On the Trainability of Masked Diffusion Language Models via Blockwise Locality

Masked diffusion language models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to standard autoregressive large language models (AR-LLMs), yet their optimization can be substantially less stable. We study blockwise MDMs and compare them with AR-LLMs on three controlled tasks that stress different aspects of structured generation: in-context linear regression, graph path-finding, and Sudoku solving. We find that standard random-masking MDMs fail to reliably learn linear regression, exhibit high variance training dynamics on graph path-finding, while outperforming AR-LLMs on Sudoku. To mitigate these instabilities, we propose two locality aware blockwise models, namely Jigsaw and Scatter, that inject left-to-right inductive bias by enforcing autoregressive locality within blocks while preserving iterative refinement at the block level. Empirically, Jigsaw matches AR-LLM stability on linear regression and remains strong on Sudoku, while Scatter retains diffusion's planning advantage on path-finding. Our results indicate that standard random-masking MDMs, even with blockwise variants, may be a suboptimal instantiation of diffusion LMs for ordered generation, motivating models beyond random masking.

Mitigating the ID-OOD Tradeoff in Open-Set Test-Time Adaptation

Open-set test-time adaptation (OSTTA) addresses the challenge of adapting models to new environments where out-of-distribution (OOD) samples coexist with in-distribution (ID) samples affected by distribution shifts. In such settings, covariate shift-for example, changes in weather conditions such as snow-can alter ID samples, reducing model reliability. Consequently, models must not only correctly classify covariate-shifted ID (csID) samples but also effectively reject covariate-shifted OOD (csOOD) samples. Entropy minimization is a common strategy in test-time adaptation to maintain ID performance under distribution shifts, while entropy maximization is widely applied to enhance OOD detection. Several studies have sought to combine these objectives to tackle the challenges of OSTTA. However, the intrinsic conflict between entropy minimization and maximization inevitably leads to a trade-off between csID classification and csOOD detection. In this paper, we first analyze the limitations of entropy maximization in OSTTA and then introduce an angular loss to regulate feature norm magnitudes, along with a feature-norm loss to suppress csOOD logits, thereby improving OOD detection. These objectives form ROSETTA, a $\underline{r}$obust $\underline{o}$pen-$\underline{se}$t $\underline{t}$est-$\underline{t}$ime $\underline{a}$daptation. Our method achieves strong OOD detection while maintaining high ID classification performance on CIFAR-10-C, CIFAR-100-C, Tiny-ImageNet-C and ImageNet-C. Furthermore, experiments on the Cityscapes validate the method's effectiveness in real-world semantic segmentation, and results on the HAC dataset demonstrate its applicability across different open-set TTA setups.

LGFNet: Local-Global Fusion Network with Fidelity Gap Delta Learning for Multi-Source Aerodynamics

The precise fusion of computational fluid dynamic (CFD) data, wind tunnel tests data, and flight tests data in aerodynamic area is essential for obtaining comprehensive knowledge of both localized flow structures and global aerodynamic trends across the entire flight envelope. However, existing methodologies often struggle to balance high-resolution local fidelity with wide-range global dependency, leading to either a loss of sharp discontinuities or an inability to capture long-range topological correlations. We propose Local-Global Fusion Network (LGFNet) for multi-scale feature decomposition to extract this dual-natured aerodynamic knowledge. To this end, LGFNet combines a spatial perception layer that integrates a sliding window mechanism with a relational reasoning layer based on self-attention, simultaneously reinforcing the continuity of fine-grained local features (e.g., shock waves) and capturing long-range flow information. Furthermore, the fidelity gap delta learning (FGDL) strategy is proposed to treat CFD data as a "low-frequency carrier" to explicitly approximate nonlinear discrepancies. This approach prevents unphysical smoothing while inheriting the foundational physical trends from the simulation baseline. Experiments demonstrate that LGFNet achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in both accuracy and uncertainty reduction across diverse aerodynamic scenarios.

Towards Spatio-Temporal World Scene Graph Generation from Monocular Videos

Spatio-temporal scene graphs provide a principled representation for modeling evolving object interactions, yet existing methods remain fundamentally frame-centric: they reason only about currently visible objects, discard entities upon occlusion, and operate in 2D. To address this, we first introduce ActionGenome4D, a dataset that upgrades Action Genome videos into 4D scenes via feed-forward 3D reconstruction, world-frame oriented bounding boxes for every object involved in actions, and dense relationship annotations including for objects that are temporarily unobserved due to occlusion or camera motion. Building on this data, we formalize World Scene Graph Generation (WSGG), the task of constructing a world scene graph at each timestamp that encompasses all interacting objects in the scene, both observed and unobserved. We then propose three complementary methods, each exploring a different inductive bias for reasoning about unobserved objects: PWG (Persistent World Graph), which implements object permanence via a zero-order feature buffer; MWAE (Masked World Auto-Encoder), which reframes unobserved-object reasoning as masked completion with cross-view associative retrieval; and 4DST (4D Scene Transformer), which replaces the static buffer with differentiable per-object temporal attention enriched by 3D motion and camera-pose features. We further design and evaluate the performance of strong open-source Vision-Language Models on the WSGG task via a suite of Graph RAG-based approaches, establishing baselines for unlocalized relationship prediction. WSGG thus advances video scene understanding toward world-centric, temporally persistent, and interpretable scene reasoning.

ManipulationNet: An Infrastructure for Benchmarking Real-World Robot Manipulation with Physical Skill Challenges and Embodied Multimodal Reasoning

Dexterous manipulation enables robots to purposefully alter the physical world, transforming them from passive observers into active agents in unstructured environments. This capability is the cornerstone of physical artificial intelligence. Despite decades of advances in hardware, perception, control, and learning, progress toward general manipulation systems remains fragmented due to the absence of widely adopted standard benchmarks. The central challenge lies in reconciling the variability of the real world with the reproducibility and authenticity required for rigorous scientific evaluation. To address this, we introduce ManipulationNet, a global infrastructure that hosts real-world benchmark tasks for robotic manipulation. ManipulationNet delivers reproducible task setups through standardized hardware kits, and enables distributed performance evaluation via a unified software client that delivers real-time task instructions and collects benchmarking results. As a persistent and scalable infrastructure, ManipulationNet organizes benchmark tasks into two complementary tracks: 1) the Physical Skills Track, which evaluates low-level physical interaction skills, and 2) the Embodied Reasoning Track, which tests high-level reasoning and multimodal grounding abilities. This design fosters the systematic growth of an interconnected network of real-world abilities and skills, paving the path toward general robotic manipulation. By enabling comparable manipulation research in the real world at scale, this infrastructure establishes a sustainable foundation for measuring long-term scientific progress and identifying capabilities ready for real-world deployment.

From Local Matches to Global Masks: Novel Instance Detection in Open-World Scenes

Detecting and segmenting novel object instances in open-world environments is a fundamental problem in robotic perception. Given only a small set of template images, a robot must locate and segment a specific object instance in a cluttered, previously unseen scene. Existing proposal-based approaches are highly sensitive to proposal quality and often fail under occlusion and background clutter. We propose L2G-Det, a local-to-global instance detection framework that bypasses explicit object proposals by leveraging dense patch-level matching between templates and the query image. Locally matched patches generate candidate points, which are refined through a candidate selection module to suppress false positives. The filtered points are then used to prompt an augmented Segment Anything Model (SAM) with instance-specific object tokens, enabling reliable reconstruction of complete instance masks. Experiments demonstrate improved performance over proposal-based methods in challenging open-world settings.

Robometer: Scaling General-Purpose Robotic Reward Models via Trajectory Comparisons

General-purpose robot reward models are typically trained to predict absolute task progress from expert demonstrations, providing only local, frame-level supervision. While effective for expert demonstrations, this paradigm scales poorly to large-scale robotics datasets where failed and suboptimal trajectories are abundant and assigning dense progress labels is ambiguous. We introduce Robometer, a scalable reward modeling framework that combines intra-trajectory progress supervision with inter-trajectory preference supervision. Robometer is trained with a dual objective: a frame-level progress loss that anchors reward magnitude on expert data, and a trajectory-comparison preference loss that imposes global ordering constraints across trajectories of the same task, enabling effective learning from both real and augmented failed trajectories. To support this formulation at scale, we curate RBM-1M, a reward-learning dataset comprising over one million trajectories spanning diverse robot embodiments and tasks, including substantial suboptimal and failure data. Across benchmarks and real-world evaluations, Robometer learns more generalizable reward functions than prior methods and improves robot learning performance across a diverse set of downstream applications. Code, model weights, and videos at https://robometer.github.io/.

Where to Touch, How to Contact: Hierarchical RL-MPC Framework for Geometry-Aware Long-Horizon Dexterous Manipulation

A key challenge in contact-rich dexterous manipulation is the need to jointly reason over geometry, kinematic constraints, and intricate, nonsmooth contact dynamics. End-to-end visuomotor policies bypass this structure, but often require large amounts of data, transfer poorly from simulation to reality, and generalize weakly across tasks/embodiments. We address those limitations by leveraging a simple insight: dexterous manipulation is inherently hierarchical - at a high level, a robot decides where to touch (geometry) and move the object (kinematics); at a low level it determines how to realize that plan through contact dynamics. Building on this insight, we propose a hierarchical RL--MPC framework in which a high-level reinforcement learning (RL) policy predicts a contact intention, a novel object-centric interface that specifies (i) an object-surface contact location and (ii) a post-contact object-level subgoal pose. Conditioned on this contact intention, a low-level contact-implicit model predictive control (MPC) optimizes local contact modes and replans with contact dynamics to generate robot actions that robustly drive the object toward each subgoal. We evaluate the framework on non-prehensile tasks, including geometry-generalized pushing and object 3D reorientation. It achieves near-100% success with substantially reduced data (10x less than end-to-end baselines), highly robust performance, and zero-shot sim-to-real transfer.

Disentangling Granularity: An Implicit Inductive Bias in Factorized VAEs

Despite the success in learning semantically meaningful, unsupervised disentangled representations, variational autoencoders (VAEs) and their variants face a fundamental theoretical challenge: substantial evidence indicates that unsupervised disentanglement is unattainable without implicit inductive bias, yet such bias remains elusive. In this work, we focus on exploring the implicit inductive bias that drive disentanglement in VAEs with factorization priors. By analyzing the total correlation in \b{eta}-TCVAE, we uncover a crucial implicit inductive bias called disentangling granularity, which leads to the discovery of an interesting "V"-shaped optimal Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) trajectory within the parameter space. This finding is validated through over 100K experiments using factorized VAEs and our newly proposed model, \b{eta}-STCVAE. Notably, experimental results reveal that conventional factorized VAEs, constrained by fixed disentangling granularity, inherently tend to disentangle low-complexity feature. Whereas, appropriately tuning disentangling granularity, as enabled by \b{eta}-STCVAE, broadens the range of disentangled representations, allowing for the disentanglement of high-complexity features. Our findings unveil that disentangling granularity as an implicit inductive bias in factorized VAEs influence both disentanglement performance and the inference of the ELBO, offering fresh insights into the interpretability and inherent biases of VAEs.

IIKL: Isometric Immersion Kernel Learning with Riemannian Manifold for Geometric Preservation

Geometric representation learning in preserving the intrinsic geometric and topological properties for discrete non-Euclidean data is crucial in scientific applications. Previous research generally mapped non-Euclidean discrete data into Euclidean space during representation learning, which may lead to the loss of some critical geometric information. In this paper, we propose a novel Isometric Immersion Kernel Learning (IIKL) method to build Riemannian manifold and isometrically induce Riemannian metric from discrete non-Euclidean data. We prove that Isometric immersion is equivalent to the kernel function in the tangent bundle on the manifold, which explicitly guarantees the invariance of the inner product between vectors in the arbitrary tangent space throughout the learning process, thus maintaining the geometric structure of the original data. Moreover, a novel parameterized learning model based on IIKL is introduced, and an alternating training method for this model is derived using Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE), ensuring efficient convergence. Experimental results proved that using the learned Riemannian manifold and its metric, our model preserved the intrinsic geometric representation of data in both 3D and high-dimensional datasets successfully, and significantly improved the accuracy of downstream tasks, such as data reconstruction and classification. It is showed that our method could reduce the inner product invariant loss by more than 90% compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, also achieved an average 40% improvement in downstream reconstruction accuracy and a 90% reduction in error for geometric metrics involving isometric and conformal.