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Sekai: AVideo Dataset towards World Exploration

Neural Information Processing Systems

Video generation techniques have made remarkable progress, promising to be the foundation of interactive world exploration. However, existing video generation datasets are not well-suited for world exploration training as they suffer from some limitations: limited locations, short duration, static scenes, and a lack of annotations about exploration and the world. In this paper, we introduce Sekai (meaning "world" in Japanese), a high-quality first-person view worldwide video dataset with rich annotations for world exploration. It consists of over 5,000 hours of walking or drone view (FPV and UVA) videos from over 100 countries and regions across 750 cities. We develop an efficient and effective toolbox to collect, pre-process and annotate videos with location, scene, weather, crowd density, captions, and camera trajectories. Comprehensive analyses and experiments demonstrate the dataset's scale, diversity, annotation quality, and effectiveness for training video generation models. We believe Sekai will benefit the area of video generation and world exploration, and motivate valuable applications.



Can Large Language Models Master Complex Card Games?

Neural Information Processing Systems

Complex games have long been an important benchmark for testing the progress of artificial intelligence algorithms. AlphaGo, AlphaZero, and MuZero have defeated top human players in Go and Chess, garnering widespread societal attention towards artificial intelligence. Concurrently, large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities across various tasks, raising the question of whether LLMs can achieve similar success in complex games. In this paper, we explore the potential of LLMs in mastering complex card games. We systematically assess the learning capabilities of LLMs across eight diverse card games, evaluating the impact of fine-tuning on high-quality gameplay data, and examining the models' ability to retain general capabilities while mastering these games. Our findings indicate that: (1) LLMs can approach the performance of strong game AIs through supervised fine-tuning on high-quality data, (2) LLMs can achieve a certain level of proficiency in multiple complex card games simultaneously, with performance augmentation for games with similar rules and conflicts for dissimilar ones, and (3) LLMs experience a decline in general capabilities when mastering complex games, but this decline can be mitigated by integrating a certain amount of general instruction data. The evaluation results demonstrate strong learning ability and versatility of LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/THUDM/


SALMONN-omni: AStandalone Speech LLM without Codec Injection for Full-duplex Conversation

Neural Information Processing Systems

In order to enable fluid and natural human-machine speech interaction, existing full-duplex conversational systems often adopt modular architectures with auxiliary components such as voice activity detectors, interrupters, conversation state predictors, or multiple LLMs. These systems, however, suffer from error accumulation across modules and struggle with key challenges such as context-dependent bargein and echo cancellation. Recent approaches, most notably Moshi, simplify the pipeline by injecting audio codecs into the token space of a single LLM. However, such methods still incur significant performance degradation when operating on the speech rather than text modality. In this paper, we introduce SALMONN-omni, the first single, standalone full-duplex speech LLM that operates without audio codecs in its token space. It features a novel dynamic thinking mechanism within the LLM backbone, enabling the model to learn when to transition between speaking and listening states. Experiments on widely used benchmarks for spoken question answering and open-domain dialogue show that SALMONN-omni achieves at least 30% relative performance improvement over existing open-source fullduplex models and performs highly competitively to half-duplex and turn-based systems, despite using substantially less training data. Moreover, SALMONN-omni demonstrates strong performance in complex conversational scenarios, including turn-taking, backchanneling, echo cancellation and context-dependent barge-in, with further improvements achieved through reinforcement learning.


Computational Budget Should Be Considered in Data Selection

Neural Information Processing Systems

Data selection improves computational efficiency by choosing informative subsets of training samples. However, existing methods ignore the compute budget, treating data selection and importance evaluation independently of compute budget constraints. Yet empirical studies show no algorithm can consistently outperform others (or even random selection) across varying budgets. We therefore argue that compute budget must be integral to data-selection strategies, since different budgets impose distinct requirements on data quantity, quality, and distribution for effective training. To this end, we propose a novel Computational budget-Aware Data Selection (CADS) method and naturally formulate it into a bilevel optimization framework, where the inner loop trains the model within the constraints of the computational budget on some selected subset of training data, while the outer loop optimizes data selection based on model evaluation.


LaRes: Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning with LLM-based Adaptive Reward Search

Neural Information Processing Systems

The integration of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) with reinforcement learning (RL) has shown superior performance compared to standalone methods. However, previous research focuses on exploration in policy parameter space, while overlooking the reward function search. To bridge this gap, we propose LaRes, a novel hybrid framework that achieves efficient policy learning through reward function search. LaRes leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate the reward function population, guiding RL in policy learning. The reward functions are evaluated by the policy performance and improved through LLMs.


Dozens walk out as Google boss Pichai addresses Stanford graduates

BBC News

Dozens of students walked out of their Stanford University graduation ceremony as Google CEO Sundar Pichai took the stage to deliver a keynote address. Video filmed by the BBC shows the students protesting against the company's controversial work with the US government. A group named Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine encouraged the walkout. This follows other recent campus protests against tech leaders, but those have largely focused on artificial intelligence and concerns about jobs. Pichai largely sidestepped the issue of AI in his remarks, though he appeared to make light of the expected protests.


Breaking the Compression Ceiling: Data-Free Pipeline for Ultra-Efficient Delta Compression

Neural Information Processing Systems

With the rise of the fine-tuned-pretrained paradigm, storing numerous fine-tuned models for multi-tasking creates significant storage overhead. Delta compression alleviates this by storing only the pretrained model and the highly compressed delta weights (the differences between fine-tuned and pretrained model weights). However, existing methods fail to maintain both high compression and performance, and often rely on data. To address these challenges, we propose UltraDelta, the first data-free delta compression pipeline that achieves both ultra-high compression and strong performance. UltraDelta is designed to minimize redundancy, maximize information, and stabilize performance across inter-layer, intra-layer, and global dimensions, using three key components: (1) Variance-Based Mixed Sparsity Allocation assigns sparsity based on variance, giving lower sparsity to high-variance layers to preserve inter-layer information.


Efficient Rectified Flow for Image Fusion

Neural Information Processing Systems

Image fusion is a fundamental and important task in computer vision, aiming to combine complementary information from different modalities to fuse images. In recent years, diffusion models have made significant developments in the field of image fusion. However, diffusion models often require complex computations and redundant inference time, which reduces the applicability of these methods. To address this issue, we propose RFfusion, an efficient one-step diffusion model for image fusion based on Rectified Flow. We incorporate Rectified Flow into the image fusion task to straighten the sampling path in the diffusion model, achieving one-step sampling without the need for additional training, while still maintaining high-quality fusion results. Furthermore, we propose a task-specific Variational Autoencoder (VAE) architecture tailored for image fusion, where the fusion operation is embedded within the latent space to further reduce computational complexity. To address the inherent discrepancy between conventional reconstruction-oriented VAE objectives and the requirements of image fusion, we introduce a two-stage training strategy. This approach facilitates the effective learning and integration of complementary information from multi-modal source images, thereby enabling the model to retain fine-grained structural details while significantly enhancing inference efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of both inference speed and fusion quality.


Federated Continual Learning via Orchestrating Multi-Scale Expertise

Neural Information Processing Systems

Federated continual learning (FCL) aims to maintain the model's performance on old tasks (i.e., stability) while enhancing its ability to acquire knowledge from current tasks (i.e., plasticity). With the development of pre-trained models (PTMs), fine-tuning PTMs on clients has become a promising approach to leveraging their extensive knowledge in FCL. In this paper, we propose MultiFCL, a novel FCL framework that fine-tunes PTMs to adapt to FCL while preserving their strong generalization capabilities. Specifically, to ensure the stability, MultiFCL introduces lightweight adapters for task adaption, which are subsequently frozen to prevent catastrophic forgetting. Moreover, by utilizing the semantic features of old tasks, MultiFCL performs multi-modal initialization of new task class prototypes. To enhance the plasticity, MultiFCL employs a multi-expert training mechanism that integrates multi-scale feature learning with multi-teacher dynamic self-distillation.