Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Abstract:This paper reports on the LoViF 2026 PhyScore challenge, a competition on holistic quality assessment of world-model-generated videos across both 2D and 4D generation settings. The challenge is motivated by a central gap in current evaluation practice: perceptual quality alone is insufficient to judge whether generated dynamics are physically plausible, temporally coherent, and consistent with input conditions. Participants are required to build a metric that jointly predicts four dimensions, i.e., Video Quality, Physical Realism, Condition-Video Alignment, and Temporal Consistency. Depart from that, participants also need to localize physical anomaly timestamps for fine-grained diagnosis. The benchmark dataset contains 1,554 videos generated by seven representative world generative models, organized into three tracks (text-2D, image-to-4D, and video-to-4D) and spanning 26 categories. These categories explicitly cover physics-relevant scenarios, including dynamics, optics, and thermodynamics, together with diverse real-world and creative content. To ensure label reliability, scores and anomaly timestamps are produced through trained human annotation with an additional automated quality-control pass. Evaluation is based on both score prediction and anomaly localization, with a composite protocol that combines TimeStamp_IOU and SRCC/PLCC. This report summarizes the challenge design and provides method-level insights from submitted solutions.
Abstract:Autoregressive models have shown superior performance and efficiency in image generation, but remain constrained by high computational costs and prolonged training times in video generation. In this study, we explore methods to accelerate training for autoregressive video generation models through empirical analyses. Our results reveal that while training on fewer video frames significantly reduces training time, it also exacerbates error accumulation and introduces inconsistencies in the generated videos. To address these issues, we propose a Local Optimization (Local Opt.) method, which optimizes tokens within localized windows while leveraging contextual information to reduce error propagation. Inspired by Lipschitz continuity, we propose a Representation Continuity (ReCo) strategy to improve the consistency of generated videos. ReCo utilizes continuity loss to constrain representation changes, improving model robustness and reducing error accumulation. Extensive experiments on class- and text-to-video datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance to the baseline while halving the training cost without sacrificing quality.
Abstract:Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have enabled visually coherent image synthesis from descriptions, but generating images containing multiple given subjects remains challenging. As the number of reference identities increases, existing methods often suffer from subject missing and semantic drift. To address this problem, we propose MUSIC, the first MLLM specifically designed for \textbf{MU}lti-\textbf{S}ubject \textbf{I}n-\textbf{C}ontext image generation. To overcome the data scarcity, we introduce an automatic and scalable data generation pipeline that eliminates the need for manual annotation. Furthermore, we enhance the model's understanding of multi-subject semantic relationships through a vision chain-of-thought (CoT) mechanism, guiding step-by-step reasoning from subject images to semantics and generation. To mitigate identity entanglement and manage visual complexity, we develop a novel semantics-driven spatial layout planning method and demonstrate its test-time scalability. By incorporating complex subject images during training, we improve the model's capacity for chained reasoning. In addition, we curate MSIC, a new benchmark tailored for multi-subject in-context generation. Experimental results demonstrate that MUSIC significantly surpasses other methods in both multi- and single-subject scenarios.
Abstract:Unified multimodal models provide a natural and promising architecture for understanding diverse and complex real-world knowledge while generating high-quality images. However, they still rely primarily on frozen parametric knowledge, which makes them struggle with real-world image generation involving long-tail and knowledge-intensive concepts. Inspired by the broad success of agents on real-world tasks, we explore agentic modeling to address this limitation. Specifically, we present Unify-Agent, a unified multimodal agent for world-grounded image synthesis, which reframes image generation as an agentic pipeline consisting of prompt understanding, multimodal evidence searching, grounded recaptioning, and final synthesis. To train our model, we construct a tailored multimodal data pipeline and curate 143K high-quality agent trajectories for world-grounded image synthesis, enabling effective supervision over the full agentic generation process. We further introduce FactIP, a benchmark covering 12 categories of culturally significant and long-tail factual concepts that explicitly requires external knowledge grounding. Extensive experiments show that our proposed Unify-Agent substantially improves over its base unified model across diverse benchmarks and real world generation tasks, while approaching the world knowledge capabilities of the strongest closed-source models. As an early exploration of agent-based modeling for world-grounded image synthesis, our work highlights the value of tightly coupling reasoning, searching, and generation for reliable open-world agentic image synthesis.
Abstract:Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in medical image analysis. However, their application in gastrointestinal endoscopy is currently hindered by two critical limitations: the misalignment between general model reasoning and standardized clinical cognitive pathways, and the lack of causal association between visual features and diagnostic outcomes. In this paper, we propose a novel Clinical-Cognitive-Aligned (CogAlign) framework to address these challenges. First, we endow the model with rigorous clinical analytical capabilities by constructing the hierarchical clinical cognition dataset and employing Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Unlike conventional approaches, this strategy internalizes the hierarchical diagnostic logic of experts, ranging from anatomical localization and morphological evaluation to microvascular analysis, directly into the model. Second, to eliminate visual bias, we provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating that standard supervised tuning inevitably converges to spurious background correlations. Guided by this insight, we propose a counterfactual-driven reinforcement learning strategy to enforce causal rectification. By generating counterfactual normal samples via lesion masking and optimizing through clinical-cognition-centric rewards, we constrain the model to strictly ground its diagnosis in causal lesion features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves State-of-the-Art (SoTA) performance across multiple benchmarks, significantly enhancing diagnostic accuracy in complex clinical scenarios. All source code and datasets will be made publicly available.
Abstract:Discrete Diffusion Language Models have emerged as a compelling paradigm for unified multimodal generation, yet their deployment is hindered by high inference latency arising from iterative decoding. Existing acceleration strategies often require expensive re-training or fail to leverage the 2D spatial redundancy inherent in visual data. To address this, we propose Locality-Aware Dynamic Rescue (LADR), a training-free method that expedites inference by exploiting the spatial Markov property of images. LADR prioritizes the recovery of tokens at the ''generation frontier'', regions spatially adjacent to observed pixels, thereby maximizing information gain. Specifically, our method integrates morphological neighbor identification to locate candidate tokens, employs a risk-bounded filtering mechanism to prevent error propagation, and utilizes manifold-consistent inverse scheduling to align the diffusion trajectory with the accelerated mask density. Extensive experiments on four text-to-image generation benchmarks demonstrate that our LADR achieves an approximate 4 x speedup over standard baselines. Remarkably, it maintains or even enhances generative fidelity, particularly in spatial reasoning tasks, offering a state-of-the-art trade-off between efficiency and quality.
Abstract:While Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate impressive general visual capabilities, they remain artistically blind and unable to offer professional evaluation of artworks within specific artistic domains like human experts. To bridge this gap, we transform VLMs into experts capable of professional-grade painting evaluation in the Chinese Artistic Domain, which is more abstract and demands extensive artistic training for evaluation. We introduce HanMo-Bench, a new dataset that features authentic auction-grade masterpieces and AI-generated works, grounded in real-world market valuations. To realize the rigorous judgment, we propose the HanMoVLM and construct a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) validated by experts. This CoT guides the model to perform expert-level reasoning: from content identification and Region of Interest (RoI) localization to professional evaluation, guided by both theme-specific evaluation and typical three-tier evaluation in Chinese paintings. Furthermore, we design a reward function to refine the reasoning process of the HanMoVLM to improve the accuracy. We demonstrate that HanMoVLM can serve as a critical backbone for Test-time Scaling in image generation. By acting as a high-quality verifier, HanMoVLM enables generative models to select the most artistically superior outputs from multiple candidates. Experimental results and human studies confirm that the proposed HanMoVLM effectively bridges the gap, achieving a high consistency with professional experts and significantly improving the quality of Chinese Painting generation.
Abstract:Recent studies have explored autoregressive models for image generation, with promising results, and have combined diffusion models with autoregressive frameworks to optimize image generation via diffusion losses. In this study, we present a theoretical analysis of diffusion and autoregressive models with diffusion loss, highlighting the latter's advantages. We present a theoretical comparison of conditional diffusion and autoregressive diffusion with diffusion loss, demonstrating that patch denoising optimization in autoregressive models effectively mitigates condition errors and leads to a stable condition distribution. Our analysis also reveals that autoregressive condition generation refines the condition, causing the condition error influence to decay exponentially. In addition, we introduce a novel condition refinement approach based on Optimal Transport (OT) theory to address ``condition inconsistency''. We theoretically demonstrate that formulating condition refinement as a Wasserstein Gradient Flow ensures convergence toward the ideal condition distribution, effectively mitigating condition inconsistency. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over diffusion and autoregressive models with diffusion loss methods.
Abstract:Current end-to-end autonomous driving systems operate at a level of intelligence akin to following simple steering commands. However, achieving genuinely intelligent autonomy requires a paradigm shift: moving from merely executing low-level instructions to understanding and fulfilling high-level, abstract human intentions. This leap from a command-follower to an intention-fulfiller, as illustrated in our conceptual framework, is hindered by a fundamental challenge: the absence of a standardized benchmark to measure and drive progress on this complex task. To address this critical gap, we introduce Intention-Drive, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the ability to translate high-level human intent into safe and precise driving actions. Intention-Drive features two core contributions: (1) a new dataset of complex scenarios paired with corresponding natural language intentions, and (2) a novel evaluation protocol centered on the Intent Success Rate (ISR), which assesses the semantic fulfillment of the human's goal beyond simple geometric accuracy. Through an extensive evaluation of a spectrum of baseline models on Intention-Drive, we reveal a significant performance deficit, showing that the baseline model struggle to achieve the comprehensive scene and intention understanding required for this advanced task.
Abstract:Gloss-free sign language translation (SLT) is hindered by two key challenges: **inadequate sign representation** that fails to capture nuanced visual cues, and **sentence-level semantic misalignment** in current LLM-based methods, which limits translation quality. To address these issues, we propose a three-stage **r**einforcing **v**ision-**l**anguage **f**ramework (**RVLF**). We build a large vision-language model (LVLM) specifically designed for sign language, and then combine it with reinforcement learning (RL) to adaptively enhance translation performance. First, for a sufficient representation of sign language, RVLF introduces an effective semantic representation learning mechanism that fuses skeleton-based motion cues with semantically rich visual features extracted via DINOv2, followed by instruction tuning to obtain a strong SLT-SFT baseline. Then, to improve sentence-level semantic misalignment, we introduce a GRPO-based optimization strategy that fine-tunes the SLT-SFT model with a reward function combining translation fidelity (BLEU) and sentence completeness (ROUGE), yielding the optimized model termed SLT-GRPO. Our conceptually simple framework yields substantial gains under the gloss-free SLT setting without pre-training on any external large-scale sign language datasets, improving BLEU-4 scores by +5.1, +1.11, +1.4, and +1.61 on the CSL-Daily, PHOENIX-2014T, How2Sign, and OpenASL datasets, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to incorporate GRPO into SLT. Extensive experiments and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of GRPO-based optimization in enhancing both translation quality and semantic consistency.