NextMotionQA: Benchmarking and Judging Human Motion Understanding with Vision-Language Models

Reliable evaluation of human motion understanding is fundamental to advancing embodied AI, robotics, and animation. However, existing benchmarks suffer from coarse semantic granularity, undifferentiated difficulty, limited annotation quality, and pervasive answer ambiguity, leaving them unable to diagnose where current models fail. To bridge this gap, we introduce NextMotionQA, a comprehensive benchmark that leverages vision-language models (VLMs) for semi-automated, expert-verified dataset. NextMotionQA features three complementary tasks: multiple-choice question answering, video captioning, and fine-grained error correction. Each task is systematically structured across three core semantic axes and stratified into three task complexity levels. Our extensive evaluation of twelve representative VLMs uncovers critical capability gaps and weakness that remain invisible under conventional, single-task evaluations. In a complementary direction, recent work has begun using VLMs as judges for text-to-motion evaluation; we ask whether they show the same degradation under harder tasks. We find that VLMs align strongly with expert ratings on coarse criteria (Cohen's κ=0.70) but break down on fine-grained, part-level judgment (κ=0.10), validating the paradigm in its strong regime while clarifying its limits.

Shot-Aware Frame Sampling for Video Understanding

Video frame sampling is essential for efficient long-video understanding with Vision-Language Models (VLMs), since dense inputs are costly and often exceed context limits. Yet when only a small number of frames can be retained, existing samplers often fail to balance broad video coverage with brief but critical events, which can lead to unreliable downstream predictions. To address this issue, we present InfoShot, a task-agnostic, shot-aware frame sampler for long-video understanding. InfoShot first partitions a video into semantically consistent shots, and then selects two complementary keyframes from each shot: one to represent the main content and one to capture unusual within-shot changes. This design is guided by an information-theoretic objective that encourages the sampled set to retain high information about both shot structure and sparse within-shot deviations. In this way, it improves the chance of preserving both overall video context and short decision-critical moments without requiring any retraining. To better evaluate such short-lived events, we further introduce SynFlash, a synthetic benchmark with controllable sub-second anomaly patterns and frame-level ground truth, and we also evaluate InfoShot on existing anomaly datasets and general video understanding tasks. Experiments show that InfoShot improves anomaly hit rate and downstream Video-QA accuracy under frame number constraints, while matching or outperforming strong baselines on standard video understanding benchmarks.

MeTok: An Efficient Meteorological Tokenization with Hyper-Aligned Group Learning for Precipitation Nowcasting

Recently, Transformer-based architectures have advanced meteorological prediction. However, this position-centric tokenizer conflicts with the core principle of meteorological systems, where the weather phenomena undoubtedly involve synergistic interactions among multiple elements while positional information constitutes merely a component of the boundary conditions. This paper focuses primarily on the task of precipitation nowcasting and develops an efficient distribution-centric Meteorological Tokenization (MeTok) scheme, which spatially sequences to group similar meteorological features. Based on the rearrangement, realigned group learning enhances robustness across precipitation patterns, especially extreme ones. Specifically, we introduce the Hyper-Aligned Grouping Transformer (HyAGTransformer) with two key improvements: 1) The Grouping Attention (GA) mechanism uses MeTok to enable self-aligned learning of features from different precipitation patterns; 2) The Neighborhood Feed-Forward Network (N-FFN) integrates adjacent group features, aggregating contextual information to boost patch embedding discriminability. Experiments on the ERA5 dataset for 6-hour forecasts show our method improves the IoU metric by at least 8.2% in extreme precipitation prediction compared to other methods. Additionally, it gains performance with more training data and increased parameters, demonstrating scalability, stability, and superiority over traditional methods.

UniComp: A Unified Evaluation of Large Language Model Compression via Pruning, Quantization and Distillation

Model compression is increasingly essential for deploying large language models (LLMs), yet existing evaluations are limited in method coverage and focus primarily on knowledge-centric benchmarks. Thus, we introduce UniComp, a unified evaluation framework for comparing pruning, quantization, and knowledge distillation. UniComp evaluates compressed models along three dimensions: performance, reliability, and efficiency, using a diverse set of capability- and safety-oriented benchmarks together with a hardware-aware efficiency analysis. Through extensive evaluation of six compression techniques on modern LLMs across more than 40 datasets, we find that (i) compression exhibits a consistent knowledge bias, where knowledge-intensive tasks are relatively preserved while reasoning, multilingual, and instruction-following capabilities degrade substantially; (ii) quantization provides the best overall trade-off between retained performance and efficiency, whereas distillation yields strong runtime acceleration gains at high computational cost; and (iii) task-specific calibration can significantly improve the reasoning ability of pruned models by up to 50%.

FrankenMotion: Part-level Human Motion Generation and Composition

Human motion generation from text prompts has made remarkable progress in recent years. However, existing methods primarily rely on either sequence-level or action-level descriptions due to the absence of fine-grained, part-level motion annotations. This limits their controllability over individual body parts. In this work, we construct a high-quality motion dataset with atomic, temporally-aware part-level text annotations, leveraging the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Unlike prior datasets that either provide synchronized part captions with fixed time segments or rely solely on global sequence labels, our dataset captures asynchronous and semantically distinct part movements at fine temporal resolution. Based on this dataset, we introduce a diffusion-based part-aware motion generation framework, namely FrankenMotion, where each body part is guided by its own temporally-structured textual prompt. This is, to our knowledge, the first work to provide atomic, temporally-aware part-level motion annotations and have a model that allows motion generation with both spatial (body part) and temporal (atomic action) control. Experiments demonstrate that FrankenMotion outperforms all previous baseline models adapted and retrained for our setting, and our model can compose motions unseen during training. Our code and dataset will be publicly available upon publication.

Beyond Demographics: Enhancing Cultural Value Survey Simulation with Multi-Stage Personality-Driven Cognitive Reasoning

Introducing MARK, the Multi-stAge Reasoning frameworK for cultural value survey response simulation, designed to enhance the accuracy, steerability, and interpretability of large language models in this task. The system is inspired by the type dynamics theory in the MBTI psychological framework for personality research. It effectively predicts and utilizes human demographic information for simulation: life-situational stress analysis, group-level personality prediction, and self-weighted cognitive imitation. Experiments on the World Values Survey show that MARK outperforms existing baselines by 10% accuracy and reduces the divergence between model predictions and human preferences. This highlights the potential of our framework to improve zero-shot personalization and help social scientists interpret model predictions.

MDPO: Overcoming the Training-Inference Divide of Masked Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion language models, as a promising alternative to traditional autoregressive (AR) models, enable faster generation and richer conditioning on bidirectional context. However, they suffer from a key discrepancy between training and inference: during inference, MDLMs progressively reveal the structure of the generated sequence by producing fewer and fewer masked tokens, whereas this structure is ignored in training as tokens are masked at random. Although this discrepancy between training and inference can lead to suboptimal performance, it has been largely overlooked by previous works, leaving closing this gap between the two stages an open problem. To address this, we frame the problem of learning effective denoising trajectories as a sequential decision-making problem and use the resulting framework to apply reinforcement learning. We propose a novel Masked Diffusion Policy Optimization (MDPO) to exploit the Markov property diffusion possesses and explicitly train the model under the same progressive refining schedule used at inference. MDPO matches the performance of the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) method with 60x fewer gradient updates, while achieving average improvements of 9.6% on MATH500 and 54.2% on Countdown over SOTA when trained within the same number of weight updates. Additionally, we improve the remasking strategy of MDLMs as a plug-in inference replacement to overcome the limitation that the model cannot refine tokens flexibly. This simple yet effective training-free strategy, what we refer to as RCR, consistently improves performance and yields additional gains when combined with MDPO. Our findings establish great potential for investigating the discrepancy between pre-training and inference of MDLMs. Code: https://github.com/autonomousvision/mdpo. Project Page: https://cli212.github.io/MDPO/.

QuaDMix: Quality-Diversity Balanced Data Selection for Efficient LLM Pretraining

Quality and diversity are two critical metrics for the training data of large language models (LLMs), positively impacting performance. Existing studies often optimize these metrics separately, typically by first applying quality filtering and then adjusting data proportions. However, these approaches overlook the inherent trade-off between quality and diversity, necessitating their joint consideration. Given a fixed training quota, it is essential to evaluate both the quality of each data point and its complementary effect on the overall dataset. In this paper, we introduce a unified data selection framework called QuaDMix, which automatically optimizes the data distribution for LLM pretraining while balancing both quality and diversity. Specifically, we first propose multiple criteria to measure data quality and employ domain classification to distinguish data points, thereby measuring overall diversity. QuaDMix then employs a unified parameterized data sampling function that determines the sampling probability of each data point based on these quality and diversity related labels. To accelerate the search for the optimal parameters involved in the QuaDMix framework, we conduct simulated experiments on smaller models and use LightGBM for parameters searching, inspired by the RegMix method. Our experiments across diverse models and datasets demonstrate that QuaDMix achieves an average performance improvement of 7.2% across multiple benchmarks. These results outperform the independent strategies for quality and diversity, highlighting the necessity and ability to balance data quality and diversity.

Scholar Inbox: Personalized Paper Recommendations for Scientists

Scholar Inbox is a new open-access platform designed to address the challenges researchers face in staying current with the rapidly expanding volume of scientific literature. We provide personalized recommendations, continuous updates from open-access archives (arXiv, bioRxiv, etc.), visual paper summaries, semantic search, and a range of tools to streamline research workflows and promote open research access. The platform's personalized recommendation system is trained on user ratings, ensuring that recommendations are tailored to individual researchers' interests. To further enhance the user experience, Scholar Inbox also offers a map of science that provides an overview of research across domains, enabling users to easily explore specific topics. We use this map to address the cold start problem common in recommender systems, as well as an active learning strategy that iteratively prompts users to rate a selection of papers, allowing the system to learn user preferences quickly. We evaluate the quality of our recommendation system on a novel dataset of 800k user ratings, which we make publicly available, as well as via an extensive user study. https://www.scholar-inbox.com/

Specializing Large Language Models to Simulate Survey Response Distributions for Global Populations

Large-scale surveys are essential tools for informing social science research and policy, but running surveys is costly and time-intensive. If we could accurately simulate group-level survey results, this would therefore be very valuable to social science research. Prior work has explored the use of large language models (LLMs) for simulating human behaviors, mostly through prompting. In this paper, we are the first to specialize LLMs for the task of simulating survey response distributions. As a testbed, we use country-level results from two global cultural surveys. We devise a fine-tuning method based on first-token probabilities to minimize divergence between predicted and actual response distributions for a given question. Then, we show that this method substantially outperforms other methods and zero-shot classifiers, even on unseen questions, countries, and a completely unseen survey. While even our best models struggle with the task, especially on unseen questions, our results demonstrate the benefits of specialization for simulation, which may accelerate progress towards sufficiently accurate simulation in the future.