From Single Scan to Sequential Consistency: A New Paradigm for LIDAR Relocalization

LiDAR relocalization aims to estimate the global 6-DoF pose of a sensor in the environment. However, existing regression-based approaches are prone to dynamic or ambiguous scenarios, as they either solely rely on single-frame inference or neglect the spatio-temporal consistency across scans. In this paper, we propose TempLoc, a new LiDAR relocalization framework that enhances the robustness of localization by effectively modeling sequential consistency. Specifically, a Global Coordinate Estimation module is first introduced to predict point-wise global coordinates and associated uncertainties for each LiDAR scan. A Prior Coordinate Generation module is then presented to estimate inter-frame point correspondences by the attention mechanism. Lastly, an Uncertainty-Guided Coordinate Fusion module is deployed to integrate both predictions of point correspondence in an end-to-end fashion, yielding a more temporally consistent and accurate global 6-DoF pose. Experimental results on the NCLT and Oxford Robot-Car benchmarks show that our TempLoc outperforms stateof-the-art methods by a large margin, demonstrating the effectiveness of temporal-aware correspondence modeling in LiDAR relocalization. Our code will be released soon.

MM-Sonate: Multimodal Controllable Audio-Video Generation with Zero-Shot Voice Cloning

Joint audio-video generation aims to synthesize synchronized multisensory content, yet current unified models struggle with fine-grained acoustic control, particularly for identity-preserving speech. Existing approaches either suffer from temporal misalignment due to cascaded generation or lack the capability to perform zero-shot voice cloning within a joint synthesis framework. In this work, we present MM-Sonate, a multimodal flow-matching framework that unifies controllable audio-video joint generation with zero-shot voice cloning capabilities. Unlike prior works that rely on coarse semantic descriptions, MM-Sonate utilizes a unified instruction-phoneme input to enforce strict linguistic and temporal alignment. To enable zero-shot voice cloning, we introduce a timbre injection mechanism that effectively decouples speaker identity from linguistic content. Furthermore, addressing the limitations of standard classifier-free guidance in multimodal settings, we propose a noise-based negative conditioning strategy that utilizes natural noise priors to significantly enhance acoustic fidelity. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that MM-Sonate establishes new state-of-the-art performance in joint generation benchmarks, significantly outperforming baselines in lip synchronization and speech intelligibility, while achieving voice cloning fidelity comparable to specialized Text-to-Speech systems.

Klear: Unified Multi-Task Audio-Video Joint Generation

Audio-video joint generation has progressed rapidly, yet substantial challenges still remain. Non-commercial approaches still suffer audio-visual asynchrony, poor lip-speech alignment, and unimodal degradation, which can be stemmed from weak audio-visual correspondence modeling, limited generalization, and scarce high-quality dense-caption data. To address these issues, we introduce Klear and delve into three axes--model architecture, training strategy, and data curation. Architecturally, we adopt a single-tower design with unified DiT blocks and an Omni-Full Attention mechanism, achieving tight audio-visual alignment and strong scalability. Training-wise, we adopt a progressive multitask regime--random modality masking to joint optimization across tasks, and a multistage curriculum, yielding robust representations, strengthening A-V aligned world knowledge, and preventing unimodal collapse. For datasets, we present the first large-scale audio-video dataset with dense captions, and introduce a novel automated data-construction pipeline which annotates and filters millions of diverse, high-quality, strictly aligned audio-video-caption triplets. Building on this, Klear scales to large datasets, delivering high-fidelity, semantically and temporally aligned, instruction-following generation in both joint and unimodal settings while generalizing robustly to out-of-distribution scenarios. Across tasks, it substantially outperforms prior methods by a large margin and achieves performance comparable to Veo 3, offering a unified, scalable path toward next-generation audio-video synthesis.

CVD-STORM: Cross-View Video Diffusion with Spatial-Temporal Reconstruction Model for Autonomous Driving

Generative models have been widely applied to world modeling for environment simulation and future state prediction. With advancements in autonomous driving, there is a growing demand not only for high-fidelity video generation under various controls, but also for producing diverse and meaningful information such as depth estimation. To address this, we propose CVD-STORM, a cross-view video diffusion model utilizing a spatial-temporal reconstruction Variational Autoencoder (VAE) that generates long-term, multi-view videos with 4D reconstruction capabilities under various control inputs. Our approach first fine-tunes the VAE with an auxiliary 4D reconstruction task, enhancing its ability to encode 3D structures and temporal dynamics. Subsequently, we integrate this VAE into the video diffusion process to significantly improve generation quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves substantial improvements in both FID and FVD metrics. Additionally, the jointly-trained Gaussian Splatting Decoder effectively reconstructs dynamic scenes, providing valuable geometric information for comprehensive scene understanding.

AudioStory: Generating Long-Form Narrative Audio with Large Language Models

Recent advances in text-to-audio (TTA) generation excel at synthesizing short audio clips but struggle with long-form narrative audio, which requires temporal coherence and compositional reasoning. To address this gap, we propose AudioStory, a unified framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) with TTA systems to generate structured, long-form audio narratives. AudioStory possesses strong instruction-following reasoning generation capabilities. It employs LLMs to decompose complex narrative queries into temporally ordered sub-tasks with contextual cues, enabling coherent scene transitions and emotional tone consistency. AudioStory has two appealing features: (1) Decoupled bridging mechanism: AudioStory disentangles LLM-diffuser collaboration into two specialized components, i.e., a bridging query for intra-event semantic alignment and a residual query for cross-event coherence preservation. (2) End-to-end training: By unifying instruction comprehension and audio generation within a single end-to-end framework, AudioStory eliminates the need for modular training pipelines while enhancing synergy between components. Furthermore, we establish a benchmark AudioStory-10K, encompassing diverse domains such as animated soundscapes and natural sound narratives. Extensive experiments show the superiority of AudioStory on both single-audio generation and narrative audio generation, surpassing prior TTA baselines in both instruction-following ability and audio fidelity. Our code is available at https://github.com/TencentARC/AudioStory

ReasonPlan: Unified Scene Prediction and Decision Reasoning for Closed-loop Autonomous Driving

Due to the powerful vision-language reasoning and generalization abilities, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have garnered significant attention in the field of end-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving. However, their application to closed-loop systems remains underexplored, and current MLLM-based methods have not shown clear superiority to mainstream E2E imitation learning approaches. In this work, we propose ReasonPlan, a novel MLLM fine-tuning framework designed for closed-loop driving through holistic reasoning with a self-supervised Next Scene Prediction task and supervised Decision Chain-of-Thought process. This dual mechanism encourages the model to align visual representations with actionable driving context, while promoting interpretable and causally grounded decision making. We curate a planning-oriented decision reasoning dataset, namely PDR, comprising 210k diverse and high-quality samples. Our method outperforms the mainstream E2E imitation learning method by a large margin of 19% L2 and 16.1 driving score on Bench2Drive benchmark. Furthermore, ReasonPlan demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization on unseen DOS benchmark, highlighting its adaptability in handling zero-shot corner cases. Code and dataset will be found in https://github.com/Liuxueyi/ReasonPlan.

Parallel Layer Normalization for Universal Approximation

Universal approximation theorem (UAT) is a fundamental theory for deep neural networks (DNNs), demonstrating their powerful representation capacity to represent and approximate any function. The analyses and proofs of UAT are based on traditional network with only linear and nonlinear activation functions, but omitting normalization layers, which are commonly employed to enhance the training of modern networks. This paper conducts research on UAT of DNNs with normalization layers for the first time. We theoretically prove that an infinitely wide network -- composed solely of parallel layer normalization (PLN) and linear layers -- has universal approximation capacity. Additionally, we investigate the minimum number of neurons required to approximate $L$-Lipchitz continuous functions, with a single hidden-layer network. We compare the approximation capacity of PLN with traditional activation functions in theory. Different from the traditional activation functions, we identify that PLN can act as both activation function and normalization in deep neural networks at the same time. We also find that PLN can improve the performance when replacing LN in transformer architectures, which reveals the potential of PLN used in neural architectures.

Aligned Better, Listen Better for Audio-Visual Large Language Models

Audio is essential for multimodal video understanding. On the one hand, video inherently contains audio, which supplies complementary information to vision. Besides, video large language models (Video-LLMs) can encounter many audio-centric settings. However, existing Video-LLMs and Audio-Visual Large Language Models (AV-LLMs) exhibit deficiencies in exploiting audio information, leading to weak understanding and hallucinations. To solve the issues, we delve into the model architecture and dataset. (1) From the architectural perspective, we propose a fine-grained AV-LLM, namely Dolphin. The concurrent alignment of audio and visual modalities in both temporal and spatial dimensions ensures a comprehensive and accurate understanding of videos. Specifically, we devise an audio-visual multi-scale adapter for multi-scale information aggregation, which achieves spatial alignment. For temporal alignment, we propose audio-visual interleaved merging. (2) From the dataset perspective, we curate an audio-visual caption and instruction-tuning dataset, called AVU. It comprises 5.2 million diverse, open-ended data tuples (video, audio, question, answer) and introduces a novel data partitioning strategy. Extensive experiments show our model not only achieves remarkable performance in audio-visual understanding, but also mitigates potential hallucinations.

GenHancer: Imperfect Generative Models are Secretly Strong Vision-Centric Enhancers

The synergy between generative and discriminative models receives growing attention. While discriminative Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) excels in high-level semantics, it struggles with perceiving fine-grained visual details. Generally, to enhance representations, generative models take CLIP's visual features as conditions for reconstruction. However, the underlying principle remains underexplored. In this work, we empirically found that visually perfect generations are not always optimal for representation enhancement. The essence lies in effectively extracting fine-grained knowledge from generative models while mitigating irrelevant information. To explore critical factors, we delve into three aspects: (1) Conditioning mechanisms: We found that even a small number of local tokens can drastically reduce the difficulty of reconstruction, leading to collapsed training. We thus conclude that utilizing only global visual tokens as conditions is the most effective strategy. (2) Denoising configurations: We observed that end-to-end training introduces extraneous information. To address this, we propose a two-stage training strategy to prioritize learning useful visual knowledge. Additionally, we demonstrate that lightweight denoisers can yield remarkable improvements. (3) Generation paradigms: We explore both continuous and discrete denoisers with desirable outcomes, validating the versatility of our method. Through our in-depth explorations, we have finally arrived at an effective method, namely GenHancer, which consistently outperforms prior arts on the MMVP-VLM benchmark, e.g., 6.0% on OpenAICLIP. The enhanced CLIP can be further plugged into multimodal large language models for better vision-centric performance. All the models and codes are made publicly available.

Monocular Depth Estimation and Segmentation for Transparent Object with Iterative Semantic and Geometric Fusion

Transparent object perception is indispensable for numerous robotic tasks. However, accurately segmenting and estimating the depth of transparent objects remain challenging due to complex optical properties. Existing methods primarily delve into only one task using extra inputs or specialized sensors, neglecting the valuable interactions among tasks and the subsequent refinement process, leading to suboptimal and blurry predictions. To address these issues, we propose a monocular framework, which is the first to excel in both segmentation and depth estimation of transparent objects, with only a single-image input. Specifically, we devise a novel semantic and geometric fusion module, effectively integrating the multi-scale information between tasks. In addition, drawing inspiration from human perception of objects, we further incorporate an iterative strategy, which progressively refines initial features for clearer results. Experiments on two challenging synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our model surpasses state-of-the-art monocular, stereo, and multi-view methods by a large margin of about 38.8%-46.2% with only a single RGB input. Codes and models are publicly available at https://github.com/L-J-Yuan/MODEST.