Asia
EgoDTM: Towards 3D-Aware Egocentric Video-Language Pretraining
Egocentric video-language pretraining has significantly advanced video representation learning. Humans perceive and interact with a fully 3D world, developing spatial awareness that extends beyond text-based understanding. However, most previous works learn from 1D text or 2D visual cues, such as bounding boxes, which inherently lack 3D understanding. To bridge this gap, we introduce EgoDTM, an Egocentric Depth-and Text-aware Model, jointly trained through large-scale 3D-aware video pretraining and video-text contrastive learning. EgoDTM incorporates a lightweight 3D-aware decoder to efficiently learn 3D-awareness from pseudo depth maps generated by depth estimation models. To further facilitate 3D-aware video pretraining, we enrich the original brief captions with hand-object visual cues by organically combining several foundation models. Extensive experiments demonstrate EgoDTM's superior performance across diverse downstream tasks, highlighting its superior 3D-aware visual understanding.
V2V: Scaling Event-Based Vision through Efficient Video-to-Voxel Simulation
Event-based cameras offer unique advantages such as high temporal resolution, high dynamic range, and low power consumption. However, the massive storage requirements and I/O burdens of existing synthetic data generation pipelines and the scarcity of real data prevent event-based training datasets from scaling up, limiting the development and generalization capabilities of event vision models. To address this challenge, we introduce Video-to-Voxel (V2V), an approach that directly converts conventional video frames into event-based voxel grid representations, bypassing the storage-intensive event stream generation entirely. V2V enables a 150 reduction in storage requirements while supporting on-the-fly parameter randomization for enhanced model robustness. Leveraging this efficiency, we train several video reconstruction and optical flow estimation model architectures on 10,000 diverse videos totaling 52 hours--an order of magnitude larger than existing event datasets, yielding substantial improvements.
DreamPRM: Domain-Reweighted Process Reward Model for Multimodal Reasoning
Reasoning has substantially improved the performance of large language models (LLMs) on complicated tasks. Central to the current reasoning studies, Process Reward Models (PRMs) offer a fine-grained evaluation of intermediate reasoning steps and guide the reasoning process. However, extending PRMs to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) introduces challenges. Since multimodal reasoning covers a wider range of tasks compared to text-only scenarios, the resulting distribution shift from the training to testing sets is more severe, leading to greater generalization difficulty. Training a reliable multimodal PRM, therefore, demands large and diverse datasets to ensure sufficient coverage.
RAG-IGBench: Innovative Evaluation for RAG-based Interleaved Generation in Open-domain Question Answering
In real-world scenarios, providing user queries with visually enhanced responses can considerably benefit understanding and memory, underscoring the great value of interleaved image-text generation. Despite recent progress, like the visual autoregressive model that unifies text and image processing in a single transformer architecture, generating high-quality interleaved content remains challenging. Moreover, evaluations of these interleaved sequences largely remain underexplored, with existing benchmarks often limited by unimodal metrics that inadequately assess the intricacies of combined image-text outputs. To address these issues, we present RAG-IGBench, a thorough benchmark designed specifically to evaluate the task of Interleaved Generation based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG-IG) in open-domain question answering. RAG-IG integrates multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with retrieval mechanisms, enabling the models to access external image-text information for generating coherent multimodal content. Distinct from previous datasets, RAG-IGBench draws on the latest publicly available content from social platforms and introduces innovative evaluation metrics that measure the quality of text and images, as well as their consistency. Through extensive experiments with state-of-the-art MLLMs (both open-source and proprietary) on RAG-IGBench, we provide an in-depth analysis examining the capabilities and limitations of these models.
Why Popular MOEAs Are Popular: Proven Advantages in Approximating the Pareto Front
Recent breakthroughs in the analysis of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) are mathematical runtime analyses of those algorithms which are intensively used in practice. So far, most of these results show the same performance as previously known for simpler algorithms like the GSEMO. The few results indicating advantages of the popular MOEAs share the same shortages: They only consider the problem of computing the full Pareto front, sometimes of algorithms enriched with newly invented mechanisms, and this on newly designed benchmarks. In this work, we overcome these shortcomings by analyzing how existing popular MOEAs approximate the Pareto front of the established LARGEFRONT benchmark. We prove that several popular MOEAs, including NSGA-II (with current crowding distance), NSGA-III, SMS-EMOA, and SPEA2, only need an expected time of O(n2 logn) fitness evaluations to compute an additive ฯ-approximation of the Pareto front of the LARGEFRONT benchmark. This contrasts with the already proven exponential runtime (with high probability) of the GSEMO on the same task. Our result is the first mathematical runtime analysis showing and explaining the superiority of popular MOEAs over simple ones like the GSEMO for the central task of computing good approximations to the Pareto front.
CODECRASH: Exposing LLMFragility to Misleading Natural Language in Code Reasoning
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong capabilities in code-related tasks, but their robustness in code reasoning under perturbations remains underexplored. We introduce CODECRASH, a stress-testing framework with 1,279 questions from CRUXEVAL and LIVECODEBENCH, designed to evaluate reasoning reliability under structural perturbations and misleading natural language (NL) contexts. Through a systematic evaluation of 17 LLMs, we find that models often shortcut reasoning by over-relying on NL cues, leading to an average performance degradation of 23.2% in output prediction tasks. Even with Chain-of-Thought reasoning, models on average still have a 13.8%drop due to distractibility and rationalization, revealing a lack of critical reasoning capability to distinguish the actual code behaviors. While Large Reasoning Models with internal reasoning mechanisms improve robustness by fostering critical thinking, plausible yet incorrect hints can trigger pathological self-reflection, causing 2 3 times token consumption and even catastrophic cognitive dissonance in extreme cases for QwQ-32B. We refer to this phenomenon as Reasoning Collapse. CODECRASH provides a rigorous benchmark for evaluating robustness in code reasoning, guiding future research and development toward more reliable and resilient models.
OptiTree: Hierarchical Thoughts Generation with Tree Search for LLMOptimization Modeling
Optimization modeling is one of the most crucial but technical parts of operations research (OR). To automate the modeling process, existing works have leveraged large language models (LLMs), prompting them to break down tasks into steps for generating variables, constraints, and objectives. However, due to the highly complex mathematical structures inherent in OR problems, standard fixed-step decomposition often fails to achieve high performance. To address this challenge, we introduce OptiTree, a novel tree search approach designed to enhance modeling capabilities for complex problems through adaptive problem decomposition into simpler subproblems. Specifically, we develop a modeling tree that organizes a wide range of OR problems based on their hierarchical problem taxonomy and complexity, with each node representing a problem category and containing relevant high-level modeling thoughts. Given a problem to model, we recurrently search the tree to identify a series of simpler subproblems and synthesize the global modeling thoughts by adaptively integrating the hierarchical thoughts. Experiments show that OptiTree significantly improves the modeling accuracy compared to the state-of-theart, achieving over 10% improvements on the challenging benchmarks.
Language Ranker: ALightweight Ranking framework for LLMDecoding
Conventional research on large language models (LLMs) has primarily focused on refining output distributions, while paying less attention to the decoding process that transforms these distributions into final responses. Recent advances, such as scaling the computation of inference time with reward models, have underscored the importance of decoding, but these methods often suffer from high computational costs and limited applicability. In this paper, we revisit LLM generation through the lens of recommender systems, conceptualizing the decoding process as analogous to the ranking stage in recommendation pipelines. From this perspective, we observe that both traditional decoding methods and reward models exhibit clear limitations such as redundancy. Motivated by this insight, we propose Language Ranker, a novel framework that introduces a lightweight module to rerank candidate responses using features extracted by the base model. Experiments across a wide range of tasks show that Language Ranker achieves performance comparable to large-scale reward models, while requiring only <0.5M additional parameters, significantly reducing the computational overhead during both training and inference stages. This highlights the efficiency and effectiveness of our method, showcasing its potential to fully unlock the capabilities of LLMs.