Recent progress in panoramic image generation has underscored two critical limitations in existing approaches. First, most methods are built upon diffusion models, which are inherently ill-suited for equirectangular projection (ERP) panoramas due to the violation of the identically and independently distributed (i.i.d.) Gaussian noise assumption caused by their spherical mapping. Second, these methods often treat text-conditioned generation (text-to-panorama) and imageconditioned generation (panorama outpainting) as separate tasks, relying on distinct architectures and task-specific data. In this work, we propose a unified framework, Panoramic AutoRegressive model (PAR), which leverages masked autoregressive modeling to address these challenges.

Estimating scene lighting from a single image or video remains a longstand-ing challenge in computer vision and graphics. Learning-based approaches areconstrained by the scarcity of ground-truth HDR environment maps, which areexpensive to capture and limited in diversity. While recent generative modelsoffer strong priors for image synthesis, lighting estimation remains difficult dueto its reliance on indirect visual cues, the need to infer global (non-local) con-text, and the recovery of high-dynamic-range outputs. We propose LuxDiT, anovel data-driven approach that fine-tunes a video diffusion transformer to gen-erate HDR environment maps conditioned on visual input. Trained on a largesynthetic dataset with diverse lighting conditions, our model learns to infer il-lumination from indirect visual cues and generalizes effectively to real-worldscenes. To improve semantic alignment between the input and the predicted environment map, we introduce a low-rank adaptation finetuning strategy using a collected dataset of HDR panoramas.

Patent examination remains an ongoing challenge in the NLP literature even after the advent of large language models (LLMs), as it requires an extensive yet nuanced human judgment on whether a submitted $\textit{claim}$ meets the statutory standards of $\textit{novelty}$ and $\textit{non-obviousness}$ against previously granted claims--$\textit{prior art}$--in expert domains. Previous NLP studies have approached this challenge as a prediction task (e.g., forecasting grant outcomes) with high-level proxies such as similarity metrics or classifiers trained on historical labels. However, this approach often overlooks the step-by-step evaluations that examiners must make with profound information, including rationales for the decisions provided in $\textit{office actions}$ documents, which also makes it harder to measure the current state of techniques in patent review processes. To fill this gap, we construct PANORAMA, a dataset of 8,143 U.S. patent examination records that preserves the full decision trails, including original applications, all cited references, $\textit{Non-Final Rejections}$, and $\textit{Notices of Allowance}$. Also, PANORAMA decomposes the trails into sequential benchmarks that emulate patent professionals' patent review processes and allow researchers to examine large language models' capabilities at each step of them. Our findings indicate that, although LLMs are relatively effective at retrieving relevant prior art and pinpointing the pertinent paragraphs, they struggle to assess the novelty and non-obviousness of patent claims. We discuss these results and argue that advancing NLP, including LLMs, in the patent domain requires a deeper understanding of real-world patent examination.

Achieving an immersive experience enabling users to explore virtual environments with six degrees of freedom (6DoF) is essential for various applications such as virtual reality (VR). Wide-baseline panoramas are commonly used in these applications to reduce network bandwidth and storage requirements. However, synthesizing novel views from these panoramas remains a key challenge. Although existing neural radiance field methods can produce photorealistic views under narrow-baseline and dense image captures, they tend to overfit the training views when dealing with wide-baseline panoramas due to the difficulty in learning accurate geometry from sparse 360 views. To address this problem, we propose PanoGRF, Generalizable Spherical Radiance Fields for Wide-baseline Panoramas, which construct spherical radiance fields incorporating 360 scene priors. Unlike generalizable radiance fields trained on perspective images, PanoGRF avoids the information loss from panorama-to-perspective conversion and directly aggregates geometry and appearance features of 3D sample points from each panoramic view based on spherical projection. Moreover, as some regions of the panorama are only visible from one view while invisible from others under wide baseline settings, PanoGRF incorporates 360 monocular depth priors into spherical depth estimation to improve the geometry features. Experimental results on multiple panoramic datasets demonstrate that PanoGRF significantly outperforms state-of-the-art generalizable view synthesis methods for wide-baseline panoramas (e.g., OmniSyn) and perspective images (e.g., IBRNet, NeuRay).

We introduce a novel, training-free method for sampling differentiable representations (diffreps) using pretrained diffusion models. Rather than merely mode-seeking, our method achieves sampling by "pulling back" the dynamics of the

Vision-and-Language Navigation requires the agent to follow language instructions to navigate through 3D environments.