Abstract:In recent years, training-free video generation has progressed remarkably. However, when handling complex textual instructions, existing methods still suffer from semantic ambiguity, incorrect concept binding, and cross-frame inconsistency. To address these issues, we propose KGEdit, a structured semantic control framework for text-to-video (T2V) diffusion models. Specifically, we first construct an ambiguity-aware knowledge graph (AAKG) to disentangle and disambiguate the input prompt, converting it into four types of structured semantics: identity, relation, attribute, and negative constraints. We then design a structured semantic injection module (SSIM) to inject these semantic signals into key layers of the diffusion Transformer, enabling fine-grained semantic control. In addition, we introduce a temporal-aware semantic control (TASC) module that dynamically schedules semantic objectives according to the stage-wise characteristics of the denoising process, further improving semantic alignment and temporal consistency. Experiments show that KGEdit outperforms existing methods in editing precision and temporal stability, while offering higher efficiency and controllability in text-driven interaction scenarios.
Abstract:Simulation-based RL for contemporary robot control is increasingly organized around GPU-resident simulation: physics, rollout collection, and learning are placed on a single GPU-centric execution path. This paradigm has greatly improved training speed, but it has also encouraged a default assumption that efficient training requires physics to reside on the GPU. We revisit this assumption. Our view is that, in simulation-dominated robot control, the essential question is not which processor runs physics, but whether simulation throughput, policy learning, and runtime synchronization form an efficient end-to-end loop. We present UniLab, a heterogeneous CPU-simulation / GPU-learning architecture that decouples CPU-parallel simulation from GPU policy updates through a unified runtime for data movement, buffering, and synchronization. UniLab is implemented as a complete and extensible training system using MuJoCoUni and MotrixSim CPU-batched physics backends, supporting PPO, SAC, FlashSAC, TD3, and APPO. On representative simulation-based robot control tasks, UniLab improves end-to-end training efficiency by 3--10$\times$ under the same hardware configuration, while reducing dependence on the NVIDIA CUDA-based software stack and supporting cross-platform execution on the Apple macOS platform and the AMD ROCm and Intel XPU accelerator backends. These results show that GPU simulation is an effective path to efficient training, but not a necessary one, broadening the practical system choices available for robot RL training. Project page: https://github.com/unilabsim/UniLab.
Abstract:Video Moment Retrieval (VMR) aims to localize temporal segments in videos that correspond to a natural language query, but typically assumes only a single matching moment for each query. This assumption does not always hold in real-world scenarios, where queries may correspond to multiple or no moments. Thus, we formulate Generalized Moment Retrieval (GMR), a unified setting that requires retrieving the complete set of relevant moments or predicting an empty set. To enable systematic study of GMR, we introduce Soccer-GMR, a large-scale benchmark built on challenging soccer videos that reflect general GMR scenarios, with realistic negative and positive queries. The benchmark is constructed via a duration-flexible semi-automated pipeline with human verification, enabling scalable data generation while maintaining high annotation quality. We further design a unified evaluation protocol with complementary metrics tailored for null-set rejection, positive-query localization, and end-to-end GMR performance. Finally, we establish strong baselines across two modeling paradigms: a lightweight plug-and-play GMR adapter for discriminative VMR models, and a GMR-tailored GRPO reward for fine-tuning multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Extensive experiments show consistent gains across all metrics and expose key limitations of current methods, positioning GMR as a more realistic and challenging benchmark for video-language understanding.
Abstract:Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based image quality assessment (IQA) has been significantly advanced by incorporating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. Recent work has refined image quality reasoning by applying reinforcement learning (RL) and leveraging active visual tools. However, such strategies are typically language-centric, with visual information being treated as static preconditions. Quality-related visual cues often cannot be abstracted into text in extenso due to the gap between discrete textual tokens and quality perception space, which in turn restricts the reasoning effectiveness for visually intensive IQA tasks. In this paper, we revisit this by asking the question, "Is natural language the ideal space for quality reasoning?" and, as a consequence, we propose Q-Tacit, a new paradigm that elicits VLMs to reason beyond natural language in the latent quality space. Our approach follows a synergistic two-stage process: (i) injecting structural visual quality priors into the latent space, and (ii) calibrating latent reasoning trajectories to improve quality assessment ability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Q-Tacit can effectively perform quality reasoning with significantly fewer tokens than previous reasoning-based methods, while achieving strong overall performance. This paper validates the proposition that language is not the only compact representation suitable for visual quality, opening possibilities for further exploration of effective latent reasoning paradigms for IQA. Source code will be released to support future research.
Abstract:Whole-body humanoid teleoperation enables humans to remotely control humanoid robots, serving as both a real-time operational tool and a scalable engine for collecting demonstrations for autonomous learning. Despite recent advances, existing systems are validated using aggregate metrics that conflate distinct motion regimes, masking critical failure modes. This lack of diagnostic granularity, compounded by tightly coupled and labor-intensive system configurations, hinders robust real-world deployment. A key open challenge is building a teleoperation system that is simultaneously robust, versatile, and affordable for practical use. Here we present OmniClone, a whole-body humanoid teleoperation system that achieves high-fidelity, multi-skill control on a single consumer GPU with modest data requirements. Central to our approach is OmniBench, a diagnostic benchmark that evaluates policies across stratified motion categories and difficulty levels on unseen motions, exposing the narrow specialization of prior systems. Guided by these diagnostics, we identify an optimized training data recipe and integrate system-level improvements: subject-agnostic retargeting and robust communication, that collectively reduce Mean Per-Joint Position Error (MPJPE) by over 66% while requiring orders-of-magnitude fewer computational resources than comparable methods. Crucially, OmniClone is control-source-agnostic: a single unified policy supports real-time teleoperation, generated motion playback, and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, while generalizing across operators of vastly different body proportions. By uniting diagnostic evaluation with practical engineering, OmniClone provides an accessible foundation for scalable humanoid teleoperation and autonomous learning.
Abstract:As 3D Gaussian Splatting becomes the de facto representation for interactive 3D assets, robust yet imperceptible watermarking is critical. We present a representation-native framework that separates where to write from how to preserve quality. A Trio-Experts module operates directly on Gaussian primitives to derive priors for carrier selection, while a Safety and Budget Aware Gate (SBAG) allocates Gaussians to watermark carriers, optimized for bit resilience under perturbation and bitrate budgets, and to visual compensators that are insulated from watermark loss. To maintain fidelity, we introduce a channel-wise group mask that controls gradient propagation for carriers and compensators, thereby limiting Gaussian parameter updates, repairing local artifacts, and preserving high-frequency details without increasing runtime. Our design yields view-consistent watermark persistence and strong robustness against common image distortions such as compression and noise, while achieving a favorable robustness-quality trade-off compared with prior methods. In addition, decoupled finetuning provides per-Gaussian attributions that reveal where the message is carried and why those carriers are selected, enabling auditable explainability. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, our approach achieves a PSNR improvement of +0.83 dB and a bit-accuracy gain of +1.24%.
Abstract:Federated recommendation facilitates collaborative model training across distributed clients while keeping sensitive user interaction data local. Conventional approaches typically rely on synchronizing high-dimensional item representations between the server and clients. This paradigm implicitly assumes that precise geometric alignment of embedding coordinates is necessary for collaboration across clients. We posit that establishing relative semantic relationships among items is more effective than enforcing shared representations. Specifically, global semantic relations serve as structural constraints for items. Within these constraints, the framework allows item representations to vary locally on each client, which flexibility enables the model to capture fine-grained user personalization while maintaining global consistency. To this end, we propose Cluster-Guided FedRec framework (CGFedRec), a framework that transforms uploaded embeddings into compact cluster labels. In this framework, the server functions as a global structure discoverer to learn item clusters and distributes only the resulting labels. This mechanism explicitly cuts off the downstream transmission of item embeddings, relieving clients from maintaining global shared item embeddings. Consequently, CGFedRec achieves the effective injection of global collaborative signals into local item representations without transmitting full embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves communication efficiency while maintaining superior recommendation accuracy across multiple datasets.
Abstract:Biological signals of interest in high-dimensional data are often masked by dominant variation shared across conditions. This variation, arising from baseline biological structure or technical effects, can prevent standard dimensionality reduction methods from resolving condition-specific structure. The challenge is that these confounding topics are often unknown and mixed with biological signals. Existing background correction methods are either unscalable to high dimensions or not interpretable. We introduce background contrastive Non-negative Matrix Factorization (\model), which extracts target-enriched latent topics by jointly factorizing a target dataset and a matched background using shared non-negative bases under a contrastive objective that suppresses background-expressed structure. This approach yields non-negative components that are directly interpretable at the feature level, and explicitly isolates target-specific variation. \model is learned by an efficient multiplicative update algorithm via matrix multiplication such that it is highly efficient on GPU hardware and scalable to big data via minibatch training akin to deep learning approach. Across simulations and diverse biological datasets, \model reveals signals obscured by conventional methods, including disease-associated programs in postmortem depressive brain single-cell RNA-seq, genotype-linked protein expression patterns in mice, treatment-specific transcriptional changes in leukemia, and TP53-dependent drug responses in cancer cell lines.
Abstract:Humanoid robots that autonomously interact with physical environments over extended horizons represent a central goal of embodied intelligence. Existing approaches rely on reference motions or task-specific rewards, tightly coupling policies to particular object geometries and precluding multi-skill generalization within a single framework. A unified interaction representation enabling reference-free inference, geometric generalization, and long-horizon skill composition within one policy remains an open challenge. Here we show that Distance Field (DF) provides such a representation: LessMimic conditions a single whole-body policy on DF-derived geometric cues--surface distances, gradients, and velocity decompositions--removing the need for motion references, with interaction latents encoded via a Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) and post-trained using Adversarial Interaction Priors (AIP) under Reinforcement Learning (RL). Through DAgger-style distillation that aligns DF latents with egocentric depth features, LessMimic further transfers seamlessly to vision-only deployment without motion capture (MoCap) infrastructure. A single LessMimic policy achieves 80--100% success across object scales from 0.4x to 1.6x on PickUp and SitStand where baselines degrade sharply, attains 62.1% success on 5 task instances trajectories, and remains viable up to 40 sequentially composed tasks. By grounding interaction in local geometry rather than demonstrations, LessMimic offers a scalable path toward humanoid robots that generalize, compose skills, and recover from failures in unstructured environments.
Abstract:Designing suitable rewards poses a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), especially for embodied manipulation. Trajectory success rewards are suitable for human judges or model fitting, but the sparsity severely limits RL sample efficiency. While recent methods have effectively improved RL via dense rewards, they rely heavily on high-quality human-annotated data or abundant expert supervision. To tackle these issues, this paper proposes Dual-granularity contrastive reward via generated Episodic Guidance (DEG), a novel framework to seek sample-efficient dense rewards without requiring human annotations or extensive supervision. Leveraging the prior knowledge of large video generation models, DEG only needs a small number of expert videos for domain adaptation to generate dedicated task guidance for each RL episode. Then, the proposed dual-granularity reward that balances coarse-grained exploration and fine-grained matching, will guide the agent to efficiently approximate the generated guidance video sequentially in the contrastive self-supervised latent space, and finally complete the target task. Extensive experiments on 18 diverse tasks across both simulation and real-world settings show that DEG can not only serve as an efficient exploration stimulus to help the agent quickly discover sparse success rewards, but also guide effective RL and stable policy convergence independently.