Recent advances in multi-modal generative models have enabled significant progress in instruction-based image editing. However, while these models produce visually plausible outputs, their capacity for knowledge-based reasoning editing tasks remains under-explored. In this paper, We introduce KRIS-Bench (Knowledge-based Reasoning in Image-editing Systems Benchmark), a diagnostic benchmark designed to assess models through a cognitively informed lens.

Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (VLLMs) have achieved remarkable video understanding capabilities, yet face critical efficiency bottlenecks due to quadratic computational growth with lengthy visual token sequences of long videos. While existing keyframe sampling methods can improve temporal modeling efficiency, additional computational cost is introduced before feature encoding, and the binary frame selection paradigm is found suboptimal. Therefore, in this work, we propose Dynamic Token compression via LLM-guided Keyframe prior (DyToK), a training-free paradigm that enables dynamic token compression by harnessing VLLMs' inherent attention mechanisms. Our analysis reveals that VLLM attention layers naturally encoding query-conditioned keyframe priors, by which DyToK dynamically adjusts per-frame token retention ratios, prioritizing semantically rich frames while suppressing redundancies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DyToK achieves state-of-the-art efficiency-accuracy tradeoffs. DyToK shows plug-and-play compatibility with existing compression methods, such as VisionZip and FastV, attaining 4.3 faster inference while preserving accuracy across multiple VLLMs, such as LLaVA-OneVision and Qwen2.5-VL.

Human communication is motivated: people speak, write, and create content with a particular communicative intent in mind. As a result, information that large language models (LLMs) and AI agents process is inherently framed by humans' intentions and incentives. People are adept at navigating such nuanced information: we routinely identify benevolent or self-serving motives in order to decide what statements to trust. For LLMs to be effective in the real world, they too must critically evaluate content by factoring in the motivations of the source--for instance, weighing the credibility of claims made in a sales pitch. In this paper, we undertake a comprehensive study of whether LLMs have this capacity for motivational vigilance.

Discrete diffusion models offer a flexible, controllable approach to structured sequence generation, yet they still lag behind causal language models in expressive power. A key limitation lies in their reliance on the Markovian assumption, which restricts each step to condition only on the current state, leading to potential uncorrectable error accumulation. In this paper, we introduce CaDDi (Causal Discrete Diffusion Model), a discrete diffusion model that conditions on the entire generative trajectory, thereby lifting the Markov constraint and allowing the model to revisit and improve past states. By unifying sequential (causal) and temporal (diffusion) reasoning in a single non-Markovian transformer, CaDDi also treats standard causal language models as a special case and permits the direct reuse of pretrained LLM weights with no architectural changes. Empirically, CaDDi outperforms state-of-the-art discrete diffusion baselines on natural-language benchmarks, substantially narrowing the remaining gap to large autoregressive transformers.

Despite its popularity in image synthesis, invisible generative watermarking remains largely underexplored in video generation. To address this gap, we propose Safe-Sora, the first framework to embed graphical watermarks directly into the video generation process. Motivated by the observation that watermarking performance is closely tied to the visual similarity between the watermark and cover content, we introduce a hierarchical coarse-to-fine adaptive matching mechanism. Specifically, the watermark image is divided into patches, each assigned to the most visually similar video frame, and further localized to the optimal spatial region for seamless embedding. To enable spatiotemporal fusion of watermark patches across video frames, we develop a 3D wavelet transform-enhanced Mamba architecture with a novel spatiotemporal local scanning strategy, effectively modeling long-range dependencies during watermark embedding and retrieval. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to apply state space models to watermarking, opening new avenues for efficient and robust watermark protection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Safe-Sora achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of video quality, watermark fidelity, and robustness, which is largely attributed to our proposals.

Image-based 3D texture transfer from a single 2D reference image enables practical customization of 3D object appearances with minimal manual effort. Adapted 2D editing and text-driven 3D editing approaches can serve this purpose. However, 2D editing typically involves frame-by-frame manipulation, often resulting in inconsistencies across views, while text-driven 3D editing struggles to preserve texture characteristics from reference images. To tackle these challenges, we introduce 3DOT, a 3DGaussian Splatting Object Texture Transfer method based on a single reference image, integrating: 1) progressive generation, 2) view-consistency gradient guidance, and 3) prompt-tuned gradient guidance. To ensure view consistency, progressive generation starts by transferring texture from the reference image and gradually propagates it to adjacent views. View-consistency gradient guidance further reinforces coherence by conditioning the generation model on feature differences between consistent and inconsistent outputs. To preserve texture characteristics, prompt-tuning-based gradient guidance learns a token that describes differences between original and reference textures, guiding the transfer for faithful texture preservation across views. Overall, 3DOT combines these strategies to achieve effective texture transfer while maintaining structural coherence across viewpoints. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations confirm that our three components enable convincing and effective 2D-to-3D texture transfer.

The ability to model interactions among agents is crucial for effective coordination and understanding their cooperation mechanisms in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, previous efforts to model high-order interactions have been primarily hindered by the combinatorial explosion or the opaque nature of their black-box network structures. In this paper, we propose a novel value decomposition framework, called Continued Fraction Q-Learning (QCoFr), which can flexibly capture arbitrary-order agent interactions with only linear complexity O(n) in the number of agents, thus avoiding the combinatorial explosion when modeling rich cooperation. Furthermore, we introduce the variational information bottleneck to extract latent information for estimating credits. This latent information helps agents filter out noisy interactions, thereby significantly enhancing both cooperation and interpretability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that QCoFr not only consistently achieves better performance but also provides interpretability that aligns with our theoretical analysis.

We provide the first sharp characterization of the optimal first-order query complexity of agnostic active learning, and propose a new general active learning algorithm which achieves it. Remarkably, the optimal query complexity admits a leading term which is always strictly smaller than the sample complexity of passive supervised learning (by a factor proportional to the best-in-class error rate). This was not previously known to be possible. For comparison, in all previous general analyses, the leading term exhibits an additional factor, such as the disagreement coefficient or related complexity measures, and therefore only provides improvements over passive learning in restricted cases. The present work completely removes such factors from the leading term, implying that every concept class benefits from active learning in the non-realizable case. Whether such benefits are possible has been the driving question underlying the past two decades of research on the theory of agnostic active learning. This work finally settles this fundamental question.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, yet their large scale often renders them impractical for resource-constrained environments.

The integration of big data, physical laws, and machine learning algorithms has shown potential to improve the estimation and understanding of complex realworld systems. However, effectively incorporating physical laws with uncertainties into machine learning algorithms remains understudied. In this work, we bridge this gap by developing the Partial Physics Informed Diffusion Model (PPIDM), a novel framework that integrates known physical principles through a physics operator while reducing the impact of unknown dynamics by minimizing related discrepancies. We showcase PPIDM's capabilities using ocean surface chlorophyll concentration data, which are influenced by both physical and biological processes, while the latter is poorly constrained. Experimental results reveal that PPIDM achieves substantially improved prediction accuracy and stability, significantly outperforming baseline methods that either neglect physics entirely or impose incomplete physical constraints under the assumption of completeness. Code will be available here.