Beyond Starry Night: Shortcut-Aware Control-State Planning for Artist-Grounded Text to Image Generation

Artist-grounded image generation requires more than appending an artist name to a prompt. Image models often respond to artist names through canonical shortcuts, such as recurring motifs, generic palettes, or overrepresented period signatures, rather than preserving the user's intended scene. We introduce Atelier, a shortcut-aware control-state planning framework for artist-grounded image generation. Atelier translates underspecified artistic intent into an explicit control state that separates scene anchors, preserve/transform decisions, style-regime hypotheses, role-bound artist evidence, and shortcut-avoidance constraints. It grounds this state using artist-level knowledge and local patch references, compiles backend-aware generation plans, and iteratively refines candidates through global and local authenticity feedback. We further introduce ArtIntentBench, a benchmark covering Van Gogh and Qi Baishi across artwork re-rendering, period/style-controlled generation, historically unseen subjects, shortcut auditing, and human preference evaluation. Across open-weight and closed-source generators, Atelier improves artist-level style fidelity, preserves source structure more faithfully, and substantially reduces shortcut substitution compared with prompt-engineered, retrieval-augmented, and general-purpose agent baselines. These results suggest that artist-grounded generation is bottlenecked not only by image synthesis, but by the upstream inference of explicit, evidence-grounded artistic controls.

Anticipatory Digital Twins for Online Head-and-Neck Adaptive Proton Therapy via Foundation-Model Registration

Head-and-neck (HN) proton therapy is highly sensitive to anatomical change over a 4-to-6-week course, as tumor shrinkage, weight loss, and setup variation can misposition the Bragg peak near critical organs such as the parotids, oral cavity, brainstem, and spinal cord, leading to target underdosing or organ-at-risk overdosing. Online adaptive proton therapy replans on the anatomy of the day, yet standard workflows rely on offline replanning that requires repeated CT acquisition and roughly a week of preparation, adding burden, cost, and delay. We investigate whether a patient's treatment-day anatomy can be predicted before image acquisition by transferring longitudinal change from a population database. We propose a digital-twin framework built on a pretrained foundation-model deformable registration network used without patient-specific training. A first registration aligns a prior patient's planning CT to the target and carries the prior's during-treatment quality assurance CT (QACT) into the target frame; a second registration estimates the prior's planning-to-QACT change, which is then applied to the target's own planning CT to synthesize predicted CTs (pdCTs) with propagated contours. Using 88 HN patients, each with a planning CT and three QACTs, we show that pdCTs better match treatment-day anatomy than the static planning CT. Compared with the planning CT alone, normalized cross-correlation improves by 22.8%, Dice for organs-at-risk by 20.2%, and CT-number error decreases by 23.4%. Gains are largest for patients with major anatomical change and negligible when anatomy is stable. This cross-patient motion transfer leverages the digital-twin concept to anticipate treatment-day anatomy, enabling personalized online adaptive proton therapy without repeated imaging.

Streaming Multi-Agent Autoregressive Diffusion Model with World State Registers

Multi-agent interactive world models should not only generate consistent observations, but also maintain world states that persist across agents and evolve across views. Existing autoregressive video diffusion pipelines carry forward observation history as conditioning context, which makes shared state difficult to maintain in multi-agent and multi-view settings. We present WorldWeaver (W^2), a streaming multi-agent video diffusion model that augments rollout with cross-agent world state registers: learnable tokens that store shared world information, track individual agent status, and are dynamically updated after each generated chunk. We ground these registers with supervision signals spanning individual agent status, global state views including bird's-eye views, and scene text. We further improve the architecture with a Mixture-of-Transformers design that uses separate weights for world state modeling and visual frame modeling. Extensive experiments in two-agent Minecraft video generation show that explicit world-state modeling improves logical consistency and generation quality.

UniTemp: Unlocking Video Generation in Any Temporal Order via Bidirectional Distillation

Autoregressive video diffusion models have emerged as a promising approach for long video generation, achieving strong performance in streaming settings. However, existing methods are restricted to forward temporal generation, whereas practical video creation often requires flexible generation order, e.g., conditioning on future context to extend backward, or on both past and future context for inbetween generation. We bridge this gap by training an autoregressive model that supports generation in arbitrary temporal directions. A key technical challenge arises from the Causal 3D VAE widely used in video diffusion models, which encodes latents strictly conditioned on past context. While suited for forward generation, this causal structure causes inter-block discontinuities when generation proceeds backward. To address this, we introduce blockwise anchor latents, a set of auxiliary latents that restore the missing past context at block boundaries during backward generation. Built on this design, we propose UniTemp, a bidirectional distillation framework that trains a single autoregressive student model for any-direction video generation. At inference time, UniTemp conditions on arbitrary past and/or future frames, improving controllability for both bidirectional and inbetween generation. Experiments show that UniTemp maintains competitive performance on short and long video generation compared to forward-only methods, while enabling diverse workflows such as bidirectional video extension, inbetween generation, looping video generation, scene transition, and visual story generation. Project website: https://lzhangbj.github.io/projects/unitemp/

From Shortcuts to Reasoning: Robust Post-Training of Theory of Mind with Reinforcement Learning

Theory of Mind (ToM) is a must-acquire skill for modern foundation model systems to operate effectively and safely in the real world. Recent works have explored honing ToM via post-training; however, we show that such progress is confounded by a pervasive "shortcut" issue: tasks can reach up to 99% accuracy by simply exploiting spurious causal correlations, leading to a false sense of ToM. Motivated by this, we first develop a framework to systematically examine ToM datasets for shortcuts and provide guidance for future development. We find that questions reducible to pure state tracking, such as "belief," are especially shortcut-prone compared to mind questions, such as "intention," where reasoning beyond tracking is required. Using four shortcut-free datasets across three ToM contexts, we then comprehensively study whether Reinforcement Fine-Tuning with verifiable rewards and explicit reasoning chains, called Thinking-RFT, elevates ToM beyond Supervised Fine-Tuning, or SFT. Our key findings are as follows. First, Thinking-RFT effectively improves ToM in all scenarios, with a 6% improvement over SFT, particularly in complex higher-order reasoning, with a 10% improvement over SFT, and multimodal cases, with a 7% improvement over SFT. It also generalizes notably better to unseen domains and higher-order queries while being more robust to counterfactuals. Second, ToM benefits specifically from the joint effect of reasoning and RL: Thinking-RFT outperforms Non-Thinking-RFT by 7% on average. Third, RFT works by learning to ground its reasoning on anchor cues, such as keywords and state changes, that correspond to causal factors. We believe our study is useful for developing effective and robust ToM post-training datasets and advancing critical ToM capabilities.

Personal AI Agent for Camera Roll VQA

We study the personal camera roll visual question answering setting. In this setting, a conversational AI assistant can access a user's personal camera roll and retrieve relevant photos to answer queries, ranging from simple factual questions (e.g., ``Name of the food I tried yesterday?'') to more open-ended ones (e.g., ``Recommend some dishes I have never eaten before''). Given the vast nature of the personal camera roll (i.e., multiple years, hundreds to thousands of photos), a successful AI assistant needs to understand a long-horizon, highly personalized visual content stream in order to navigate and locate the correct and/or relevant information. To support this, we collect and manually annotate questions that mimic real-world usage. The final dataset, camroll, contains 50 users, 31,476 images, and 2,500 QA pairs. We further design camroll-agent, a conversational AI agent equipped with hierarchical memory and a minimal set of tools for efficient navigation over large, personalized visual memory. Experimental results show that camroll-agent outperforms numerous baselines and methods for long-context understanding AI agents system. Together, the camroll dataset and camroll-agent highlight the gap in AI agents' long-context reasoning: personalized visual memory requires different approaches from standard long-context textual memory, especially when consistency, visual details, and user-specific context are present.

Personal Visual Memory from Explicit and Implicit Evidence

Long-term memory is increasingly important for personalized AI agents, yet existing benchmarks and methods remain largely text-centric. Even when images are included, the user-specific information needed for later questions is typically recoverable from text alone, and most memory systems reduce image turns to generic captions. Yet images often carry personal information that text rarely states -- both explicit evidence, such as recurring user-associated entities, and implicit evidence, such as latent user facts inferred from visual or multimodal cues. We introduce a benchmark for personal visual memory that targets both forms of evidence, and propose VisualMem, a hybrid visual--text architecture that augments a text-memory backend with a structured personal visual memory module. Rather than collapsing images into captions, VisualMem uses conversational context to resolve identity, ownership, and durable user facts. Experiments show that VisualMem substantially outperforms prior memory systems on our benchmark while remaining competitive on standard text-memory benchmarks, indicating that personal visual memory is a distinct and important component of long-term memory for personalized AI agents.

Universal CT Representations from Anatomy to Disease Phenotype through Agglomerative Pretraining

Computed tomography (CT) is a central to three-dimensional medical imaging, yet CT-based artificial intelligence remains fragmented across task-specific models for segmentation, classification, registration, and report analysis. Here we present FlexiCT, a family of CT foundation models trained by agglomerative continual pretraining on 266,227 CT volumes from 56 publicly available datasets, forming a large-scale public resource for CT representation learning. FlexiCT uses agglomerative pretraining across three stages: two-dimensional axial pretraining, three-dimensional anatomical pretraining and report-guided semantic alignment. This training strategy supports slice-level, volume-level and vision-language analysis. Across five downstream task families (segmentation, classification, registration, vision-language understanding and clinical retrieval), FlexiCT matches or exceeds prior task-specific approaches on multiple benchmarks. Its embeddings further organize CT scans along gradients associated with various tumor stages, suggesting that CT foundation models can capture imaging features relevant to disease phenotype characterization. Code is available at https://github.com/ricklisz/FlexiCT

Planning, Scheduling, and Behavior in EV Charging Systems: A Critical Survey and Trilemma Framework

The rapid growth of electric vehicles is shifting the main constraint on transport electrification from vehicle adoption to the deployment and operation of charging infrastructure. Charging-network design requires decisions across three interdependent layers: Planning, which determines where and how much infrastructure to build; Scheduling, which governs charging dispatch, pricing, and grid interaction; and Behavior, which captures how users choose stations, charging times, and charging durations. Existing studies have advanced each layer substantially, but the literature remains fragmented, and cross-layer interactions are often treated through simplifying assumptions. This survey develops a three-layer Planning-Scheduling-Behavior (PSB) framework to organize EV charging research according to decision horizon, actor objective, and coupling structure. We further identify a fidelity-tractability tradeoff, termed the PSB trilemma: each layer is computationally difficult in isolation, and realistic integration across layers generally requires reducing the fidelity of at least one layer. Reviewing the three pairwise-coupling literatures - Planning-Scheduling, Scheduling-Behavior, and Planning-Behavior - we show that the omitted third layer is typically fixed exogenously or represented by a static aggregate surrogate. These simplifications enable tractability but impose distinct costs: they can obscure long-term investment feedback, temporal grid and emissions dynamics, or heterogeneous user response and equity outcomes. Building on this diagnosis, we identify open challenges in emerging charging technologies, behavioral incentives, equity metrics, and city-scale learning-based methods that balance fidelity, interpretability, and policy relevance.

Quantitative Video World Model Evaluation for Geometric-Consistency

Generative video models are increasingly studied as implicit world models, yet evaluating whether they produce physically plausible 3D structure and motion remains challenging. Most existing video evaluation pipelines rely heavily on human judgment or learned graders, which can be subjective and weakly diagnostic for geometric failures. We introduce PDI-Bench (Perspective Distortion Index), a quantitative framework for auditing geometric coherence in generated videos. Given a generated clip, we obtain object-centric observations via segmentation and point tracking (e.g., SAM 2, MegaSaM, and CoTracker3), lift them to 3D world-space coordinates via monocular reconstruction, and compute a set of projective-geometry residuals capturing three failure dimensions: scale-depth alignment, 3D motion consistency, and 3D structural rigidity. To support systematic evaluation, we build PDI-Dataset, covering diverse scenarios designed to stress these geometric constraints. Across state-of-the-art video generators, PDI reveals consistent geometry-specific failure modes that are not captured by common perceptual metrics, and provides a diagnostic signal for progress toward physically grounded video generation and physical world model. Our code and dataset can be found at https://pdi-bench.github.io/.