FinBoardBench: Benchmarking Dynamic Wealth Management and Strategic Financial Reasoning of LLMs via Board Game Simulations

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have achieved superior performance in static financial reasoning and simple dynamic trading tasks. However, existing static financial benchmarks are insufficient to assess the dynamic wealth management and financial decision-making capabilities of LLMs in real-world environments. To bridge this gap, we present FinBoardBench, an evaluation suite based on three classic financial board games: Cashflow, Acquire, and Monopoly. FinBoardBench assesses a comprehensive set of financial skills, including personal cash flow management with debt balancing, corporate investment and acquisition forecasting, and competitive trade negotiations with asset auctions. Our experiments with 9 advanced LLMs reveal that while exhibiting basic long-term planning and investment logic, they fail to effectively leverage complex interactions for profit, and their strong static reasoning performance does not transform into successful dynamic decision-making. Notably, they tend to prioritize immediate asset acquisition over maintaining sufficient liquidity, making them vulnerable to financial crises triggered by random events. We hope that FinBoardBench can provide a valuable reference for more intelligent LLM-based decision-making systems in the future.

EasyVFX: Frequency-Driven Decoupling for Resource-Efficient VFX Generation

Generating high-fidelity visual effects (VFX) typically demands massive datasets and prohibitive computational power due to the intricate coupling of spatial textures and temporal dynamics. In this paper, we introduce EasyVFX, a resource-efficient framework that achieves realistic VFX synthesis under stringent constraints. Our core philosophy lies in frequency-domain decomposition: we observe that the complexity of VFX can be significantly mitigated by decoupling high-frequency components, which represent intricate spatial appearances, from low-frequency components that encapsulate global motion dynamics. This spectral disentanglement transforms a high-dimensional learning problem into manageable sub-tasks, thereby lowering the optimization barrier and reducing data dependency. Building upon this insight, we propose a two-stage training paradigm. First, we design a Frequency-aware Mixture-of-Experts (Freq-MoE) architecture. By utilizing a soft routing mechanism, our model assigns specialized experts to distinct spectral bands, enabling them to cultivate robust priors for appearance and motion dynamics. This specialization allows the model to acquire foundational VFX knowledge with fewer GPU resources. Second, we introduce a Test-Time Training strategy powered by a novel Frequency-constraint Loss. This allows the pre-trained model to swiftly adapt to specific, unseen effects through localized optimizations, requiring only about 100 steps on a single GPU. Experimental results demonstrate that EasyVFX produces structurally consistent and visually stunning effects, proving that frequency-aware learning is a key catalyst for democratizing professional-grade VFX.

Focused Forcing: Content-Aware Per-Frame KV Selection for Efficient Autoregressive Video Diffusion

Recent advances in autoregressive video diffusion have enabled sequential and streaming video generation. However, long-horizon generation requires increasingly large KV caches, making efficient compression without sacrificing quality challenging. Existing methods mostly select historical frames based on attention scores, but their context decisions remain coarse. When multiple frames are generated in the same chunk, these methods often apply a shared history selection to the whole chunk, score historical frames solely by attention, and assign head-wise budgets either uniformly or by attention-pattern heuristics rather than explicit head-importance estimation. We show that frames within the same generated chunk can depend on distinct historical frames, that the same historical frame can receive different attention scores as its relative temporal distance to the current frames changes, and that masking different heads induces unequal generation degradation. Motivated by these findings, we propose \textbf{Focused Forcing}, a training-free KV selection method that focuses cached history along both generated-frame and head dimensions. For each generated frame, Focused Forcing preserves the most relevant and distinctive historical frames by combining attention scores with diversity scores of historical frames, while assigning larger budgets to heads with higher estimated importance. Across multiple autoregressive generation paradigms, Focused Forcing achieves up to $\textbf{1.48}\times$ end-to-end acceleration without training, while \textbf{improving visual quality and text alignment}. \textit{Our code will be released on GitHub.}

Bridging the Embodiment Gap: Disentangled Cross-Embodiment Video Editing

Learning robotic manipulation from human videos is a promising solution to the data bottleneck in robotics, but the distribution shift between humans and robots remains a critical challenge. Existing approaches often produce entangled representations, where task-relevant information is coupled with human-specific kinematics, limiting their adaptability. We propose a generative framework for cross-embodiment video editing that directly addresses this by learning explicitly disentangled task and embodiment representations. Our method factorizes a demonstration video into two orthogonal latent spaces by enforcing a dual contrastive objective: it minimizes mutual information between the spaces to ensure independence while maximizing intra-space consistency to create stable representations. A parameter-efficient adapter injects these latent codes into a frozen video diffusion model, enabling the synthesis of a coherent robot execution video from a single human demonstration, without requiring paired cross-embodiment data. Experiments show our approach generates temporally consistent and morphologically accurate robot demonstrations, offering a scalable solution to leverage internet-scale human video for robot learning.

Catching the Infection Before It Spreads: Foresight-Guided Defense in Multi-Agent Systems

Large multimodal model-based Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) enable collaborative complex problem solving through specialized agents. However, MASs are vulnerable to infectious jailbreak, where compromising a single agent can spread to others, leading to widespread compromise. Existing defenses counter this by training a more contagious cure factor, biasing agents to retrieve it over virus adversarial examples (VirAEs). However, this homogenizes agent responses, providing only superficial suppression rather than true recovery. We revisit these defenses, which operate globally via a shared cure factor, while infectious jailbreak arise from localized interaction behaviors. This mismatch limits their effectiveness. To address this, we propose a training-free Foresight-Guided Local Purification (FLP) framework, where each agent reasons over future interactions to track behavioral evolution and eliminate infections. Specifically, each agent simulates future behavioral trajectories over subsequent chat rounds. To reflect diversity in MASs, we introduce a multi-persona simulation strategy for robust prediction across interaction contexts. We then use response diversity as a diagnostic signal to detect infection by analyzing inconsistencies across persona-based predictions at both retrieval-result and semantic levels. For infected agents, we apply localized purification: recent infections are mitigated via immediate album rollback, while long-term infections are handled using Recursive Binary Diagnosis (RBD), which recursively partitions the image album and applies the same diagnosis strategy to localize and eliminate VirAEs. Experiments show that FLP reduces the maximum cumulative infection rate from over 95% to below 5.47%. Moreover, retrieval and semantic metrics closely match benign baselines, indicating effective preservation of interaction diversity.

AvatarPointillist: AutoRegressive 4D Gaussian Avatarization

We introduce AvatarPointillist, a novel framework for generating dynamic 4D Gaussian avatars from a single portrait image. At the core of our method is a decoder-only Transformer that autoregressively generates a point cloud for 3D Gaussian Splatting. This sequential approach allows for precise, adaptive construction, dynamically adjusting point density and the total number of points based on the subject's complexity. During point generation, the AR model also jointly predicts per-point binding information, enabling realistic animation. After generation, a dedicated Gaussian decoder converts the points into complete, renderable Gaussian attributes. We demonstrate that conditioning the decoder on the latent features from the AR generator enables effective interaction between stages and markedly improves fidelity. Extensive experiments validate that AvatarPointillist produces high-quality, photorealistic, and controllable avatars. We believe this autoregressive formulation represents a new paradigm for avatar generation, and we will release our code inspire future research.

The Latent Space: Foundation, Evolution, Mechanism, Ability, and Outlook

Latent space is rapidly emerging as a native substrate for language-based models. While modern systems are still commonly understood through explicit token-level generation, an increasing body of work shows that many critical internal processes are more naturally carried out in continuous latent space than in human-readable verbal traces. This shift is driven by the structural limitations of explicit-space computation, including linguistic redundancy, discretization bottlenecks, sequential inefficiency, and semantic loss. This survey aims to provide a unified and up-to-date landscape of latent space in language-based models. We organize the survey into five sequential perspectives: Foundation, Evolution, Mechanism, Ability, and Outlook. We begin by delineating the scope of latent space, distinguishing it from explicit or verbal space and from the latent spaces commonly studied in generative visual models. We then trace the field's evolution from early exploratory efforts to the current large-scale expansion. To organize the technical landscape, we examine existing work through the complementary lenses of mechanism and ability. From the perspective of Mechanism, we identify four major lines of development: Architecture, Representation, Computation, and Optimization. From the perspective of Ability, we show how latent space supports a broad capability spectrum spanning Reasoning, Planning, Modeling, Perception, Memory, Collaboration, and Embodiment. Beyond consolidation, we discuss the key open challenges, and outline promising directions for future research. We hope this survey serves not only as a reference for existing work, but also as a foundation for understanding latent space as a general computational and systems paradigm for next-generation intelligence.

InstanceAnimator: Multi-Instance Sketch Video Colorization

We propose InstanceAnimator, a novel Diffusion Transformer framework for multi-instance sketch video colorization. Existing methods suffer from three core limitations: inflexible user control due to heavy reliance on single reference frames, poor instance controllability leading to misalignment in multi-character scenarios, and degraded detail fidelity in fine-grained regions. To address these challenges, we introduce three corresponding innovations. First, a Canvas Guidance Condition eliminates workflow fragmentation by allowing free placement of reference elements and background, enabling unprecedented user flexibility. Second, an Instance Matching Mechanism resolves misalignment by integrating instance features with the sketches, ensuring precise control over multiple characters. Third, an Adaptive Decoupled Control Module enhances detail fidelity by injecting semantic features from characters, backgrounds, and text conditions into the diffusion process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that InstanceAnimator achieves superior multi-instance colorization with enhanced user control, high visual quality, and strong instance consistency.

Group Editing : Edit Multiple Images in One Go

In this paper, we tackle the problem of performing consistent and unified modifications across a set of related images. This task is particularly challenging because these images may vary significantly in pose, viewpoint, and spatial layout. Achieving coherent edits requires establishing reliable correspondences across the images, so that modifications can be applied accurately to semantically aligned regions. To address this, we propose GroupEditing, a novel framework that builds both explicit and implicit relationships among images within a group. On the explicit side, we extract geometric correspondences using VGGT, which provides spatial alignment based on visual features. On the implicit side, we reformulate the image group as a pseudo-video and leverage the temporal coherence priors learned by pre-trained video models to capture latent relationships. To effectively fuse these two types of correspondences, we inject the explicit geometric cues from VGGT into the video model through a novel fusion mechanism. To support large-scale training, we construct GroupEditData, a new dataset containing high-quality masks and detailed captions for numerous image groups. Furthermore, to ensure identity preservation during editing, we introduce an alignment-enhanced RoPE module, which improves the model's ability to maintain consistent appearance across multiple images. Finally, we present GroupEditBench, a dedicated benchmark designed to evaluate the effectiveness of group-level image editing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GroupEditing significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of visual quality, cross-view consistency, and semantic alignment.

Manifold-Aware Exploration for Reinforcement Learning in Video Generation

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) methods for video generation like FlowGRPO remain far less reliable than their counterparts for language models and images. This gap arises because video generation has a complex solution space, and the ODE-to-SDE conversion used for exploration can inject excess noise, lowering rollout quality and making reward estimates less reliable, which destabilizes post-training alignment. To address this problem, we view the pre-trained model as defining a valid video data manifold and formulate the core problem as constraining exploration within the vicinity of this manifold, ensuring that rollout quality is preserved and reward estimates remain reliable. We propose SAGE-GRPO (Stable Alignment via Exploration), which applies constraints at both micro and macro levels. At the micro level, we derive a precise manifold-aware SDE with a logarithmic curvature correction and introduce a gradient norm equalizer to stabilize sampling and updates across timesteps. At the macro level, we use a dual trust region with a periodic moving anchor and stepwise constraints so that the trust region tracks checkpoints that are closer to the manifold and limits long-horizon drift. We evaluate SAGE-GRPO on HunyuanVideo1.5 using the original VideoAlign as the reward model and observe consistent gains over previous methods in VQ, MQ, TA, and visual metrics (CLIPScore, PickScore), demonstrating superior performance in both reward maximization and overall video quality. The code and visual gallery are available at https://dungeonmassster.github.io/SAGE-GRPO-Page/.