imitation learning, which requires minimal additional hardware setup and integrates seamlessly with existing imitation learning algorithms. The website of our project is https://yichen928.github.io/robot_multiview.

Mean Flow Policy with Instantaneous Velocity Constraint for One-step Action Generation

Learning expressive and efficient policy functions is a promising direction in reinforcement learning (RL). While flow-based policies have recently proven effective in modeling complex action distributions with a fast deterministic sampling process, they still face a trade-off between expressiveness and computational burden, which is typically controlled by the number of flow steps. In this work, we propose mean velocity policy (MVP), a new generative policy function that models the mean velocity field to achieve the fastest one-step action generation. To ensure its high expressiveness, an instantaneous velocity constraint (IVC) is introduced on the mean velocity field during training. We theoretically prove that this design explicitly serves as a crucial boundary condition, thereby improving learning accuracy and enhancing policy expressiveness. Empirically, our MVP achieves state-of-the-art success rates across several challenging robotic manipulation tasks from Robomimic and OGBench. It also delivers substantial improvements in training and inference speed over existing flow-based policy baselines.

DADP: Domain Adaptive Diffusion Policy

Learning domain adaptive policies that can generalize to unseen transition dynamics, remains a fundamental challenge in learning-based control. Substantial progress has been made through domain representation learning to capture domain-specific information, thus enabling domain-aware decision making. We analyze the process of learning domain representations through dynamical prediction and find that selecting contexts adjacent to the current step causes the learned representations to entangle static domain information with varying dynamical properties. Such mixture can confuse the conditioned policy, thereby constraining zero-shot adaptation. To tackle the challenge, we propose DADP (Domain Adaptive Diffusion Policy), which achieves robust adaptation through unsupervised disentanglement and domain-aware diffusion injection. First, we introduce Lagged Context Dynamical Prediction, a strategy that conditions future state estimation on a historical offset context; by increasing this temporal gap, we unsupervisedly disentangle static domain representations by filtering out transient properties. Second, we integrate the learned domain representations directly into the generative process by biasing the prior distribution and reformulating the diffusion target. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks across locomotion and manipulation demonstrate the superior performance, and the generalizability of DADP over prior methods. More visualization results are available on the https://outsider86.github.io/DomainAdaptiveDiffusionPolicy/.

Shallow- and Deep-fake Image Manipulation Localization Using Vision Mamba and Guided Graph Neural Network

Image manipulation localization is a critical research task, given that forged images may have a significant societal impact of various aspects. Such image manipulations can be produced using traditional image editing tools (known as "shallowfakes") or advanced artificial intelligence techniques ("deepfakes"). While numerous studies have focused on image manipulation localization on either shallowfake images or deepfake videos, few approaches address both cases. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of using a deep learning network to localize manipulations in both shallow- and deep-fake images, and proposed a solution for such purpose. To precisely differentiate between authentic and manipulated pixels, we leverage the Vision Mamba network to extract feature maps that clearly describe the boundaries between tampered and untouched regions. To further enhance this separation, we propose a novel Guided Graph Neural Network (G-GNN) module that amplifies the distinction between manipulated and authentic pixels. Our evaluation results show that our proposed method achieved higher inference accuracy compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

BuddyMoE: Exploiting Expert Redundancy to Accelerate Memory-Constrained Mixture-of-Experts Inference

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures scale language models by activating only a subset of specialized expert networks for each input token, thereby reducing the number of floating-point operations. However, the growing size of modern MoE models causes their full parameter sets to exceed GPU memory capacity; for example, Mixtral-8x7B has 45 billion parameters and requires 87 GB of memory even though only 14 billion parameters are used per token. Existing systems alleviate this limitation by offloading inactive experts to CPU memory, but transferring experts across the PCIe interconnect incurs significant latency (about 10 ms). Prefetching heuristics aim to hide this latency by predicting which experts are needed, but prefetch failures introduce significant stalls and amplify inference latency. In the event of a prefetch failure, prior work offers two primary solutions: either fetch the expert on demand, which incurs a long stall due to the PCIe bottleneck, or drop the expert from the computation, which significantly degrades model accuracy. The critical challenge, therefore, is to maintain both high inference speed and model accuracy when prefetching fails.

SADA: Stability-guided Adaptive Diffusion Acceleration

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generative tasks but suffer from high computational costs due to their iterative sampling process and quadratic attention costs. Existing training-free acceleration strategies that reduce per-step computation cost, while effectively reducing sampling time, demonstrate low faithfulness compared to the original baseline. We hypothesize that this fidelity gap arises because (a) different prompts correspond to varying denoising trajectory, and (b) such methods do not consider the underlying ODE formulation and its numerical solution. In this paper, we propose Stability-guided Adaptive Diffusion Acceleration (SADA), a novel paradigm that unifies step-wise and token-wise sparsity decisions via a single stability criterion to accelerate sampling of ODE-based generative models (Diffusion and Flow-matching). For (a), SADA adaptively allocates sparsity based on the sampling trajectory. For (b), SADA introduces principled approximation schemes that leverage the precise gradient information from the numerical ODE solver. Comprehensive evaluations on SD-2, SDXL, and Flux using both EDM and DPM++ solvers reveal consistent $\ge 1.8\times$ speedups with minimal fidelity degradation (LPIPS $\leq 0.10$ and FID $\leq 4.5$) compared to unmodified baselines, significantly outperforming prior methods. Moreover, SADA adapts seamlessly to other pipelines and modalities: It accelerates ControlNet without any modifications and speeds up MusicLDM by $1.8\times$ with $\sim 0.01$ spectrogram LPIPS.

Cross-Attention Speculative Decoding

Speculative decoding (SD) is a widely adopted approach for accelerating inference in large language models (LLMs), particularly when the draft and target models are well aligned. However, state-of-the-art SD methods typically rely on tightly coupled, self-attention-based Transformer decoders, often augmented with auxiliary pooling or fusion layers. This coupling makes them increasingly complex and harder to generalize across different models. We present Budget EAGLE (Beagle), the first, to our knowledge, cross-attention-based Transformer decoder SD model that achieves performance on par with leading self-attention SD models (EAGLE-v2) while eliminating the need for pooling or auxiliary components, simplifying the architecture, improving training efficiency, and maintaining stable memory usage during training-time simulation. To enable effective training of this novel architecture, we propose Two-Stage Block-Attention Training, a new method that achieves training stability and convergence efficiency in block-level attention scenarios. Extensive experiments across multiple LLMs and datasets show that Beagle achieves competitive inference speedups and higher training efficiency than EAGLE-v2, offering a strong alternative for architectures in speculative decoding.

Chain-of-Thought for Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Survey and Future Prospects

The rapid evolution of large language models in natural language processing has substantially elevated their semantic understanding and logical reasoning capabilities. Such proficiencies have been leveraged in autonomous driving systems, contributing to significant improvements in system performance. Models such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1, leverage Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, an advanced cognitive method that simulates human thinking processes, demonstrating remarkable reasoning capabilities in complex tasks. By structuring complex driving scenarios within a systematic reasoning framework, this approach has emerged as a prominent research focus in autonomous driving, substantially improving the system's ability to handle challenging cases. This paper investigates how CoT methods improve the reasoning abilities of autonomous driving models. Based on a comprehensive literature review, we present a systematic analysis of the motivations, methodologies, challenges, and future research directions of CoT in autonomous driving. Furthermore, we propose the insight of combining CoT with self-learning to facilitate self-evolution in driving systems. To ensure the relevance and timeliness of this study, we have compiled a dynamic repository of literature and open-source projects, diligently updated to incorporate forefront developments. The repository is publicly available at https://github.com/cuiyx1720/Awesome-CoT4AD.

Interleave-VLA: Enhancing Robot Manipulation with Interleaved Image-Text Instructions

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown great promise for generalist robotic manipulation in the physical world. However, existing models are restricted to robot observations and text-only instructions, lacking the flexibility of interleaved multimodal instructions enabled by recent advances in foundation models in the digital world. In this paper, we present Interleave-VLA, the first framework capable of comprehending interleaved image-text instructions and directly generating continuous action sequences in the physical world. It offers a flexible, model-agnostic paradigm that extends state-of-the-art VLA models with minimal modifications and strong zero-shot generalization. A key challenge in realizing Interleave-VLA is the absence of large-scale interleaved embodied datasets. To bridge this gap, we develop an automatic pipeline that converts text-only instructions from real-world datasets in Open X-Embodiment into interleaved image-text instructions, resulting in the first large-scale real-world interleaved embodied dataset with 210k episodes. Through comprehensive evaluation on simulation benchmarks and real-robot experiments, we demonstrate that Interleave-VLA offers significant benefits: 1) it improves out-of-domain generalization to unseen objects by 2-3x compared to state-of-the-art baselines, 2) supports flexible task interfaces, and 3) handles diverse user-provided image instructions in a zero-shot manner, such as hand-drawn sketches. We further analyze the factors behind Interleave-VLA's strong zero-shot performance, showing that the interleaved paradigm effectively leverages heterogeneous datasets and diverse instruction images, including those from the Internet, which demonstrates strong potential for scaling up. Our model and dataset will be open-sourced.