Veo-Act: How Far Can Frontier Video Models Advance Generalizable Robot Manipulation?

Video generation models have advanced rapidly and are beginning to show a strong understanding of physical dynamics. In this paper, we investigate how far an advanced video generation model such as Veo-3 can support generalizable robotic manipulation. We first study a zero-shot approach in which Veo-3 predicts future image sequences from current robot observations, while an inverse dynamics model IDM recovers the corresponding robot actions. The IDM is trained solely on random-play data, requiring neither human supervision nor expert demonstrations. The key intuition is that, if a video model can generate physically plausible future motions in image space, an IDM can translate those visual trajectories into executable robot actions. We evaluate this "Veo-3+IDM" approach in both simulation and the real world using a high-dimensional dexterous hand. We find that, owing to the strong generalization capability of frontier video models, Veo-3+IDM can consistently generate approximately correct task-level trajectories. However, its low-level control accuracy remains insufficient to solve most tasks reliably. Motivated by this observation, we develop a hierarchical framework, Veo-Act, which uses Veo-3 as a high-level motion planner and a VLA policy as the low-level executor, significantly improving the instruction-following performance of a state-of-the-art vision-language-action policy. Overall, our results suggest that, as video generation models continue to improve, video models can be a valuable component for generalizable robot learning.

Subject-Specific Low-Field MRI Synthesis via a Neural Operator

Low-field (LF) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) improves accessibility and reduces costs but generally has lower signal-to-noise ratios and degraded contrast compared to high field (HF) MRI, limiting its clinical utility. Simulating LF MRI from HF MRI enables virtual evaluation of novel imaging devices and development of LF algorithms. Existing low field simulators rely on noise injection and smoothing, which fail to capture the contrast degradation seen in LF acquisitions. To this end, we introduce an end-to-end LF-MRI synthesis framework that learns HF to LF image degradation directly from a small number of paired HF-LF MRIs. Specifically, we introduce a novel HF to LF coordinate-image decoupled neural operator (H2LO) to model the underlying degradation process, and tailor it to capture high-frequency noise textures and image structure. Experimental results in T1w and T2w MRI demonstrate that H2LO produces more faithful simulated low-field images than existing parameterized noise synthesis models and popular image-to-image translation models. Furthermore, it improves performance in downstream image enhancement tasks, showcasing its potential to enhance LF MRI diagnostic capabilities.

Improving Image-to-Image Translation via a Rectified Flow Reformulation

In this work, we propose Image-to-Image Rectified Flow Reformulation (I2I-RFR), a practical plug-in reformulation that recasts standard I2I regression networks as continuous-time transport models. While pixel-wise I2I regression is simple, stable, and easy to adapt across tasks, it often over-smooths ill-posed and multimodal targets, whereas generative alternatives often require additional components, task-specific tuning, and more complex training and inference pipelines. Our method augments the backbone input by channel-wise concatenation with a noise-corrupted version of the ground-truth target and optimizes a simple t-reweighted pixel loss. This objective admits a rectified-flow interpretation via an induced velocity field, enabling ODE-based progressive refinement at inference time while largely preserving the standard supervised training pipeline. In most cases, adopting I2I-RFR requires only expanding the input channels, and inference can be performed with a few explicit solver steps (e.g., 3 steps) without distillation. Extensive experiments across multiple image-to-image translation and video restoration tasks show that I2I-RFR generally improves performance across a wide range of tasks and backbones, with particularly clear gains in perceptual quality and detail preservation. Overall, I2I-RFR provides a lightweight way to incorporate continuous-time refinement into conventional I2I models without requiring a heavy generative pipeline.

Vision-Language Model-Guided Deep Unrolling Enables Personalized, Fast MRI

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a cornerstone in medicine and healthcare but suffers from long acquisition times. Traditional accelerated MRI methods optimize for generic image quality, lacking adaptability for specific clinical tasks. To address this, we introduce PASS (Personalized, Anomaly-aware Sampling and reconStruction), an intelligent MRI framework that leverages a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to guide a deep unrolling network for task-oriented, fast imaging. PASS dynamically personalizes the imaging pipeline through three core contributions: (1) a deep unrolled reconstruction network derived from a physics-based MRI model; (2) a sampling module that generates patient-specific $k$-space trajectories; and (3) an anomaly-aware prior, extracted from a pretrained VLM, which steers both sampling and reconstruction toward clinically relevant regions. By integrating the high-level clinical reasoning of a VLM with an interpretable, physics-aware network, PASS achieves superior image quality across diverse anatomies, contrasts, anomalies, and acceleration factors. This enhancement directly translates to improvements in downstream diagnostic tasks, including fine-grained anomaly detection, localization, and diagnosis.

Quality-Controlled Active Learning via Gaussian Processes for Robust Structure-Property Learning in Autonomous Microscopy

Autonomous experimental systems are increasingly used in materials research to accelerate scientific discovery, but their performance is often limited by low-quality, noisy data. This issue is especially problematic in data-intensive structure-property learning tasks such as Image-to-Spectrum (Im2Spec) and Spectrum-to-Image (Spec2Im) translations, where standard active learning strategies can mistakenly prioritize poor-quality measurements. We introduce a gated active learning framework that combines curiosity-driven sampling with a physics-informed quality control filter based on the Simple Harmonic Oscillator model fits, allowing the system to automatically exclude low-fidelity data during acquisition. Evaluations on a pre-acquired dataset of band-excitation piezoresponse spectroscopy (BEPS) data from PbTiO3 thin films with spatially localized noise show that the proposed method outperforms random sampling, standard active learning, and multitask learning strategies. The gated approach enhances both Im2Spec and Spec2Im by handling noise during training and acquisition, leading to more reliable forward and inverse predictions. In contrast, standard active learners often misinterpret noise as uncertainty and end up acquiring bad samples that hurt performance. Given its promising applicability, we further deployed the framework in real-time experiments on BiFeO3 thin films, demonstrating its effectiveness in real autonomous microscopy experiments. Overall, this work supports a shift toward hybrid autonomy in self-driving labs, where physics-informed quality assessment and active decision-making work hand-in-hand for more reliable discovery.

R-PGA: Robust Physical Adversarial Camouflage Generation via Relightable 3D Gaussian Splatting

Physical adversarial camouflage poses a severe security threat to autonomous driving systems by mapping adversarial textures onto 3D objects. Nevertheless, current methods remain brittle in complex dynamic scenarios, failing to generalize across diverse geometric (e.g., viewing configurations) and radiometric (e.g., dynamic illumination, atmospheric scattering) variations. We attribute this deficiency to two fundamental limitations in simulation and optimization. First, the reliance on coarse, oversimplified simulations (e.g., via CARLA) induces a significant domain gap, confining optimization to a biased feature space. Second, standard strategies targeting average performance result in a rugged loss landscape, leaving the camouflage vulnerable to configuration shifts.To bridge these gaps, we propose the Relightable Physical 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) based Attack framework (R-PGA). Technically, to address the simulation fidelity issue, we leverage 3DGS to ensure photo-realistic reconstruction and augment it with physically disentangled attributes to decouple intrinsic material from lighting. Furthermore, we design a hybrid rendering pipeline that leverages precise Relightable 3DGS for foreground rendering, while employing a pre-trained image translation model to synthesize plausible relighted backgrounds that align with the relighted foreground.To address the optimization robustness issue, we propose the Hard Physical Configuration Mining (HPCM) module, designed to actively mine worst-case physical configurations and suppress their corresponding loss peaks. This strategy not only diminishes the overall loss magnitude but also effectively flattens the rugged loss landscape, ensuring consistent adversarial effectiveness and robustness across varying physical configurations.

CRISP: Rank-Guided Iterative Squeezing for Robust Medical Image Segmentation under Domain Shift

Distribution shift in medical imaging remains a central bottleneck for the clinical translation of medical AI. Failure to address it can lead to severe performance degradation in unseen environments and exacerbate health inequities. Existing methods for domain adaptation are inherently limited by exhausting predefined possibilities through simulated shifts or pseudo-supervision. Such strategies struggle in the open-ended and unpredictable real world, where distribution shifts are effectively infinite. To address this challenge, we introduce an empirical law called ``Rank Stability of Positive Regions'', which states that the relative rank of predicted probabilities for positive voxels remains stable under distribution shift. Guided by this principle, we propose CRISP, a parameter-free and model-agnostic framework requiring no target-domain information. CRISP is the first framework to make segmentation based on rank rather than probabilities. CRISP simulates model behavior under distribution shift via latent feature perturbation, where voxel probability rankings exhibit two stable patterns: regions that consistently retain high probabilities (destined positives according to the principle) and those that remain low-probability (can be safely classified as negatives). Based on these patterns, we construct high-precision (HP) and high-recall (HR) priors and recursively refine them under perturbation. We then design an iterative training framework, making HP and HR progressively ``squeeze'' to the final segmentation. Extensive evaluations on multi-center cardiac MRI and CT-based lung vessel segmentation demonstrate CRISP's superior robustness, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods with striking HD95 reductions of up to 0.14 (7.0\% improvement), 1.90 (13.1\% improvement), and 8.39 (38.9\% improvement) pixels across multi-center, demographic, and modality shifts, respectively.

RIS-Aided Sensing: Experimental Validation of Radar 3D Imaging in the mmWave Band

The transition toward 6G networks demands energy-efficient hardware capable of active interaction with the environment. Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) have emerged as a key technology for Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC), enabling geometric environment recognition with minimal power consumption. However, achieving targeted 3D spatial mapping in a fully autonomous, closed-loop system remains a significant challenge. In this work, we validate experimentally an autonomous mmWave 3D imaging framework that integrates an Frequency-Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar with a 1-bit RIS and a Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) to perform targeted 3D reconstruction. The FMCW radar acts as a coarse localizer, providing real-time spatial priors to define dynamic Regions of Interest (ROI). These coordinates are translated into optimized RIS phase profiles to perform Stepped-Frequency Continuous-Wave (SFCW) measurements. We experimentally validate the system through three diverse scenarios, including metallic mannequins, calibration spheres, and a complex multi-target environment containing human subjects and an Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV). The results demonstrate accurate 3D voxel-based reconstruction of targets even at reduced angular resolutions, advancing the feasibility of RIS-based sensing for industrial and security applications.

VibeFlow: Versatile Video Chroma-Lux Editing through Self-Supervised Learning

Video chroma-lux editing, which aims to modify illumination and color while preserving structural and temporal fidelity, remains a significant challenge. Existing methods typically rely on expensive supervised training with synthetic paired data. This paper proposes VibeFlow, a novel self-supervised framework that unleashes the intrinsic physical understanding of pre-trained video generation models. Instead of learning color and light transitions from scratch, we introduce a disentangled data perturbation pipeline that enforces the model to adaptively recombine structure from source videos and color-illumination cues from reference images, enabling robust disentanglement in a self-supervised manner. Furthermore, to rectify discretization errors inherent in flow-based models, we introduce Residual Velocity Fields alongside a Structural Distortion Consistency Regularization, ensuring rigorous structural preservation and temporal coherence. Our framework eliminates the need for costly training resources and generalizes in a zero-shot manner to diverse applications, including video relighting, recoloring, low-light enhancement, day-night translation, and object-specific color editing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VibeFlow achieves impressive visual quality with significantly reduced computational overhead. Our project is publicly available at https://lyf1212.github.io/VibeFlow-webpage.

Graphic-Design-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating AI on Graphic Design Tasks

We introduce GraphicDesignBench (GDB), the first comprehensive benchmark suite designed specifically to evaluate AI models on the full breadth of professional graphic design tasks. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on natural-image understanding or generic text-to-image synthesis, GDB targets the unique challenges of professional design work: translating communicative intent into structured layouts, rendering typographically faithful text, manipulating layered compositions, producing valid vector graphics, and reasoning about animation. The suite comprises 50 tasks organized along five axes: layout, typography, infographics, template & design semantics and animation, each evaluated under both understanding and generation settings, and grounded in real-world design templates drawn from the LICA layered-composition dataset. We evaluate a set of frontier closed-source models using a standardized metric taxonomy covering spatial accuracy, perceptual quality, text fidelity, semantic alignment, and structural validity. Our results reveal that current models fall short on the core challenges of professional design: spatial reasoning over complex layouts, faithful vector code generation, fine-grained typographic perception, and temporal decomposition of animations remain largely unsolved. While high-level semantic understanding is within reach, the gap widens sharply as tasks demand precision, structure, and compositional awareness. GDB provides a rigorous, reproducible testbed for tracking progress toward AI systems that can function as capable design collaborators. The full evaluation framework is publicly available.