Technology
DreamVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model Dreamed with Comprehensive World Knowledge
Recent advances in vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown promise in integrating image generation with action prediction to improve generalization and reasoning in robot manipulation. However, existing methods are limited to challenging image-based forecasting, which suffers from redundant information and lacks comprehensive and critical world knowledge, including dynamic, spatial and semantic information. To address these limitations, we propose DreamVLA, a novel VLA framework that integrates comprehensive world knowledge forecasting to enable inverse dynamics modeling, thereby establishing a perception-prediction-action loop for manipulation tasks. Specifically, DreamVLA introduces a dynamic-region-guided world knowledge prediction, integrated with the spatial and semantic cues, which provide compact yet comprehensive representations for action planning.
Scaling Computer-Use Grounding via User Interface Decomposition and Synthesis
Graphical user interface (GUI) grounding, the ability to map natural language instructions to specific actions on graphical user interfaces, remains a critical bottleneck in computer use agent development. Current benchmarks oversimplify grounding tasks as short referring expressions, failing to capture the complexity of real-world interactions that require software commonsense, layout understanding, and fine-grained manipulation capabilities. To address these limitations, we introduce OSWorld-G, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 564 finely annotated samples across diverse task types including text matching, element recognition, layout understanding, and precise manipulation. Additionally, we synthesize and release the largest computer use grounding dataset Jedi, which contains 4 million examples through multi-perspective decoupling of tasks. Our multi-scale models trained on Jedi demonstrate its effectiveness by outperforming existing approaches on ScreenSpot-v2, ScreenSpot-Pro, and our OSWorld-G. Furthermore, we demonstrate that improved grounding with Jedi directly enhances agentic capabilities of general foundation models on complex computer tasks with state-of-the-art performance, improving from 23% to 51% on OSWorld. Through detailed ablation studies, we identify key factors contributing to grounding performance and verify that combining specialized data for different interface elements enables compositional generalization to novel interfaces.
Computational Budget Should Be Considered in Data Selection
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.
Rig3R: Rig-Aware Conditioning and Discovery for 3D Reconstruction
Estimating agent pose and 3D scene structure from multi-camera rigs is a central task in embodied AI applications such as autonomous driving. Recent learned approaches such as DUSt3R have shown impressive performance in multiview settings. However, these models treat images as unstructured collections, limiting effectiveness in scenarios where frames are captured from synchronized rigs with known or inferable structure. To this end, we introduce Rig3R, a generalization of prior multiview reconstruction models that incorporates rig structure when available, and learns to infer it when not. Rig3R conditions on optional rig metadata including camera ID, time, and rig poses to develop a rig-aware latent space that remains robust to missing information. It jointly predicts pointmaps and two types of raymaps: a pose raymap relative to a global frame, and a rig raymap relative to a rig-centric frame consistent across time. Rig raymaps allow the model to infer rig structure directly from input images when metadata is missing. The global pose raymaps allow the model to reason about the agent's ego-motion, while the rig raymaps allow the model to infer rig structure directly from input images when metadata is missing. Rig3R achieves state-of-the-art performance in 3D reconstruction, camera pose estimation, and rig discovery -- outperforming both traditional and learned methods by 17-45% mAA across diverse real-world rig datasets, all in a single forward pass without post-processing or iterative refinement.
ACT as Human: Multimodal Large Language Model Data Annotation with Critical Thinking
Supervised learning relies on high-quality labeled data, but obtaining such data through human annotation is both expensive and time-consuming. Recent work explores using large language models (LLMs) for annotation, but LLM-generated labels still fall short of human-level quality. To address this problem, we propose the Annotation with Critical Thinking (ACT) data pipeline, where LLMs serve not only as annotators but also as judges to critically identify potential errors. Human effort is then directed towards reviewing only the most suspicious cases, significantly improving the human annotation efficiency. Our major contributions are as follows: (1) ACT is applicable to a wide range of domains, including natural language processing (NLP), computer vision (CV), and multimodal understanding, by leveraging multimodal-LLMs (MLLMs).
Squared families are useful conjugate priors
Squared families of probability distributions have been studied and applied in numerous machine learning contexts. Typically, they appear as likelihoods, where their advantageous computational, geometric and statistical properties are exploited for fast estimation algorithms, representational properties and statistical guarantees. Here, we investigate the use of squared families as prior beliefs in Bayesian inference. We find that they can form helpful conjugate families, often allowing for closed-form and tractable Bayesian inference and marginal likelihoods. We apply such conjugate families to Bayesian regression in feature space using end-to-end learnable neural network features. Such a setting allows for a rich multi-modal alternative to Gaussian processes with neural network features, often called deep kernel learning. We demonstrate our method on few shot learning, outperforming existing neural methods based on Gaussian processes and normalising flows.
Robust Ego-Exo Correspondence with Long-Term Memory
Establishing object-level correspondence between egocentric and exocentric views is essential for intelligent assistants to deliver precise and intuitive visual guidance. However, this task faces numerous challenges, including extreme viewpoint variations, occlusions, and the presence of small objects. Existing approaches usually borrow solutions from video object segmentation models, but still suffer from the aforementioned challenges. Recently, the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) has shown strong generalization capabilities and excellent performance in video object segmentation. Yet, when simply applied to the ego-exo correspondence (EEC) task, SAM 2 encounters severe difficulties due to ineffective ego-exo feature fusion and limited long-term memory capacity, especially for long videos. Addressing these problems, we propose a novel EEC framework based on SAM 2 with long-term memories by presenting a dual-memory architecture and an adaptive feature routing module inspired by Mixture-of-Experts (MoE).
Prompt Tuning Transformers for Data Memorization
Prompt tuning has emerged as a powerful parameter-efficient fine-tuning technique, allowing large pretrained Transformers to adapt to downstream tasks by optimizing a small set of prompt embeddings. Despite its empirical success, the extent to which prompt tuning can memorize data remains poorly understood. In this paper, we provide both theoretical and empirical analyses of data memorization ability of prompt-tuned Transformers. Building on recent theoretical frameworks, we derive an upper bound on the required prompt length for exact memorization of finite datasets and establish a trade-off between prompt length and the number of autoregressive generation steps. Specifically, we show that a constant-size Transformer can memorize $n$ input-output pairs with prompts of length $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{nN})$, where $N$ denotes the sequence length. Empirical results further demonstrate that prompt-tuned, randomly initialized Transformers are able to effectively memorize finite datasets. These models also capture the intrinsic low-rank structure of the data, leading to a reduction in the required prompt length. Finally, we analyze how the initialization of the Transformer backbone affects the performance of prompt tuning. Our findings provide new insights into the expressivity, efficiency, and underlying mechanisms of prompt tuning, bridging theoretical memorization limits with observed empirical behaviors.
Cognitive Mirrors: Exploring the Diverse Functional Roles of Attention Heads in LLM Reasoning
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in a variety of tasks, but remain largely opaque in terms of their internal mechanisms. Understanding these mechanisms is crucial to improve their reasoning abilities. Drawing inspiration from the interplay between neural processes and human cognition, we propose a novel interpretability framework to systematically analyze the roles and behaviors of attention heads, which are key components of LLMs. We introduce CogQA, a dataset that decomposes complex questions into step-by-step subquestions with a chain-of-thought design, each associated with specific cognitive functions such as retrieval or logical reasoning. By applying a multi-label probing method, we identify the attention heads responsible for these functions. Our analysis across multiple LLM families reveals that attention heads exhibit functional specialization, characterized as cognitive heads. These cognitive heads exhibit several key properties: they are universally sparse, and vary in number and distribution across different cognitive functions, and they display interactive and hierarchical structures. We further show that cognitive heads play a vital role in reasoning tasks--removing them leads to performance degradation, while augmenting them enhances reasoning accuracy. These insights offer a deeper understanding of LLM reasoning and suggest important implications for model design, training and fine-tuning strategies.
MOSDT: Self-Distillation-Based Decision Transformer for Multi-Agent Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning
We introduce MOSDT, the first algorithm designed for multi-agent offline safe reinforcement learning (MOSRL), alongside MOSDB, the first dataset and benchmark for this domain. Different from most existing knowledge distillation-based multi-agent RL methods, we propose policy self-distillation (PSD) with a new global information reconstruction scheme by fusing the observation features of all agents, streamlining training and improving parameter efficiency. We adopt full parameter sharing across agents, significantly slashing parameter count and boosting returns up to 38.4-fold by stabilizing training. We propose a new plug-and-play cost binary embedding (CBE) module, which binarizes cumulative costs as safety signals and embeds the signals into return features for efficient information aggregation. On the strong MOSDB benchmark, MOSDT achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) returns in 14 out of 18 tasks (across all base environments including MuJoCo, Safety Gym, and Isaac Gym) while ensuring complete safety, with only 65% of the execution parameter count of a SOTA single-agent offline safe RL method CDT.