A Dual-Positive Monotone Parameterization for Multi-Segment Bids and a Validity Assessment Framework for Reinforcement Learning Agent-based Simulation of Electricity Markets

Reinforcement learning agent-based simulation (RL-ABS) has become an important tool for electricity market mechanism analysis and evaluation. In the modeling of monotone, bounded, multi-segment stepwise bids, existing methods typically let the policy network first output an unconstrained action and then convert it into a feasible bid curve satisfying monotonicity and boundedness through post-processing mappings such as sorting, clipping, or projection. However, such post-processing mappings often fail to satisfy continuous differentiability, injectivity, and invertibility at boundaries or kinks, thereby causing gradient distortion and leading to spurious convergence in simulation results. Meanwhile, most existing studies conduct mechanism analysis and evaluation mainly on the basis of training-curve convergence, without rigorously assessing the distance between the simulation outcomes and Nash equilibrium, which severely undermines the credibility of the results. To address these issues, this paper proposes...

ManipArena: Comprehensive Real-world Evaluation of Reasoning-Oriented Generalist Robot Manipulation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and world models have recently emerged as promising paradigms for general-purpose robotic intelligence, yet their progress is hindered by the lack of reliable evaluation protocols that reflect real-world deployment. Existing benchmarks are largely simulator-centric, which provide controllability but fail to capture the reality gap caused by perception noise, complex contact dynamics, hardware constraints, and system latency. Moreover, fragmented real-world evaluations across different robot platforms prevent fair and reproducible comparison. To address these challenges, we introduce ManipArena, a standardized evaluation framework designed to bridge simulation and real-world execution. ManipArena comprises 20 diverse tasks across 10,812 expert trajectories emphasizing reasoning-oriented manipulation tasks requiring semantic and spatial reasoning, supports multi-level generalization through controlled out-of-distribution settings, and incorporates long-horizon mobile manipulation beyond tabletop scenarios. The framework further provides rich sensory diagnostics, including low-level motor signals, and synchronized real-to-sim environments constructed via high-quality 3D scanning. Together, these features enable fair, realistic, and reproducible evaluation for both VLA and world model approaches, providing a scalable foundation for diagnosing and advancing embodied intelligence systems.

Identity-Consistent Video Generation under Large Facial-Angle Variations

Single-view reference-to-video methods often struggle to preserve identity consistency under large facial-angle variations. This limitation naturally motivates the incorporation of multi-view facial references. However, simply introducing additional reference images exacerbates the \textit{copy-paste} problem, particularly the \textbf{\textit{view-dependent copy-paste}} artifact, which reduces facial motion naturalness. Although cross-paired data can alleviate this issue, collecting such data is costly. To balance the consistency and naturalness, we propose $\mathrm{Mv}^2\mathrm{ID}$, a multi-view conditioned framework under in-paired supervision. We introduce a region-masking training strategy to prevent shortcut learning and extract essential identity features by encouraging the model to aggregate complementary identity cues across views. In addition, we design a reference decoupled-RoPE mechanism that assigns distinct positional encoding to video and conditioning tokens for better modeling of their heterogeneous properties. Furthermore, we construct a large-scale dataset with diverse facial-angle variations and propose dedicated evaluation metrics for identity consistency and motion naturalness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves identity consistency while maintaining motion naturalness, outperforming existing approaches trained with cross-paired data.

RoboStereo: Dual-Tower 4D Embodied World Models for Unified Policy Optimization

Scalable Embodied AI faces fundamental constraints due to prohibitive costs and safety risks of real-world interaction. While Embodied World Models (EWMs) offer promise through imagined rollouts, existing approaches suffer from geometric hallucinations and lack unified optimization frameworks for practical policy improvement. We introduce RoboStereo, a symmetric dual-tower 4D world model that employs bidirectional cross-modal enhancement to ensure spatiotemporal geometric consistency and alleviate physics hallucinations. Building upon this high-fidelity 4D simulator, we present the first unified framework for world-model-based policy optimization: (1) Test-Time Policy Augmentation (TTPA) for pre-execution verification, (2) Imitative-Evolutionary Policy Learning (IEPL) leveraging visual perceptual rewards to learn from expert demonstrations, and (3) Open-Exploration Policy Learning (OEPL) enabling autonomous skill discovery and self-correction. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate RoboStereo achieves state-of-the-art generation quality, with our unified framework delivering >97% average relative improvement on fine-grained manipulation tasks.

SAM-R1: Leveraging SAM for Reward Feedback in Multimodal Segmentation via Reinforcement Learning

Leveraging multimodal large models for image segmentation has become a prominent research direction. However, existing approaches typically rely heavily on manually annotated datasets that include explicit reasoning processes, which are costly and time-consuming to produce. Recent advances suggest that reinforcement learning (RL) can endow large models with reasoning capabilities without requiring such reasoning-annotated data. In this paper, we propose SAM-R1, a novel framework that enables multimodal large models to perform fine-grained reasoning in image understanding tasks. Our approach is the first to incorporate fine-grained segmentation settings during the training of multimodal reasoning models. By integrating task-specific, fine-grained rewards with a tailored optimization objective, we further enhance the model's reasoning and segmentation alignment. We also leverage the Segment Anything Model (SAM) as a strong and flexible reward provider to guide the learning process. With only 3k training samples, SAM-R1 achieves strong performance across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of reinforcement learning in equipping multimodal models with segmentation-oriented reasoning capabilities.

InterAnimate: Taming Region-aware Diffusion Model for Realistic Human Interaction Animation

Recent video generation research has focused heavily on isolated actions, leaving interactive motions-such as hand-face interactions-largely unexamined. These interactions are essential for emerging biometric authentication systems, which rely on interactive motion-based anti-spoofing approaches. From a security perspective, there is a growing need for large-scale, high-quality interactive videos to train and strengthen authentication models. In this work, we introduce a novel paradigm for animating realistic hand-face interactions. Our approach simultaneously learns spatio-temporal contact dynamics and biomechanically plausible deformation effects, enabling natural interactions where hand movements induce anatomically accurate facial deformations while maintaining collision-free contact. To facilitate this research, we present InterHF, a large-scale hand-face interaction dataset featuring 18 interaction patterns and 90,000 annotated videos. Additionally, we propose InterAnimate, a region-aware diffusion model designed specifically for interaction animation. InterAnimate leverages learnable spatial and temporal latents to effectively capture dynamic interaction priors and integrates a region-aware interaction mechanism that injects these priors into the denoising process. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first large-scale effort to systematically study human hand-face interactions. Qualitative and quantitative results show InterAnimate produces highly realistic animations, setting a new benchmark. Code and data will be made public to advance research.

Separate to Collaborate: Dual-Stream Diffusion Model for Coordinated Piano Hand Motion Synthesis

Automating the synthesis of coordinated bimanual piano performances poses significant challenges, particularly in capturing the intricate choreography between the hands while preserving their distinct kinematic signatures. In this paper, we propose a dual-stream neural framework designed to generate synchronized hand gestures for piano playing from audio input, addressing the critical challenge of modeling both hand independence and coordination. Our framework introduces two key innovations: (i) a decoupled diffusion-based generation framework that independently models each hand's motion via dual-noise initialization, sampling distinct latent noise for each while leveraging a shared positional condition, and (ii) a Hand-Coordinated Asymmetric Attention (HCAA) mechanism suppresses symmetric (common-mode) noise to highlight asymmetric hand-specific features, while adaptively enhancing inter-hand coordination during denoising. The system operates hierarchically: it first predicts 3D hand positions from audio features and then generates joint angles through position-aware diffusion models, where parallel denoising streams interact via HCAA. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods across multiple metrics.

Audio-visual Controlled Video Diffusion with Masked Selective State Spaces Modeling for Natural Talking Head Generation

Talking head synthesis is vital for virtual avatars and human-computer interaction. However, most existing methods are typically limited to accepting control from a single primary modality, restricting their practical utility. To this end, we introduce \textbf{ACTalker}, an end-to-end video diffusion framework that supports both multi-signals control and single-signal control for talking head video generation. For multiple control, we design a parallel mamba structure with multiple branches, each utilizing a separate driving signal to control specific facial regions. A gate mechanism is applied across all branches, providing flexible control over video generation. To ensure natural coordination of the controlled video both temporally and spatially, we employ the mamba structure, which enables driving signals to manipulate feature tokens across both dimensions in each branch. Additionally, we introduce a mask-drop strategy that allows each driving signal to independently control its corresponding facial region within the mamba structure, preventing control conflicts. Experimental results demonstrate that our method produces natural-looking facial videos driven by diverse signals and that the mamba layer seamlessly integrates multiple driving modalities without conflict.

HunyuanPortrait: Implicit Condition Control for Enhanced Portrait Animation

We introduce HunyuanPortrait, a diffusion-based condition control method that employs implicit representations for highly controllable and lifelike portrait animation. Given a single portrait image as an appearance reference and video clips as driving templates, HunyuanPortrait can animate the character in the reference image by the facial expression and head pose of the driving videos. In our framework, we utilize pre-trained encoders to achieve the decoupling of portrait motion information and identity in videos. To do so, implicit representation is adopted to encode motion information and is employed as control signals in the animation phase. By leveraging the power of stable video diffusion as the main building block, we carefully design adapter layers to inject control signals into the denoising unet through attention mechanisms. These bring spatial richness of details and temporal consistency. HunyuanPortrait also exhibits strong generalization performance, which can effectively disentangle appearance and motion under different image styles. Our framework outperforms existing methods, demonstrating superior temporal consistency and controllability. Our project is available at https://kkakkkka.github.io/HunyuanPortrait.

FireEdit: Fine-grained Instruction-based Image Editing via Region-aware Vision Language Model

Currently, instruction-based image editing methods have made significant progress by leveraging the powerful cross-modal understanding capabilities of vision language models (VLMs). However, they still face challenges in three key areas: 1) complex scenarios; 2) semantic consistency; and 3) fine-grained editing. To address these issues, we propose FireEdit, an innovative Fine-grained Instruction-based image editing framework that exploits a REgion-aware VLM. FireEdit is designed to accurately comprehend user instructions and ensure effective control over the editing process. Specifically, we enhance the fine-grained visual perception capabilities of the VLM by introducing additional region tokens. Relying solely on the output of the LLM to guide the diffusion model may lead to suboptimal editing results. Therefore, we propose a Time-Aware Target Injection module and a Hybrid Visual Cross Attention module. The former dynamically adjusts the guidance strength at various denoising stages by integrating timestep embeddings with the text embeddings. The latter enhances visual details for image editing, thereby preserving semantic consistency between the edited result and the source image. By combining the VLM enhanced with fine-grained region tokens and the time-dependent diffusion model, FireEdit demonstrates significant advantages in comprehending editing instructions and maintaining high semantic consistency. Extensive experiments indicate that our approach surpasses the state-of-the-art instruction-based image editing methods. Our project is available at https://zjgans.github.io/fireedit.github.io.